Robert Malley, President Joe Biden’s now-suspended special envoy to Iran, has reportedly been linked to an “Iranian spy ring” operating to shift U.S. policy to favor the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The news comes as Iranian-backed terrorists launched an unprecedented wave of attacks against Israel over the weekend, killing hundreds of people and wounding thousands more.
Tablet Magazine highlighted recent reports from Semafor and Iran International on emails stolen from the Iranian government allegedly outlining the operation.
Malley — who is currently under criminal investigation by the FBI over his handling of classified material — is accused in the reports of advancing several operatives in the spy ring, including helping an alleged Iranian asset named Ariane Tabatabai infiltrate her way into “some of the most sensitive positions in the U.S. government,” including at the State Department and Pentagon.
The operation began in 2014 when Iran created the Iran Experts Initiative (IEI), a propaganda and influence operation that recruited top talent from Iranians living abroad to help Iran obtain a favorable nuclear deal. The group reported to an official from the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), which is a terrorist organization, and Iran’s then-Foreign Minister Javad Zarif was also reportedly involved.
The Table Magazine report, headlined “High-Level Iranian Spy Ring Busted In Washington,” states:
The contents of the emails are damning, showing a group of Iranian American academics being recruited by the Iranian regime, meeting together in foreign countries to receive instructions from top regime officials, and pledging their personal loyalty to the regime. They also show how these operatives used their Iranian heritage and Western academic positions to influence U.S. policy toward Iran, first as outside “experts” and then from high-level U.S. government posts. Both inside and outside of government, the efforts of members of this circle were repeatedly supported and advanced by Malley, who served as the U.S. government’s chief interlocutor with Iran under both the Obama and the Biden administrations. Malley is also the former head of the International Crisis Group (ICG), which directly paid and credentialed several key members of the regime’s influence operation.
Retired CIA analyst Peter Theroux, who was with the agency for 25 years, responded to the report by saying, “I know what a spy network looks like.”
“This is how recruited assets speak to their handling officers,” he said. “There’s lots of the mood music around that correspondence saying, let me know what you need me to collect. It seems clear who’s the subordinate here — what you’d call responsive to tasking.”
Theroux noted that for someone like Tabatabai to receive even the most basic security clearance from the U.S. government, she would be so thoroughly examined that it would be impossible that the Biden administration did not know about her connections to Iran.
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“The hoops you have to jump through to get a bare-bones top secret clearance even without compartments or special access programs are enormous,” he said. “They grill you on your foreign contacts. Contacts with any foreign government raise more red flags than Bernie Sanders’ honeymoon. Contacts with senior officials from enemy governments, classified as non-frat governments like Russia, China, Cuba, as well as Iran, are in a different category altogether — what would normally be totally disqualifying.”
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) suggested in July that Malley could have committed treason.
“Malley and others created an incredibly permissive environment for Hamas, for Iran, to do all these things,” said Gabriel Noronha, a former special adviser on Iran at the State Department.
Last January, three U.S. officials working on the team negotiating with Iran left the group because Malley would not take a harder negotiating position regarding sanctions.
Noronha said Malley and his negotiating team “purposefully funneled billions of dollars to [Iran] through lack of sanctions enforcement and provision of sanctions relief that has given them somewhere between $50 [billion] and $80 billion over the last two and a half years.”