Mousavi accused of helping 'foreign spies'

Press TV reports:

A prominent lawmaker accuses the campaign headquarters of defeated presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi of aiding and abetting foreign intelligence operatives in Iran.

Ali-Asghar Zarei, a senior parliamentarian and an advisor to newly re-elected Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, claimed on Sunday that the Mousavi camp had candidly supported foreign espionage activities to advance its political agenda before and after the June 12 election.

“Our intelligence sources say that the Mousavi camp not only laid the foundation for a coup, but also offered their full support to foreign intelligence agents in Iran,” he said.

Zarei claimed that Mousavi and his associates were well aware that foreign spies had infiltrated their election headquarters. “They had full knowledge and yet they did nothing to prevent them from acting against Iranian interests.”

At some point, Zarei also accused the former prime minister of cooperating with Western media outlets in casting doubt on the legitimacy of the presidential poll.

“Without the help of foreign media outlets such as the BBC and VOA, Mousavi could have never spread such baseless rumors about the election conduct,” said Zarei.

He went on to charge that Mousavi had coordinated his efforts with foreign embassies in Tehran, particularly Britain. “If it wasn't for the help extended by Mousavi, British diplomats could not have interfered in the post-election events.”

However, Qorban Behzadian-Nejad, the head of the Mousavi campaign headquarters, dismissed the accusations as “absurd.”

“We have said it before and we will say it again, there were absolutely no meetings between the headquarters [of Mousavi] and foreign embassies,” he said.

Hundreds of thousands of people in Iran took to the streets after the victory of President Ahmadinejad with nearly two-thirds of the vote, which his rivals term as “fraudulent.”

Iran blames the post-election protests on foreign 'interference' and accuses certain Western countries, particularly Britain, for inciting violence during the unrest.
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Commentary: while there is no doubt in my mind that Imperial intelligence agencies were deeply involved in the "Gucci Revolution", I don't believe for one second that these acted through the local Western embassies or directly through the Mousavi campaign headquarters. This is just not how such kind of things are done. Frankly, I am even dubious whether there is any formal collaboration or conspiracy between Rafsanjani's Guccis and Imperial intelligences agencies. It is far more likely that the very real collaboration between Rafsanjani and the West is the result of a tacitly acknowleged community of interests and the opposition to a common enemy (Ali Khamenei). Unlike a conspiracy, this type of collusion is impossible to prove or break-up.

What is clear from this report, as well as from the one about a purge of the intelligence services, is that the Iranian intelligence community is being drawn in into the infighting taking place between the various Iranian elites and that is very bad news indeed.

The Saker