Former national security officials and Iranian policy experts are raising alarm about a report linking a Pentagon official to the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Ariane Tabatabai currently serves as the chief of staff to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict. She was previously a senior policy advisor to the Department of Defense and a senior advisor to the Department of State, according to her LindkedIn.
She has also written for Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), an independent private foundation specializing in foreign affairs and security issues. ASD is funded by billionaire Pierre Omidyar's "Democracy Fund" and the Sandler Foundation, among others.
An article published in Semafor this week linked Tabatabai to the Iranian Experts Initiative (IEI), a Tehran-backed project to advance its positions and improve its public image across the world. The outlet obtained a litany of communications between IEI participants and the Iranian government. Among those communications was an email from March 2014 in which Iranian diplomat Saeed Khatibzadeh confirmed meetings with Tabatabai and another academic, saying that "]w]e three agreed to be the core group of the IEI."
Critics of the IEI describe it as "a covert operation initiated by Iran’s foreign ministry in 2014", and that the IEI was "meticulously planned to strategically position Iranian analysts within Western think tanks, subtly advancing Iran's diplomatic objectives."
In 2021, Tabatabai served on Special Envoy to Iran Robert Malley's team for Iranian nuclear negotiations. Malley is himself currently under investigation for mishandling classified information and is on leave from the State Department, the House Foreign Affairs Committee noted this week.
Tabatabai has not responded to requests for comment from Just the News.
In the wake of the revelations, foreign policy experts say the reported ties to Iran represent the latest example of the Biden administration permitting Tehran to act with impunity.
"This has been the case since the minute the Biden administration came into office," Heritage Foundation Vice President of Foreign Policy Victoria Coates said Thursday on the "Just the News, No Noise" television show. "They immediately did things like take the Houthi terrorists in Yemen, the Iranian proxies off the terrorism list." Coates is former national security advisor to the White House and Congress.
