Hard Realities of Soft Power

Magazine new york times
Hard Realities of Soft Power
By NEGAR AZIMI
Published: June 24, 2007
As a senior adviser to the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, David Denehy is charged with overseeing the distribution of millions of dollars to advance the cause of a more democratic Iran. Affable, charming and approachable, he is bearlike in stature and manner. His voice is pleasantly rumbly; his smile is so wide that it seems to have been drawn onto his face with a crayon. Over the last two years, Denehy has canvassed dozens of pundits, students, journalists, bloggers and activists across the world about how he might best go about his work — what he calls, echoing President Bush, “the freedom agenda.” He has shaken hands with millionaire exiles, dissidents, monarchists, Communists, self-styled Mandelas and would-be Chalabis. He is the public face of “the democracy fund,” as it has come to be known, or simply “the $75 million.”
On Feb. 14, 2006, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice — only three weeks into her new job — went before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and called for $75 million to be spent on advancing freedom and human rights within Iran. Though this would be the third year of requests for such financing, previous appropriations had been much smaller, ranging from $1.5 million to $11 million; $75 million was a considerable jump. “We are going to work to support the aspirations of the Iranian people for freedom in their own country,” Rice told the assembled senators. The initiative would pour $36.1 million into existing television and radio programs beaming into Iran, while $10 million would pay for public diplomacy and exchange programs, including helping Iranians who hope to study in America. (“I’ve read that it is forbidden in some quarters to play Beethoven and Mozart in Tehran,” Rice said. “We hope that Iranians can play it in New York or Los Angeles.”) Perhaps most contentiously, $20 million would support the efforts of civil-society groups — media, legal and human rights nongovernmental organizations — both outside and inside Iran.
Now, a year after its unveiling and with the administration requesting an additional $75 million for 2008, the democracy fund faces criticism, not only from Iranian officials but also from some of the very people whose causes it aims to advance. Could this ambitious program actually be doing more harm than good?
For the Iranian government, the democracy fund is just one more element in an elaborate Bush administration regime-change stratagem. (“Is there even a perception that the American government has democracy in mind?” Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, Javad Zarif, asked me recently in New York. “Except among a few dreamers in Eastern Europe?”) In recent months, Tehran has upped the pressure on any citizens who might conceivably be linked to the democracy fund and, by extension, on civil society at large, making the mere prospect of American support counterproductive, even reckless. As of this writing, two Iranian-American scholars, Haleh Esfandiari of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and Kian Tajbakhsh, an urban planner and consultant for the Open Society Institute, sit in solitary confinement in a hillside prison called Evin, Tehran’s Alcatraz, arrested on charges of spying for the United States. A Los Angeles-based peace activist named Ali Shakeri is also now in Evin — no charges have been announced — while Parnaz Azima, a dual national who works for the U.S.-financed Radio Farda, has been barred from leaving the country. She is charged with collaborating with a counterrevolutionary radio station.
Many Iranians have grown paranoid about anything vaguely linked to the West. Conference and workshop attendance, travel and even e-mail and phone contact with foreign entities is suspect. In the last three months, at least three prominent NGOs have been shut down indefinitely. Kayhan, the semiofficial newspaper, editorializes almost daily about an elaborate network conspiring to topple the regime. Called “khaneh ankaboot,” or “the spider nest,” the network is reportedly bankrolled by the $75 million and includes everyone from George Soros to George W. Bush to Francis Fukuyama to dissident Iranians of all shades. In this vision, the network gets its “orders” from the Americans.
It is particularly telling, perhaps, that some of the most outspoken critics of the Iranian government have been among the most outspoken critics of the democracy fund. Activists from the journalist Emadeddin Baghi to the Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi to the former political prisoner Akbar Ganji have all said thanks but no thanks. Ganji has refused three personal invitations to meet with Bush. A member of a U.S.-based institution that has received State Department financing and who works with Iranians told me that the Iranians had expressly asked not to have their cause mentioned in presidential speeches. “The propaganda campaign surrounding the launch of this campaign has meant that many of our partners are simply too afraid to work with us anymore,” she told me on condition of anonymity. “It’s had a chilling effect.”
If the spider’s nest had a headquarters, it might well be the Office of Iranian Affairs, which sits on the second floor of the State Department, its pencil-thin plastic sign a bit more shiny and newer than those glued to adjoining doors. Begun in March 2006 with the patronage and blessing of the secretary of state, the office was charged with outlining, in close consultation with Denehy, how to spend the democracy fund. According to an internal State Department memo, the office was part of a new effort to “respond to the full spectrum of threats Iran poses,” as well as to “reach out to the Iranian people to support their desire for freedom and democracy.” One senior administration official who is a key proponent of the fund recently explained the logic informing the investment in Iran. “This was a reaction to the slowness of the U.S. government in reacting to Iran,” he told me. “There were two people working at the Iran desk when Condi came in. Think about how many people we had working on, say, Germany. Even the National Security Council did not have a director for Iran. And there was not much of a human rights program. It was about time we did something.”
In Denehy’s spare office at State hangs a map of Iran, a U.S. flag and a Persian miniature with a faceless Imam Hussein — Shia Islam’s iconic martyr. Denehy is painfully aware of the conspiracy theories that surround him. Unlike most of his colleagues at State, he is a political appointee. Some have taken to referring to his office as the “vice presidential outpost at State.” A veteran of democracy promotion programs in Eastern Europe and Central Asia with the International Republican Institute and a close associate of Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz during the Iraq war, he served in Baghdad from June to October 2003, where his focus was on civil-society development. “I’ve focused my career on promoting personal liberty because I want my kids to grow up in a better world than their parents did,” he told me. “I don’t want them to be concerned about the global war on terror. I want them to be able to travel throughout the Middle East without concerns.”
From the beginning, Denehy’s influence at the Office of Iranian Affairs had stirred up resentment. Suzanne Maloney was on the policy-planning staff at the State Department for two years before she left last month to take up a post at the Brookings Institution . Her experience with the Iran portfolio demonstrates some of the difficulties inherent in democracy promotion. “In a small room it sounds terrific,” she told me. “You put some money on the table, we support freedom and it gets us some points at home.” Maloney, who was one of a handful of staff members at the State Department who spoke some Farsi and had actually been to Iran, said she found herself doing a lot of damage control during her policy-planning stint: “I was worried about the safety of those on the receiving end of the funds. But I also just wondered if this was feasible. I don’t see how a U.S. government that has been absent from Tehran for 30 years is capable of formulating a program that will have a positive effect.” She continued: “You had to wonder where this money was going to go and what’s going to happen when you don’t have the time to sit down and sift through the more questionable proposals. There’s just not enough oversight. Of the 100 or more preliminary proposals I saw under the first call, it was an enormous challenge to find anything viable. This may have been a very high profile, sexy project, but the likelihood of real impact was minimal.”
Between 2001 and 2003, Hillary Mann Leverett was director for Iran and Persian Gulf affairs at the National Security Council. Leverett considers the democracy fund a concession to those who were keen on regime change but, for timing reasons — particularly with the U.S. bogged down in Iraq — couldn’t have their way. “There was a strong push for policy toward U.S.-style democracy from the White House and the N.S.C. the entire time I was in the administration,” Leverett told me. “They were looking to undermine the Iranian government any way they could, from military strikes and sanctions to funding U.S.-style democracy activists. The compromise was among the regime-change advocates; some of them believed that all they could have gotten then was the democracy funding. But at least it would set the U.S. government on a course for regime change.” As is still the case today, the administration was divided between those who were more militaristic in bent and intent on regime change and those who were more inclined toward engagement, whether that took the form of easing sanctions or sitting down at the table with the Iranians over issues of mutual interest.
Denehy insists that his program “is not about regime change.” He also bristles at allegations that the democracy fund may be linked to the current crackdown. “It’s not our activity that is breeding repression,” he said, emphasizing the continuity of America’s approach to promoting democracy abroad. “It’s been the policy of the U.S. since the end of World War II to support efforts to expand personal liberty and freedom around the world. This is the overarching policy of the U.S., and from my perspective, something we should be proud of. We’re supporting freedom and liberty.”
The current pressures in Iran are not entirely new, nor is chronic suspicion of foreigners. The 1953 C.I.A.-engineered coup that overthrew the nationalist prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh shaped modern Iranian history — and was financed by a modest $1 million, Iranians will tell you. The shah of Iran, an ally of successive American administrations, was himself famously paranoid about outsiders. In the first years after the Islamic revolution overthrew the shah, there was a marked anxiety over a “cultural invasion.” The postrevolutionary regime has been attacking its domestic opponents as Western lackeys for 27 years. In 2000 Ayatollah Muhammad Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, an influential ultraconservative Shiite cleric, charged that a C.I.A. agent had entered the country with a suitcase full of dollars to pay reformist newspaper editors. Likewise, the dozen or more reformist newspapers shut down that same year were described as Western agents by Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. More recently, in April of last year, a Canadian-Iranian dual citizen, Ramin Jahanbegloo, was accused of fomenting a velvet revolution through his international academic networks. After four months in prison, he admitted being exploited by foreign agents and was released.
And, of course, there is a deep awareness of more recent U.S. efforts to destabilize the Islamic government. As Martin Indyk, an assistant secretary of state for Near East Affairs during the Clinton administration, recently told me: “Don’t forget 1996, when Newt Gingrich proposed an $18 million program, a covert program to overthrow the regime. From then the Iranians were convinced we were coming for them.”
The government’s fears have direct consequences for people like Emadeddin Baghi, a charismatic journalist who spent three years in prison for his work in exposing the culprits behind a series of murders of dissident intellectuals in the mid-1990s. I last saw him in Tehran in February at his high-rise offices on Jordan Avenue. Even then, before this latest crackdown, he was chafing under the heightened pressures imposed on civil society in the Ahmadinejad era. To this day, he is regularly interrogated by intelligence officers about his work, his financing and his allegiances. “The [democracy] money is a blade,” he told me. “Our government accuses us of receiving money from the Americans. All of a sudden, my normal human rights work becomes political. I have one question: Why do I have to suffer when this money is going to pay for someone else’s salary in Washington?”
State Department officials admit that the great bulk of the funds has not left the United States. A handful of Beltway-based think tanks and institutions have announced new “Iran desks” in the past year. Other institutions have invested the money in Web zines, training sessions, workshops and exchanges. But even such mild activities can bring risks, as can be seen in the case of Ramin Ahmadi.
A compact man, peripatetic and cordial, Ahmadi is an assistant clinical professor of medicine at Yale Medical School, founder of the Griffin Center for Health and Human Rights and a frequent commentator on Iranian affairs. Having left Iran at the age of 17 — “through the hills,” as he often recounts — he has devoted himself to bringing about his particular vision of a democratic Iran. When in his excited presence, you get the impression that Iran is on the verge of a revolution, that disenfranchisement, isolation and desperation have pushed people to the edge. “We are where Poland was in 1981 or 1982,” Ahmadi told me. “There is a mass movement. There is a silent majority that does not want this regime. We’re experiencing a slow 1978 in the context of Iranian history.” In 1978, he points out, President Carter came to Iran and lauded the country as “an island of stability.” “And then came revolution!” he said, gesturing furiously. “It is just under the surface.”
Ahmadi and a group of partners were among the earlier recipients of State Department democracy financing, securing initial grants of $1.6 million in 2004 to start the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center. Its offices are now in a vast oblong space overlooking Yale’s gothic campus. When I recently visited the center, its executive director, Tom Parker, emphasized that Ahmadi does not speak for the organization. But Ahmadi remains on the center’s board. In early 2005, he brought the board a proposal to hold a human rights workshop in Dubai. (He had been running his own, privately financed workshops for Iranians for several years.) Some board members, including Reza Afshari, a professor of history at Pace University , worried about taking Iranians out of the country for such an event. “We had two primary concerns: Are we capable of providing solid training? And what of the safety of those concerned?” Afshari told me. Ahmadi was persuasive, according to Afshari and former employees of the center, assuring his colleagues that every step would be taken to ensure that the participants’ identities would be protected. The board reluctantly agreed, and the workshops went on, scheduled for April and May 2005.
Emadeddin Baghi, who at that time was running a center for the defense of prisoners’ rights in Tehran, sent members of his family — including his wife and daughter — to Dubai. “I was under the impression that this was a U.N.-sponsored event and that it would work on basic human rights reporting and documentation,” he told me. “When the participants arrived, there was no trace of the U.N. And they had more in mind than reporting and documenting. We were lied to.”
Upon arrival, he said, participants were kept sequestered in small groups, housed in separate hotels across Dubai. Over three sets of sessions, they were not only given some basic human rights and health training but also a session on successful popular revolts in places like Serbia, conducted by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, a Washington-based group. At least two members of Otpor — the Serbian youth movement instrumental in ousting Slobodan Milosevic — were present. Portions of “A Force More Powerful,” a three-hour documentary series featuring civil-resistance movements overcoming authoritarian rule around the world, was also screened.
Further sessions included a lesson on how to use Hushmail (an encrypted e-mail account) and a secure open-source software called Martus designed to store information about human rights abuses. With the press of a single button, you can upload information to a server and erase any trace of the file from your computer. Each participant was given the software to take back to Tehran. One participant recently told me: “We were certain that we would have trouble once we went back to Tehran. This was like a James Bond camp for revolutionaries.”
Two years later, at least two persons have been arrested in connection with attending the Dubai workshops. To this day, Ahmadi’s name continues to come up in interrogations. The nonviolent conflict center, for its part, is no longer running workshops with Iranians. “We don’t want people to get arrested,” Jack DuVall, the organization’s president, told me. Reza Afshari, the professor who had been so worried by the Dubai project, has resigned from the documentation center’s board, and the New Haven center has gone through three successive executive directors. But Ahmadi has carried on. He held another workshop recently following which at least three people were imprisoned in connection with their attendance, though one maintains that he was never there in the first place. Ahmadi, for his part, maintains that all of his workshops are carried out with private funds. (The State Department declined to comment on Ahmadi’s work.) “The question is not whether you will interfere, it is how will you interfere,” he told me. “They need the help now . . . but they can’t possibly publicly say it. They have to say, Leave us alone. You have to not listen.”
When I met Ahmadi last month, in a bustling Starbucks in New Haven, he excitedly told me of plans to translate a sort of activist computer game developed by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict into Farsi. (It enables players to construct and act out certain scenarios, like women rising up against a clerical regime.) They were to be smuggled into the country to be copied en masse: “There will be 20,000 copies on the street in one week.”
Every day at 8 p.m., hundreds of thousands of Iranians around the country tune into the Voice of America’s Persian service on their satellite televisions. Setareh Derakhshesh reads the evening news; her father was a minister of education under the shah. Founded in 1996, the television service is based upon the V.O.A. template designed during World War II to target restive populations under Nazi occupation. It is perhaps best known for its work in broadcasting beyond the Iron Curtain during the cold war. By and large, V.O.A. Persian has earned a reputation as a balanced source of news, especially compared with an Iranian state television that has grown increasingly doctrinaire and dozens of exile-run stations — particularly in Los Angeles — that seem more the reflections of individual whim or separatist ambition than credible information sources. The fundamental assumption of Voice of America is that the societies to which it is broadcasting are not free and that the best thing you can do to advance their freedom is to show them what fair reporting is like and, along the way, show them the good news about American values. Just as blue jeans brought down the Soviet Union, the U.S. would triumph by example in Iran.
So when it was announced that $36.1 million of the democracy money was to go to V.O.A. Persian and Radio Farda — an American-financed broadcaster primarily known for its pop music and news — there was great hope for recreating the successes of the cold war. Besides, in the Iranian case, programming seemed a sound investment and avoided most of the dangers associated with directly financing individuals within the country. V.O.A.’s Persian television programming spiked from one to five hours a day.
Still, more than one year later, the dedicated funds for Persian-language media increasingly look to many inside the V.O.A. like an opportunity lost, particularly as the money arrived with a bundle of expectations attached. “There was this idea that we had to serve the White House with this money,” one V.O.A. staff member recently told me. “And then there was Archin’s report.” Ladan Archin, a former student of Paul Wolfowitz’s currently serving in the Defense Department, had been asked to write an internal report on Persian-language programming for the N.S.C. and the now-dissolved Iran Steering Group in 2006. Her report, leaked in September 2006, was pithy and damning: she deemed the programming a waste of money. Archin chronicled instances of what she considered the V.O.A.’s giving a platform to “the Islamic Republic’s version of issues” and listed commentators who had gone on air criticizing American policy. Her report was echoed by Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, who has consistently pressed V.O.A. to be harder on the Islamic Republic. Suddenly, one V.O.A. staff member told me, “everyone’s asking themselves if they are ‘Coburn-PC.’ ”
The charged climate may have given free rein to a disturbing variety of political actors. On occasion, V.O.A. has lurched toward Reza Pahlavi, the shah’s son. The 40-something would-be monarch, who lives in Maryland, is often on the program and on occasion is invited to bestow New Year’s wishes on the Iranian people. And on April 1 of this year V.O.A. featured Abdolmalek Rigi, the head of Jondollah, a militant Sunni group that operates inside Iran’s southeastern border and claims to advance the interests of the Baluch minority. Jondollah is responsible for dozens of hostage takings and terrorist attacks. On this particular round-table program, Rigi was introduced as the leader of an armed national resistance group. Two days later, ABC News reported that the United States was funneling covert support to the group. (The U.S. immediately denied this.) Mehdi Khalaji, currently a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, worked at Radio Farda for three years and has spent the past months studying the Persian-language media. The new administrators at V.O.A. “do not seem to be able to distinguish between journalism and propaganda,” Khalaji told me. “If you host the head of Jondollah and call him a freedom fighter or present a Voice of America run by monarchists, Iranians are going to stop listening.”
Before their recent arrests, Haleh Esfandiari and Kian Tajbakhsh were very cautious in their work. Esfandiari, now 67, came and went to Iran at least twice each year to see her aging mother. A petite and sweetly fierce grandmother herself, Esfandiari was careful about whom she saw and what she said, keen on being balanced in her views. She was a tireless facilitator of dialogue between the two countries, organizing dozens of exchanges between Iran and the U.S. with people of diverse agendas and backgrounds in her capacity as head of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center. She was so evenhanded that in some exile circles she was viewed as an apologist for the Iranian government. She was often called upon to lend nuance when public discussions about Iran veered into hyperbole; she declined offers to appear on Voice of America, for fear of being tied to an American agenda.
So when she was stopped in Tehran on Dec. 30 last year, en route to the airport, and had her passports taken away, it came as a surprise. She faced weeks of interrogations — sometimes for up to eight hours at a time. In February, they unexpectedly came to a halt. Her passports, however, were not returned to her. And then on May 8 she was arrested. Three days later, Kian Tajbakhsh was arrested and taken from his home in Tehran. Both have since been accused of taking part in efforts to destabilize the government, charges that could carry the death penalty. The Intelligence Ministry has been keen to point out that the Wilson Center receives U.S. government money, as well as money from the Open Society Institute, the New York-based foundation begun by the financier George Soros. On May 22, the ministry announced that O.S.I. had “played key roles in intrigues that have led to color revolutions in former Soviet republics in recent years” and now aimed to overthrow Iran’s government as well.
Not only was Tajbakhsh given official sanction by Iran for his work with O.S.I., but he also undertook several projects directly for the government. To many who knew him and his work, O.S.I.’s being implicated in a conspiracy to topple the regime was absurd. The organization was invited by the Iranian government to provide technical assistance on a project related to IV drug use in 2002. Since then, it had been invited to work on projects from H.I.V./AIDS education to contributing to the relief efforts following a 2003 earthquake that devastated the southeastern city of Bam. “Kian’s activities were done in plain view and with the knowledge of the Iranian government,” Anthony Richter, O.S.I.’s associate director, recently told me.
Still, Tajbakhsh was aware of an increased sensitivity in recent months to contacts with the West. In early April, he was part of a group planning to launch an NGO that would help other NGOs maintain their books — to be more transparent and accountable. “I know, very dry,” he said, laughing, when we discussed the project earlier this spring in his Tehran apartment. He recounted a recent meeting of the proposed board in which they debated the question of whether they would apply for any foreign financing or be a part of any international networks. “We all voted against it,” he said.
“One always has to make compromises and choices,” he continued. “The compromises reinforce isolation, but perhaps this is what you have to do to exist.” Since Ahmadinejad’s election, a new NGO law had been drafted, instituting all manner of procedural pettifoggery to dissuade people from engaging with civil society at all. I asked him what the biggest change was as a result. “Withdrawal,” he said. “Quiescence.”
The most painful paradox in all of this may be that neither Tajbakhsh nor Esfandiari received American democracy funds and, in fact, were critical of the American effort’s potential costs. Whether their arrests are a reflection of an internal battle between pro-engagement elements of the Khatami and Rafsanjani variety and those who are increasingly insular (notably Ahmadinejad) remains unclear. What is clearer, perhaps, is that the very public nature of the U.S. funds gave the Iranian government the perfect opportunity to send an unsubtle signal to the world about the potential cost of engagement.
Lee Hamilton is a former congressman who today serves as the president and director of the Woodrow Wilson Center, where Esfandiari worked. (He was also co-chairman, with James Baker, of the Iraq Study Group, which urged the Bush administration to take a more conciliatory stance toward Iran.) “She is not involved in any democracy-fund program,” he told me. “The Iranian government is deeply concerned about the so-called democracy fund and sees it as an effort at regime change. The U.S. has the right to promote democracy, but context makes all the difference. The problem is that the statements of the administration have been mixed.
“The activities of the democracy fund should be an open book. What is important is the clear articulation of American foreign policy. Is it one of regime change or behavior change? We have to be crystal clear — that is an enormous difference.”
But this is precisely the distinction the Bush administration has continually failed to make. Ambiguity as to what the United States really wants from Iran seems to be built into the system. While the goals of the democracy fund may seem mild and the U.S. recently participated in rare talks with Iran, American aircraft carriers patrol the Persian Gulf, and five Iranian officials continue to be held incommunicado by U.S. forces in Iraq.
The administration now finds itself in the curious situation of having its allies — potential and existing — feeling that they must publicly distance themselves from the White House, the State Department and America in general. The damage is not even limited to America. Iran has grown suspicious of Holland, for example, not a country noted for geopolitical meddling. Sussan Tahmasebi is a member of the One Million Signatures campaign, a movement of women across Iran pushing for modest changes in the Iranian legal code — from rules surrounding custody to those governing the legal age of marriage. Their goal is to amass one million signatures in support of their demands and finally take their petition to the Iranian Parliament. “We are reform minded, not regime-change minded,” Tahmasebi told me from Iran. “We’re talking to the Parliament and the Iranian public.”
Yet the suspicion of foreign influence remains. When 34 women activists were arrested and interrogated in March, they were closely questioned about contact with foreigners. A special emphasis was placed on the works of the Dutch NGO Hivos. The Dutch, not unlike the Americans, had unveiled a 15-million-euro plan to support civil society in Iran in 2004, and not unlike the American funds, the Dutch money has inspired charges of destabilization. “They say our movement serves the Americans,” Fariba Davoudi Mohajer, a campaign member and journalist, told me recently. “But even before they announced this money, they were accusing us of trying to start a velvet revolution.” Mohajer has a prison sentence of four years hanging over her head and is now living in Washington; the multiple charges against her include spreading propaganda against the regime. “Besides ourselves, our independence from foreign funding is our only strength,” she told me an extraordinary statement, really, and one that suggests a bleak future for American promotion of democracy.
While David Denehy acknowledges the difficulties of the administration’s democracy project, he still finds it critical to Iran’s democratic future. “Is now the time to re-evaluate our support to Iranian civil society?” he asks. “No. . . . Iranian civil society is now under siege, and we do not intend to turn our back on them in their desperate hour. Now is when they need us most.”
Negar Azimi is an editor at Bidoun, a cultural magazine based in New York City. She last wrote for the magazine about human rights in Egypt
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