Rooyesh

Iranian Dissident to Seek Support For Opposition

Less than 24 hours after one of Iran’s leading dissidents and authors escaped to a neighboring state, the former chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle, interrupted his trip to central Asia to meet with him in a cramped hotel room.

The meeting between Mr. Perle and Amir Abbas Fakhravar on April 29, in a location both men have asked not appear in print, may end up being as important as the first contacts between Mr. Perle and the ex-Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky in the 1980s.

Bush: Iran letter doesn’t answer nuclear question

President George W. Bush said on Wednesday that a letter from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad this week did not answer the key question of when Tehran would abandon its nuclear program. “It looks like it did not answer the main question that the world is asking and that is, ‘When will you get rid of your nuclear program?’,” Bush said in his first public comment on the letter.

A New Gesture From Iran?

A top Iranian official, in an open letter given to TIME, offers what could be a starting point for negotiations.

The White House has brushed aside a new letter from Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to President Bush that was designed, according to a senior Iranian official, to offer “new ways for getting out of the current, fragile international situation,” a reference to the impasse between the two countries over Iran’s alleged drive to develop nuclear weapons.