By: Professor Kazem Kazerounian, 5-2-2026
This response was sent to Mr. Carlson on May 1, 2026. As of the publication of this note, no response has been received.
Tucker Carlson, in his April 28, 2026, podcast, interviewed John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer, during which several false claims were made about the MEK. Even a cursory fact-check shows that the interviewee lacks the most basic knowledge of the MEK, yet makes serious allegations without offering an iota of evidence. As elaborated below, the MEK was not founded by Mr. and Mrs. Rajavi, was not based in Iraq in the 1970s, did not attempt assassinations against Americans, and did not receive funding from any country.
These unfounded allegations come at a moment when the regime has launched a shocking execution spree, putting to death 18 dissidents, including eight members of the MEK—the very organization Kiriakou disparages—and sentencing 11 more to death. Regrettably, not a single government has condemned these executions. Many more MEK supporters are languishing in prison and could face the same fate.
For more than four decades, the question of how to confront the Iranian regime has produced a parallel debate about the nature of its opposition. At the center of that debate stands the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), one of the most organized and enduring alternatives to clerical rule. Whatever one’s conclusion about the organization, the subject demands seriousness. It requires honest engagement with history, disciplined use of evidence, and a clear separation between fact and conjecture.
It is precisely this discipline that is absent from the recent discussion featuring Carlson and Kiriakou. The exchange offers sweeping claims delivered with confidence, yet collapses under the weight of basic historical errors. What is presented as informed commentary instead reveals chronological confusion, unsupported allegations, and analytical shortcuts.
Consider first the origins of the MEK. The organization was founded in 1965 by Iranian university graduates, intellectuals, and activists opposed to the monarchy’s authoritarian rule. This is not a matter of interpretation but of record. Yet the interview reduces this complex founding to the claim that the MEK was established by a “husband and wife team” of Massoud and Maryam Rajavi. Massoud Rajavi joined the MEK in 1966, one year after its founding. Maryam Rajavi, then a student at Sharif University of Technology, joined in 1972, seven years after the organization was founded. Most importantly, they married in 1985, two decades after the MEK’s founding. Such an egregious factual error is not a minor slip; it exposes Kiriakou’s profound illiteracy on, and ignorance of, the subject he purports to explain.
The distortion becomes even more pronounced in the discussion of the 1970s. The claim that the MEK was “based in Iraq” during that decade and conducting cross-border attacks into Iran is demonstrably false. Anyone with even a rudimentary familiarity with Iran’s modern history—Kiriakou evidently excepted—knows that the entire MEK leadership and nearly 90 percent of its rank and file were imprisoned by the Shah’s regime during those years, many of them later executed. No member of the MEK was based in Iraq. One is therefore left to wonder where this fiction of MEK cross-border operations originates.
When Khomeini unleashed a reign of terror in June 1981, the MEK relocated to France, where it operated until 1986—six years after the Iran-Iraq war had begun.
These are not trivial corrections. They go to the heart of how the organization’s trajectory is understood. By collapsing distinct historical phases into a single fabricated narrative, the exchange replaces analysis with conjecture and distortion. It invites the audience to draw conclusions from a timeline that never existed.
The same lack of rigor appears in the treatment of the MEK’s relationship with Iraq. There is no need to sanitize this chapter. The organization did operate from Iraqi territory from 1986 onward. But the suggestion that the MEK simply “switched sides” after being “pushed out” by Saddam Hussein is a historically incoherent narrative, dressed up as analysis. The actual sequence is well established: exile from Iran in 1981, relocation to France, transfer to Iraq in 1986, continued presence there until after the 2003 U.S. invasion, handover of its weapons at the request of U.S. forces, and eventual relocation out of Iraq between 2012 and 2016 to European countries, with the majority resettled in Albania under UN and international supervision. Even a freshman college student could establish this with a basic search. Yet Kiriakou proceeds with such fabrications.
Regrettably, Tucker Carlson accepts this narrative without adequately examining the historical record.
The discussion of the MEK’s designation as a terrorist organization follows the same pattern of simplification and misrepresentation. The group was indeed listed for political reasons to appease Tehran’s mullahs, a fact senior U.S. officials publicly acknowledged in 1997. But its removal from the U.S. list in 2012 was not the result of a sudden political impulse or some shadowy lobbying campaign. It followed a 15-year legal and administrative process in which America’s second-highest court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, heard oral arguments from both sides, examined classified and unclassified evidence, ruled unanimously in favor of the MEK, chastised the Secretary of State for egregious delay, and, most notably, granted the MEK’s petition for a writ of mandamus, an extraordinary judicial remedy that is rarely granted. That decision left the State Department with no choice but to revoke the politically motivated FTO designation. To reduce this complex judicial process to a transactional narrative is a grave disservice to the U.S. justice system and the rule of law.
More broadly, the exchange recycles familiar accusations: claims of ideological extremism, allegations of external sponsorship, suggestions of clandestine operations—without providing substantiation. Repetition does not confer validity, and insinuation is not proof. As Mahatma Gandhi observed: “An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it. Truth stands, even if there be no public support. It is self-sustained.”
Misrepresentations of this kind do more than obscure the past; they distort present policy debates and cloud future choices. If the objective is to understand the options available to the Iranian people and the international community, then the first requirement is clarity. That clarity cannot be achieved through conjecture, lazy insinuation, or a distorted reading of undisputed historical facts.