Iran: Efforts to Eliminate "The New Yorkers Circle" Begin

Rooz Online

After Iran’s supreme leader announced that some actions by Hassan Rowhani’s administration in New York were “inappropriate,” hardline principlists intensified their verbal assaults on the administration and members of the foreign ministry. A team close to foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif known as “The New Yorkers Circle” has received the strongest heat.

A member of Majlis’ national security committee Bagher Hosseini has declared that the assembly intends “to send a Majlis representative to the P5+1 nuclear talks with the purpose of not allowing the creation of a New Yorkers gang during the Iran-US talks and prevent these groups from misusing this connection.”

Hosseini’s remarks came soon after ayatollah Khamenei told a group of military cadets and graduates in that some of the actions of the Iranian delegation at the UN lead by president Rowhani were “inappropriate,” spurring speculation that what he had in mind was the telephone conversation between Hassan Rowhani and Barack Obama.

After Khamenei’s notice, Hossein Naghavi Hosseini, the spokesperson for Majlis’s national security council disclosed that foreign minister Javad had told the members of the committee that he had the impression that “the telephone conversation between Rowhani and Obama was ok.”

Rowhani himself also said, during a cabinet session, that “the administration’s advance forward was based on the national interest and the guidance of the supreme leader.”

There have been other critics of the Rowhani-Obama talks. Former MP Parviz Soruri, a hardline principlist from the eight Majlis, had also said that some administration steps were “premature” and disregarded “America’s specific record”.

The New Yorkers circle that some Majlis representatives have referred to in recent days is a reference to foreign ministry diplomats who had at one time been in New York.

Jahanshah Javid, who at one time worked at the Islamic Republic News Agency in New York wrote this in Iran Wire website: “New Yorkers is a large group. These are individuals who from the 1980s to the middle of the 2000 worked either at Iran’s UN offices in New York or cooperated with them. What they have in common is their desire that Iran have normal relations with the West, including the US; something that is not easily achievable in the Islamic republic and has not till now succeeded. The core of the New Yorkers was formed during Kamal Kharazi’s mission at the UN when Hashemi Rafsanjani was the president. Kharazi used to be the managing director of the Islamic Republic News Agency and during the 8-year Iran-Iraq was in charge of the war propaganda inter-agency committee.”

Principlists had in the past on several occasions criticized this group. A weekly belonging to hardliner Hamid Rasai - 9-Dey - had written, “Zarif’s record shows that when he was part of the diplomatic machinery of Iran in the past, the New Yorkers gang had been formed because of his efforts at the foreign ministry, which was the source of considerable damage to the country. The principal members of the group worked at Iran’s UN offices in New York or cooperated with it. This gang is a well-known group in the foreign ministry and other decision-making bodies of Iran involved in foreign affairs which enjoys a very negative opinion and is responsible for measures in the years after the Islamic revolution which were mostly destructive for the country.”

The weekly cited “pressure to sign the UN Security Council resolution no 598, assignment of diplomats associated with the US and favoring the West, making Iran’s adherence to the NPT permanent and the nuclear talks” as the destructive actions favored by the group.

Raja News website, close to the Steadfast Front (a pro-Ahmadinejad group formed primary against Majlis speaker Ali Larijani) also echoed this view by writing, “The clear and undeniable record of the activities of the New Yorkers group in damaging the national interest of the country in recent years remains in the memory of the Iranian people.”