Masoumeh Ebtekar, the first female vice president of Iran
As the first female vice president of Iran and the head of Iran’s Environmental Protection Organization, Masoumeh Ebtekar may be the most powerful woman in Iran. [12] But long before her current role, Americans came to know Ebtekar in 1979 as “Mary,” the English-speaking spokeswoman for the Iranian student group that overran the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took 52 Americans hostage. [12] Thirty-six years after the hostage crisis, Ebtekar said Iranian society is open to dialogue and understanding with the American people, but that there is a persistent distrust of the U.S. government, specifically as it relates to the war against the militant group ISIS. [12] Masoumeh Ebtekar, has singled out the United States and the CIA as the progenitor of ISIS or IS, the Islamic State. “Well, I think there’s a lot of skepticism about the role of the United States in dealing with ISIS, because the support they initially provided for ISIS in Syria strengthened this group at that time, and then also other reasons to believe this is not a genuine group, it somehow instigated or created by, I don’t know, a certain intelligence agency,” Ebtekar said when asked about IS during an interview conducted by ABC News. [1] [12] Ebtekar went on to say that there needs to be a shared goal of raising awareness about “the true face of Islam” as one means of countering the ideology of ISIS. “The reality is that we need to work, all with genuine intentions, and part of that is cultural, part of that is working with the young people, introducing them to the true face of Islam,” Ebtekar said. “The attempts that we see in certain countries to promote a very negative image of Muslims, of Islamic countries, that Islamophobia or Iranophobia, that will change into an attitude of dialogue and understanding.” [12] Maybe Ebtekar’s opinion about the true nature of ISIS is shared by a great number of her countrymen because when the journalistic team of “On the Radar” made a visit to Iran as the country celebrated the 36th anniversary of the Iranian Revolution they noticed that many Iranians chanted “death to America” during the festivities. [12]
In October the former Iranian minister of intelligence, Heydar Moslehi, was more direct. He said ISIS was created by “the triangle of Mossad, MI6, and the CIA.” [1] [3] Moslehi said that “dollars from Saudi Arabia and some of the Gulf countries” are responsible for funding the terrorist army. “The coalition certainly does not want to destroy IS because it needs to use IS for most of its Satanic goals,” he added. [3] His remarks followed those of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who said ISIS and al-Qaeda are the work of “the wicked government of Britain.” [4] In June it was revealed that the U.S. military had trained ISIS members at a secret base in Jordan. [5] Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, it was reported a number of the purported hijackers were “trained in strategy and tactics” at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida, and the Air War College in Montgomery, Alabama, according to Newsweek. [6] The U.S. had admitted its allies fund IS. In September the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin E. Dempsey, told the Senate Armed Services Committee: “I know major Arab allies who fund them.” [7] In January said to be a Pakistani commander of IS, Yousaf al Salafi, confessed to law enforcement agencies in Pakistan to getting funds via the United States. “The US has been condemning the IS activities but unfortunately has not been able to stop funding of these organizations, which is being routed through the US. The US had to dispel the impression that it is financing the group for its own interests and that is why it launched offensive against the organization in Iraq but not in Syria,” a source told the Urdu-language Daily Express. [8] For a detailed explanation of the strategy at work in the Middle East, see Kurt Nimmo’s ISIS and the Plan to Balkanize the Middle East. [9] Obviously, the ABC interview attempted to delegitimize Masoumeh Ebtekar’s remarks on ISIS by noting her association with the Muslim Student Followers of the Imam’s Line who took hostages and occupied the US Embassy in 1979. [1] Unfortunately, ABC did not mention the inconvenient fact that the CIA was using the embassy as a base of operations in Iran at the time. [1] As Bruce Schneier and others have noted, the CIA routinely uses diplomatic cover to conduct operations in foreign countries. “Like the intelligence services of most other countries, the CIA has been unwilling to set up foreign offices under its own name. So American embassies — and, less frequently military bases — provide the needed cover,” Schneider writes. [10] CIA operatives “recruit local officials as CIA agents to supply secret intelligence and, especially in the Third World, to help in the Agency’s manipulation of a country’s internal affairs.” [10]
