What You've Been Told vs What Actually Happened

The Chameleon: The MEK's Fifty-Year Metamorphosis

by Iran Prism 10 min read

The Man Who Disappeared

Massoud Rajavi has not been seen in public since March 2003. He is the leader of the Mujahedin-e Khalq — the MEK — an organization that has, at various points in its fifty-year history, been an Islamo-Marxist guerrilla group, an assassin of American military advisors, a revolutionary faction with hundreds of thousands of supporters, a bombing campaign that killed a chief justice and two presidents, a proxy army for Saddam Hussein, a totalitarian cult that forced its members into celibacy and separated children from parents, and an Albania-based troll farm managing thousands of fake social media accounts.

In 2016, a former Saudi intelligence chief referred to him as “the late Massoud Rajavi.” The organization refuses to confirm his death, releasing occasional audio messages to maintain his messianic status among the rank-and-file.

If you have encountered the MEK, it was likely through one of the most expensive foreign-lobbying operations in American history — an operation that paid former U.S. cabinet officials six-figure speaking fees to describe the MEK as a democratic resistance movement. What follows is the part of the story that machine was designed to obscure.

The MEK is the most cautionary tale in opposition politics: an organization that was right about the regime’s nature from the beginning and still managed to lose every shred of moral authority. Understanding how requires following a metamorphosis so extreme that only the name remained constant.

The Engineers

In September 1965, three young engineers from the University of Tehran — Mohammad Hanifnejad, Saeid Mohsen, and Ali-Asghar Badizadegan — concluded that peaceful opposition to the Shah was futile. They had watched the violent suppression of the 1963 uprising. They decided that armed struggle was the only path.

What they built was ideologically unprecedented: a synthesis of revolutionary Shi’ism and Marxist-Leninist guerrilla theory. They reinterpreted tawhid — monotheism — as a mandate for a classless society. They recast Imam Hussein as a revolutionary hero fighting early class warfare. They studied Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara, and Regis Debray alongside the Quran.

For six years, the MEK operated in complete secrecy — recruiting, indoctrinating, building cells. In 1971, SAVAK cracked the network and arrested the entire leadership. All three founders and nearly the entire Central Committee were executed following military tribunals in May 1972.

One young member survived: Massoud Rajavi. His death sentence was reportedly commuted after an international campaign — though critics allege he cooperated with SAVAK during interrogation. He would emerge from prison in 1979 as the organization’s undisputed leader.

The Assassins

Before the revolution, the MEK assassinated American military personnel in Iran.

Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Lee Hawkins, deputy chief of the U.S. Military Mission, was shot dead by two gunmen on a motorcycle on June 2, 1973. Colonel Paul Shaffer and Lieutenant Colonel Jack Turner were ambushed on May 21, 1975. Three Rockwell International employees — William Cottrell, Donald Smith, and Robert Krongard — were killed on August 28, 1976.1

The MEK today attributes these killings to the Marxist splinter faction that broke away in 1975, when internal leaders staged an ideological coup, declared the organization Marxist-Leninist, and murdered a loyalist named Majid Sharif-Vaghefi — dissolving his body in acid to hide the evidence. But U.S. State Department assessments confirm the operations were conducted under the MEK banner, often before the split was finalized.

This history matters because it is the history the MEK’s expensive Washington lobbyists would prefer you not know.

The Revolution’s Darlings

When the revolution succeeded in February 1979, the MEK emerged from prison as a powerful, organized force — “hundreds of thousands of supporters, primarily young students and intellectuals.” They were a genuine mass movement. They had sacrificed more than almost any other faction. Their founders had been executed. Their members had been tortured.

Khomeini labeled them Monafeqin — Hypocrites — citing their eclectic blend of Islam and Marx. He barred Rajavi from the 1980 presidential election. Despite significant vote shares, not a single MEK candidate was allowed into parliament. Electoral manipulation by the Islamic Republic Party ensured they were locked out of power. They had played by every rule the revolution offered — and been cheated at every turn.

On June 20, 1981, the MEK organized massive demonstrations in Tehran. The Revolutionary Guards crushed them — hundreds killed and arrested. This date marks the beginning of the armed rebellion.

The Bombing Campaign

What followed was the most audacious campaign of political violence in modern Iranian history.

On June 28, 1981, a bomb destroyed the headquarters of the Islamic Republic Party in Tehran. The blast killed Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti — the Chief Justice and the regime’s second-in-command — along with four cabinet ministers, twenty-seven members of parliament, and dozens of other officials. Over seventy dead. The perpetrator was Mohammad Reza Kolahi, an MEK member who had secured a position as a sound engineer inside the building.

On August 30, 1981, another bomb killed President Mohammad-Ali Rajai and Prime Minister Mohammad-Javad Bahonar. The bomber, Masoud Keshmiri, had infiltrated the Prime Minister’s office so effectively that he was initially mourned as a martyr — until his true identity was revealed.

A chief justice and two presidents killed in two months. The regime was nearly decapitated. But no popular uprising followed. Instead, the regime responded with ferocity — thousands of MEK members were hunted, tortured, and executed.

In July 1981, Rajavi and ousted President Banisadr fled Iran together in a daring flight to Paris.

The Unforgivable Alliance

In 1986, France — seeking to improve relations with Tehran in exchange for the release of French hostages in Lebanon — pressured Rajavi to leave Paris. He relocated to Iraq.

This was the decision that destroyed the MEK’s legitimacy forever.

By allying with Saddam Hussein — who was launching missiles at Iranian cities and using chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers — the MEK crossed the line from opposition to treason in the eyes of ordinary Iranians. It has never been forgiven. Saddam provided Camp Ashraf in Diyala province, T-55 tanks, armored personnel carriers, artillery, and financial support amounting to millions of dollars from Iraqi oil revenues. The MEK rebranded its military wing as the National Liberation Army in 1987.

In July 1988, immediately after Iran accepted a UN ceasefire, Rajavi ordered a full invasion — misreading Iran’s exhaustion as collapse. Seven thousand MEK fighters, including women, drove tanks deep into Kermanshah province, hoping to march on Tehran. The Iranian military lured them into a trap at the Charzabar Pass. In Operation Mersad, attack helicopters decimated the column. Between 1,400 and 2,500 fighters were killed.2 The MEK’s military capability was destroyed — and the failed invasion triggered the 1988 prison massacres inside Iran, in which an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 political prisoners were executed on Khomeini’s orders.3

Then came 1991. After Saddam’s defeat in the Gulf War, uprisings erupted among Kurds in northern Iraq and Shia in the south. Saddam called on the MEK. Maryam Rajavi reportedly told her commanders: “Take the Kurds under your tanks, and save your bullets for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.” MEK units deployed to Khanaqin, Tuz Khurmatu, Kifri, Jalawla, and Sulaymanbag. In 2007, the Iraqi High Tribunal issued arrest warrants for the Rajavis for crimes against humanity.

The Cult

After the 1988 military defeat, Rajavi needed to explain why the revolution he had promised had failed. His answer: the fighters had failed spiritually. They were distracted by sexual and familial attachments. To achieve victory, they had to divorce themselves from everything but the leadership.

What followed was a transformation that meets every diagnostic criterion for a totalitarian cult.

All members were forced to divorce their spouses. Marriage was declared a “bourgeois” concept. Sexual thoughts were demonized. Children were separated from parents at Camp Ashraf and sent to MEK-run safe houses in Europe — effectively holding parents hostage to the organization. Members were required to participate in weekly ghisl (cleansing) sessions: public confessions of sexual fantasies and moments of doubt, enforced through peer pressure and humiliation.

Maryam Rajavi — appointed co-leader in 1985 — became the object of fanatical devotion. She was styled as “the Sun” around which members revolve. Female defectors have described forced hysterectomies — the surgical removal of ovaries and wombs — framed as the “peak” of loyalty to the leader.

Defector Masoud Banisadr detailed in his memoirs how love for Maryam was “engineered to replace all other forms of love.”4

From Tanks to Tweets

The MEK adapted. It always does.

In 2002, it achieved its greatest political coup when Alireza Jafarzadeh, representing the MEK’s political wing, revealed the existence of Iran’s secret Natanz uranium enrichment plant at a Washington press conference. The technical precision of the intelligence — satellite coordinates, centrifuge cascade details — pointed to state-level capabilities. It is widely accepted in intelligence circles that the information came from Israel’s Mossad, laundered through the MEK to avoid direct Israeli exposure. This single revelation triggered the IAEA inspections and the two-decade nuclear standoff.

The Natanz revelation bought the MEK renewed relevance in Washington. What followed was one of the most expensive lobbying campaigns in American history — millions funneled through front organizations to hire lobbyists and pay former U.S. officials to advocate for the MEK’s removal from the terrorist list. If you have ever watched a former U.S. official praise the MEK on cable news, you have seen the end product of this machine — and had no way to know you were watching a paid performance.

The speaker fees:

  • John Bolton: ~$180,000
  • Ed Rendell: $150,000+
  • Tom Ridge: $20,000-$30,000 per speech
  • Howard Dean: $20,000-$30,000 per speech
  • Rudy Giuliani: undisclosed (high)

In September 2012, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delisted the MEK — while explicitly noting the State Department “did not overlook the group’s past terrorism.”5

After relocation to Albania in 2013-2016, roughly 3,000 members were housed in a compound called Ashraf 3 near Manez. The pivot from tanks to tweets was complete: defectors and investigative reports describe a massive troll farm operation — members managing thousands of fake social media accounts to amplify anti-regime hashtags, attack journalists who favor diplomacy, and inflate the popularity of Maryam Rajavi. In June 2023, Albanian police raided the compound, seized 150 computers, and accused the MEK of organized cyber activities including hacking.

The Hostile Symbiosis

Inside Iran (GAMAAN 2024): MEK support is below 1% — drastically lower than Reza Pahlavi or generic “secular republic” options.

The streets confirmed the polls with behavioral precision. When Iran International coded 641 chant instances across 453 protest videos from 91 locations during the uprising’s first ten days, they catalogued 93 distinct slogans. Not one was pro-MEK. Zero instances. Meanwhile, pro-Pahlavi slogans — “This is the final battle; Pahlavi will return,” “Javid Shah,” “Reza Shah, bless your soul” — accounted for 31.8 percent of all chanting. The organization that spends millions manufacturing the appearance of support could not produce a single audible voice in the largest Iranian uprising since 1979.

The treason stigma from the Saddam alliance cuts across every political line. Monarchists, reformists, and hardliners agree on almost nothing — except their disdain for the MEK.

The regime and the MEK now exist in hostile symbiosis. The regime uses the MEK as its bogeyman — proof that all opposition is treasonous, violent, or cultish. The MEK uses the regime’s brutality to justify its existence and its fundraising. Each needs the other. Neither serves the Iranian people.

The MEK was right about the regime. They were right that the Islamic Republic was a theocratic dictatorship that would never reform. They were right about the brutality, the executions, the repression. And they threw away every advantage — every claim to moral authority, every ounce of popular support — through an alliance with a dictator who gassed their countrymen, a cult structure that destroyed their members’ humanity, and a lobbying machine that made them Washington’s most expensive chameleon.

The leader who made all these decisions has not been seen in twenty-three years. The organization that bears his stamp has less than 1% support in the country it claims to liberate. The next time a former official praises the MEK at a conference or on television, you now have the full record — the assassinations, the alliance, the cult, the troll farms, the speaking fees. The question that remains is whether being right about the enemy excuses becoming one.

This article is a companion to The Revolution’s First Victims. For the hostage crisis that sealed the revolution’s outcome, see 444 Days. For the forensic audit of death tolls inflated by all sides, see The Number That Changed Everything. For what Iranians actually support today, see What Iranians Actually Want.

Footnotes

  1. U.S. State Department, historical records on MEK attacks against American personnel in Iran, 1973-1976 ↩

  2. PBS Tehran Bureau/FRONTLINE, “The Bloody Red Summer of 1988: Grave Crimes Against Humanity,” August 2011 ↩

  3. Iran 1988 Massacre Documentation Project, iran1988.org, accessed 2026 ↩

  4. Masoud Banisadr, Memoirs of an Iranian Rebel, Fair Observer review, “Living and Escaping a Terrorist Cult,” accessed 2026 ↩

  5. U.S. Department of State, delisting announcement for the MEK, September 2012 ↩