Prominent Washington think tank the International Crisis Group, influential in the negotiation of the United States’ nuclear deal with Iran, has extensive but previously undisclosed connections to the Islamic Republic’s foreign ministry, according to a report from Iran International, a Persian-language news outlet frequently at odds with Iran’s government, which charges that the theocratic regime has used the experts “to lobby the US government on its behalf.”
The connections between the Iranian Foreign Ministry and the Crisis Group run through the former’s in-house think tank, the Institute for Political and International Studies (IPIS), which Western governments and organizations have largely shied away from since the group sponsored a notorious Holocaust denial conference in 2006.
IPIS and the Crisis Group signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) in 2016, predating much of the latter’s involvement in negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program and the lifting of sanctions on the regime.
“The think tank has given recommendations to the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations on Iran,” the report says, “as well as the US Congress. However, the Crisis Group never made public the agreement it had with the Iranian foreign ministry, and its analysts never mentioned their close ties with the Iranian officials.”
“In reviewing the large cache of leaked Iranian Foreign Ministry correspondence and Tehran’s interactions with Western organizations,” wrote Jay Solomon of Semafor, with which Iran International shared the documents, “I was startled, not only by its depth, but the lack of transparency involved.”
Crisis Group denies any wrongdoing, asserts that links are misrepresented
The think tank, however, denies any wrongdoing and maintains that analysts’ coordination with Iran’s Foreign Ministry was merely a component in their research and due diligence, as experts who make a point of talking to all parties involved in a given issue before weighing in on it.
In public statements and threads on X, representatives of the Crisis Group think-thank asserted that the Iran International report selectively translated correspondence between the analysts and the Iranian officials, and pointed to a pattern of criticism the think tank has received from the Iranian government and media personalities.
