Aspen Institute Meddles in Iran

One of the books at the top of my reading list is Hostage to Khomeini, by Robert Dreyfuss. After reading this short excerpt online, I'm now more eager than ever to have a look at the book.

The entire book is available online here.

Persepolis, Iran was built c. 500 BC by Darius the Great

In September 1975, the Aspen Institute organized a symposium in the ancient city of Persepolis, Iran. Their goals were, as usual, completely subversive. Publicly, the Institute documented its proceedings in a book that was later published entitled Iran: Past, Present and Future. Subversely, they made plans to reverse the Shah's industrialization program and to turn Iran into a model for Dark Age brutality and repression. As is usual with the Establishment, they got the people they were targeting (in this case, the Shah and his wife, Empress Farah Diba) to underwrite and finance the cost of their "research."

Some of the attendees at the Persepolis symposium included:

• Aureho Peceei (Club of Rome chairman)
• Sol Linowitz
• Jacques Freymond
• Robert O. Anderson (Aspen Institute)
• Rarlan Cleveland (Aspen Institute)

We of course met Robert O. Anderson earlier on my post about the $25 Million Constitution.

The goal of the conference was to drive home a single point: modernization and industrialization (such as that which the Shah was pursuing) undermine the "spiritual, nonmaterial" values of ancient Iranian society, and these values must be preserved above all else.

Bani-Sadr, Elected President of Iran in 1980

The other interesting thing to note here are some of the connections which aided Abolhassan Bani-Sadr in his rise to power under the watchful guidance of the Aspen Institute and the various western intelligence agencies. Bani-Sadr spent most of the 1970s living in exile in Paris, where he joined the Iranian "resistance" group lead by the Ayatollah Khomeini. Bani-Sadr returned with Khomeini to Iran in February 1979 as the Iranian Revolution was just beginning. He was later elected president of Iran in 1980.

What's interesting about Bani-Sadr is that while in Paris, he studied under the following people and institutions:

• Centre Nationale des Recherches Scientifiques (CNRS)
  
• "Division Six" of the Ecole Pratique des Hatues Etudes (EPHE-6)
• National Institute for Agronomical Research
• George Balandier
• Paul Veille
• Rene Dumont (expelled from Cuba and Algeria for being a CIA agent)
  
• Miche Crozier (theorist associated with the Tavistock Institute in Britain, and coordinator of the 1968 destabilization of the de Gaulle government)
• Jene-Pierre Vigier (also a key figure in the 1968 destabilization of the de Gaulle government)
• Michel Foucault (connected to British and Israeli intelligence)
• Jacques Soustelle (connected to British and Israeli intelligence)
• Charles Battelheim (connected to British and Israeli intelligence)
• Claude Levi-Strauss (connected to British and Israeli intelligence)
• Henri Corbin (connected to British and Israeli intelligence)
• Roger Garaudy (a French Jesuit, associated with the Institute for the Dialogue of Civilizations)

What's so important about these people and institutions? It's that these are precisely the same people and institutions who were responsible for "training" and "mentoring" Khieu Samphan just a few years earlier.. and who, might you say, was Khieu Samphan? He was the president of Cambodia under Pol Pot, at a time when Cambodia was undergoing a similar genocidal "cultural revolution" that would later become the fate of Iran under Khomeini.

You beginning to see a few connections?