American scholar Haleh Esfandiari has been charged with trying to topple the Iranian regime, Iran’s state-controlled television reported today.
Iran’s Intelligence Ministry accused Esfandiari, director of Middle East programs at the Smithsonian’s Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, of trying to foment a soft revolution by setting up a network “against the sovereignty” of Iran. Esfandiari was imprisoned May 8 after more than four months under virtual house arrest.
“This is an American-designed model with an attractive appearance that seeks the soft-toppling of the country,” state TV reported, according to the Associated Press.
The Wilson Center said the charges had no foundation.
“It’s very disturbing. We deny all the charges. There is not one scintilla of evidence to support these allegations,” said Lee H. Hamilton, Wilson Center director and a former Democratic congressman from Indiana who once chaired the House International Relations Committee.
Esfandiari’s husband Shaul Bakhash, a George Mason University professor, also said today that the charges against his wife were “totally without any basis.”
In a statement published by Iran’s ISNA news agency, the Ministry of Intelligence and Security charged that Esfandiari had received money from George Soros’s Open Society Institute.
“The long-term and final goal of such centers is to try to enable this network . . . to confront the ruling powers. This model designed by the Americans . . . is following the ‘soft revolution’ in the country,” the statement said.
Wilson Center Deputy Director Mike Van Dusen said Esfandiari had received some support from the Open Society Institute to bring people to conferences. “But the Soros Foundation has also given money to the Iran government after the Bam earthquake in 2003,” he noted.
The hard-line Kayhan newspaper, widely considered a mouthpiece for the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, alleged last week that Esfandiari was fomenting revolution and spying for the United States and Israel.
Esfandiari, a 67-year-old grandmother who is a dual U.S. and Iranian national, was originally in Iran to take care of her 93-year-old mother when her passport was taken in a robbery as she was en route to the airport Dec. 30. When she went in to get a replacement, she was put under interrogation for six weeks.
