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.
]]>by Jim Lobe
Along with AIPAC and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), one of the most active groups that have promoted a policy of confrontation with Iran has been United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), headed by a former Bush administration representative (under John Bolton) to the UN, Mark Wallace. According to a recent [...]]]>
by Jim Lobe
Along with AIPAC and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), one of the most active groups that have promoted a policy of confrontation with Iran has been United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), headed by a former Bush administration representative (under John Bolton) to the UN, Mark Wallace. According to a recent story in the New York Times, UANI, which has specialized in mounting public campaigns against foreign companies allegedly violating US or other sanctions against Iran, recently benefited from an intervention by the Justice Department in a defamation suit against one of its targets, a Greek ship-owner, by asking the trial court to prevent the disclosure of the identity of its donors, as well as other internal UANI documents, arguing that such disclosure could jeopardize ongoing law-enforcement activities.
The intervention was highly unusual, according to some experts, as well as the trial judge himself, who nonetheless bowed to the government’s request.
The story piqued the interest of the intrepid LobeLog alumnus, Eli Clifton, who has uncovered some rather interesting facts about UANI in a piece he just published on Salon. The whole article is well worth reading, but its focus is the curious business relationship between Wallace and billionaire-philanthropist Thomas S. Kaplan, one of the world’s biggest investors in precious metals. As noted by Eli:
The nature of Kaplan’s ties to UANI aren’t entirely clear, but the links are apparent: Kaplan’s investment operations have shared several employees with UANI over the past six years, notably including UANI’s Wallace, who controls several mining ventures through the Tigris Financial Group with the billionaire. Together, the pair are betting big on investments in precious metals they say will retain or appreciate in value in an unstable economic and geopolitical environment. By Tigris’ own account, it stands to make money in the case of “political unrest in the Middle East” — exactly the kind of instability many experts think will become inevitable if naysayers of diplomacy with Iran have their way.
Wallace, according to UANI’s website, is CEO of the Tigris Financial Group, which happens to be controlled by Kaplan. Eli points out that both men have described the prospects for investors in silver, as bright, particularly given the possibility of global unrest, especially in the Middle East. He quotes a 2002 annual report for Kaplan’s Apex Silver Mines Ltd asking investors to consider “destabilization in the Middle East and Persian Gulf, tensions between India and Pakistan, the potential for nuclear confrontation with North Korea and Iran, […] religious extremism and terrorism on a global scale and hooliganism.” Similarly, in a 2011 prospectus for the Sunshine Silver Mine Corp. in Idaho, Tigris CEO Wallace noted that “investment demand for silver exposure remains strong” given “continued U.S. dollar weakness, ongoing economic uncertainty in Europe and political unrest in t he Middle East.”
Eli writes:
Though Kaplan isn’t listed anywhere on UANI’s public disclosures or on the gorup’s website, he acknowledged his connection to the anti-Iran group while receiving the French Legion of Honor insignia from French Ambassador Francois Delattre in April in New York.
“A friends’ comment that one day our kids might ask what our generation did when we knew what the Iranians’ intentions were prompted me to become part of something bigger,” he said, his words appearing only in a video recording of the event. “Hard to know what the outcome will be but I do know that as much as United Against Nuclear Iran may not have had Tomahawk missiles and aircraft carriers at its disposal, we’ve done more to bring Iran to heel than any other private sector initiative and most public ones.”
The published transcript of his remarks contained no mention of UANI or the comparison of the group’s work to advanced weaponry, presumably to be directed at Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Photo: Thomas S. Kaplan (Credit: YouTube/The Economist)
]]>by Farideh Farhi
From the looks of it, the second round of talks with Iran in Almaty, Kazakhstan was a complete failure, with both sides unable to even find a common language to begin a process of give and take. The sense I get is that the US side is rather [...]]]>
by Farideh Farhi
From the looks of it, the second round of talks with Iran in Almaty, Kazakhstan was a complete failure, with both sides unable to even find a common language to begin a process of give and take. The sense I get is that the US side is rather unhappy, even more than expected, with Iran. After all, it made a slight move during the first round by reportedly not demanding the complete dismantling of Fordo and rather asking for its suspension with provisions that would make its return to operation difficult. In return, it offered some sanctions relief regarding the gold trade and petrochemical industry.
The Iranian leadership did not think this was a balanced offer even if they acknowledged the US move as a positive step. The closure or non-operation of Fordo is a key component of a solution to the nuclear conflict while the slight sanctions relief offered in return hardly impacts the complex web of trade and financial sanctions that have been imposed on Iran. More importantly, for negotiation purposes, Fordo — an under-mountain site built in reaction to the repeated refrain of “all options are on the table” — is Tehran’s most important leverage for the talks. So, giving it away cheaply is just bad negotiating strategy.
There were attempts by some members of Iran’s foreign policy establishment to sell the US offer as a good first step to the Iranian public but that didn’t work out. In private conversations, even those hoping that Tehran would take the offer talked about the need for the Leader to take the “poisoned chalice,” a reference to Islamic Revolution founder Ayatollah Khomeini’s famous words when he accepted a ceasefire with Iraq in 1988. In other words, even those hoping for the acceptance of the offer considered it unbalanced and only necessitated through circumstances.
Subsequent efforts to make the offer more balanced during the technical talks in Istanbul failed. Hence, as they have done before, the Iranian negotiating team shifted gears and began talking about a comprehensive solution to the Iran question that will address other regional issues (i.e. Syria and Bahrain) as well as delineate what the end game will be. The endgame for Tehran since everything began in 2003 has always entailed the right to enrich uranium on Iranian soil. In retrospect, we should have expected Iran’s shift back toward a comprehensive discussion — which also happened in Moscow — after efforts during the technical talks to make the revised proposal more balanced failed.
As a result, the question of “now what?” will have to be on the table for the US. By moving a bit, the Obama administration has acknowledged that just making demands without at least appearing to address some of Iran’s bottom lines won’t move the process forward. Similarly, the presumption that a successful sanctions regime will convince Tehran to accede to a perceived bad deal in order to rescue Iran’s economy also just received a solid beating.
The US can of course continue to tighten the economic noose on Iran, although it is not clear how much more “useful” damage that will actually do. Two recent reports from completely divergent outlets — the National Iranian American Council and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy — suggest that Iran’s economy is adapting to the limits that have been imposed on its oil exports. Neither of these reports deny the harm sanctions have inflicted or the opportunity costs that have resulted, but they do acknowledge that Iran has been able to adjust and limp along at least in terms of macro trade and budget numbers. Even a recent joint-report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Federation of American Scientists — while focusing on the costs and risks of Iran’s nuclear program — ends up acknowledging that costs from the loss of oil exports and opportunity costs resulting from the loss of foreign investment has been absorbed by Iran.
Indeed, continuing with what hasn’t worked in the past with the hope that it will one day work is what Gary Samore, Obama’s former nuclear advisor, expects. I guess the hope is that something magical will happen with Iran’s June 14 election and a newly elected president who will take charge by August. Perhaps he will be able to convince the Iranian leadership across the board that the offer Iran just designated as neither balanced nor comprehensive needs to be accepted.
This expectation or hope is a risky one. It is premised on the belief that Iran is a contested political environment and the harshness of sanctions will eventually pave the way for folks who think it’s time to abandon Iran’s nuclear program in favor of economic riches to gain the upper hand or argument. But the logic of Iran as a contested political terrain actually brings us to the opposite conclusion. One can more easily argue that the inability to begin a process of give and take on the nuclear issue before Iran’s election provides incentive to those who insist on Iran’s nuclear rights — and also happen to be in charge of the country — to make sure that a president is elected who will continue to toe their established line. In other words, the further escalation of sanctions may end up impacting the Iranian election, but not in the way that was intended.
So are there other options? Yes, according to another recent report by the Atlantic Council called Time to Move from Tactics to Strategy on Iran. It calls upon the Obama administration to “lay out a step-by-step reciprocal and proportionate plan that ends with graduated relief of sanctions on oil, and eventually on the Iranian Central Bank, in return for verifiable curbs on Iranian uranium enrichment and stocks of enriched uranium, and assurances that Iran does not have undeclared nuclear materials and facilities.”
Various sections of the report appear like they have been written by different members of the Council’s Iran Task Force, but the process laid out is pretty close to what the Iranians have articulated; if the issue is Iran’s nuclear program, then let’s lay out a roadmap and endgame for how the nuclear issue can be resolved to the relative satisfaction of all sides. The report also calls for opening an US Interests Section in Iran and increased people-to-people contact. Although it doesn’t come right out and say it, it effectively endorses various improved relations (people-to-people or government-to-government) as a companion to or simultaneous with a clearly defined step-by-step framework that reduces pressure on Iran in exchange for limitations on its nuclear program.
I’m not sure if the individuals who wrote the section on people-to-people contact and the need to use stepped-up public diplomacy to make Iranians “aware of the real reasons for sanctions” (to ensure the peacefulness of Iran’s nuclear program) understand how hard it is even for the most adept propaganda machine — and our country does have a pretty good one — to sell the idea that the US is justified in collectively punishing Iranians for the policies of their leaders. Nevertheless, making the case that the US is really not that bad while the sanctions regime is being relaxed through a step-by-step process of negotiations is a whole lot easier than what is being done right now: escalating the process of squeezing Iran while denying responsibility for it.
The Council report curiously does insist on maintaining one aspect of the Obama administration’s approach. It says that the majority of the Iran Task Force favors maintaining the military option as a last resort. It calls on the Obama administration to make sure that the option remains credible despite the acknowledgment that “While the drawbacks of a nuclear Iran are grave, the ramifications of a premature military strike—what the US military refers to as “second- and third-order effects”—could also be dire.” My dictionary tells me that “dire” is much worse than “grave” and I guess the report tries to ignore this by highlighting its rejection of a “premature” strike, whatever that means. But the dire effects of the premature strike are the same, I suppose, as a rightly timed strike.
Beyond this, I am truly puzzled by the inability of those promoting this type of public discourse to understand the corrosive impact that the language of “all options are on the table” has on the so-called international community that the Obama administration claims to represent, as well as various stakeholders in Iran, including the “Iranian people” who we apparently love and are so interested in establishing contact with. These fighting words do nothing to make the threat of military attack credible to those who run Iran’s nuclear policy precisely because of the “dire” effects that the Council report lays out. They also undercut any claim to righteousness regarding the nuclear row for the people who occupy the land and buildings that are being threatened. I cannot claim to know what the “Iranian people” think, but I can say that the overwhelming majority of Iranians I know, inside and outside of Iran, consider this language vulgar and appalling and reflective of an utter disregard for other people’s lives and livelihoods. Who else speaks this way nowadays? North Korea?
America’s “now what?” moment regarding Iran could be a productive moment if it begins to come to terms with the fact that the sanctions regime has not changed the calculation of the Iranian government — as evidenced by what just happened in Almaty. It can only do so, however, if it acknowledges that the military option cannot be made credible because the idea is both stupid and offensive.
]]>It’s almost as though the “threat” of Iran’s growing “influence” in Iraq is being used as a reason for the US to stay even though Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta insists he’s waiting on Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to make the decision. Some analysts say it’s mere posturing by the Obama administration ahead of the elections to show that the president will take a tough line on Iran.
On July 5 US ambassador to Iraq James F. Jeffrey said that “forensic testing” on weapons used against Iraqi police prove “[t]here is no doubt” the weapons are Iranian. The article notes that in some cases no effort was made to remove weapons identification numbers suggesting that they came from Iran.
On July 7 Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen repeated Jeffrey’s claims to reporters at a luncheon, adding that “there’s no reason … for me to believe that they’re going to stop that as our numbers come down.”
Panetta made a news media splash when he told US troops in Baghdad that the US is very concerned about “Iran and the weapons they are providing to extremists here in Iraq…In June we lost a hell of a lot of Americans as a result of these attacks. And we cannot just simply stand back and allow this to continue to happen.”
Panetta also told the soldiers that the “reason you guys are here is because on 9/11 the United States got attacked, and 3,000 … innocent human beings got killed because of al Qaeda.”
Writing in The Independent Patrick Cockburn argues that Panetta’s comment show
Without supplying a direct quote, Reuters reports that Panetta also stated that the US will take “unilateral action when needed to deal with the threat to American troops in Iraq from Shi’ite militias armed by Iran” (this quote is taken from the body of the article).
Further down in the same piece Reuters notes that General Lloyd Austin, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, declined to comment on what exactly unilateral action would involve, but said “the secretary was pointing to was we’ll do what’s necessary to protect ourselves and that could include a host of things … so we’ll just leave it at that.”
While all of this is happening the Wall Street Journal is reporting that the US and Iraq have “quietly” restarted negotiations regarding an Iraqi purchase of what was initially priced at over 4 billion dollars worth of F-16s from Lockheed Martin. The new deal will cost billions more if Iraq decides to double the number of fighter jets purchased from18 to 36. It may be completed as a “government-to-government” transaction in the “coming months.”
The article begins by arguing that Washington hopes the purchase “will help counter Iranian influences and cement long-term ties with Baghdad after American troops pull out.” But considering increasingly warming ties between Iraq and Iran caused by the US invasion of 2003, it’s fun to ponder exactly how (or why?) the F-16s can be used to counter Iraq’s previous arch enemy, especially when its recovering air force does not have the expertise required to use or maintain them.
Finally, Iranian, Israeli and Arab representatives attended a EU hosted WMD-free zone meeting in the Middle East, but Gary Samore, President Obama’s adviser on nuclear disarmament and proliferation, was a no show!
]]>WASHINGTON, Dec 15, 2010 (IPS) – The Barack Obama administration is preparing a new batch of sanctions against Iran to be announced next [...]]]>
WASHINGTON, Dec 15, 2010 (IPS) – The Barack Obama administration is preparing a new batch of sanctions against Iran to be announced next week in advance of nuclear talks in Turkey.
Two Iran experts in Washington who are usually well briefed about U.S. Iran policy said more Iranian officials would be designated as abusers of human rights on top of eight sanctioned earlier this year. That would deny them the right to travel to the U.S. and freeze any assets they might hold in this country.
Gary Samore, White House coordinator on non-proliferation, told a neoconservative organisation, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, last week that the U.S. would “maintain and even increase pressure” against Iran so long as negotiations produced no progress on curbing Iran’s nuclear programme.
Asked by IPS if that meant new punishments before a meeting expected in January in Istanbul, Samore said, “I think it would be an important message to send to take additional measures.”
At the FDD conference, Samore made an off-the-cuff comment that seemed a bit strange. The Nation‘s Robert Dreyfuss picked up on it:
Weirdly enough, Samore’s speech followed a panel discussion by ultra-hardliners about the “kinetic option,” i.e., a military attack on Iran, and Samore said that he “agreed with a great deal of what was said, probably more than I can publicly admit to.” That’s unsettling, to say the least, and afterwards I asked Samore about it in the hallway outside. He refused to clarify what he meant—but it seemed obvious.
The FDD conference was heavily focused on ratcheting-up sanctions — it seemed a point of broad agreement among all participants.
Yet the question remains: Why now? Why push for new sanctions in the next month right before the U.S. returns to the table with Iran? Why just ahead of what one hopes will lead to a confidence-building deal?
The two-track path pursued by the administration — pressure and engagement — shouldn’t mean that the United States can’t pull back on one (pressure) for just a month in the hope that a small piece of the other (engagement) can work out in good faith.
]]>Because I got hung up in New York Wednesday morning, I hit rush hour traffic on the Beltway coming into DC, and arrived late for the opening session of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies‘s Washington Forum on “Countering the Iranian Threat.”
Nothing out of the ordinary during last night’s cocktail outing at the Ritz-Carlton, where in an adjacent conference area, two Barhraini gentlemen stood in white robes and head-dresses greeting people for an event sponsored by that government. The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) event is your run-of-the-mill blue chip neoconservative conference at the high-endest of high-end Washington hotels.
As I looked closely at the final schedule, I was rather struck by the speakers’ list.
The New York Times‘s David Sanger — who just co-wrote a controversial story about Iran – will moderate a panel. Jeffry Goldberg, another mainstream journalist and no stranger to controversial stories on Iran, will be on a panel with perhaps the most strident advocate of immediate attacks on Iran, Reuel Marc Gerecht.
From officialdom, U.S. WMD czar and the former vice president of United Against a Nuclear Iran, Gary Samore, will address the crowd on Friday morning.
Naturally, the right wing of the foreign policy establishment is represented as well. Iran Policy Committee head Raymond Tanter, a tireless advocate of the Mojehedeen-e Khalq (MEK), was at the cocktail. And the Hudson Institute‘s I. Lewis Scooter Libby — formerly then-Vice President Dick Cheney‘s chief of staff who was convicted of lying to investigators in the PlameGate scandal — was in attendance for Thursday morning’s panels, as was Patrick Clawson of the AIPAC-formed Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Of course there is the FDD roster itself: Gerecht (who was seen chatting in the lobby on Thursday morning with neoconservative Washington Times journalist Eli Lake), Cliff May, Michael Ledeen, and all the others.
But what really piqued my interest was an FDD fundraiser scheduled for Thursday night at the home of an unnamed ambassador to the United States.
Here’s what the schedule has to say:
7:00 pm
Dinner at the residence of one
of Washington’s noteworthy Ambassadors
(Closed to Media)
(Minimum $5,000 gift required. Contribute here, or for more information on becoming a donor, please contact XXXXXXX)
FDD’s communications director, Judy Mayka, told me on Wednesday night that just which ambassador is hosting the $5,000 a plate fund-raiser is such a closely guarded secret that even she didn’t know. I’ll update as I find out more.
However, Thursday morning’s session featured Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL), who made the case for more robust U.S. assistance to Israel on missile defense. He received spontaneous mid-presentation applause — a rarity at these Washington panels.
Given the focus on Israel for FDD and many of its scholars — and the neoconservative movement from which they emerge — it’s not a stretch to put the early odds that Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren will play host to tonight’s big money FDD donors.
Otherwise, what I caught of the opening panel was rather unremarkable. Former Regean administration national security advisor Bud McFarlane spoke about impending threats and FDD’s unique ability to confront them:
We’re going, in the next two years, to face a threat from Iran, North Korea… We’re probably going to face a disruption of the oil supply…
Nobody else in Washington has the reach and the depth and the solutions that will get us out of this.
Mark Dubowitz, FDD’s executive director, ran down the group’s roster and sang their praises. He joked, as anti-anti-Semitism activist Irwin Cotler did on Thursday morning, about being a Canadian. Threats against Iran were not totally absent, but Dubowitz delivered them with a metaphor:
There’s no silver bullet for solving this problem, but there might be silver shrapnel.
Knowing some of the views of FDD staff and experts, some of the panel titles read like rhetorical questions:
- Sanctions: What’s Next?
Is enforcement enough?- Increasing Threats, Diminishing Options: Should the Military Option be Employed against Iran?
When does this become the only option?
Dubowitz confirmed the militarist bent of FDD when he closed out Wednesday night’s opening cocktail reception: “We’re not just a think tank. We like to think of ourselves as a ‘battle tank’.”
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