Despite the U.S. State Department having designated the Iranian MKO (Mujahedin Khalq Organization) as a terrorist group, some administration hawks nevertheless think that its members could be useful as the Bush administration pressures Iran over its nuclear weapons program. At the Ashraf camp south of Baghdad, U.S. forces have confined 3,850 MKO members since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, largely because the MKO were once Saddam's allies against Iran during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq War and were thus seen by the U.S. military as unreliable.
But now some members of the Bush administration, notably in the Pentagon and CIA, are seeking to recruit useful MKO members to operate in or simply to pressure Iran -- even as it insists that it does not deal with the MKO as a group. Some Pentagon policy planners are hoping a corps of informants can be selected from among the MKO at Ashraf, trained as spies and then be infiltrated back into Iran to gather intelligence, particularly on Iran's nuclear activities. One MKO official complains, "They (want) to make us mercenaries." The MKO has its roots in Marxism. Its former role in terrorist attacks dates back to its support for the U.S. embassy takeover in February 1979. During the 1970s, when the shah ruled Iran, the MKO assassinated U.S. military and civilian personnel working on defense projects. | They already seem to have infiltrated the Iranian nuke program. This is one of those dammed-if-you-do / dammed-if-you-don't subjects. They could be a valuable intel asset if handled with rubber gloves. |
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