UPDATED Iran: How the Regime Constructed the "Velvet Revolution"

The Latest from Iran (28 August): The President Prays
Iran Video Exclusive: Ministry of Intelligence Proves “Velvet Revolution”

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UPDATE 29 August: Ayande News has posted a lengthy audio interview with Hamid Reza Moghadam-Far, the Managing Director of Fars News Agency, and a Mr. Gharebaghi, whom Ayande claim are two of the authors of the Tehran trial indictments. (Ayande also says Reza Seraj, the Head of Student Basij Organization, is a third author of the indictment.)

The interviewee try to distinguish between "velvet" and "colored" revolutions. A "colored" revolution, such as the movements in Ukraine and Georgia in 2004, only intend to change behaviour, whereas a "velvet" revolution intends to overthrow the regime, as in Czechoslovakia. (Significantly, the Tehran trial indictments repeatedly refer to US-sponsored operatives planning their Iranian regime change from a Czech academic institution.) Both men express their unhappiness that Iran's judicial and security systems do not have sufficient powers to deal with the "velvet" revolution.

And the source of the trouble? Samuel Huntington and his 1991 book, The Third Wave of Democratization, which was translated into Persian and apparently became a "manifesto" for reformers.

UPDATE: By coincidence, just after writing this, I discovered that Robert Mackey wrote yesterday of "Iran’s Fear of a ‘Velvet Revolution’" in The Lede blog of The New York Times, referring to Tajbakhsh's testimony briefly. The piece, unfortunately, is not in the print edition of the newspaper.

One of the surprises of this week's 4th Tehran trial was how little attention was paid outside Iran to the testimony of the Iranian-American academic Kian Tajbakhsh, who was among the latest set of defendants. The foreign media had featured the situation of French national Clotilde Reiss, a graduate student spending time at Isfahan University, when she “confessed” in an earlier trial, and earlier this year the detention of Iranian-American Roxana Saberi had been headline news. Tajbakhsh, however, was almost invisible, apart from passing references to his status and a couple of paragraphs in the Wall Street Journal.

The episode is far more than a question of the media noting a “foreigner” in jail. Tajbakhsh's testimony illustrated the fundamental pretext of these trials and, indeed, the regime's crackdown on political opposition; paradoxically, it also undermined the pretext.

Because --- Mr Prosecutor, Mr Ahmadinejad, Generals of the Revolutionary Guard --- are academics really at the forefront the “velvet revolution” to overthrow your Islamic Republic?

The claim has been at the heart of the prosecution's case since the indictment at the first trial three weeks ago. We noted then that the efforts for regime change not only involved but were supposedly inspired and led by academics and writers such as Gene Sharp, Abbas Milani, and Mark Palmer, adding a large dose of scepticism to our analysis. It is Tajbakhsh's testimony that illustrates, however, just how far the regime will go and, how with each step, its legal and political case is shakier and shakier.

The opening gambit in Tajbakhsh's “confession” is that “information services” of the US Government and the CIA develop and carry out their schemes with “semi-hidden” activities of academic institutions “such as the [Woodrow] Wilson Center in Washington”, behind the front of their “scientific research, academic seminars, and meetings”, and funders such as the Soros Foundation, for whom Tajbakhsh worked in Iran, and the Carnegie Foundation. The real goal of supposedly neutral study and research is “disturbing public order and creating chaos and fear in society” in the seven-step pursuit of “soft overthrow” of the enemy system.

Beyond the general allegation of the scheme “promoting Western democracy, secularism, and liberalism”, there were few details of Tajbakhsh's activities inside Iran. The headline charge was his meetings with Mohammad Khatami, Iranian President from 1997 to 2005, including an introduction of the leader to George Soros. The contacts had started in 1997, which implied that Khatami was seeking the overthrow of the Government that he was leading, and continued after he left the Presidency. Others named in the “confession” were Mostafa Tajzadeh, a Vice Minister at the Ministry of Interior under Khatami, Gholamhossein Karbaschi, a key Khatami advisor  supporting Mehdi Karroubi during the 2009 Presidential campaign, and journalist Mohammad Atrianfar. There were also meetings with Saeed Hajjarian, the reformist leader whose own “confession” was the headline moment of the 4th trial about developing and using “social capital” for velvet revolution.

As sketchy as these claims are, however, it is Tajbakhsh's “confession” of the foreigners directing his efforts to the level of the fantastic. The relatively little-known Dutch foundation Hivos makes another appearance, after its citation in the indictment of the first trial, to set up subversive media activities. Unsurprisingly, given the regime's denunciation of Britain throughout the crisis, BBC Persian gets a mention.

Then this revelation: one of the networks for this velvet revolution is a discussion list, with “more than a thousand members”, called “Gulf 2000”, led by a former National Security Council staff member in the Carter and Reagan Administrations, now Professor at Columbia University, named Gary Sick. While Tajbakhsh noted that Sick and the list members are not CIA agents, he said,"If I had known about it [G2K's misconduct "proven" in Iranian documents], I would have cut my contacts with it."

“Fantastic” claims, indeed, for the Tajbakhsh's testimony and the claims of velvet revolution now reached all the way to Enduring America. Here I should declare a personal interest. In the last years of the Khatami Presidency, a close colleague unwittingly came close --- if Tajbakhsh's “confession” were true --- to becoming part of the conspiracy. Working with an Iranian university, he drafted a grant request to the Soros Foundation in Tehran to fund the purchase of books and the movement of students and scholars between Iranian and Western institutions. Before the proposal could be submitted, the word came down from higher levels of the Iranian university: Soros, with its promotion of “democracy” and “open society”, was off-limits.

And I am a member of Gulf 2000's misbehaving network. Apparently, amidst discussion of topics from Saudi Prince Turki al-Feisal's recent writings on energy to the political situation in Iraq to Iran's dispute with the United Arab Emirates over islands in the Persian Gulf, I take my place as a velvet revolutionary.

None of this is to belittle the seriousness of events in Iran, both the general political conflict and the specific situation of Kian Tajbakhsh. It does, however, point to the absurdity when politics and academia collide. Far from being the hyper-clever agents of revolution, professors and social scientists find themselves as mute actors in the play of a regime which sees a dispute over a Presidential election as a threat to its survival.