Yesterday, Gary Samore, president of United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), published a column on the website of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) arguing that even if talks between the P5+1 and Iran collapse, “Iran’s ability to produce nuclear weapons in the near term is severely constrained by political and technical factors.”
But Samore seems not to have contacted his office with that sensible sounding message. “It’s time to come down like a ton of bricks on this regime,” Gabriel Pedreira, communications director of UANI, told The Algemeiner, a US Jewish news outlet, on the same day. “We want an economic blockade if real change doesn’t come about. We haven’t seen a single concession from the Iranians, nor has even one centrifuge been destroyed,” said Pedreira.
That’s not what Samore, Pedreira’s boss, wrote. “Despite the impasse over the scale and scope of Iran’s enrichment program, the negotiators have made progress on several other issues, such as converting the Fordow enrichment facility to a research and development facility and converting the Arak heavy water research reactor to produce less plutonium,” said Samore.
And as for Pedreira’s argument that an “economic blockade” would be helpful? Samore acknowledged that a new interim agreement, presumably to be considered if the P5+1 and Iran are unable to meet the November 24 deadline for a comprehensive agreement, would be “resisted by some in Iran” if it is perceived that “it gives away too much nuclear capability without getting enough sanctions relief in return.”
In other words, an “economic blockade,” as Pedreira puts it, would give Iran’s hardliners ammunition to oppose a new interim agreement, which might be exactly what UANI wants.
The organization expressed “disappointment” with the November 2013 Joint Plan of Action, complaining that the agreement “provides disproportionate sanctions relief to Iran,” and has consistently opposed rollback of sanctions as part of an interim deal.
Indeed, both Mark Wallace, UANI’s CEO, and UANI’s mysterious benefactor, billionaire Thomas Kaplan, have expressed more hardline views than Samore, who served in the Obama administration as the president’s Coordinator for Arms Control and Weapons of Mass Destruction until last year.
But the divergence between Samore’s column, in which he is ID’d with his Belfer Center affiliation instead of UANI, and UANI’s contradictory statements the same day, raises questions about how much leadership Samore is offering to the organization and whether his role is more than purely ceremonial. Either way, Samore should probably phone his (UANI) office.
This article was published by The Nation on Sept. 30 and was reprinted here with permission. Copyright The Nation.
]]>by Jim Lobe
Eli has a new blog post on The Nation’s website today that provides additional details about the curious — one is tempted to say incestuous — relationship between the staff of United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) and the corporate interests of billionaire gold and silver investor, Thomas Kaplan. [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
Eli has a new blog post on The Nation’s website today that provides additional details about the curious — one is tempted to say incestuous — relationship between the staff of United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI) and the corporate interests of billionaire gold and silver investor, Thomas Kaplan. It also provides more details about the relationship between UANI and Harvard’s Belfer Center, a major beneficiary of Kaplan’s largesse, which hired UANI’s president, Gary Samore, shortly after he stepped down as a top proliferation adviser to Obama in 2012 (some prominent faculty members also serve on the group’s advisory board). We excerpted Eli’s original Salon piece on UANI’s ties to Kaplan last Friday.
Eli’s latest is based on a recent filing by the plaintiff, Greek shipowner Victor Restis, in his pending defamation case against UANI. It adds new layers of intrigue to the alleged connections between UANI and Kaplan:
[Kaplan] got his start with help from the family of Leon Recanati, a Greek-Israeli entrepreneur whose family owns and still operates Overseas Shipholding Group (“OSG”), a rival shipping company to Enterprises Shipping and Trading. See Exs. 4, 5. OSG operates oil tankers that compete directly with Mr. Restis’ tanker company, Golden Energy Maritime Corp., whose initial public offering had to be abandoned in 2013 when Defendants launched their defamation campaign that is at the heart of this litigation. See Am. Compl. ¶ 97. OSG would stand to profit if Mr. Restis and his companies were no longer able to operate. Kaplan married Leon Recanati’s daughter Dafna Recanati and was introduced to Israeli investor Avi Tiomkin, by Dafna Recanati’s mother.
If this allegation is true — that Kaplan and/or the Recanati family stood to gain a competitive advantage by publicly charging (through UANI) that Restis and his companies were violating sanctions against Iran — then UANI’s failure to publicly disclose any and all of its ties to Kaplan would obviously constitute a serious ethical breach.
(This is not the only example of billionaire financiers allegedly trying to benefit from Iranophobia. As Charles Davis wrote for IPS a year ago, when the fight between Argentina and Paul Singer and other hold-out, or “vulture” bondholders of the country’s debt was getting relatively little media notice, Singer and his fellow-holdouts founded the American Task Force Argentina (ATFA), which has led a lavishly funded public relations and lobbying campaign against the Kirchner government, including a host of full-page ads in national and Capitol Hill newspapers, at least two of which assailed Argentina’s ties to Iran and suggested that Kirchner was engaged in a cover-up of Tehran’s alleged — and highly doubtful — role in the 1994 bombing of the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. One even showed a photo of Kirchner alongside then-President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with the headline, “A Pact with the Devil?” Singer, who has given millions of dollars to the Likudist Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), stands to make tens of million dollars of dollars in profit if he and his other hedge-fund holdouts prevail in the case.)
In addition to the connections between Kaplan and UANI, which Eli had previously documented in his Salon article, the plaintiff’s filing alleges that UANI operates out of offices at Rockefeller Center. Those offices are provided rent-free by Continental Properties, whose managing director, Mark Fisch, co-funds an NYU fellowship with Kaplan, and whose staff member, Kim Hillman, has served as an UANI director. The filing also notes that UANI’s CEO, Mark Wallace, serves not only as CEO of Kaplan’s Tigris Financial Group as Eli reported last week, but also as an officer and/or director of at least five other Kaplan enterprises, as well. It concludes:
Wallace has not drawn a salary from UANI since 2009, so Wallace appears to be getting his financial benefit indirectly through UANI supporter Kaplan.
Read the rest of Eli’s piece here.
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