This year, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made speeches about corruption and property confiscation in Iran that borrowed animating details from a skewed, 5-year-old story that is gaining influence, writes Ivan Kesic.
By Ivan Kesic
in Zagreb, Croatia
Special to Consortium News
When U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo gave speeches about mega corruption in Iran this year, he did not cite a Reuters’ 2013 article or give credit to its three reporters; Steve Stecklow, Babak Dehghanpisheh and Yeganeh Torbati.
Instead he presented it as the kind of specialized knowledge that only a high-ranking official such as himself might be in a position to reveal. “Not many people know this,” Pompeo told an audience gathered last July at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library in Simi Valley, California, “but the Ayatollah Khamenei has his own personal, off-the-books hedge fund called the Setad, worth $95 billion, with a B.” Pompeo went on to tell his audience that Khamenei’s wealth via Setad was untaxed, ill-gotten, and used as a “slush fund” for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
But a comparison between the 5-year-old Reuters article and Pompeo’s speech, which was lauded by The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board as “truth telling,” shows a type of symbiosis that could only help cast a backward glow over President Donald Trump’s move, last summer, to reimpose all sanctions lifted by the Obama’s administration’s historic nuclear deal with Iran.
Pompeo: Ayatollah ran ‘slush fund’. (Gage Skidmore)
The imprint of the Reuters article on Pompeo’s speech was obvious in an anecdote about the travails of an elderly woman living in Europe. “The ayatollah fills his coffers by devouring whatever he wants,” Pompeo said. “In 2013 the Setad’s agents banished an 82-year-old Baha’i woman from her apartment and confiscated the property after a long campaign of harassment. Seizing land from religious minorities and political rivals is just another day at the office for this juggernaut that has interests in everything from real estate to telecoms to ostrich farming.”
The 82-year-old Baha’i woman living in Europe clearly matches Pari Vahdat-e-Hagh, a woman the Reuters team put at the very start of their extensive, three-part investigation. Here’s how the Reuters article begins: “The 82-year-old Iranian woman keeps the documents that upended her life in an old suitcase near her bed. She removes them carefully and peers at the tiny Persian script.”
While tapping the human-interest aspects of the story, Pompeo’s speech steered clear of some of the qualifications that the Reuters reporters and editors injected into their general profile of corruption. Pompeo referred to Khamenei using Setad as a “personal hedge fund,” for instance, suggesting personal decadence on the part of the Iranian leader. But the Reuters team was careful to note that it had found no evidence of Khamenei putting the assets to personal use. “Instead, Setad’s holdings underpin his power over Iran.”
Iran : Target of U.S. machinations. (Creative Commons)
While stipulating that Khamenei’s greed was not for money but for power, the Reuters team neglected something of timely and possibly greater relevance. Earlier that same year the U.S. admitted its own longstanding greed for power over this foreign country.
Final CIA Admission
In August 2013—three months before the Reuter’s article was published—the CIA finally admitted its role in the 1953 Iranian coup. “Marking the sixtieth anniversary of the overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq, the National Security Archive is today posting recently declassified CIA documents on the United States’ role in the controversial operation. American and British involvement in Mosaddeq’s ouster has long been public knowledge, but today’s posting includes what is believed to be the CIA’s first formal acknowledgement that the agency helped to plan and execute the coup,” the archive said.
This U.S. aggression led directly to two phases of property confiscation in Iran: first under the Shah and then under the religious fundamentalists who overthrew him. Unaccountably, however, the Reuters team ignored the CIA admission so relevant to their story.
To its credit, the Reuters article does allude, early on, to the two inter-related periods of property confiscation in Iran. “How Setad came into those assets also mirrors how the deposed monarchy obtained much of its fortune – by confiscating real estate,” the article says. But that sentence only functions as a muffled disclaimer since the team makes no effort to integrate that history into the laments of people such as Pari Vahdat-e-Hagh, who emotionally drives the story.
Dubious Figure
For anyone familiar with the history of property confiscations in Iran, this ex-pat widow is a dubious figure. In the article, she claims that she lost three apartments in a multi-story building in Tehran, “built with the blood of herself and her husband.” She also says her late husband Hussein was imprisoned in 1981 because he began working for a gas company that had been set up to assist unemployed members of the Baha’i faith, and finally executed a year later.
The suggestion is that he was killed as part of a widespread persecution of Bahai’i followers.
What the Reuters reporters and editors omitted to mention, however, is that Hussein had been a lieutenant in the military regime of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi; the last shah of Iran who was overthrown by the uprising of 1979.
The Shah’s name has become so intertwined with UK and U.S. meddling in Iran that his role in setting a pro-western foreign policy is mentioned in the opening sentence of the Encyclopedia Brittanica entry on him. But the Reuters article places this mention at the end of the story, as deep background. By the time the team discloses the Shah’s penchant for confiscating property and flagrant corruption, the reader is in the third section of a three-part article. By that time, the elderly Vahdat-e-Hagh has come and gone. By then, she has cemented herself in the reader’s imagination as an unequivocal victim, even though some obvious questions about her should occur to anyone familiar with the country’s history.
How, for instance, did she and her husband come to own such significant property at the center of Iran’s capital city? Under the Pahlavi regime, most military personnel were provided with one apartment, not three. In the article, Vahdat-e-Hagh says that she and her husband obtained the property themselves, so presumably they did not inherit it. Could her late husband, Hussein, have been of high importance to the Shah’s U.S.-backed regime, which was famous for its lavish handouts to special loyalists?
Trump reimposing sanctions on Iran,; Bedminster, N.J., August 2018. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)
Such questions float over the article, not only about this particular subject, but many others who are presented to dramatize the ayatollah’s misdeeds. Several sources appear as human rights “experts” and lawyers. They are all Iranians living abroad and many have controversial biographical details that go unmentioned. There are similar well-known credibility issues with people who are introduced as respectable scholars and politicians.
The article offers the story of another aggrieved Baha’i family without ever mentioning how such people, in general, had lost property during the Shah’s White Revolution of 1963 which was intended to weaken those classes that supported the traditional system, primarily landed elites.
One obvious problem with the article is the distance of the three Reuters journalists from the scene of their story. They are based in New York, London and Dubai and do not reveal their information-gathering methods about Iran, a country that admits very few foreign reporters. So far, Yeganeh Torbati, the reporter who presumably wrote the first, human-interest part of the story, has not responded to a message to her Facebook account seeking comment. Nor has she responded to an email. Torbati, now based in Washington, was based in Dubai in 2013.
Story with Long Legs
In the years since its publication, the Reuters article has been bubbling up in book citations. Suzanne Maloney mentioned it in her 2015 book “Iran’s Political Economy since the Revolution” as did Misagh Parsa in “Democracy in Iran: Why It Failed and How It Might Succeed” published in 2016.
This year Pompeo relied on it in four speeches. Two books published in 2018 place some weight on the Reuters article: “Challenging Theocracy: Ancient Lessons for Global Politics” by David Tabachnick, Toivo Koivukoski and Herminio Meireles Teixeira; and “Losing Legitimacy: The End of Khomeini’s Charismatic Shadow and Regional Security” by Clifton W. Sherrill.
The name Setad, which means “headquarters” in Farsi, has been kicking around Washington for five years, ever since the U.S. imposed sanctions on the group. In June of 2013, the U.S. Treasury Department issued a press release about Setad and its subsidiaries, with a long list of Persian-named properties that were managing to avoid UN sanctions imposed on the country’s business dealings as a means of discouraging Iran’s enrichment of nuclear-weapon grade uranium.
Six months later, in November, Reuters published its extensive, three-part investigative package, which now tops Google searches for “Setad.”
The report was the first piece of important follow-up journalism on the U.S. Treasury press release. But in one key piece of wording, editors and reporters almost seem to be straining to move their story ahead of the government’s rendition, to the primary position it now holds in Google search-terms.
“Washington,” according to the article, “had acknowledged Setad’s importance.” Acknowledged? By journalistic conventions that Reuters editors would certainly know, an acknowledgement indicates a reluctant admission, something a source would rather not reveal. Five months earlier, however, the Treasury Department sounded eager to call attention to Setad as “a massive network of front companies hiding assets on behalf of … Iran’s leadership.”
For hardliners on Iran, the U.S. Treasury press release was important fodder. But it lacked the human drama necessary to stir an audience against the current regime. When the Reuters article came along, with all its historical omissions, it filled that gap.
Ivan Kesic is a Croatia-based freelance writer and open-source data analyst who has contributed to “Balkans Post” & “Sahar Balkan.” He worked as a writer at the Cultural Center of Iran in Zagreb from 2010 to 2016.
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Par for the course for Reuters…not to mention all the other syndicated ‘news’ companies. It used to be that one could listen to ‘raw feed’, before the editors got to an article or report. I used to listen to CBS raw feed and saw how these reports changed from the initial report. Quite an eye opener. I’m glad to see someone call them out on their duplicity…especially in relation to the B’hai. I got a sound trundling on a website which turned out to be a psyop (at least in my opinion). I argued that the anti-Muslim brigades were memes promoted to keep US citizens in the ‘radical Muslim’ camp. I used Iran as an example and was immediately attacked by B’hai members (and Muslin haters, as the site owner is). I should have replied, but did not, as I was not wanting to be sidetracked from my subject, which is how I saw the interruption. At any rate, I delved further into the B’hai thing and what I found was very similar to the revelations in the above article. Not mentioned here though is the location of B’hai libraries and religious sites…Israel. Strange that they are the only ‘foreign religion’ in Israel that is given such support and protection. I now regret not calling out those that attacked me, but Ure as well. He hates Muslims because (supposedly) one once backstabbed him. However, he has no such feelings toward Zionists (or Talmudists), even though they do promote the tactics he attributes to all Muslims and are the bane of the world. I finally came to realize that there are fakes out there in the alt-news world that are every bit as duplicitous as the big boys that are willing to sell their souls. In the end a good learning experience…trust no one and look and think for yourself.
Something else occurs to me. One of two things must be true. Either (a) Reuters is, as Mr. Chuckman suggests, a mouthpiece for the CIA and his speeches were actually spouting the CIA line and Mr. Pompous was simply trying to hide his source. or (b) the secretary of state is relying on a foreign (Reuters is British) news service for his picture of the world. Neither choice is particularly appetizing.
Why does Sec. Pompeo regail us with a stale story about an octogenarian widow in distress, when he is responsible for the plight of the 100+ Christian Iranian refugees who have been approved for entry into the US, but are being marooned in limbo in Vienna by US government inaction?
Talk about Chutzpah!
What gives the war criminals in DC the right to tell other nations how to behave? The problem with this world right now is we don’t have a high enough authority(on this planet that is!) to deal with war criminals from the militarily-dominant nations! Someone witjhion the USA power structure is going to have to one day try and put a stop to this!
The Pentagon cannot account for $21t. The US debt is $21t plus. Could there be a connection? Like a taxpayer funded US gov/Pentagon slush fund?
The US likes to vilify Ayatollah Khmenei in the same unproven way as Putin who presumably owns a fortune of $2b. Also unproven.
What have these two politicians in common?
They are both excellent politicians, tacticians and strategists and therefore very effective diplomats and foresightful leaders of their countries. And if there is anything the US gov. fears more than anything, it is the intelligence of these two leaders. Same applies to Xi Jinping.
So how could anything be good about them and how could the Setad be just an internal reserve fund? Every country has internal monetary reserves that are invested in various assets. RE in Tehran and elsewhere is one type of investment that also enables the state to build anything from affordable housing to schools and cultural venues for the well being of its people.
But of course the reader of the US smear articles should never ask themselves how a country is governed in real life actions, lest the reader come to doubt the US’s own system.
Pompeo putting the “swagger” back into the state dept via falsehoods (or lies if you will), plagerism, false news, and provocations. I’m sure he is very worried about the Iranian civilians (sarc).
I bet Mike and Don copied off upperclassman essays in high school. Just add plagiarism to the Trump Administration sin count; not to mention hypocrisy and hubris.
Psyops care nothing for the truth. The more outrageous and sensational the lie, the more the stupefied public eats it up.
“the more the stupefied public eats it up.”
Where does this eating up take place?
The opponents have consistently “asserted/believed” that the “benefits” of dumbing-down accrue solely to them as in Mr. Rove’s observation paraphrased as:
“We are an Empire; we create our own reality to which others react,
While they are reacting we create another reality to which they react.”
in emulation of the logic of Mad Hatter’s who hold that things mean what they mean them to mean, facilitating the representation of hopes as tactics, wishes as strategies and “psyops” as truths for those who hold these truths to be self-evident.
As with other comments the above can be “edited/moderated” in emulation of the practices referenced above.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
Like Mr. Rove the opportunities are often derived from Humpty Dumpty’s notion that “mastery” is possible.
““The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
Like Mr. Rove the opportunities are often derived from Alice’s notion that anything can be “made” through sole agency.
The contentions of both Alice and Humpty Dumpty are derived from the same genus of varying assay and hence encourage limited quantitative modified iteration within linear frameworks facilitating Humpty Dumpty having a great fall, (so) all of the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.
These were among the reasons that when the opponents “declared” the end of history and the quest for full spectrum dominance, some had honeyed blinis with afternoon coffee.
Sep 11, 2011 General Wesley Clark: Wars Were Planned – Seven Countries In Five Years
“This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.” I said, “Is it classified?” He said, “Yes, sir.” I said, “Well, don’t show it to me.” And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, “You remember that?” He said, “Sir, I didn’t show you that memo! I didn’t show it to you!”
https://youtu.be/9RC1Mepk_Sw
“Not many people know this,” Pompeo told
because it comes from a 5-year-old Reuters article
and everybody has forgotten about it
an now i can recycle it and claim it is new information
This article is about a revolutionary régime adopting the institutions of its hated predecessor, in this case slush funds fed by land confiscations designed to weaken political opponents.
This is an utterly routine phenomenon that has occurred hundreds of times throughout history. Citing this phenomenon as proof of some kind of hypocrisy by someone or other is simply a load of codswallop.
I wrote a comment and saw it go up on the site and now it is not there. I don’t think I said anything that shouldn’t be printed, so why has it disappeared?
Wisdom is the ability to tell you what you already know. Intelligence is the ability to tell you what you want to know. Reality is the ability to believe what you want to believe.
The oft repeated conundrum is the motivation of one to impose his beliefs on another.
Great article. And as always, the comments are just as informative as the piece.
“U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo made speeches about corruption and property confiscation in Iran”
It really does sound as though they confused Iran with Israel.
By the way, Reuters has an old reputation as a CIA disinformation outlet.
I have a close friend who is a B’hai and has been for the 30 years I’ve known her(she is not of Iranian ancestry). She told me that the Shah used B’hais as his personal body guard, because he couldn’t trust any others (presumably that meant various sects of Islam). I think B’hais were also part of the political prisoner department.
For those who don’t know what the B’hai religion is, I will simply say that it is a recently formed religion. Their prophet is B’ha Ullah (sp??) who started it a little over 100 years ago. The main tenet is that all religions are valid. In other words Jesus was a prophet from God as was Mohammad, and also Buddha and so on and on. Each one was a prophet sent by God at various times to help mankind find his soul.
This was popular with people in the US (and elsewhere) who found formal religions either hypocitical or too complicated and rule bound to really adhere to. But B’hai-ism has its rules too (no alcohol for example).
Khalil Gibran (author of the popular book “The Prophet” and others) was probably a B’hai or at least sympathetic to it. His writings made the religion commonly acceptable in the US because Gibran was often quoted in Christian churches and meetings.
If my friend was correct and the Shah used B’hai’s as his personal body guard, that would explain the 82 year old widow’s claim that she had 3 apartments , not just one and the other questions in this article.
Thank you for that information.
Pls. don’t be too gullible in accepting the B’hai story of the Shah having B’hais in his body guards the Immortals. I worked in Iran with IAI / BHI and was in contact with him in revamping the Mehrabad Helicopter Depot Overhaul training organization for a number of years and learned he was reluctant in trusting locals when it came to him personal i.e. the maintenance on his Boeing-727 personal plane was performed by foreigners, not Iranians, he was a FAA certified pilot himself, but the other pilots and Flight Engineers on the crew were foreign, not Iranian.
As for the Gard e Javidan it had 4 – 5000 men of which 30 – 50 Household Cavalry. To be accepted in the Gard e Javidan one of the many prerequisites for initiation was to be able to recite one’s family history back for 23 generations from memory alone. Personally I think this would make it very difficult for a B’hai to be accepted in the Gard e Javidan let alone the Household Cavalry.
What a very important article, really needed to counteract the pompous lies of the SoS and the numerous pieces of disinformation so readily spread around. As GKJames mentions, why does the USA decide on some other country’s business? As for the truth, the present behavior of the USA towards Ukraine and Russia, not to say Israel, show us that the USA has no interest in that.
I lived in Tehran from 1977 to 1979 and was there when the Shah left the country. When I say that there was dancing in the streets, I mean that literally. Fast forward a couple of decades and I’m living in St. Charles, Missouri. There’s a used car lot in town and so I go in looking for a cheap car. It’s being run by an Iranian. We get to talking and it turns out that he came to the US about the same time I returned to the US in 1979. He went back to Iran every year for a vacation so I asked him what it was like since the Shah had left. He extolled the progress that had been made building schools and hospitals and roads out in the provinces. David was pretty apolitical and I saw no reason to doubt what he was saying to me. Especially since I knew that when I live there, once you got outside the major population centers, the poverty could be pretty wrenching.
I’d also like to add a couple of things to frame some things in the article. One, Pompous was speaking in California. California is filthy with Iranians who were and still are loyalist to the old regime and it was a regime. The Shah was an absolute monarch. Today, it’s a theocracy thanks to the US’s meddling in the country. For that matter, Israel is a theocracy. It seems to be something that Middle Easterners do. And two is the hilarious outrage at an alleged “slush fund” being controlled by the head Ayatollah. Russia-gate has yet (and won’t) provide any evidence that Russia “meddled” in the 2016 election but one thing it has provided evidence of is widespread corruption in the ranks of the Republican apparatchiks with slush funds galore – slush funds that are illegal whereas the legality of the Ayatollah’s slush fund is unknown since we don’t know the source for this slush fund or the Iranian rules that pertain to it.
Great comment. I appreciate your perspective.
I used to live in Jeff City, but now Quincy, IL.
My dad was there in that time frame as well. McDonnell-Douglas sent him there for aircraft maintenance instruction. I visited for a very short time and maintained a friendship with an Iranian that eventually moved to the US and attended martial arts classes with me. I found the Iranians to be very friendly and warm. A few years later, my dad went to KSA under the Peace Sun II initiative…which was when Israel and KSA began a long relationship. The difference between peoples was astounding. In Iran, one could travel anywhere and be relatively safe. KSA however, you never went out of your compound unescorted. The Saudis were not friendly generally and foreigners kept to themselves as their laws were very strict(especially for infidels) and one could be imprisoned or expelled for an infraction as minor as showing the sole of your shoes to a Saud. BTW, we lived in Machins, just north of St Charles. Thanks for the comment and the return to memory lane for me.
The real issue is Iran’s ranking of proven oil and gas reserves … as determined by, who else,
… the CIA:
Oil > 4th Link Oil
Gas > 2nd Link Gas
Study these rankings. They explain much of the otherwise inexplicable, monumental hysteria and hypocrisy of US foreign “policy.”
As shown in this article, Washington is extremely concerned about cyberwarfare with Iran:
https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2018/11/cyberwarfare-with-iran.html
Given Washington’s involvement in the creation of the Stuxnet worm which wreaked havoc with Iran’s centrifuges, it’s interesting to see that they now fear Iran’s cyber capabilities.
Thanks. Clapper the truthteller! I always notice that if someone CAN attack the US, the USA assumes it will.
“I always notice that if someone CAN attack the US, the USA assumes it will.”
This will have utility in the encouragement of an “arms race” with one runner.
Only the cannibal fears that his enemy will eat him.
Isn’t this just another chapter in the rolling narrative to justify war on Iran? And even if every detail in Pompeo’s recitation were correct, what business is it of the US? Iranians will sort out how to govern themselves; they don’t need foreign help, least of all the American kind. Further, as if yet another example of oxygen-starved Washington “thinking” were needed (see decades of game-playing as to who is/isn’t a “terrorist”), notable about its obsession with corruption in Iran is its highly selective nature. If memory serves, there were no Iranian names in the Panama Papers. Nor have there been speeches from US leaders about Netanyahu’s indictment … for corruption.
Well said.
And the very America with the hubris to tell everyone else how to run their affairs can’t even run its own.
And if they REALLY want to talk about corruption, how can they honestly avoid mentioning the US military and it’s perennial avoidance of normal auditing norms, resulting in not just unaccounted-for BILLIONS, but up-to $21 TRILLION (‘…with a “T”..’) which easily trumps whatever else can be imagined in the world. But of course perspective and proportionality are enemies of propaganda, hence their absence.
For your perusal:
https://whowhatwhy.org/2018/12/17/the-real-story-of-the-pentagons-21-trillion-con-game/
I find it interesting that the investigative reporter in your linked article states: “The truth is $21 trillion over that period of time works out to about $1.5 trillion per year, and if you were… If that was actually money, as some ill-thought-out articles on the left and on the right have written, we would never have had any recessions. That would be an incredible amount of deficit spending into the economy every year. We’d have a lot of inflation, but we wouldn’t have any recessions. *There’s no sign of that money flowing into the economy. It’s not real money*.” Much like the money hoarded by the 1% in offshore tax havens and such, the money (REAL MONEY) is taken away from the workers in profits, taxes, or “harvesting the stock market” and the money never stimulates or helps the economy or the people whose work the money derives from.
Absolutely bang on comment GK? Iran is a independent, Sovereign Nation that has never invaded anyone & America has absolutely NO RIGHT to tell another Country how their Nation should be governed, or to meddle in their affairs via economic warfare sanctions & Militaristic threats! The US needs to bugger off & stay in it’s own backyard & stop messing around in other Countries affairs, as theres plenty of your own domestic problems to sort out, back in the US! Leave Iran & the rest of the World alone!