Robert Malley -- How Did This Story Get Lost?

As of this posting, Robert Malley's Wikipedia entry is a version that was last updated on October 3, in response to an October 1 story in the Tablet that I linked yesterday. The Wikipedia entry notes, "On June 29, 2023, Malley was placed on unpaid leave as special envoy to Iran, his security clearance was suspended amid an investigation into possible mishandling of classified material."

I took note of the Tablet story only over this current weekend, assuming it must have been part of the prior weekend's bad news dump. But as I dug deeper, the story is months old. It was covered in a Washington Post op-ed on September 6, referring to events four months earlier:

Anyone who criticized the Chinese government for its secrecy surrounding the disappearance of former foreign minister Qin Gang (including me) is guilty of hypocrisy unless they acknowledge that the U.S. government is being similarly opaque about the fate of one of America’s top diplomats. Congress and the American people deserve to know more about what’s going on with the State Department’s Iran envoy Robert Malley.

. . . Until four months ago, Malley was leading the U.S. diplomatic effort on Iran’s nuclear program and the fate of U.S. hostages held by Tehran. But it was only two months ago that Congress and the public learned — from the media — that the State Department had suspended his security clearance because of an investigation into a possible mishandling of classified information. It’s since emerged that the FBI is also investigating this matter. (In some cases, mishandling classified information may constitute a federal crime.)

. . . we now know, through leaked U.S. government documents published by the state-controlled Tehran Times, that Malley was informed on April 21 that he was under investigation for mishandling protected information and that his security clearance was suspended. Yet the State Department told Congress and the public nothing about this for weeks, and Malley continued to conduct some of his duties that did not require a security clearance.

Note that the April 21 date for his security clearance suspension conflicts with the Wikipedia date of June 29, when he was also placed on leave. But prior to either of those dates, his main job had been to negotiate the complex $6 billion hostage exchange deal with Iran that's currently being criticized as funding the Hamas invasion of Israel, although his full range of duties was much broader. The Wikipedia entry says,

On January 28, 2021, President Biden named Malley U.S. special envoy to Iran, where he was tasked with trying to ease diplomatic tensions with Iran and rein in its nuclear program by compliance to the original pact.

He had previously served in the Clinton administration from 1998 as Special Assistant to President Clinton for Arab-Israeli Affairs, a post he held until the end of the administration in 2001. Then, according to Wikipedia,

Malley provided informal advice to the [Obama] campaign in the past without having any formal role in the campaign. On May 9, 2008, the campaign severed ties with Malley when the British Times reported that Malley had been in discussions with the militant Palestinian group Hamas, listed by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist organization. In response, Malley told The Times he had been in regular contact with Hamas officials as part of his work with the International Crisis Group. "My job with the International Crisis Group is to meet with all sorts of savory and unsavory people and report on what they say. I've never denied whom I meet with; that's what I do", Malley told NBC News, adding that he informs the State Department about his meetings beforehand and briefs them afterward.

The New York Times reported on 18 February 2014 that Malley was joining the Obama administration to consult on Persian Gulf policy as senior director of the National Security Council. On 6 March, the National Security Council announced that Malley would be replacing Philip Gordon as the Special Assistant to the President and White House Coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf Region, effective on 6 April 2015.

Malley's background is upper-upper crust. Again via Wikipedia,

Robert attended École Jeannine Manuel, a prestigious bilingual school in Paris, and graduated in the same class (1980) as U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

. . . Malley attended Yale University, and was a 1984 Rhodes Scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he earned a D.Phil. in political philosophy. There he wrote his doctoral thesis about Third-worldism and its decline. Malley continued writing about foreign policy, including extended commentary about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He earned a J.D. at Harvard Law School, where he met his future wife, Caroline Brown. Another fellow law school student was Barack Obama. In 1991–1992, Malley clerked for Supreme Court Justice Byron White, while Brown clerked for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

At this point, all we know is that Malley's security clearance is suspended, he's on leave from the State Department, and neither the FBI nor the State Department will say much more. The target="_blank">most visible allegation against Malley is that he

helped to infiltrate an Iranian agent of influence named Ariane Tabatabai into some of the most sensitive positions in the U.S. government—first at the State Department and now the Pentagon, where she has been serving as chief of staff for the assistant secretary of defense for special operations, Christopher Maier.

On Thursday [September 28], Maier told a congressional committee that the Defense Department is “actively looking into whether all law and policy was properly followed in granting my chief of staff top secret special compartmented information.”

. . . Malley’s protégé was an active participant in a covert Iranian influence campaign designed to shape U.S. government policy in order to serve the interests of the Iranian regime. Her requests for guidance from top Iranian officials, which she appears to have faithfully followed, and her desire to harmonize her own words and actions with regime objectives, are hardly the behavior of an impartial academic, or a U.S. public servant. Tabatabai’s emails show her enthusiastically submitting to the control of top Iranian officials, who then guided her efforts to propagandize and collect intelligence on U.S. and allied officials in order to advance the interests of the Islamic Republic.

. . . It seems likely that by the time of her appointment to the Pentagon’s special operations office, Tabatabai’s covert activities on behalf of the Iranian regime were well known in Biden administration and intelligence circles. “The hoops you have to jump through to get a bare-bones top secret clearance even without compartments or special access programs are enormous,” says [retired CIA analyst Peter] Theroux. “They grill you on your foreign contacts. Contacts with any foreign government raise more red flags than Bernie Sanders’ honeymoon. Contacts with senior officials from enemy governments, classified as non-frat governments like Russia, China, Cuba, as well as Iran, are in a different category altogether—what would normally be totally disqualifying.”

. . . Why an Iranian operative is still at the Pentagon, especially in a job which gives her daily access to classified information that puts the country’s most sensitive military operations at risk, is another matter entirely. “The optimistic reading,” says Theroux, “is that they were watching her to see what she does and the FBI has her apartment all teched up. But to be an optimist you have to believe the FBI is clean, rather than see this as a huge counterintelligence failure. Though, of course, it’s not a failure if they were complicit.”

Irrespective of any further investigation of the Malley-Tabatabai association, the Hamas invasion of Israel is beginning to look like a major intelligence failure for both Israel and the US and a diplomatic disaster for the US. So far, the Malley-Tabatabai affair seems to be a key part of the story. It's remarkable how little interest either legacy media or Conservative Inc has shown in it so far.

My impression is that Malley's potential role as an Iranian agent of influence is a scandal as big as, if not bigger, than the Cambridge Stalinist spies in the UK or Alger Hiss in the US. It's worth noting that the UK in particular has spent generations coming to grips with the Cambridge spies. Robert Malley seems to be a somewhat parallel case, an individual apparently considered beyond reproach given his elite background, and fast-tracked through the Ivy establishment -- but at some point, he appears to have been recruited for the dark side.