In that piece, we explained that the Regime had two methods of discrediting the MEK; disinformation agents who were individual associated with the Regime who would travel/live abroad to talk about policy surrounding the MEK and Iranian Regime, and disinformation websites, which contained a whole host of lies about the MEK, including trying to frame them for the murders of Americans in Iraq.

There is another piece to the puzzle though and that is fellow travellers.

Iran Lobby

Fellow travellers are people who support the policies of a foreign government (i.e.Iran) but have no formal relationship with it. In the US, these fellow travellers are known as the Iran Lobby and their job is to promote the Regime and discreet the MEK.

Clare Lopez, a former CIA officer and Iran policy expert, said: “[Evidence] suggests that the Iran Lobby in America is coordinated in Iran at various government levels and within establishment circles both governmental and industrial.”

There are many groups and organisations that form the Iran Lobby, including, but not limited to:

• Centre for a New American Society
• Campaign for a New American Policy on Iran
• American Foreign Policy Project
• Council on American Islamic Relations
• National Iranian-American Council (NIAC)

Let’s focus on the biggest of those groups: the NIAC.

The NIAC

Trita Parsi, an Iranian raised in Sweden, formed the NIAC in 2002 to promote the Iranian Regime’s agenda, sway US policy in favour of the mullahs, and disparage Iranian opposition groups, like the MEK.

In 2009, Parsi and the NIAC filed a defamation lawsuit against Iranian activist Seid Hassan Daioleslam after he described Parsi as a key player “in the lobby enterprise of Tehran’s ayatollahs in the United States”.

Daioleslam’s legal team requested information about Parsi’s meetings and emails with Iranian Regime officials, in order to prove that Daioleslam’s statement was true and therefore not defamatory.

However, desperate to avoid having the truth revealed, Parsi and the NIAC failed to provide information about over 4,000 calendar appointments and other data from computers and a shared server.

Some 1,000 calendar entries, including meetings with Iranian officials at the United Nations, were deleted and the other information lost after Parsi’s laptop was “stolen” in Norway because the data had not been backed up.

A lot of this data was later found by Daioleslam’s defence team during a forensic assessment, which led to the lawsuit being dismissed in September 2012 and Parsi and the NIAC being ordered to pay nearly $200,000 for filing a frivolous lawsuit.

The NIAC’s attacks on the MEK

The NIAC has its own disinformation campaigns against the MEK, which range from repeating baseless claims against the MEK to any media outlet that will still feature the NIAC to running a full-on secret conspiracy website to distributing anti-MEK press releases.

Why? Because the NIAC is dedicated to ending US support for the MEK, even listing it as their third highest priority.

It is clear that the NIAC wants to discredit the MEK and that the US should view any information from the NIAC as fake news.