Iran links detained US scholar to 'regime overthrow bid'

TEHRAN: Iran has accused a US-Iranian scholar detained in Tehran for the past two weeks of being linked to a drive funded by Washington aimed at "overthrowing" the country's Islamic rulers.   

The charges against Haleh Esfandiari, 67, of the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, prompted an angry reaction from Washington which described them as "outrageous" and "just silly".   

Iran's intelligence ministry said Esfandiari, who runs the Middle East programme at the Washington-based centre, was connected to attempts to build up a network whose ultimate aim was to topple the authorities.   

It said her department was funded by US financier George Soros, who it accused to trying to mastermind a peaceful revolution in Iran along the lines of those in communist-ruled Eastern Europe.   

"Esfandiari said in interrogation that the activities and programmes regarding Iran in her centre were financially supported by the Soros Foundation," it said.   

"In the preliminary interrogation she said that Soros was trying to create in Iran an official network and was trying to expand it to carry out an overthrow."   

It said in a statement carried by official media that with her "cooperation", the "representative" of the Soros Foundation in Iran has been identified and was being hunted by the police.   

Soros foundations are run under the umbrella of the billionaire's Open Society Institute to "support open society activities". They exist in 30 countries but its website makes no mention of any operation in Iran.   

The justice ministry said last week that Esfandiari was being held on charges of harming national security and the investigations were ongoing.   

Esfandiari travelled to Iran in December to visit her sick grandmother, 93, but her passport was confiscated and she was subjected to interrogations by intelligence before being arrested on May 8 and sent to Tehran's Evin prison.   

The ministry statement accused that the Wilson Center, an independent body partly funded by Congress, as being "a link between Iranians with American organisations and entities aimed at empowering them in order to follow the foreigners' aims."   

It accused the centre of been working with other US organistions to draw parallels between the situation in Eastern Europe in the 1980s and modern Iran.   

State Department spokesman Tom Casey described the charges as "just silly".   

"Haleh Esfandiari is not a threat to this Iranian government or the regime as a whole," he said in an interview with CNN, urging Iran "to release her and let her come back home".   

"She is an academic and a voice for tolerance and people-to-people exchanges between the Iranian and American people. We can't imagine why she is considered a threat."   

Lee Hamilton, the director of the Wilson Center and co-chair of the Iraq Study Group, which has advised the United States to engage in talks with Iran, denied any wrongdoing on Esfandiari's part.   

"Haleh was not engaged in any activities to undermine any government, including the Iranian government. Nor does the Wilson Center engage in such activities," Hamilton was quoted as saying by the Washington Post.   

"There is not one scintilla of evidence to support these outrageous claims."

The intelligence ministry has linked the Iranian-Canadian intellectual Ramin Jahanbegloo to the issue, saying that he had been invited to the centre.   

In a case with similarities to that of Esfandiari, Jahanbegloo was held in Iran for four months last year for acting against national security and links to a US drive to instigate a "velvet" revolution in Iran.    

Jahanbegloo was released in August and apologised for his "deviation".