Meet Kian Kianfar, the Pro-Iranian ‘Cement Worker’ Agitating for Mullahs in Massachusetts

Photo: Dexter Van Zile

A stocky, olive-skinned man of middling height in his late fifties strides aggressively on the sidewalk in front of the police station parking lot in Woburn, Mass. It’s early in the evening of Friday, July 5, 2024, the day after most Americans celebrated the 248^th anniversary of their nation’s birth. He has not driven from his home in Framingham, a city 45 minutes away, to enjoy the long weekend at a restaurant in Woburn or watch fireworks in a nearby town. No, he has come to the city to affirm his ties to a hostile regime by voting in a presidential election organized by Iran, a country that manufactured roadside bombs used to kill hundreds of U.S. servicemen in Iraq and which paid the Taliban $1,000 for each U.S. soldier it killed in Afghanistan.

The election, in which every candidate was hand-picked by people close to Iranian dictator Ayatollah Khamenei, will select the replacement for Ebrahim Raisi who died in a helicopter crash in May, prompting celebrations in Iran and the rest of the world. In the late 1980s, Raisi served on the “death committee” that oversaw the murder of thousands of dissidents held in prisons throughout the country.

The man is angry that he was not able to cast his ballot. Election organizers—who transported and stored the ballots in a white plastic box in the trunk of a car parked next to the Woburn Police Station—fled the scene soon after they were jeered at by anti-regime protesters affiliated with a group called From Boston to Iran. The mere presence of the protesters—who kept their distance and merely shouted their contempt for the balloting—was enough to drive the election officials from the scene before the man from Framingham was able to cast his vote.

Instead of reserving his ire for the election officials who timidly ran off in the face of a few protesters, the man unbuttons his shirt to reveal a gold pendant hanging from his neck. It’s called a Farivar, an ancient symbol that some Iranians wear to proclaim their Persian ancestry. He walks, iPhone in hand, videotaping his approach toward the activists, a few of them women, gesturing toward his exposed chest and belly and says “Enjoy!” in Persian.

His arrogant swagger would seem reminiscent of the prison guards and police officers who have tortured and killed thousands of t

Their friends and relatives since the founding of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979, but all the women can do is laugh and jeer at him. “He calls us a psycho!” one of the women says. Nevertheless, the women have good reason to be concerned at the man’s decision to videotape their protests. Earlier that day, Navid Mohebbi, former policy director at National Union for Democracy (NUFDI) reported on X that, “The IRGC released a video identifying eight diaspora dissidents based in the United States and the European Union who protested the regime’s election circus, including their ID info, calling it ‘the phase of identification.’ They warned, ‘Wait for the action phase.’”

The Iranian regime’s long history of murdering its opponents, and its habit of burying them in secret locations, make people wonder how to interpret the man’s actions when he opens the trunk of his car to reveal a bag of cement, declaring in Persian, “I’m a cement worker.”

The act was no innocent gesture but an act of psychological warfare, one of the protesters explains later. “He was trying to intimidate us because, in Iran, when the Islamic Republican Guard Corps killed protesters, they would bury them and pour cement on their bodies so their parents couldn’t move them,” the protester declares. “We now believe he was trying to send us that message—implying he would do the same to us.”

Things get ugly when the cement worker almost comes to blows with one of the protesters, “You’re shaking like a little bitch!” he says, apparently proud of the fear he has inspired. “Zionists are rats like you!” he says to his adversaries.

When a reporter from Focus on Western Islamism (FWI) approaches and starts asking him questions, the man—who refuses to reveal his name— declares, “We got pro-democracy groups and Zionists trying to suppress voting in an election.”

The man, who describes himself as an Iranian-American, seems unaware of the contradiction of an American citizen voting in an election held by a regime that manufactured roadside bombs that caused the deaths of hundreds of American soldiers during the Iraq War.

“That was an illegal war,” he said. “We should never have gone to Iraq.” When asked to square the election being held on U.S. soil despite Iranian support for proxies that have killed his fellow American citizens in other parts of the world, the man is less direct. “I have no idea about that,” he says. And when challenged to at least admit that the regime holding the election on American soil has murdered thousands of its own citizens, he declares, “I don’t admit anything. I’m just a small person for the Iranian government.”

So, who are the people who told you that voting was going to be taking place here?

“It’s none of your business,” he says. After a few more minutes of back and forth, the interview ends, but not before the reporter asks the man his name one last time.

“My name is none of your business.”

The Woburn police chief pulls up in his cruiser and gets out of his vehicle, mystified at the confrontation taking place in front of his station. The organizers of the balloting had told people to show up to vote at the police station without speaking to anyone in the department and clearly, no federal agencies had informed local law enforcement officials about the prospects of Iranian voting stations popping up in random locations in their cities and towns the day after Independence Day. The chief quickly takes stock of the situation, recognizes the bully and moves to isolate him from the folks he’s been trying to intimidate. The chief talks with him for a while and then speaks briefly with the anti-regime protesters. After a few moments of diplomacy, the antagonists agree to go home. The chief has kept the peace.

The day after the confrontation, activists from Boston to Iran take to X to highlight the man’s aggressive antics on X, describing the man as an “Iranian agent” and calling on officials to investigate any financial connections to the Iranian government. Three days after that, Avril Haines, director of National Intelligence, issues a warning about Iranian efforts to sow discord into American political life.

“Iran is becoming increasingly aggressive in their foreign influence efforts, seeking to stoke discord and undermine confidence in our democratic institutions, as we have seen them do in the past, including in prior election cycles. They continue to adapt their cyber and influence activities, using social media platforms and issuing threats. It is likely they will continue to rely on their intelligence services in these efforts, as well as Iran-based online influencers, to promote their narratives,” she declares.

Haines’s warning of “threats” appears to be an oblique reference to Ramezan Soltan-Mohammadi, a staffer at the Iranian Interests Section located in the Pakistani embassy in Washington, D.C., who was slapped with a temporary restraining order after drawing his hand as if it were knife across his throat at Iranian dissidents protesting at a memorial ceremony for Raisi in May.

Eventually, activists engaged in dogged internet sleuthing discover the name of their antagonist— Kian M. Kianfar—who, judging from his Facebook and Instagram pages, revels in his status as the eastern Massachusetts mascot for the oppressive mullahs in Iran. In various political donations documented by the Federal Elections Commission, Kianfar describes himself as working as a property management professional and a taxi driver. Kianfar’s involvement in the taxi business is confirmed by multiple entries in the corporation database maintained by the Massachusetts Secretary of State which lists his involvement in two taxi companies, one called Gorgan, Inc., (the name of which appears to be derived from the name of a prominent city in Iran).

His Facebook page reveals he is an enthusiastic attendee of anti-Israel rallies and a follower of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC). In March 2020, Kianfar made a small donation ($12.50) to NIAC’s political action committee. NIAC was established in 2002 by Trita Parsi, an Iranian/Swedish dual citizen who, in addition to lobbying against U.S. sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran, has communicated with high-ranking figures in the regime, including Mohammad Javad Zarif. Zarif is a longtime diplomat currently serving as vice president for the country.

Like Parsi, Kianfar, who follows Zarif on his Twitter account, has advocated for his homeland with U.S. officials, speaking out against sanctions against the regime during a 2019 meeting with a staffer for U.S. Rep. Katherine Clark, a Democrat who represents Massachusetts’s fifth congressional district, winning praise from the Massachusetts Peace Action Campaign for his efforts.

Interestingly enough, the Peace Action Campaign has interacted with influential Iranian intellectuals with close ties to the regime. In 2009, group representatives met with Mohammad Marandi, a Tehran-based scholar described by the New Republic in 2013 as a “polished ideologue of the regime” who, by virtue of his father’s status as a physician to Ayatollah Khamenei, “is connected to the very center of power” in Iran. Members of the organization also met with Hassan Hosseini. Writing for Americans for Peace and Tolerance in 2016, Sam Westrop, director of the Middle East Forum’s Islamist Watch project, described Hosseini as a religious scholar who worked for over a decade in Washington D.C. to “protect the interests” of the Iranian regime, with his CV suggesting that he worked at the Iranian section in the Pakistani embassy.

Kianfar’s Facebook profile indicates he is also a fan of Beijing-backed Party For Socialism and Liberation (PSL), which declares on its website that “capitalism must end” if the planet is to survive. The organization condemned the Trump Administration for taking a harder line against Iran over its nuclear program and has accused Israel of “genocide” and “apartheid”—two themes clearly present in Iranian regime messaging.

Clearly, Kianfar has a penchant for political movements in the U.S. that advance Iranian interests, posting an image of himself shaking hands with former presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard—who condemned the Trump Administration’s decision to kill Qassam Soleimani—on Facebook.

Over the years, he has made numerous donations to Democratic presidential candidates such as Gabbard, Bernie Sanders, and congressional candidates such as recently ousted U.S. Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-New York) and Nasser Beydoun, whose name was kept off the 2024 Democratic primary ballot for the U.S. Senate in Michigan for paperwork violations.

Photo: Dexter Van Zile

Kianfar’s use of an image of Aaron Bushnell as his profile photo on Facebook is a troubling detail, warns Romany Shaker, a research analyst monitoring global jihadi and terrorist groups who has written about Iranian influence operations for FWI. Imagery of Bushnell, the troubled Air Force recruit who committed suicide by setting himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., in February, has been a central plank of the Iranian regime’s anti-Israel and anti-American propaganda.

“It is likely that Kianfar mirrors the coordinated Iranian media campaign aimed at exploiting this tragedy to mobilize support for its cause,” he said, adding that people who deal with the activist should exercise due diligence when interacting with him.

Adrian Calamel, a fellow at Arabian Peninsula Institute, says it’s perfectly reasonable to wonder if Kianfar is an agent for the Islamic Republic of Iran. “The regime agents have become more brazen and with folks like Kianfar it has become increasingly easy for them to blend in with the Communist/Islamist (Red/Green) alliance mob on the streets. With regime-specific events they run the chance of being exposed, but not so much with leftist protests against Israel,” he said.

For his part, Kianfar denies any official connection to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

“I have no connection to the Iranian government,” he says. “I haven’t been to Iran for 30 years.”

Photo: Dexter Van Zile

Kianfar offered this denial at a protest at the intersection of Pleasant Street and Massachusetts Avenue in Lexington, Mass., held on the evening of Friday, August 16, 2024. He waved a banner comprised of the American and Palestinian flags sewn together. Sometimes he puts the flag down to display a sign lionizing the previously mentioned Aaron Bushnell, and other times he displayed a sign accusing Israel of “apariheid” (a misspelling of “apartheid”) attached to two ski poles with duct tape over his head. He came prepared to protest, but not to speak with reporters.

“What do the women in your family think of the regime in Iran,” the FWI reporter asks him.

“What part of ‘I don’t want an interview’ you don’t understand?” he says.

“You were pretty aggressive when no one knew your name,” says the reporter.

“I don’t give a fuck if you know my name,” he says. “I don’t care.”

The reporter from FWI asks Kianfar, who was born in 1965, who he rooted for during the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979 when protesters took more than 52 U.S. embassy workers hostage and held them for more than a year.

“I was washing dishes,” he says.

How did he respond to the death of 241 U.S. Marines at the hands of Iranian-backed Hezbollah in 1983.

“I don’t remember that,” Kianfar says. “I don’t remember anything like that. Hezbollah is lawful. They don’t attack Americans. They’re just resistance.”

So, what does he think about the American citizens held by Hamas?

“What do you think about the $3.8 billion a year going to Israel,” he says. “They’ve got dental. You don’t have it.”

What happens if you took your family to Iran? Would they have to veil?

“None of your business.”

Why are you working on behalf of a regime that would oppress your relatives?

He doesn’t answer.

During the course of the protest, three white, apparently secular female activists take turns protecting Kianfar from questioning and challenges from activists from Boston to Palestine and the FWI reporter. One refuses to give her name when asked; none speak to the reporter. One whispers into Kianfar’s ear, apparently to tell him that he shouldn’t respond to any questions. He referred to her as his “advisor” after she coaches him. It’s an odd thing to see a self-described “cement worker” who went out of his way to harass Iranian women protesting a misogynist regime being defended by progressive women on the streets of Lexington, but that’s how it is in America these days.