Deal is close with Iran despite White House denials, former CIA spy says

Is Iranian-born Valerie Jarrett leading U.S. engagement?

By Mark Ellis

Reza Khalili, the pseudonym of a former CIA spy in Iran, says Iranian and U.S. negotiators are close to a nuclear deal, despite White House denials concerning a New York Times report that surfaced Saturday.

The New York Times said the U.S.and Iran agreed in principle to direct negotiations over the Iranian nuclear program after the election, apparently at the Iranians’ request. Both the White House and the Iranian Foreign Ministry denied that they had agreed to such talks.

“If you read it carefully, the New York Times piece actually verifies that secret meetings have been taking place,” Khalili notes. “The White House is not denying any secret meetings beforehand,” he says. “It is cleverly denying any agreement on one-on-one talks after the election.”

Khalili believes the story was leaked to the New York Times to prepare the public for the announcement of a nuclear deal. “The revelation of the secret meetings caught the U.S. and Iran off guard,” Khalili maintains. “They are very nervous.”

According to Khalili’s high-placed source inside Iran, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is awaiting a letter from President Obama guaranteeing the details of the agreement, arrived at recently during secret negotiations in Doha, Qatar.

The deal states that if Iran agrees to a temporary halt to their uranium enrichment program before the elections, then some of the sanctions on the Iranian central bank and oil industry will be removed, and there will be greater collaboration with the Obama administration after November 6^th.

The American and Iranian delegations began their meetings in Doha, Qatar October 1^st, according to Khalili’s source. “The Iranian side was headed by Ali Akbar Velayati, the former Iranian foreign minister and a close adviser to the supreme leader Khamenei.

Khalili’s source identified Valerie Jarrett, a senior Obama adviser, as the head of the U.S. effort to engage Iran. Jarrett was born in Shiraz, Iran in 1956. “With her roots in Iran and her family ties, the source believes she is leading the efforts. However, we are attempting to verify this on this side,” he notes.

Jarrett’s family has known the Velayati family since their stay in Iran in the 1950s, Khalili’s source maintains. Jarrett’s father worked at the Namazi hospital in Shiraz, owned by an Iranian family that has been influential with the regime after the Islamic Revolution.

“Surrogates of the Iranian regime have infiltrated Washington D.C.for a long time,” Khalili observes. “They have approached each administration with the hope of delaying any sanctions, removing sanctions in place, avoiding a war, protecting the Islamic regime, and promoting the false hope that negotiations can be achieved.”

“They have tried to sell the idea of a grand bargain to the Obama administration,” he says. But Khalili believes such a bargain would amount to appeasement, hearkening back to the period prior to World War II.

“The regime wants to fool and deceive the West,” he says. “It will be very dangerous for the world. We will be going back to the 1930s when people believed Hitler.”

If the sanctions continue to cripple Iran’s economy, the regime will collapse from within. “The Iranians resent this regime by a majority,” Khalili believes. “Now we are running against the clock.”

Kahlili teaches at the U.S. Department of Defense’s Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy (JCITA), is a senior fellow with EMPact America and a member of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security. He is the author of “A Time to Betray,” a book about his double life as a CIA agent in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. “A Time to Betray” was the winner of the 2010 National Best Book Award, and the 2011 International Best Book Award. The book is set to become a movie.