IRAN is facing an "international conspiracy" to over throw the Khomeinist re gime with a "velvet revolution," the official Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) claimed yesterday.
The latest mascot of the plotters is supposed to be Roxana Saberi, a former Miss North Dakota now charged with espionage in Tehran. A US citizen with an Iranian father and a Japanese mother, the 31-year-old Roxana has worked in Iran on and off for years as a freelance reporter.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has called for Saberi's immediate release and safe return to the US.
IRNA claims that the plot was first given "a credible structure" during a conference organized by a German think tank in Berlin eight years ago. It identifies the Heinrich Boll as an annex of the Green Party that is itself "controlled by Zionists." Former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer is labeled as arch-conspirator and presented as "a close friend" of Massoud Rajavi, leader of the People's Mujahedin, an Iranian armed opposition group based in Iraq.
The latest IRNA analysis is one of several that the official news agency has published on the subject in the past two weeks. An earlier installment quoted Saeed Hajjarian, a key theoretician of the so-called "reformist" camp opposed to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, praising "velvet revolutions." In another, the agency's analysts claimed that supporters of "regime change" are now "entering the stage in the name of democracy and the transfer of power through elections."
This is not the first time that Iran's rulers claim to have uncovered foreign plots.
Two years ago, Tehran was struck by another spy fever. At that time Haleh Esfandiari, a 71-year-old American grandmother, was arrested and charged with anti-regime activities. (She was later released and allowed to return to the US after making forced televised confessions.)
At the same time, financier George Soros was accused of having funded a "velvet revolution" study in Iran. Ramin Jahanbagloo, a Canadian-Iranian philosopher working for Soros, was arrested and charged with espionage. Iranian-American journalist Parnaz Azima and Iranian-American researcher Kian Tajbakhsh were also arrested on similar charges. (All were later released as a gesture of "magnanimity" from the "Supreme Guide" Ali Khamenei.)
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