Why Are Iran’s Thugs Free to Walk the Streets of New York?

NEW YORK—In many ways, Manhattan during the UN General Assembly is a choreographed show: awards dinners, media events, and grandiloquent speeches by the world’s autocrats in the land of the free. Fidel Castro once lambasted the U.S. for four hours during a speech; the late Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez accused George W. Bush of being “the devil”; and Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, after erecting his tribal tent in New Jersey, pinned the JFK assassination on Israel. 

In keeping with tradition, on Tuesday, Iran’s newly elected president, Masoud Pezeshkian, took to the rostrum at the General Assembly and heralded himself as a symbol of moderation and as the diplomatic partner through which to solve the Middle East’s woes. “We are confident that through this mechanism we can achieve a lasting peace with Muslims, Christians, and Jews living alongside one another,” the cardiac surgeon-turned-politician told assembled world leaders in Turtle Bay.

Across the city, the 69-year-old Iranian leader’s message of coexistence wasn’t resonating. As he was speaking, Masih Alinejad, who is among Tehran’s most outspoken political opponents in the U.S., got the news that she had been rejected by a Manhattan co-op board.

“The co-op rejected me and my husband. Why? Because, when they Google us, they realize that they don’t want to share their building with someone being followed around by people with AK-47s,” said the 48-year-old dissident. 

The board didn’t overtly say that its decision was driven by fear, but Alinejad told The Free Press she’s certain that Tehran’s repeated, and highly publicized, attempts to assassinate her on American soil—including at her home—drove the board’s decision. 

Alinejad, who has lived in 21 different safe houses under FBI protection over the past three years, is constantly shifting her locations. “Because the U.S. government can’t protect us, the Iranian regime’s fear is working. They’re isolating us.”

The contrast between the Iranian president’s charm offensive, and Alinejad’s misery, offers a unique window into the geopolitical struggle playing out across Manhattan this week—both in the spotlight and the backrooms—as the global elite attend the annual UN General Assembly and Iranian officials take to American airwaves and dine at New York restaurants.

Pezeshkian and his delegation are being feted by UN, European, and Middle East delegations as a potential ally in stopping the regional spread of Israel’s war against Hamas, Tehran’s military proxy in the Gaza Strip. According to Iranian state media, Tehran’s president met the leaders of Kuwait, Lebanon, Sudan, and Pakistan, as well as French president Emmanuel Macron and UK foreign minister David Lammy.

Iran’s Islamist government has spent decades arming and funding a network of militias, terrorist organizations, and allied governments that allows Tehran to essentially turn on and off a spigot of violence at a whim to threaten the region’s strategic waterways and, in turn, the global economy. European and Middle East officials at the UN Assembly are panicked by the prospect of Israel invading southern Lebanon in pursuit of Tehran’s most important military proxy, Hezbollah, and potentially expanding the regional war.

That’s why, as some told me in recent days, they believe the U.S. has little choice but to test Pezeshkian’s rhetoric and see if his new government can really take steps to de-escalate tensions. “We want to grab this line,” one senior Arab official said of Pezeshkian’s overture. “I think we need to discuss it.”

Alinejad and a wider group of Iranian political activists, émigré journalists, and former U.S. officials—who all talked to The Free Press this week—said they’ve been stunned by what they see as the almost purposeful naiveté of the world’s leaders meeting with Pezeshkian for the first time. (He only took office in July, following the death of his predecessor, Ebrahim Raisi, in a helicopter crash.) They say the Islamic Republic’s statesmen and diplomats have mastered an ability to tailor their messaging of moderation for global audiences, even as Tehran’s security forces continue to support the very groups stoking the Middle East’s conflicts. 

The fact that American intelligence agencies in recent days have said that Iran’s spy agencies continue to pursue terrorist plots inside the U.S., including against former president Donald Trump, only underscores the hollowness of Pezeshkian’s calls for diplomacy and coexistence in these dissidents’ eyes.

But the UN’s annual gathering is also providing these Iranian dissidents a unique opportunity to confront their tormentors—a small army of Davids staring down a Goliath. And they are using the occasion of the UN gathering to highlight the regime’s perfidy and its continued assault on them, their families, and the Iranian people. 

One of the frontline actors in this week’s drama is Iran International, the 24-hour Persian language television channel that’s officially banned inside Iran. Started only seven years ago, with funding from a politically connected Saudi-British investor and media company, the network has become Iran’s most-watched independent news organization, in part, because of its confrontational approach toward the Islamic Republic. Iran International’s coverage of the 2022 women-led uprising against Tehran’s rulers—called the Women, Life, Freedom movement—garnered it particular notoriety. It told the story of the protests, and the government’s harsh crackdown, through videos, audio recordings, and interviews smuggled out of the country, as the network’s journalists couldn’t be on the ground. (Last year, I collaborated with Iran International for a story on Iranian influence operations inside the US that originally ran on the media site Semafor.)

But Iran International’s journalism has earned it the regime’s ire, and Tehran has hunted down its journalists on foreign soil, just as it has Masih Alinejad.

In 2023, the network decided to temporarily shut its London headquarters after British security services notified management that Iranian agents were plotting to attack its Chiswick offices and assassinate senior editors and journalists. Last December, the British media outlet, ITV, disclosed that Tehran had offered $200,000 to a Syrian hitman to attack two of Iran International’s most high-profile on-air personalities. And this March, Eastern European thugs, apparently at the behest of Tehran, stabbed the Iran International anchor, Pouria Zeraati, outside his London home. (He survived.)

British officials told Iran International they couldn’t ensure its staff’s security. As a result, the network’s headquarters were briefly shifted to Washington, D.C., last year. And at last year’s UN General Assembly, a regime security agent pummeled one of the network’s journalists. 

But in New York this week, Iran International deployed nearly a dozen staffers to cover every move of Pezeshkian and his delegation. That includes the large number of the president’s family members who accompanied him to New York and their shopping sprees at places like Costco.

“We can’t travel to Iran. If we do, it’s a one-way ticket to Evin Prison,” Fardad Farahzad, one of the Iran International journalists named as being on Tehran’s assassination list, told The Free Press. “So, this is a unique opportunity for us to try and hold them accountable on foreign soil.”

On Wednesday night, the network tracked the Iranian Americans who attended a gala dinner Pezeshkian and his entourage hosted near the UN. Many of the attendees wore Covid masks, Iran International reported, apparently to hide their identities. Two days earlier, network reporter Arash Aalaei, tracked Trita Parsi, a prominent U.S. think-tank leader and advocate for engaging Iran, for blocks after he left the Millennium hotel, where Iran’s delegation is staying. Peppered with questions about his meetings, Parsi simply stared blankly down the street and refused to engage in any discussions with the journalist.  

Another recent target of the Iranian regime, computer scientist Siamak Aram, also sought to confront his nemesis this week. On Tuesday, just as Pezeshkian was taking the stage at the General Assembly, the 43-year-old gathered a small collection of Iranian dissidents across the street at Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza. Members of his National Solidarity Group for Iran mixed between calling for the overthrow of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to mirroring the slogan of the Black Lives Matter movement by chanting, “No Justice! No Peace!”

Aram was menaced last May by an Iranian official, named Ramezan Soltan-Mohammadi, who threatened to slice the dissident’s throat after his group staged a protest outside a pro-Islamic Republic mosque in Maryland. Aram successfully filed a restraining order against Soltan-Mohammadi and is now pursuing legal action against him. But the ability of regime agents and officials to so openly operate in the U.S. stunned the political activist. “They will do whatever they can to stop the protests and activities [taking place] outside Iran,” Aram told me. “One of them is by threatening the dissidents and protesters outside.”

According to U.S. intelligence and Department of Justice officials, the regime’s operations are hardly just targeting dissidents. In recent days, they’ve described uncovering active plots against former president Donald Trump that are allegedly aimed at disrupting November’s presidential election. And the man who is accused of stalking Trump this month at a golf course with a high-powered rifle, Ryan Wesley Routh, said his animus towards the Republican politician was driven, in part, by his treatment of Tehran.

Many of these plots, U.S. officials tell The Free Press, are Iranian attempts to avenge the Trump administration’s 2020 assassination of Major General Qasem Soleimani, head of the country’s elite overseas military unit, the Quds Force.  A range of Trump advisers who took part in the operation, including former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and ex-national security adviser John Bolton, travel today with round-the-clock U.S. government-provided security details in response to threats that are still assessed as “high.” In 2022, the Department of Justice indicted a member of Iran’s elite military unit, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, for allegedly plotting remotely with an American citizen to kill Bolton at or near his home in Washington, D.C. This March, the FBI’s Miami field office issued a nationwide alert seeking information on an Iranian intelligence official—based at times in Latin America—who also was suspected of trying to assassinate Trump-era officials, including Pompeo.

The July arrest of a Pakistani national, Asif Merchant, shows the elaborate nature of Iran’s plots inside the U.S. According to his indictment, Merchant traveled to Tehran to meet Iranian handlers who advised him on a scheme to kill Trump at a political rally this year. The Pakistani then flew to New York to recruit would-be hitmen at restaurants and bars to take part in the conspiracy—which allegedly involved creating a distraction at a campaign event to give an assassin an opening to fire.

Unbeknownst to Merchant, one of his contacts was a U.S. government informant whom he paid $5,000 to advance the plot. “Now we’re bonded,” the Iranian agent said to his recruit, according to the indictment. Merchant was arrested two months ago, shortly before he was scheduled to depart New York.

Pompeo told The Free Press that he traveled to Manhattan this week, in part, to warn foreign officials about the continuing Iranian threat, despite Pezeshkian’s recent rhetoric. A successful assassination of Trump or his former aides could potentially spark a war between the U.S. and Iran.  

“We restricted Iranian diplomat travels even BEFORE they threatened Americans in the U.S. with assassinations,” Pompeo said in a text message. “The streets of NYC are not the place for plotters and murderers to be given freedoms here in the USA.”

He added: “The fact U.S. taxpayer dollars provided personal security for Iranian leaders trying to kill senior Americans is simply lunacy.”

Iranian president Masoud Pezeshkian addresses the UN on September 24, 2024. Iran’s terrorist plots inside the U.S. underscore the hollowness of Pezeshkian’s calls for diplomacy, writes Jay Solomon for The Free Press. (Charly Triballeau via Getty Images)

Pezeshkian departed New York early Thursday following what Iranian state media described as a highly successful final meeting with the Iranian diaspora, including scientists, investors, and manufacturers. Tehran’s most-skilled diplomat and messaging man, meanwhile—former foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif—engaged in a round of media interviews with U.S. outlets and flatly denied U.S. accusations that Tehran was pursuing terrorist plots on American soil. The U.S. Treasury Department formally sanctioned Zarif in 2019 for serving as an agent of Supreme Leader Khamenei. But the Biden administration said this week it was diplomatically bound as host nation of the UN to allow the U.S.-educated official to come to New York.

“We don’t send people to assassinate people,” Zarif told Ian Bremmer of GZERO Media. “I think that’s a campaign ploy in order to get former president Trump out of the not-so-favorable situation he’s in in the elections.”

The Iranian dissidents fumed at the freedom Zarif and other Iranian officials were continuing to be given to roam Manhattan, even while the terrorist threats against them remain active. “The only way to help Iran is that you support the people of Iran, rather than providing visas to its leaders or buying this narrative of reform,” Alinejad said. “What kind of reform is this ‘reformist’ Pezeshkian? This reformist is just good PR for Khamenei.”

Jay Solomon is an investigative reporter for The Free Press and author of The Iran Wars. Follow him on X at @jaysolomon.

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