Ideas in Action host Jim Glassman moderates a panel discussion on how the internet and other cybertools are "revolutionizing revolution" in Iran. In the wake of Iran's disputed June 12, 2009 election, protesters are using cell phones, digital cameras and the internet to communicate with each other and to get their message to the outside world. Have YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter become the latest weapons in the war against tyranny? Jim and his four guests discuss the effect of these new technologies on movements for democracy and freedom in Iran and other parts of the world.

How a former Iranian official and a U.S. foreign-policy guru are shifting Washington’s stance toward regime change in Tehran

By Lee Smith | 7:00 am Feb 2, 2010

Mohsen Sazegara is sipping tea at Starbucks to ease his flu. The temperature is below freezing in Georgetown, and the 55-year-old Iranian-rights activist has his sweater buttoned up to his chin. A compact and balding man in glasses, Sazegara came to Washington four years ago for heart surgery after undergoing an eye operation in London to repair the damage done to his body during a hunger strike he started after he was arrested by Iran’s Intelligence Ministry in 2003. Now, he’s at the center of the cyberwar against the Khamenei regime in Tehran.

Despite his professorial appearance, Sazegara is one of the most important figures influencing U.S. policy toward Iran, a central player in the campaign of street protests that took official Washington by surprise and have increasingly been embraced by the “realist” foreign policy establishment as the West’s only hope of reducing the threat posed by an Iranian government intent on developing a nuclear bomb. His website, at Sazegara.net, is a virtual command center for Iranians who are risking their lives to confront the regime. The site, which gets up to 40,000 visits in a day, has been subject to repeated cyber-attack by the regime. It features daily videoblogs in Persian that provide analysis of recent events and answer questions coming in from the field, like “the security forces are tear-gassing us, how do we handle it?”

Sazegara’s credibility goes back to the foundations of the Islamic Republic and his proximity to its founding father, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. “At the beginning, I believed in the regime’s revolutionary ideology of Islam, like the majority of Iranians,” says Sazegara. “In 1979, I was in Paris with Ayatollah Khomeini and returned to Iran with him on the same flight.” Sazegara was so far inside the regime’s inner circle that he helped to found one of the Islamic Republic’s most notorious institutions, the Revolutionary Guard. The nascent revolution that is gathering strength in the streets of Tehran today is not spontaneous, he says, but is the result of two decades of dissatisfaction and disenchantment.

The political transformation in Tehran is matched by a similar revolution in consciousness on the part of the realist foreign policy establishment in Washington. If Sazegara is one of the leaders of the movement that is shaking the Iranian regime, the realists in Washington are led by Richard Haass, the current president of the Council on Foreign Relations—who opposed the Bush administration’s Iran policy as too aggressive and famously argued that the US had no interest in throwing Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait during the first Gulf War.

While neither man is a household name, the fact is that the policymaking process in Washington can be as inscrutable to outsiders as the inner workings of Iran’s famously opaque clerical regime. Public figures like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or James Jones, the national security adviser, are simply the most visible members of a broad circle of policymakers who cross the aisle just as frequently as they stick to partisan prejudices, and who speak to each other through private channels, thinktanks, and the media.

Haass’ influence on the tone of foreign policy discourse in Obama’s 2008 campaign and on the staffing of the State Department and White House makes him perhaps the most influential foreign policy expert in Washington who is not a member of the Obama administration. The fact that the tone-setter of much of Obama’s public discourse about foreign policy has now become a proponent of “regime change”—the phrase associated with George W. Bush’s brazen invasion of Iraq—is enough to make any observer do a double take. During the reign of the neoconservatives in Washington, Haass and the realists delighted in savaging the Bush administration’s miscues and recommended a return to a more pragmatic foreign policy. Haass even invited Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to address the Council in a controversial 2006 session, paving the way for candidate Barack Obama’s campaign promise that he would talk to anyone, especially the Islamic Republic of Iran.

However, now more than a year into Obama’s term, the engagement with Tehran that Haass and the realists wanted has led nowhere. Moreover, the anti-government demonstrations taking place throughout Iran have not abated, as some had prophesied in June.

With more protests expected for the 30th anniversary of the revolution on February 11, it seems the realists are now jumping off the “engagement with Iran” bandwagon. “The nuclear talks are going nowhere,” Haass wrote in a January issue of Newsweek. Instead, he argued:

we should be focusing on another fact: Iran may be closer to profound political change than at any time since the revolution that ousted the shah 30 years ago…. Outsiders should act to strengthen the opposition and to deepen rifts among the rulers. This process is underway, and while it will take time, it promises the first good chance in decades to bring about an Iran that, even if less than a model country, would nonetheless act considerably better at home and abroad. Even a realist should recognize that it’s an opportunity not to be missed.

If some in the realist camp, like Israel Lobby author Stephen Walt, were appalled by Haass’ conversion, the neoconservatives welcomed it. “I hope his many minions will follow his lead,” says Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who worked in the Pentagon during the George W. Bush administration. “And that the disruptions they’ve caused in preventing us from creating an effective Iran policy will end as will their fantasy that Iran is a regime like any other.”

“I think it’s terrific,” says Michael Ledeen, at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, who has distinguished himself as one of the few in the capital who has argued that the opposition was able, or willing, to bring down the Iranian regime. “Richard had an awful lot invested in making a deal with the regime, so I take my hat off to him for saying I changed my mind.”

The more cynical reading of Haass’ conversion is that the embrace of regime change in Iran through a revolution in the streets—that the United States will support in theory, but do nothing practical to advance—is really an effort to block the Israelis from taking military action to destroy the Iranian nuclear program. “It struck me that Richard was running this idea up a flagpole for the administration, or maybe for someone in the administration,” says a former senior official in the George W. Bush White House. “Maybe it’s Dennis Ross, who’s toyed around with some of these ideas before. Who knows? Richard’s not usually someone this far out in front on stuff. This suggests to me the administration is moving closer to formulating an Iran policy now that engagement has failed.”

There is evidence to support the idea that the American foreign policy establishment believes stopping Israel from attacking Iran is a key goal of U.S. Middle East policy. At a late November war game simulating the confrontation over Iran’s nuclear program, Nicholas Burns, the former undersecretary of State played President Barack Obama. “The most difficult problem we have is how to restrain Israel,” said Burns. “We need to play for a long-term solution, avoid a third war in the greater Middle East and wear down the Iranians over time.”

It therefore appears that we are entering the final act of a shadow play that is ostensibly about the Iranian nuclear program but is in fact about regional hegemony and who gets to set the agenda in the oil-rich, and strategically vital, Middle East. The Bush administration’s martial posture and the Obama White House’s engagement have shown that the Americans are incapable of directly shaping Iran’s strategy, whether by threats or finesse. The United States must therefore find a way to leverage the two remaining instruments at its disposal—an Israeli ally that menaces Iran and an opposition movement that means to bring the Tehran regime to its knees—in the hope of creating the necessary pressure for negotiations that the Iranians clearly don’t want but might be forced to embrace as the least-bad of available options.

If Haass’ article does indeed represent the views of influential members of the Obama administration, Washington may be about to stake its position in the Middle East on the ability of Mohsen Sazegara and his colleagues to turn a revolution on its head. Yet if the balance of threats from above (Israel) and below (the Iranian street) is not managed deftly, the Obama administration will find its assets are at cross-purposes. The bomb is a regime-saver, for there are few Iranians who do not believe that the proud and ancient Persian civilization merits the badge of technological prowess that a nuclear program represents. The easiest way for the Iranian regime to restore its battered credibility with its own people may be to ignore external pressure and work even harder to develop a bomb. By removing the threat of an Israeli attack, Obama gives Iran the time to acquire the bomb and with it the credentials to corral its domestic adversaries and cement its aggressive position at home and abroad.

WASHINGTON — It means something in foreign policy circles when realists and idealists converge on a policy, as they are beginning to do on Iran.
Realists assert that only the external behavior of a regime is of direct concern to America; its habits of repression matter little to the national interest. Idealists believe that the internal nature of a regime eventually determines its external behavior; a government that represses its people is more likely to be aggressive and destabilizing, so American interests are served by the spread of democratic ideals. Somewhere in the compromise between these views, U.S. foreign policy is formed.

Read more: http://newsok.com/realism-and-regime-change-in-iran/article/3436598#ixzz0eVxkoBms

At the height of the protests following Iran's controversial presidential election this summer, a young woman named Neda Agha Soltan was shot and killed on the streets of Tehran. Her death -- filmed on a camera phone, then uploaded to the Web -- quickly became an international outrage, and Soltan became the face of a powerful movement that threatened the hard-line government's hold on power.

In A Death in Tehran, FRONTLINE revisits the events of last summer, shedding new light on Neda's life and death and the movement she helped inspire.

By Scott Peterson Staff Writer
posted December 29, 2009 at 10:58 am EST
Istanbul, Turkey —
After massive protests shook Iran this past summer, Iran singled out an obscure American political scientist in his 80s as a key figure behind the unrest.
Gene Sharp, a retired Harvard researcher, is considered the godfather of nonviolent resistance. Since the early 1970s, his work has served as the template for taking on authoritarian regimes from Burma to Belgrade. A list of his 198 methods for nonviolent action can be downloaded free of charge, along with his seminal work, “From Dictatorship to Democracy,” which has been translated by his Albert Einstein Institute into two dozen languages ranging from Azeri to Vietnamese.
Hailed as the manual by those who conducted people-power coups in Eastern Europe, its contents were no secret in Iran, where authorities have obsessed for years about their vulnerability to a “velvet revolution.” In fact, a few years ago they requested – and were sent – hard copies of Mr. Sharp’s works. Officials saw this summer’s unrest as the fruit of his strategies.
In a mass trial of some 100 key reformist figures this past August, Iranian prosecutors charged that postelection protests were “completely planned in advance and proceeded according to a timetable and the stages of a velvet coup [such] that more than 100 of the 198 events were executed in accordance with the instructions of Gene Sharp.”
Sharp does not take credit – nor accept blame – for the summer crisis that, in the words of Iran’s most powerful military commanders, brought the regime to the “edge of a downfall.” But Sharp’s ideas are clearly reflected in the continuing political unrest.
“We don’t take charge of movements,” says Sharp, who runs his nonprofit on a modest budget out of his Boston home. “We try to provide materials to enable the people on the scene, who know the scene better than we do, by far, to make those decisions and do those things.”
Protests by the reformists took a bloody turn this weekend, with at least 8 dead by Monday. Antigovernment demonstrators attacked police with stones for the first time and also burned a jeep, according to an eyewitness. The nephew of former presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi was killed. A spokesman for Mr. Mousavi alleged that Seyd Ali Mousavi's killing was a targeted assassination. He said he was shot in the heart.
Farsi downloads of booklet soar
In June, as hundreds of thousands took to Iran’s streets and faced a violent crackdown, downloads of “From Dictatorship to Democracy” in Farsi spiked to 3,487 from just 79 the month before on Sharp’s website. Other sites hosting Sharp’s work reported a similar boost in demand.
“The great irony is that people actually weren’t focused on the velvet revolution option before the elections,” says Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. “It’s only after the elections, when Iranians have come to the realization that they can’t change their political fate with the ballot box, that they’ve looked to more dramatic options.”

31/12/09: P3 - Iran Dissent

It has been a week of mayhem in the streets of Iran. Iran hasn't seen unrest like this since 1979, when the Islamic Revolution toppled the Shah of Iran. Mohsen Sazegara helped found Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps. He joined us today to shed light on the matter.

Right click to Download 31/12/09: P3 - Iran Dissent
[mp3 file: runs 27:29]

http://cbc.ca/radio
http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/index.html
http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/podcast.html

Former revolutionary guard provides tips on organized resistance in Iran

http://video.foxnews.com/v/3957478/inside-job

A recent Mashable report couldn't have been more on target when it recognized YouTube as the top social media innovation of the decade. That social media tool in the able of hands of Mohsen Sazegara, an opposition activist is being used as a military resource to rebel against Iranian tyranny that has swept the land since the disputed presidential elections held back in June. Like David versus Goliath, this is a classic tale of choosing the right weaponry.

According to Christina Lamb in a TimesOnline report, Sazegara "tells people to boycott goods manufactured by factories belonging to the Revolutionary Guard and to hoard small change to make daily transactions impossible. They arrange to plug in kettles, irons and hairdryers simultaneously to try to crash the power grid. He also suggests so-called “white strikes” where workers go to factories but do nothing. The objective is to paralyse the government,” he said.

Some of Sazegara's tactics are having an impact. When Iranian sports fans turned up at football matches wearing green, the state television resorted to broadcasting in black and white. He also encouraged activists to reach out to the Revolutionary Guard troops after there were signs that they were not happy. Rebels continue to carry placards with “Army join the nation” to attract more defectors.

Sometimes Sazegara shows films or PowerPoint presentations to demonstrate a point: “I showed a supporter being beaten after he had been left by other activists and told them if his friends had gone back and surrounded him, it would have been impossible for the basiji.”

Shahab, his 25-year-old son, downloads the daily messages onto YouTube and Facebook and to key email addresses. They estimate they reach an audience of half a million. Unfortunately all of these videos are spoken in Farsi so they have not had wide distribution with American audiences to gain additional Western support.

Social media has certainly made its mark on the first decade of the 21st Century. Barriers like the Cold War or even the Berlin Wall can no longer keep dissidents at bay. Hopefully YouTube in the trusted hands of Sazegara will motivate not only protesters but diplomats and national leaders to take heed and assist in remedying this unrest. According to Sazegara, he admits that "it won't break yet the neck of the regime as the Muharram demonstrations 31 years ago did with the Shah regime...but it will clearly demonstrate to the Iranian and world community the illegitimacy of the regime and the fact that they want a change."

One can only hope that Sazegara's YouTube aim hits his target as effectively as his biblical counterpart David's slingshot did when he was presented with insurmountable odds.

Ron Callari
Society and Trends Writer
InventorSpot.com

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/july-dec09/iran_12-21.html

Transcript

GWEN IFILL: And we move on to Iran and the protests that won't go away.

Margaret Warner reports.

MARGARET WARNER: The streets of Qom, Iran's holy city and the center of its religious life, filled with tens of thousands of mourners today. They came both to honor a founding father of modern Iran, Grand Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri, and to protest the government he had come to oppose.

Foreign journalists were kept away, but unconfirmed reports from reformist and conservative Web sites reported clashes between mourners and pro-government supporters.

Montazeri, who died Sunday at age 87, was a patriarch of the Islamic Revolution that swept Iran 30 years ago. At one point, he was designated the successor to the revolution's founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, but Montazeri was pushed aside when he split with government hard-liners in the late 1980s.

He called for expanding civil liberties and women's rights and emerged as the senior dissident cleric in Iran. Recently, he even apologized for the 1979 storming of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and the 444-day hostage crisis that followed.

Montazeri's legacy of defiance helped inspire and embolden the opposition movement that gained momentum after last June's disputed presidential election. After President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was proclaimed the winner amid widespread allegations of fraud, Montazeri penned stinging broadside denouncing the Ahmadinejad government for its handling of the post-election protests.

Those rebukes found a wide audience in Iran and amid the opposition supporters around the world, like Mohsen Sazegara in Northern Virginia.

MOHSEN SAZEGARA, co-founder, Revolutionary Guard: I write down whatever I want to say here in the home video here on a piece of paper.

MARGARET WARNER: Every evening, Sazegara descends to his basement and speaks to tech-savvy reform-minded citizens back in his native Iran. His 10-minute videos counseling tactics of resistance are posted on YouTube, Facebook and Google Mail.

His audience? The thousands of young people and others who, six months after the election, are still taking to the streets of Tehran and elsewhere in protest, as they did today.

Like Montazeri, Sazegara is a somewhat unlikely mentor for them. An aide to Ayatollah Khomeini in the earliest days of the revolution, he went on to help found the Revolutionary Guard, which is now the regime's main instrument for maintaining control.

Sazegara says his aim is nothing less than bringing down what he calls the coup regime of Ahmadinejad and the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

MOHSEN SAZEGARA: The aim of the movement is overthrowing the coup government. And because that the leader is with the coup government leader as well, and he should be tried.

MARGARET WARNER: You were one of the early adherents of this revolution. You helped found the Revolutionary Guard. Why did you turn against it?

MOHSEN SAZEGARA: Because this Revolutionary Guard is not that Revolutionary Guard that I was one of its founders. We wanted to have a people army to defend the country, not an organization which is involved in politics to suppress the people.

One of the pillars of Islamic Revolution was freedom. Independence, freedom, Islamic republic, they were what people shouted on the streets in 1979. But now we have no freedom.

ABBAS MILANI, director of Iranian studies, Stanford University: I think they have succeeded in intimidating some of the people who were sitting on the fence. And they came out in the days after the election in millions. And now that the price of participation has gone up a bit, they are back on the fence.

But I don't think this is comforting news to the regime, because they have now realized that they are sitting on a potential volcano.

MARGARET WARNER: Resistance is continuing, with protests organized through text messages and Twitter. The regime is fighting back on the P.R. front. It's been organizing its own pro-government rallies.

It's also vilifying the opposition with accusations like this new one running on state TV, alleging opposition demonstrators desecrated a photo of the revered Ayatollah Khomeini. And, most recently, government-linked newspapers and political figures have been calling for the arrest of senior opposition leaders, including the reform politician who claims to have actually won the election, Mir Hossein Mousavi.

ABBAS MILANI: If at any time the regime thought that they could get away with arresting him, I think they would. I think the only thing that is barring it is that they know that they are sitting on this seething volcano. They don't want to take a risk. They don't want to do something that they don't know the results of. And this is one of the biggest risks, I think, that they would have to take.

MARGARET WARNER: All this takes place against the backdrop of mounting tensions with the United States and the West over Iran's nuclear program, its repeated missile tests, and the fate of three American hikers who strayed across the border and are now facing trial for espionage.

Yet, stability at home remains the regime's top priority. In a recent meeting with clerics, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei said, the government would remain stable and the opposition will be destroyed before your eyes.

But Mohsen Sazegara insists there are significant splits in the clergy and even in the Revolutionary Guard.

Do you think this opposition movement, which you're helping to inspire as well, can really bring down this regime?

MOHSEN SAZEGARA: Yes, I think so. While we are going ahead, we can see that many gaps in this society, for instance, gender gap, generation gap, minorities gap, social class gap, and the gap between knowledge and ignorance of the regime, knowledge of a nation and ignorance of a regime, they are big motivations for a nation to uprise for her rights.

MARGARET WARNER: Opposition leaders say they plan to show their muscle again next Sunday on the major Shiite religious holiday of Ashura. It will coincide with the seventh day of mourning for Montazeri, adding to the expected outpouring in the streets. What isn't at all clear is how long the regime will tolerate this kind of public dissent.

With two such determined foes, it would appear that this drama in Iran has many chapters to play out.

EVERY evening before dinner, Mohsen Sazegara disappears into the basement of his cosy suburban house in Virginia and makes a 10-minute home movie to post on YouTube.

Far from showcasing the talents of his sons or pets, Sazegara’s videos are of protest tactics aimed at bringing down a regime. His house is the epicentre of what he hopes will be the world’s first technological revolution and his videos are watched more than 6,000 miles away in Iran.

Six months after the disputed presidential election in Iran, the opposition has refused to give up despite a crackdown that has seen arrests, beatings, torture and show trials. Co-ordination of the so-called green revolution has increasingly moved overseas, where exiles are using the new media to spread the message.

Last week, when tens of thousands of students took to the streets of Iran in some of the biggest demonstrations since the elections, Sazegara had been sending instructions via Facebook, YouTube and email.

They have good reason to listen. Thirty years ago, as a young revolutionary, he helped to topple the Shah, putting today’s Islamic regime in power and working as a speechwriter for its founding father, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Sazegara was one of the founders of the Revolutionary Guard. Now he is teaching protesters how to tackle the force.

“In one part of my life I was involved in creating something; now, after 30 years, I’m trying to destroy it,” he said.

One of the highest ranking members of the regime to defect to the West, Sazegara held a number of key posts, including head of state radio, deputy prime minister and director of industrial development and renovation.

He helped to mould the Revolutionary Guard into an elite security force and to write its charter. “The idea was to create a people’s army to guard against coups and defend the country,” he said.

He was horrified to see it turn on its own people and extend its power over politics, media and security. “I had pictured a revolution whose face was full of kindness for the people and instead it became a brutal regime of tortures, executions, massacres,” he said.

In 1988 he left government and became a prominent critic, publishing three newspapers. “I realised we were wrong in the revolution, thinking creating an Islamic republic could solve all our problems,” he said. “Going back to the time of the prophet, cutting off hands of thieves, putting women in hijab doesn’t work — we have tested this in Iran and it has failed.”

Sazegara’s newspapers were shut down and he was jailed three times. The last time, in 2003, he was released after a 79- day hunger strike that saw his weight halve to 90lb. He fled overseas for eye and heart surgery, first to London, then the United States, where he was a visiting fellow at Yale and Harvard. This year he moved to Washington to set up a think tank and work for regime change.

Defeating the Revolutionary Guard is the key to success, he says. Describing the 130,000- strong force as “a corrupt and dangerous mafia”, he argues that “this movement will win when the Revolutionary Guard is defeated”.

The guard led the crackdown after elections in June in which Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the hardline president, was controversially re-elected and supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoubi, the opposition candidates, took to the streets.

“They thought if they kill 200 people, arrest 200 activists, everything will be stopped and Iranians won’t fight any more,” he said. “They did what they wanted. They killed, raped and they arrested more than 4,000. We believe 178 lost their lives.”

One of those was Neda Soltan, whose death was captured on a mobile phone camera and sent round the world, becoming a symbol of the repression. It was after her death that Sazegara began sending out daily videos from his basement to advise the movement.

“What I offer is non-violent tactics,” he said. “When they banned street protests, we told people to go to the roofs and shout ‘Allahu akbar’ [God is the greatest] or to drive along the streets at night, honking their horns. When they ban noise, we tell people to march in silent columns.”

He and others scour texts for methods used in revolutions in eastern Europe and Latin America and most recently Ukraine.

“When they stopped us writing slogans on the walls we started writing them on bank notes,” he said. He estimates 80% of the currency is stamped with “Death to the dictator” or slogans in support of Mousavi.

To spread the movement to provinces and small towns, they created a decentralised social network with people working in groups of between three and seven to pass on his daily missives: “That way, if they arrest some, there are thousands of new activists.”

He tells people to boycott goods manufactured by factories belonging to the Revolutionary Guard and to hoard small change to make daily transactions impossible. They arrange to plug in kettles, irons and hairdryers simultaneously to try to crash the power grid. He also suggests so-called “white strikes” where workers go to factories but do nothing. “The objective is to paralyse the government,” he said.

Some tactics are having an impact. When people turned up at football matches wearing green, state television resorted to broadcasting in black and white.

One of his main targets is the basiji, volunteer paramilitaries deployed by the Revolutionary Guard to break up protests: “Our activists take their photographs and identify them, then go to their homes and attach pictures of the martyrs on their wall and go to the schools of their children. These pressures are very effective — in last week’s protests we saw there were few basiji present.”

He has been encouraging activists to reach out to troops in the regular army after signs that they are not happy. “Army join the nation” read a number of placards last week.

Sometimes Sazegara shows films or PowerPoint presentations to demonstrate a point: “I showed a supporter being beaten after he had been left by other activists and told them if his friends had gone back and surrounded him, it would have been impossible for the basiji.”

Shahab, his 25-year-old son, downloads the daily messages onto YouTube and Facebook and to key email addresses. They estimate they reach an audience of half a million.

To impede this, the regime has slowed internet speeds so accessing an email account can take half an hour. It blocks access to Facebook, YouTube and Twitter and has set up monitoring centres in the judiciary and the Revolutionary Guard to track political dissent.

According to Sazegara, Iranians abroad are adopting a similar role to the one they played in toppling the Shah in 1979 by providing money and skills. “Then we smuggled in cassettes of the ayatollah’s speeches,” he said. “Now we are using the internet.”

The United Nations says that more than 4,200 Iranians have sought refugee status since the elections. Two athletes from the national wrestling and karate teams, an anchor on state television and a film director have applied for political asylum in Europe. Columbia University in New York has seen applications from Iranian students rise 20-fold this year.

Western governments, preoccupied with the nuclear issue, appear to have accepted Ahmadinejad’s re-election and written off the revolutionaries. But Sazegara insists they will not be defeated. “We were really encouraged by the size and geographic spread of last week’s protests,” he said.

The next plan involves the Shi’ite religious holiday of Muharram, which starts this week. Traditionally people take to the streets with green flags for the martyrdom of Imam Hussain, grandson of the prophet Muhammad. “A door has been opened that cannot be closed,” said Sazegara. “We hope to mobilise millions. After that the countdown for the regime will be started — or not.”

30 years of upheaval

1979

Shah is overthrown. Islamic republic declared

1980

Iran-Iraq war begins, lasting eight years

1989

Ayatollah Khomeini dies. Ayatollah Khamenei appointed supreme leader

1997

Reformist Mohammed Khatami elected president

2005

Ultra-conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad succeeds him

2009

Ahmadinejad declared winner of disputed June election. Mass demonstrations follow

Mohsen Sazegara, a founder of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, posts daily videos on the Internet, working from his home in a Washington suburb. (Chris Usher / For The Times / November 30, 2009)

http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-fg-iran-exiles10-2009dec10,0,2320373,full.story
By Borzou Daragahi
December 10, 2009

Reporting from Paris - "Tehran is online," the director's wife announces.

For the third time in less than an hour, Mohsen Makhmalbaf politely excuses himself. He ambles off to the other end of a sparsely furnished salon-turned-makeshift war room: a desktop computer, two laptops perched on end tables and a giant television screen. He fits on a headset and begins speaking to an aide of one of Iran's opposition figures.

One of his country's most highly regarded filmmakers, Makhmalbaf has lived abroad for five years, moving his family first to Afghanistan and then to Paris. Iran's censors, he complained, refused to grant him permission to make the movies he wanted.

The authorities were happy to let him go, along with thousands of other young, tech-savvy Iranians -- a gambit that may have proved a grave miscalculation.

Now the black-clad director spends most of his time serving as an unofficial spokesman for the green movement that sprang to life after Iran's disputed June 12 presidential election, a soldier in an army of Iranian exiles who from abroad have taken up the fight against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his hard-line allies.

There are e-mails from expatriates in California to answer, chats with counterparts in Germany, politicians in European capitals and Washington to lobby, and the frequent calls from Tehran and other Iranian cities via Skype, the voice-over- Internet software popular among plugged-in Iranians.

"Thirty years ago if I wanted to get in touch with someone in Iran from abroad, I had to send a letter or make a phone call," Makhmalbaf says. "Phones are expensive and are monitored. Now I get online and instantly have a connection to Iran.

"Cellphones, computers, the Internet -- they are the weapons of the new war."

Chris Usher / For The Times / November 30, 2009
Mohsen Sazegara prepares his 10-minute videos in his Washington-area basement studio. The onetime Iranian journalist estimates that as many as 500,000 young people in Iran have seen them.

Iran has long used exile as a tool to rid itself of political opponents. Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi sent a rabble-rousing Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini abroad to Turkey, keeping him at bay for more than 14 years.

After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, hordes of Iranians fled abroad -- many settling in Los Angeles, which has the largest Iranian community outside the Middle East. They vowed to pursue the fight for freedom in Iran from a distance, and failed miserably, drifting into lives of perpetual exile, their dreams of triumphant returns receding as they lost contact with the old country.

After the crackdown on Iran's reformist movement this decade, hundreds more Iranian intellectuals and dissidents left the country. Thousands of physicians, engineers and scholars, unable to tolerate Iran under the harsh rule of the hard-liners, followed suit, immigrating to the United Arab Emirates, Canada and Western Europe as well as the U.S.

Pleased by the irrelevance of those who had left during the 1980s exodus, authorities issued passports, responded to paperwork and all but encouraged the charismatic activists and the disgruntled middle class to head out.

But new technology and the character of the new emigres have foiled the hard-liners' plans, resulting perhaps in Iran's biggest demographic blunder since a 1980s fertility drive bred a generation of educated malcontents seeking to change the country.

Communication tools such as e-mail, blogs and Twitter have created virtual communities where Iranians in the diaspora and in the country can mingle, instantly and effortlessly, circumventing restrictions on broadcast and telephone communications.

Although not the lead actor in Iran's political drama, the diaspora, as even Iranian authorities acknowledge, plays a supporting role by "re-tweeting" reports, videos, ideas and photographs that the exiles trawl from Iran, flooding the country's throttled Internet and heavily controlled airwaves with news, videos and insight.

Iranian authorities have struggled to comprehend the new rules of the political environment. For months they described the innovative tools as instruments used by the West in a "soft war" against Iran, even naming Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as co-conspirators during the trials of activists this summer.

Although Iran's Revolutionary Guard and Basiji militia have recently announced plans to confront the threat of the new technologies, tens of thousands of Iranians continue to flood the nation's communication channels with messages that contradict Tehran's official narratives.

"The regime didn't have any understanding of the power of the new communications, satellite TV, Internet," says Mohsen Sazegara, a founder of the Revolutionary Guard and former journalist who now lives in a Washington suburb.

"Letting us go abroad was the policy, and I call it the short-term policy," he says. "They just see a few steps ahead of themselves."

A confession of sorts

Standing before the camera in prison garb and bandages, the man confesses to having contacts with the CIA, sleeping with the celebrity wife of French President Nicolas Sarkozy as well as actress Angelina Jolie and plotting with counterrevolutionaries to destroy the Islamic Republic.

The man is Ebrahim Nabavi, Iran's most famous satirist, who left the country for Belgium three years after a stint in solitary confinement that he said "shattered" him.

"The Confession," his hilarious parody of Iran's show trials, was posted on the Internet and broadcast on exile channels even before the latest round began in August. It so perfectly captured the forced jailhouse confessions written by Iran's interrogators that it quickly went viral, blunting the effect of the televised court proceedings.

"They thought we would go abroad and just become irrelevant," says political caricaturist Nikahang Kowsar, who left the country after being imprisoned for his biting parodies likening Ahmadinejad's spiritual mentor to a crocodile.

Now he's in Canada and is a reporter for Dutch-funded, Persian-language Radio Zamaneh, disseminating digital versions of his caricatures of Ahmadinejad with a chintzy halo above his head via e-mail and his own blog.

"After the revolution, many of those who went abroad were those who were part of a system whose time was ending," director Makhmalbaf says.

"Those who are going abroad now belong to a group of people whose time is just beginning. At the beginning of the revolution, they were part of the past regime. This time they're the harbingers of the next regime."

Diaspora's renewal

The new exiles have also breathed new life into the Iranian diaspora, long a political backwater dominated by monarchists and various strands of Marxists.

They have reinvigorated the Persian-language programming of the U.S.-funded Voice of America news channel, and played a major role in the launch of the BBC's popular Persian-language channel. According to Ali Darabi, the deputy chief of Iran's state broadcaster, 40% of Iranians have access to such satellite channels.

"If I left the country in the 1980s, then I might have worked in McDonald's for a while," says Omid Memarian, a reformist journalist who left Iran in 2005 after several months in prison and now works as a Berkeley-based researcher for Human Rights Watch, the international advocacy group. "But the Internet era has changed this."

Unlike those who fled Iran immediately after the revolution, Memarian knows intimately the institutions of the Islamic Republic. He once worked for a newspaper run by Hadi Khamenei, the reformist brother of Iran's supreme leader, and wrote speeches for a Revolutionary Guard commander.

"I am familiar with the system," he says. "I think they made a mistake to let me go."

Unlike previous waves of exiles, the reformists also tend to be in the communication business, journalists whose job it is to find an audience, speak its language and remain relevant.

"A journalist calls up Iran and says, 'What's going on?' " Makhmalbaf says. "When he's doing analysis, he's investigating yesterday's events not some old history."

He pauses and smiles. "The Iranian government sent a bunch of journalists abroad to freely propagate against the system."

6,000 miles away

Every night in his town-house basement outside Washington, Sazegara attaches a small microphone to the lapel of his golf shirt, turns on a small video camera and speaks to Iranians 6,000 miles away.

"Salaam," he says, speaking in the informal idioms of the contemporary Islamic Republic. "Today I want to bring up four matters with you."

In the daily 10-minute videos, he discusses the day's news, techniques for nonviolent protest, upcoming events and viewers' e-mailed questions. He even sends shout-outs to listeners.

Sazegara once enthusiastically served Khomeini. But in the late 1990s he became a vocal critic of the Islamic Republic that the cleric founded. After he was imprisoned and went on a lengthy hunger strike, Sazegara went abroad in 2003 for medical treatment, and stayed when threatened with a longer sentence if he returned.

"The message was that they preferred me to stay out of Iran," he says.

Sazegara and others provide what amounts to vision and direction for a movement whose leaders are either constrained by constant surveillance or deprived of their smartest advisors, who have been locked up in prison.

It's Sazegara, for example, who explicitly urges the opposition green movement to reach out to Iran's ethnic minorities, factory workers and the lower middle class. He notes small demonstrations in faraway towns and poses questions that opposition leaders such as Mehdi Karroubi and Mir-Hossein Mousavi would never dare ask.

"How do we bring the coup d'etat government down and put pressure on them, and keep the movement going in the best way possible?" Sazegara said in his Nov. 11 video, defining the purpose of his daily talks.

He estimates that as many as 500,000 young Iranians have seen his videos. At least 12,000 a day view them on YouTube and Facebook, in addition to the 12,000 subscribers who receive them via e-mail.

"What I am doing is trying to transfer the experiences of other countries to the people of Iran," he says.

"The ideas also come from hundreds of e-mails I receive a day from Iranians."

Sazegara is sure he'd be in prison if he were still in Iran. And even if he weren't, he doubts he'd have the reach he now has.

"I was considered dangerous because of the more than 50 speeches that I had at big universities of Iran," he says. "Sometimes, in a speech, at most 1,000 students were in the auditorium. But now 50,000 people can listen to or read whatever I say."

VIENNA, Va. -- From a dim basement just down the street from a train station here, Mohsen Sazegara is working to overthrow the leadership of Iran.

He's done it before. Thirty years ago, as a hot-headed young revolutionary in a Paris suburb, he helped topple Iran's last monarch, the shah, putting today's Islamic regime in power.

Matt Eich/Luceo Images for The Wall Street Journal.
Mohsen Sazegara makes opposition videos in his Virginia basement.

"Iranians across the world have found each other again," says Mr. Sazegara, sipping homemade sour-cherry juice, an Iranian summertime drink, in his basement. Thirty years ago he co-founded the Revolutionary Guards, Iran's feared security force. Today he makes YouTube videos teaching Iranians how to evade the Revolutionary Guards and stage nonviolent uprisings.

Mr. Sazegara's unusual career -- from revolutionary, to ultimate Tehran insider, to opposition video maker in his basement -- helps explain why Iran is especially worried about the global nature of the "Green Movement" calling for regime change in Iran. His weekly videos rack up thousands of hits.

He's one of several prominent Iranian figures pressing the cause world-wide. Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf traveled to Washington, D.C., in recent weeks to plead for economic sanctions against Iran. Akbar Ganji, a former journalist who uncovered killings of lawyers, journalists and writers by Iran's regime, has organized rallies and hunger strikes in New York attracting thousands.

Part of Mr. Sazegara's influence stems from the fact that he split from the regime after decades walking its halls of power.

He got his start as a young revolutionary back in the 1970s, quitting graduate school in the U.S. to join with Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Islamic state's founding father, then an exile in Paris. Mr. Sazegara became the ayatollah's speechwriter.

Matt Eich/Luceo Images for The Wall Street Journal
Mr. Sazegara works with his son Shahab, 25, to prepare the material that they will record later that evening.

Mr. Sazegara has a checkered reputation. Some Iranians still blame him for arrests and executions in Iran in the 1980s. Mr. Sazegara has said the actions happened in the past and need to be judged in that context.

Iran's political landscape shifted in 1997 when a reform-minded president promised more social openness. When those reforms failed to materialize, Mr. Sazegara went his separate way. He criticized Iran's leadership and publicly claimed the 1979 Islamic revolution had failed to deliver its promise of freedom and democracy.

He became particularly vocal about his brainchild, the Revolutionary Guards, giving radio interviews and writing commentary suggesting the Guards were contaminating the regime. By this time, the Guards were extending their power over politics, finance, media and security.

In 2004, Mr. Sazegara was jailed for his criticism, and later fled the country. Today he calls Iran's government "a religious dictatorship" and the Revolutionary Guards "a corrupt and dangerous mafia."

"I believe the only solution for Iran is a liberal, democratic and secular government," he says. "We need to overhaul the constitution."

This summer's election in Iran presented an opportunity, he believes. The controversial re-election of Iran's hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, spurred protests in Iran, followed by a bloody crackdown.

Mr. Sazegara turned his suburban Virginia home, with its many Persian carpets on the floor, into the de facto U.S. headquarters of Iran's opposition. Phones ring constantly. His wife, a physician, monitors blogs and Web sites from a laptop on the dining-room table. And in the basement, Mr. Sazegara cranks out videos recorded by his son. He delivers 10-minute lessons on civil disobedience, drawing on his knowledge from having helped build Iran's complex security apparatus.

"From remote villages in Iran to the streets of Los Angeles, we now stand united," he says in one video. "You must not give up."

Source: Middle East Forum (September 2009) (11-24-09)

[Michael Rubin, a senior editor of the Middle East Quarterly, is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior lecturer at the Naval Postgraduate School.]

On January 21, 2005, George W. Bush looked out over the crowds gathered in front of the U.S. Capitol for his second inaugural and declared, "It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."

He was lambasted from all sides. Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, a moderate Democrat, told CNN that the focus on democracy was not "practical." Patrick J. Buchanan said it was "a recipe for endless war." At a conference I attended in Rome just days later, a senior U.S. embassy official told a largely European audience during a question-and-answer period that his boss's speech was "stupid."

Such sentiments have become especially widespread on the Left. Faced with a choice between promoting real reform in Middle Eastern governance and supporting policies that might echo Bush's, progressives have sacrificed any pretense of embracing liberalization. Thus, instead of siding with the reformers in Syria who issued the 2005 Damascus Declaration calling for a "democratic national regime" through a process "peaceful, gradual, founded on accord, and based on dialogue and recognition of the other," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi chose to sit down with their tormentor, Bashar al-Assad.

Opponents of Bush's emphasis on democratization in the Middle East adopted two strategies during his time in office. The first, employed by those within the administration who found his idealism imprudent, was to play down the extent of repression in a given autocracy. "There's one dramatic difference between Iran and the other two axes of evil, and that would be its democracy," Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage told the Los Angeles Times in 2003. "You approach a democracy differently." Thus, rather than promote civil society or unleash forces that might lead to a velvet revolution in the Islamic Republic, Armitage led a thinly veiled insurrection against democratization, hampering implementation of the administration's own Middle East Partnership Initiative and, in many cases, blocking discharge of its Iran Democracy Fund.

The second strategy, voiced more broadly in both the academic and foreign policy communities, based itself on cultural relativism. "Arab societies lack certain dispositional prerequisites for democracy," wrote Adam Garfinkle in a smart essay in the National Interest. "Perhaps in our desperation to achieve absolute security in a newly perilous world, we are distorting the social history of democracy and misreading the nature of the societies whose political virtue we mean to raise up." Juan Cole, president of the one-man Global Americana Institute, tarred democratization as "neocolonialism."

The fundamental debate about whether democratization is an American interest worth American investment predates the presidency of George W. Bush and will extend beyond that of Barack Obama. Can democratization get a second wind under Obama? After Obama's much heralded speech to "the Muslim world" in Cairo, his supporters rushed to defend him from accusations that he had abandoned democracy. But while the president had in fact spoken of democracy, he, like Armitage, diluted the term to the point of meaninglessness when he reassured Arab states that "each nation gives life to this principle [of popular will] in its own way, grounded in the traditions of its own people. America does not presume to know what is best for everyone."

A related trend, but potentially more dangerous, is the assumption by certain proponents of democratization—including the National Endowment for Democracy—that if democracies accommodate political Islam, Islamists will abide by the norms of liberal democracy. Prominent foreign policy commentators and democratization supporters like Peter Beinart, Robert Kagan, Larry Diamond, and Tamara Cofman Wittes (recently tapped to oversee Arab democratization efforts in Hillary Clinton's State Department) recently endorsed a letter urging the White House to engage Islamist groups and the Muslim Brotherhood. But this is to be too casual in discounting the writings and past practices of Islamist groups. Assigning sovereignty to God and placing it in the hands of the people are mutually exclusive. These irreconcilables are one reason that Islamists throughout the region view liberalism as a greater threat than autocracy and target secular reformists with as much if not more vigor than do the dictators.

* * *

It is in the context of this debate that The Next Founders: Voices of Democracy in the Middle East, the new book by Johns Hopkins University scholar and longtime Commentary contributor Joshua Muravchik, is so important. Seventeen years after publishing Exporting Democracy, perhaps the most thoughtful case for making pursuit of democracy a core principle of U.S. foreign policy, Muravchik now revisits the theme with specific attention to the Middle East.

In the late 20th century, the world witnessed a democratic revolution. Since the 1970s, the percentage of countries with governments chosen by their people has doubled from 30 to 60 percent. Not only has Eastern Europe come in from the cold, but in West Africa, East Asia, and Latin America, states once dismissed by Western diplomats as impervious to democratic liberty now hold elections and regularly and peacefully transfer power from government to opposition.

The Middle East, however, remains a fitful holdout. Not a single Arab state is a democracy, nor is the Islamic Republic of Iran. Until 9/11, few people in Washington policy circles cared. Those of the "realist" school justified almost any partnership with autocrats; as Muravchik summarizes, "it was alright if they were bastards, if only they would be our bastards." But al-Qaeda's attacks on New York and Washington heralded a paradigm shift: "perhaps the internal affairs of Middle Eastern states was a strategic consideration."

Eight years and two trying wars later, Obama told his audience in Cairo that "no system of government can or should be imposed upon one nation by any other." The value of The Next Founders is to show that a policy of democratization need not mean, as in the leftist caricature, a program of obnoxious American imposition. "The fact that there is precious little democracy in the Middle East does not mean, however, that there are no democrats," Muravchik observes. His book profiles seven dissidents and reformers among the many he encountered in his extensive travels in the Middle East.

Some of Muravchik's democrats choose to work within their systems. For example, rather than be cowed into silence or forced into exile, Iraqi parliamentarian Mithal al-Alusi ratchetted up his battle against religious incitement, militias, and intolerance, even after extremists murdered his sons. Rola Dashti, a Kuwaiti economist leading the battle in her country for women's suffrage, broke through the glass ceiling and won a seat in parliament in May when The Next Founders was already at press. Dashti's triumph underlines Muravchik's prescience in telling her story.

This summer's unrest in Iran and the role of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in crushing it highlight the relevance of another profile, that of Mohsen Sazegara, who helped found the corps before undergoing a change of heart. If democrats are to triumph, they will have to win over groups like the corps that exist to secure the regime against the people. Muravchik's narrative fascinatingly traces Sazegara's path, from rise to power to disillusionment and ultimately to dissidence.

The stories of the other "founders" are as compelling: feminist Wajeha al-Huwaider's protests to win Saudi women the right to drive, publisher Hisham Kassem's struggles against Egypt's censors, Bassem Eid's struggle to document the Palestinian Authority's human rights abuses, and Syrian poet Ammar Abdulhamid's decision to leave his homeland and advocate for reform from abroad.

Muravchik is well aware of the criticism that his democrats are the exceptions rather than the rule, and he wisely refrains from making any promises of imminent redemption. But he notes that alongside the individuals are noticeable trends. "My seven subjects were born in the 1950s or 1960s," he writes. "In the generation behind them, the number of democrats is far larger. How do I know? Because the Internet is humming with their voices." Whereas once critics could dismiss Muravchik as a starry-eyed idealist, the events of this summer—the electoral defeat of Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Twitter uprising in Iran—suggest that George W. Bush was right to envision "the day when the people of the Middle East leave the desert of despotism for the fertile gardens of liberty." If only we do not help erect barriers in their path.

NEW YORK -- His first impulse was to dismiss the ominous email as a prank, says a young Iranian-American named Koosha. It warned the 29-year-old engineering student that his relatives in Tehran would be harmed if he didn't stop criticizing Iran on Facebook.

Two days later, his mom called. Security agents had arrested his father in his home in Tehran and threatened him by saying his son could no longer safely return to Iran.

"When they arrested my father, I realized the email was no joke," said Koosha, who asked that his full name not be used.

Tehran's leadership faces its biggest crisis since it first came to power in 1979, as Iranians at home and abroad attack its legitimacy in the wake of June's allegedly rigged presidential vote. An opposition effort, the "Green Movement," is gaining a global following of regular Iranians who say they never previously considered themselves activists.

The regime has been cracking down hard at home. And now, a Wall Street Journal investigation shows, it is extending that crackdown to Iranians abroad as well.

In recent months, Iran has been conducting a campaign of harassing and intimidating members of its diaspora world-wide -- not just prominent dissidents -- who criticize the regime, according to former Iranian lawmakers and former members of Iran's elite security force, the Revolutionary Guard, with knowledge of the program.

Part of the effort involves tracking the Facebook, Twitter and YouTube activity of Iranians around the world, and identifying them at opposition protests abroad, these people say.

Interviews with roughly 90 ordinary Iranians abroad -- college students, housewives, doctors, lawyers, businesspeople -- in New York, London, Dubai, Sweden, Los Angeles and other places indicate that people who criticize Iran's regime online or in public demonstrations are facing threats intended to silence them.

Today's crisis echoes the events of three decades ago, when Iran's Islamic revolution first bloomed. Back then, Iranians around the world pooled their energy and money to help oust Iran's monarch, the shah. This time, the global community is backing a similar effort, using new tools including Facebook and Twitter. YouTube videos providing step-by-step instructions for staging civil disobedience rack up thousands of views.

But now, unlike 30 years ago, Iran's leadership is striking back across national borders.

Dozens of individuals in the U.S. and Europe who criticized Iran on Facebook or Twitter said their relatives back in Iran were questioned or temporarily detained because of their postings. About three dozen individuals interviewed said that, when traveling this summer back to Iran, they were questioned about whether they hold a foreign passport, whether they possess Facebook accounts and why they were visiting Iran. The questioning, they said, took place at passport control upon their arrival at Tehran's Imam Khomeini International Airport.

Five interviewees who traveled to Iran in recent months said they were forced by police at Tehran's airport to log in to their Facebook accounts. Several reported having their passports confiscated because of harsh criticism they had posted online about the way the Iranian government had handled its controversial elections earlier this year.

Before this past summer, "If anyone asked me, 'Does the government threaten Iranians abroad or their families at home,' I would say, 'Not at all,'" says Nasrin Sotoudeh, a prominent lawyer inside Iran. "But now the cases are too many to count. Every day I get phone calls and visits from people who are being harassed and threatened" because of relatives' activities abroad.

In November, the deputy commander of Iran's armed forces, Gen. Massoud Jazayeri, wrote an editorial in the conservative newspaper Kayhan that "protesters inside and outside Iran have been identified and will be dealt with at the right time."

In Germany, a national intelligence report indicates that Iranian intelligence operatives are monitoring about 900 critics of the Iranian regime within Germany. One German intelligence official, Manfred Murch, said last month that his staff has identified "Iranian intelligence agents" trying to intimidate protesters in Germany by videotaping them. A German foreign-ministry official said Germany rejected requests from Iran to restrict anti-Iranian protests there.

Mohammad Reza Bak Sahraei, a diplomat at Iran's mission to the United Nations in New York, didn't respond to written questions about Iran's intelligence activities abroad. "The allegation that the Islamic Republic of Iran has created limitations and problems for Iranians who are visiting Iran from abroad is false," Mr. Sahraei said.

In recent months, he said, "Many Iranians have returned to Iran and visited their family members. Until now we have no reports of any limitations being imposed on them. Representatives of Iran abroad are doing their utmost to facilitate traveling for Iranians to Iran."

The crisis in Iran started with June's controversial re-election of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Claims of vote fraud spawned massive street protests, and a bloody crackdown.

The post-election violence has turned Iran's relationship with overseas Iranians on its head. Previously, Iran generally enjoyed good relations with its diaspora. Most opposition movements were on the fringe -- for instance, royalists calling for the shah's return. But the violent suppression of street protests "showed people the true nature of Iran's regime," says Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran analyst for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

There are approximately four million Iranians abroad. The U.S. is home to the largest number, totaling at least several hundred thousand. They rank among the nation's best educated and most affluent immigrant groups.

At first, many protesters inside Iran and abroad simply wanted a vote recount. But after the violence, they began calling for a complete overhaul of Iran's Islamic system, up to and including change that would remove Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei from power. Around the world, Iranians took to the streets to march in protest against the events in Iran.

An Iranian engineer in his 30s who lives in a German-speaking area of Europe, and who attended protests there this year, described having his passport, cellphone and laptop confiscated when he later traveled to Tehran. He said he was called in for questioning several times, blindfolded, kicked and physically abused, and asked to hand over his email and Facebook passwords.

Interrogators showed him images of himself participating in protests in Europe, he said, and pressed him to identify other people in the images.

"I was very scared. My knees were trembling the whole time and I kept thinking, 'How did this happen to me?'" he said recently. "I only went to a few demonstrations, and I don't even live in Iran."

He said he was told he was guilty of charges including attending antiregime protests abroad, participating in online activities on Facebook and Twitter that harmed Iran's national security and leaving comments on opposition Web sites. He said he was given a choice: Face trial in Iran, or sign a document promising to act as an informant in Europe.

He says he signed the paper, took his passport and left Iran after a month. He says he has received follow-up emails and phone calls but hasn't responded to them.

Other Iranians abroad report receiving email threats tied to their online activities. In Los Angeles in June, an Iranian-American graduate student named Hamid said he received an email that read in part: "Stop spreading lies about Iran on Facebook." He said he received it after he changed his Facebook profile picture to a "V" symbol, for victory, dripping with blood to protest the Iran violence, along with a message about wanting to travel to Iran to support the opposition.

The email, written in Farsi, read in part, "We know your home address in Los Angeles. Watch out, we will come after you," according to Hamid.

There is no way to identify the email's anonymous sender, who signed it "Spider." Other Iranians interviewed in the U.S. and Europe reported receiving similar emails in recent months. Some emails were signed "Spider," they said, while others were signed "Revolutionary Hossein," a possible reference to one of the most revered saints in Shiite Islam.

No matter how widespread, the worries are sowing panic in the overseas community. Concerns about the safety of friends and family are so prevalent among younger Iranians that a number have changed their surnames on Facebook to "Irani" (which means simply "from Iran") to be harder to single out.

Omid Habibinia, a dissident Iranian who left Iran seven years ago for Europe, says he has always been harassed, but the pressure has grown this year. He claims Iranian security services early this year created a fake Facebook account for him and tried to "friend" people on his behalf and ask them questions. Other Iranian dissidents, along with some journalists, described similar experiences.

Officials at Facebook said the company often gets reports of fake profiles and will remove them after a review. A spokeswoman declined to comment on specific profiles that have been removed, including the one Mr. Habibinia described. She said deleted profiles no longer reside on Facebook's servers, making it impossible to trace their origins. She said she wasn't aware of complaints of harassment on Facebook at the hands of Iranian security services.

One 28-year-old physician who lives in Dubai said that in July he was asked to log on to his Facebook account by a security guard upon arrival in Tehran's airport. At first, he says, he lied and said he didn't have one. So the guard took him to a small room with a laptop and did a Google search for his name. His Facebook account turned up, he says, and his passport was confiscated.

After a month and several rounds of interrogations, he says, he was allowed to exit the country.

During Iran's historic 1979 Islamic revolution, Iranians abroad played an instrumental role in transforming the movement from a fringe idea led by a frail cleric, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, into a global force that eventually toppled the monarchy of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Iranians abroad flocked to Mr. Khomeini's side, lending his movement language skills, money and, ultimately, global legitimacy.

In the current crisis, Iran is eager to prevent a similar scenario.

To cut communication between Iranians inside and outside the country, Iran slowed Internet speeds so that accessing an online email account could take close to a half-hour. It blocked access to Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. For a while, an automated message warned people making international phone calls not to give information to outsiders.

Tracking Internet crimes -- from political dissent to pornography -- has long been a priority of the regime. Iran's local media openly report on Internet-monitoring centers inside the country's judiciary and armed forces that are staffed with English-speaking, tech-savvy young people.

Late last month, at a military parade in Tehran, intelligence minister Heydar Moslehi announced the training of "senior Internet lieutenants" to confront Iran's "virtual enemies online." This month Iran announced a 12-member unit within the armed forces called the Internet Crime Unit to track individuals "spreading lies and insults" about the regime.

Iran's elite security force, the Revolutionary Guard Corps, along with the intelligence ministry each have their own, separate Internet-monitoring units that track prominent political figures and activists, according to dissidents including Mohsen Sazegara, one of the original founders of the Revolutionary Guard who is now in exile in the U.S. After the June election crisis, these Internet-monitoring units expanded their work to include the online activity of Iranians abroad, these people say.

In the U.S., Koosha, the young engineering student whose father was briefly arrested in Tehran, says he was never politically active before. But this past summer, he said, he watched the turmoil in Iran and "I couldn't just sit and do nothing, I felt too guilty." He watched "people my age getting beaten and killed in the streets for expressing their opinion," he said. "The least I could do was to show my solidarity."

That's when he took steps that attracted the unwelcome attention. He attended a few rallies organized by opposition supporters near where he lives in the U.S. And then, when a prominent human-rights lawyer was jailed in Iran, Koosha created an online petition.

After his father was detained, Koosha took down his petition. "I was terrified and furious," he said. And he doesn't talk politics anymore when he calls his parents in Tehran.

But he's still finding ways to express his views. In September, he biked from Toronto to New York with his brother as part of the group Bicycling for Human Rights in Iran. "They want to control even Iranians who don't live under their rule," he says.
—Jeanne Whalen in London, David Crawford in Berlin and Christopher Rhoads in New York contributed to this article.

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Interview with Corriere della Sera 19 October, 2009