Iran monarchists, foreign spies, behind suspicious news reports

M.R. Madhi

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
There is no question that the domestic security situation in Iran is critical, and that we may soon witness crucial political shifts in the Islamic Republic. At the same time, however, observers should be cognizant of what Politico’s Laura Rozen calls “a notable uptick […] in very fishy stories” forecasting the immediate end of the Islamic government by supposed radical Western-aligned forces. IntelNews has detected several such stories in recent days, such as this unconfirmed December 31 report in Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, which stated that the Iranian government was moving “[h]undreds of military forces and tens of armored vehicles towards Tehran”, something which never actually occurred. Two days earlier, a report in Dutch government-owned Radio Netherlands had suggested that members of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, including Supreme Leader Sayyid Ali Khamenei, were preparing to abandon the country and seek political asylum in Russia. The report was traced to a document published by a Dutch-based Iranian exile group, and dismissed as an “obvious forgery” by intelNews sources in Holland. Such reports are usually anonymous, for obvious reasons. Recently, however, one such fishy story was signed by Maximilian Weschsler, a “freelance writer”, who published an interview with one Mohammad Reza Madhi, self-described “former high-ranking officer in Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards’ intelligence service”. Politico’s Laura Rozen was unable to detect any mention of Madhi in connection with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, and so was I, after an exhaustive search today. But even more interesting is the background of the article’s author, Czechoslovakian-born Maximilian Wechsler. As Rozen correctly reports, he is a documented former employee of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (cover name BOSCH), who infiltrated Australian communist groups in the 1970s, and moved to Thailand after his activities emerged in the Australian press.