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In today’s edition of the Washington Post, the husband of noted American scholar Haleh Esfandiari today angrily denied allegations made in Iran’s press during the weekend that the 67-year-old grandmother was trying to foment revolution inside Iran and was spying for both the United States and Israel. The unofficial charges were made in Tehran’s Kayhan newspaper, which is closely tied to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and reflects government views. The allegations against Esfandiari, who is director of the Middle East program at the Smithsonian Institution’s Woodrow Wilson International Center of Scholars, offer the first indication of the case that Iran may be trying to craft against the Potomac resident. Although the Foreign Ministry finally confirmed her detention Sunday, no formal charges have been issued since she was imprisoned a week ago after more than four months under virtual house arrest and weeks of interrogations in Tehran.

Asked about Esfandiari’s case during a weekend visit to Abu Dhabi, Ahmadinejad said, “This is within the jurisdiction of Iran’s judiciary, which will provide information about the issue in due course,” Iran’s Web site reported today. Esfandiari’s husband Shaul Bakhash, Monday refuted the long list of allegations made in a front-page Kayhan article. Esfandiari had never been to Israel, worked with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, formed an “Iran office” for the Jewish organization, organized its conferences, worked with the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, or been a Zionist, Bakhash said. Kayhan said Esfandiari had been “one of the main elements of Mossad in driving a velvet revolution strategy in Iran.” The article also said she ran “obvious intelligence missions” under her cover as a Wilson Center programming director and used her seminars to “evaluate the capacity of reformists to change the Islamic order.” It also said she had formed two networks of Iranian activists in the United States and Dubai with the goal of topping Iran’s Islamic government. Bakhash, a George Mason University professor, also denied today that he had ever worked with Mossad. “The charges against my wife Haleh and myself are sinister and also absurd and fantastical, the concoctions of men who have lost touch with reality,” he said. Bakhash said today that he had also never been a Zionist. Esfandiari, a widely respected academic who ran a program featuring an array of views on Iran, is a Shiite Muslim. She was in Tehran visiting her ailing 93-year-old mother, who is Austrian by birth, when she was first summoned by Iran’s Intelligence Ministry. Esfandiari was imprisoned just as Iran and the United States have agreed to meet in Baghdad within the next two weeks to discuss Iraq. The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, will lead the delegation. A “Free Haleh” Web site campaign has been launched by the American Islamic Congress in conjunction with Ibn Khaldoun Center in Cairo, the Initiative for Inclusive Security in Washington, and the Kuwaiti Economic Society

Iranian police have prevented 50 women from boarding flights in their ongoing crackdown on dress styles deemed to be out of line with Islamic dress rules, officials said yesterday. “Fifty badly-veiled women were prevented from boarding domestic and international flights for failing to respect Islamic dress rules,” said the head of airport police Mamoud Bot-Shekane, according to the Fars news agency. He said that the airport police have handed out “17,135 warnings to women who are not fully respecting the Islamic veil and 850 of them have had to make a written pledge to respect the veil more.”

Source: Gulf News

The U.S. magazine, Newsweek has  an article regarding the arrest of Iranian-American scholar, Haleh Esfandiari in Iran. Shaul Bakhash told himself the ordeal was almost over. In calls and e-mails, the George Mason University professor’s wife, Haleh Esfandiari, 67, said she hoped to be home in Maryland soon, free at last after more than four months under virtual house arrest in Tehran. The Iranian-born woman, a naturalized American who heads the Middle East program at Washington’s Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, had flown to Iran in December for a week’s visit with her 93-year-old mother—a trip Esfandiari had often made since moving to America in 1980. But this time armed thugs stole her U.S. and Iranian passports just as her stay was ending.

Then Iranian intelligence agents summoned her for interrogations of up to eight hours a day. When the questionings stopped in February, Esfandiari told her husband she would fly home as soon as the Iranians issued her a new passport. But last week, Bakhash got a 2 a.m. phone call. It was his wife’s sister, saying Esfandiari had just been hauled away to Tehran’s notorious Evin prison. Bakhash fought against despair. “We’re hoping it’s just a colossal mistake by some overzealous security officials,” he told NEWSWEEK late last week. The hard-liners are feeling pretty nervous themselves lately. The Iranian economy is wobbling, the Western press keeps alluding to covert plans for military strikes on their nuclear facilities and the White House makes no secret of its desire for regime change in Tehran. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice began talking publicly more than a year ago about a $75 million program to promote Iranian democracy, and now the hard-liners are imagining enemies everywhere. They’re especially fearful of feminists, trade unionists and the like. “The government knows well that if they allow civil-rights activists to have a public gathering, it can easily become a social movement that can soon get out of hand,” says Abbas Abdi, who led the storming of the U.S. Embassy in 1979 and now is one of the country’s most outspoken reformists. The big fear is a repetition of the people-power uprisings that toppled antidemocratic regimes a few years ago in the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Ukraine. But the spreading crackdown is dividing the hard-liners. Since mid-April, the Revolutionary Guards’ morality cops—with the tacit support of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Hoseini Khamenei—have declared all-out war against young women wearing pushed-back headscarves and tight jeans and their male counterparts with spiky hair and stylishly plucked eyebrows. The cops don’t bother filing formal charges; they just take names and rough up anyone who talks back. The Intelligence Ministry argues that enforcing the dress code is counterproductive and will only stir up dissent among otherwise apolitical kids. The kids agree, as does President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a source close to him tells NEWSWEEK, asking not to be named on such a loaded topic. Rather than proving the strength of the regime, the twin crackdowns are yet another sign of the splits among Iran’s leadership In February the Wilson Center’s president, Lee Hamilton, wrote to Ahmadinejad saying Esfandiari was not engaged in any subversive activity and pleading for her freedom. “It was a simple letter setting out the facts,” Hamilton says. “We just want Haleh back.” So far there has been no reply.

Iran confirmed Sunday that it has arrested a prominent Iranian-American academic, and a hardline newspaper accused her of spying for the United States and Israel and trying to start a revolution inside Iran. Haleh Esfandiari’s arrest, part of a spate of recent crackdowns against Iranian activists, appears to reflect President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad government’s growing fear that the United States is using pro-democracy advocates to promote regime change, analysts say.

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The United States and Iran will meet in Baghdad in the next few weeks to discuss Tehran taking a “productive role” in Iraq’s security, the White House said on Sunday. U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Chester Crocker will represent the United States, which has accused Iran of backing Shiite militia in Iraq and seeking an atomic bomb. Tehran denies both charges.

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The Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of the country’s most powerful Shiite parties, announced Saturday that “revolution” would be dropped from its name and that Iran’s top cleric would cease to be the party’s dominant spiritual leader.

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The diplomatic tussle between Iran and the United States picked up steam Sunday as leaders from both countries toured Middle Eastern capitals seeking to shore up relationships, even as signs of new cooperation over Iraq emerged between them. Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, arrived in the United Arab Emirates Sunday afternoon, the first trip there by an Iranian leader, seeking to mend relations with a strategic trade partner, just as Vice President Dick Cheney landed in Cairo on the final leg of a Middle Eastern tour meant to mollify America’s allies in the region and shore up support against Iran.

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