I used to dismiss what I thought was an urban myth that, to help sell Tehran on the nuke deal, President Barack Obama granted thousands of Iranian spies a backdoor path to residence and ultimately citizenship in the United States. After all, visas and green cards are not like the letters of transit in Casablanca, where you fill in your name and hop on the plane to Lisbon. U.S. consular rules would block such individuals from getting here anyway. Yet in the years after the Iran deal (known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA), this story got traction, even as Obama’s spokesmen naturally denied it.
But this year, this supposed myth was given new credibility with the arrest in Los Angeles of Shamim Mafi, an Iranian arms trafficker who came to California in 2013 and was given permanent residency under the Obama administration three years later. And it turns out Mafi is small potatoes compared to what a recent wave of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests and deportations has exposed: that upper Iranian terrorist nobility has been prospering all over the United States.
“They have eyes and ears everywhere,” Iranian American author and human-rights activist Elham Yaghoubian told me about the regime. “It peaked under Obama.”
For a prime example, look first to the $2 million five-bedroom, five-bath modern gray-and-white clapboard house in suburban Los Angeles that has been causing firestorms all over Iranian social media. Its most recent occupants have posted a two-and-a-half-minute video online showing off the grand front, the sprawling interior, and the adjoining elm-shaded McMansions. The camera loiters over the kitchen and dining room surfaces laden with an acre of holiday goodies, a great room of flat-screen TVs and speakers blaring performances nearly drowned out by clapping, while breakfronts full of bric-a-brac reflect, through their glass backing, glimpses of the LA woman documenting the vastness of her lavish residence.
The hostess with the iPhone camera is not Britney Spears, but one Maryam Tahmasebi, sneering at the neighbors’ American flag in contrast to the Shia Imam Hussein banner flying on her own house. And those flat-screen TVs are lit up with screeching mullahs, with a clapping mob cheering them in response. She is the daughter-in-law of Masoumeh Ebtekar, the unhinged “Screaming Mary” spokesperson of the student group that occupied the U.S. Embassy for 444 days in 1979, now an ICE detainee.
There is no way a visa applicant listing two U.S. Embassy hostage takers as parents, or those from the Soleimani or Larijani dynasties, were granted entrance to the United States without high-level intervention.
The online haters are the outraged Persians around the globe who are fuming at the latest sign of corrupt aghazadeh, or “princeling decadence,” the effrontery of the Islamic Republic’s elite Gen Zers living it up overseas while Iranians go hungry and get shot dead by the thousand at home. The aghazadeh in question is Ebtekar’s son, Eissa Hashemi. Incredibly enough, this scion of two embassy hostage takers “entered the United States in 2014 in visas issued by the Obama administration,” according to a statement by Secretary of State Marco Rubio on April 11. Even more incredibly, according to the same statement, “in June 2016 – just months after the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] seized two U.S. Navy vessels and captured 10 American sailors – the Obama Administration granted all three Iranian nationals lawful permanent resident (LPR) status via the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program.” That would be the same time frame when Mafi, the arms trafficker in Woodland Hills, got her green card. Hashemi is in ICE detention as well, along with the couple’s son.
Americans of a certain age have to pause here to savor the thought of hostage taker Masoumeh, née Nilufar, Ebtekar (the hard-liner Water Lily renamed herself Sinless), watching her revolutionary family members being seized, cuffed, shackled, and hustled into custody for an uncertain but inevitably humiliating fate.
Though Hashemi was Iranian revolutionary aristocracy, he often pleaded to his haters—fellow Iranians—that he was not a fanatic and was not even born when his parents took the American hostages and his mother gloated over her desire to murder them. Not so with Hamideh Soleimani-Afshar, reportedly the niece of Qassem Soleimani, the deceased IRGC-Quds Force chief. Afshar had celebrated attacks on U.S. soldiers and military facilities, praised Iran’s supreme leader, called America the “Great Satan,” and voiced support for the IRGC, a designated terror organization, according to the New York Post, citing the State Department. She and her daughter, Sarinasadat Hosseiny, were detained by ICE, leaving behind a black Tesla—in which the Post glimpsed Hermès cushions, a Miss Dior bag, and a Sephora bag—in front of their home on Plainview Avenue in Tujunga, on the opposite side of the San Fernando Valley from Agoura Hills.
By this time Rubio’s department had revoked the LPR status of Fatemeh Ardeshir-Larijani and her husband, Kalantar Motamedi. Fatemeh, as the daughter of Iran’s Secretary of the Supreme National Council Ali Larijani, had an Islamic regime pedigree comparable to Hashemi’s. She and her husband had already fled the United States after being fired by Emory University. Iraq-born Larijani père had authorized the use of military-grade weaponry against unarmed demonstrators in Iran who were massacred in the thousands earlier this year; he was killed in an Israeli airstrike in mid-March. Husband and wife are now inadmissible to the United States.
Then on April 13, ICE detained Yousof Azizi, a Ph.D. candidate at Virginia Tech, the son of the late Ali Khamenei’s confidante Fereydoun Azizi, and the brother of Touhid Azizi, who led a government-run campaign to identify anti-regime protesters.
Rubio’s green-card-confiscation staffers possess a target-rich environment, as Iranian operatives have been left to roam free in the United States for years. Lawdan Bazargan, the California-based director of AAIRIA, the Alliance Against Islamic Regime of Iran Apologists, estimates that there are 30 to 50 such bad actors who require vetting and dozens more family members of regime leaders who may be engaged in money laundering, propaganda, and industrial espionage and need scrutiny as well. “As the days go by, the number increases,” Ms. Bazargan told me. “People are sending us names and information.
Take Hossein Mousavian, who was forced to retire from his academic post at Princeton University. He was serving as Iran’s ambassador to Germany at the time of the Mykonos café massacre of Iranian dissidents in 1992—which the trial judge, Frithjof Kubsch, found had been ordered directly by Supreme Leader Khamenei. Germany also found that former Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani personally authorized the operation along with Khamenei. Rafsanjani wrote the introduction to the Persian-language edition of Mousavian’s garbage dissertation that was published in Iran. Mousavian called the charges a “joke” but was expelled from Germany along with 14 of his embassy colleagues deemed to be intelligence officers. That was fine with Princeton, which hired him in 2009. He then spent about 15 years at the Ivy League school and was privileged to accept three invitations to Obama’s White House to plead Iran’s case during the JCPOA negotiations.
Much of these Iranians’ access, though, was not global but among each other, especially among those who got American educations. Mousavian studied at Sacramento City College and got his bachelor’s degree in engineering from Sacramento State in 1981. Another regime apparatchik is the “cleric” Hojjatolislam Mohammad Jafar Amir Mahallati. He got a master’s degree at the University of Kansas and a Ph.D. from McGill University in Canada (he boasts about his doctorate in “Islamology,” which was improbably granted for a single year of graduate study). Mahallati had as his protégé Mohammad Javad Zarif, eight years his junior, who had gotten in on the ground floor at age 18 as a U.S.-based student serving in Iran’s first postrevolutionary United Nations office in place of military service. Zarif would become foreign minister and give this old scam a name, the Iran Experts Initiative (IEI)—a regime propaganda unit set up in 2014, which tasked Iranian operatives in diaspora communities to promote the Islamic Republic’s interests during negotiations with the United States.
“We want to see more and more” deportations, Yaghoubian told me. “For many of us, this issue has been a long-standing concern. We left Iran seeking safety, freedom, and dignity, and it is deeply troubling to see individuals connected to the regime benefiting from those same freedoms while the people of Iran continue to face repression. It is not only a moral contradiction. It also raises legitimate concerns within our community. Some of these individuals hold influential positions in academic and policy spaces, and in certain cases, there are fears about networks that may serve the regime’s interests.”
She surprises me with an account of being scolded for not wearing a hijab, on Westwood Boulevard—the heart of Tehrangeles, famous for great Persian restaurants and bookstores selling biographies of Queen Farah. While that was a onetime occurrence, she points out the ubiquity of pro-regime elements in universities and think tanks and even in houses of worship in Los Angeles.
I ask Yaghoubian about reports that Obama granted access to the United States to 2,500 Iranians as a sweetener to the JCPOA. “It started in the Iranian media,” she said. “One faction accused the other of getting special privileges from the deal. Remember, the regime is divided—they expose each other, as one faction did by revealing Shamkhani’s daughter’s wedding.” Late senior military adviser Ali Shamkhani had indeed hosted a lavish wedding for his daughter, radiant in a low-cut strapless gown, and a hundred of her unveiled friends in October of last year. Of course, the scandal originated on Iranian social media.
In the case of the visa rumor, it emerged in the Iranian parliament in late 2018 when a clerical member, Mojtaba Zonnour, accused the intelligence minister of seeking favors from Washington. The rumor spread to the point where, according to Radio Farda, “in a tweet addressed to U.S. President Donald Trump, former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wrote on August 1, ‘Mr. Donald Trump; release the list of relatives of Iranian Government officials that (sic) have Green cards and bank accounts in the United States.’”
So while there may not have been a green card equivalent to the pallets of cash that Obama gifted the regime, obviously there was something. Vetting of Iranian visa applications has always been strict, especially per U.S. Code 1182. Over the past 15 years, both the United States and Canada have grappled with the cases of Iranian visa applicants who served in the designated terrorist IRGC and were denied on terrorism-related inadmissibility grounds. Applicants have frequently argued that they were conscripted unwillingly into the IRGC as teenagers and served as drivers, dishwashers, or cooks under duress and, in many cases, before the IRGC was designated in 2019. In late 2025, Canadian courts ruled in Vadiati v. Canada to define membership broadly and duress narrowly, closing that loophole. Even before that, scrutiny of IRGC veterans was such that Iranian Canadian families entering the United States by land from Vancouver saw the wives and children granted entry but not the father. The same kind of families flying from Canada to Mexico were separated and denied in the same pattern. For better or worse, the children, born in North America, are tagged as associates of the supposed terrorists. It may be heavy-handed, but it’s the reality.
Real enough that there is no way a visa applicant listing two U.S. Embassy hostage takers as parents, or those from the notorious Soleimani or Larijani dynasties, were granted entrance to the United States without high-level intervention. Traditionally, most Iranian visa applications to the United States get denied—before the current blanket ban—and none of the decisions lie with the local consular officer. The granting of LPR status removes any doubt that the Obama administration was currying favor with the worst elements of the Islamic Republic regime. Did they do it 2,500 times? Rubio’s department will find out. A U.S. State Department officer from the first Trump administration told me that when the Bureau of Consular Affairs was asked to provide the names of regime-affiliated Iranians who had been granted U.S. visas, it did not provide the ones arrested so far this year. He speculated that there was some consular laxity at work. Laxity is a polite word for the department’s working-level practices before Rubio cleaned house in the first half of 2025.
So who’s next? We could start with the Golden State, where the action has been so far. We have Meysam Zamanabadi of Glendora, another Los Angeles suburb (“Pride of the Foothills”), who has been rumored to control the X account of Iran’s parliamentary speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. The non-English-speaking Ghalibaf taunts Americans about gasoline prices with witty gibes like “Enjoy the current pump figures. With the so-called blockade, soon you’ll be nostalgic for $4-$5 gas.” This was accompanied by a Google Maps screenshot of Washington, D.C., displaying gas prices ranging from $4.10 to $4.80 a gallon. (Is Zamanabadi/Ghalibaf trying too hard to distance himself from Glendora? I live a 40-minute drive from every California Iranian mentioned so far, and I am two blocks away from $7 gas.) Zamanabadi has a degree in media psychology from Fielding Graduate University in Santa Barbara.
But ultimately, the effort should swing back east. The Hashemi and Larijani family members now in ICE custody may have been unsavory and corrupt (have a look at the Tahmasebi video clip from Agoura Hills—how did a teacher afford that?) who made no secret of supporting the Tehran regime, and Hamideh Soleimani-Afshar clearly committed gross fashion and cosmetic surgery abuse (a common offense in LA), but there is worse—and that’s in Washington, D.C.
Two and a half years ago, Lee Smith examined the apparent information operation stemming from the aforementioned Iranian Foreign Ministry’s IEI, which was “funded and supported by an IRGC official, Mostafa Zahrani, who was the point of contact between IEI operatives and Iran’s then-Foreign Minister Javad Zarif.”
During his tenure as U.N. ambassador, Zarif worked with Trita Parsi, cofounder of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), as part of a campaign to influence American public opinion and relieve U.S. pressure on Iran, allowing the Islamic Republic to proceed with its nuclear program. According to email exchanges between the two, in April 2006, Zarif provided Parsi with a copy of the so-called “Iranian 2003 offer for grand bargain,” which Parsi then seeded in the press and used it as the centerpiece of a campaign that painted Iran as a peaceful interlocutor. In addition, as a 2009 article in The Washington Times revealed, the documents showed that Parsi “had helped arrange meetings between members of Congress and Mr. Zarif.”
Under the Obama administration, Parsi and NIAC gained prominence as amplifiers of the 44th president’s realignment with Iran, even as the regime crushed a popular uprising in Iran in 2009-10. Whereas Mousavian got three invites to the Obama White House, Parsi made 33 such visits.
Parsi is not yet a naturalized U.S. citizen, as Secretary of State Rubio’s staff is no doubt aware.
The “experts” linked to disgraced former Obama official Rob Malley included Ariane Tabatabai, Ali Vaez, and Dina Esfandiary. In Iranian government emails published by Semafor and analyzed by Smith, these and other of Tehran’s co-optees addressed Iranian officials with abject servility. They all used their positions to advance the regime’s agenda. None is U.S.-born; Esfandiary’s roots are British and Iranian, and the others were born in Iran. (The AAIRIA plans to add to the list Shiraz-born Mohammad Hossein Mahallati, who is Mohammad Jafar’s brother and for six years was the head of the Alavi Foundation, present in the United States since 1983.) Unlike the unfortunates in ICE detention, all are U.S. citizens. For how long?
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