What Else Can We Discover About Ariane Tabatabai?

Recent developments have focused attention on Ariane Tabatabai, in particular that she is currently Chief of Staff for the US Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict. On the other hand, a web search brings up what almost looks like too much information.

She appears on web sites as adjunct professor at Goergetown University, Middle East Fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund of the United States and an adjunct senior research scholar at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), and the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, which says of her

Ariane M. Tabatabai is an associate political scientist at the RAND Corporation. Prior to joining RAND, she served as the director of curriculum and a visiting assistant professor of security studies at the Georgetown University Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and an international civilian consultant for NATO. Previously, Tabatabai was a post-doctoral fellow (2017-18) in the International Security Program and a Stanton nuclear security fellow (2013-14) in the International Security Program and the Project on Managing the Atom at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs where she was also an associate (2014–2015). Tabatabai also held positions as a non-resident scholar with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute; senior associate in the Proliferation Prevention Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and adjunct senior fellow in the Middle East Program at the Center for A New American Security (CNAS). She holds a Ph.D. in War Studies from King's College London. She is the co-author of Triple Axis: Iran's Relations With Russia and China and has published widely in academic, policy, and mainstream outlets, including International Security, the Journal of Strategic Studies, the New York Times, the Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy.

This frankly makes my head spin. Why isn't this woman already queen of the world? She also has a Wikipedia entry that isn't helpful in putting any of the above in context:

Ariane Tabatabai (Persian: آرین طباطبایی, born in Tabriz) is a former senior policy advisor to the United States Department of Defense who has vowed allegiance to the Iranian government. She is a graduate of King's College London and the daughter of Javad Tabatabai, an Iranian philosopher and professor at the University of Tehran.

It doesn't give a birth date. LinkedIn shows her with a BA from SUNY Stony Brook in 2008, an MA in International Peace and Security from Kings College London in 2011, and a PhD in War Studies from Kings College London in 2015. The 2008 BA might place her birth date in the mid to late 1980s, but other dates for her career milestones are difficult to determine. So far, I've been unable to find out how and when, if she was born in Tabriz according to Wikipedia, she found her way to the US and study at SUNY Stony Brook, and how she excelled here to the point of moving to Kings College London. Her father continues to be thriving in Iran under the current regime there.

She first appears in the Semafor article writing e-mails to senior Iranian diplomatic figures in 2014, which would place her at Kings College London finishing her PhD.

Ariane Tabatabai, the current Pentagon official, on at least two occasions checked in with Iran’s Foreign Ministry before attending policy events, according to the emails. She wrote to [Mostafa] Zahrani [former director general of strategic affairs in the foreign ministry] in Farsi on June 27, 2014, to say she’d met Saudi Prince Turki al Faisal — a former ambassador to the U.S. — who expressed interest in working together and invited her to Saudi Arabia.

. . . Ariane Tabatabai told Zahrani that she was slated to give testimony before the U.S. Congress on the nuclear deal. On July 10, 2014, she wrote that she had been asked to appear before multiple congressional committees alongside two Harvard academics — Gary Samore and William Tobey — whom she viewed as hawkish on Iran. “I will bother you in the coming days. It will be a little difficult since both Will and Gary do not have favorable views on Iran,” she wrote.

.. . Tabatabai shared a link with Zahrani to an article she’d published in the Boston Globe that outlined the “Five Myths about Iran’s Nuclear Program.” The piece explained why Iran needs nuclear power and highlighted a fatwa, or religious edict, that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei allegedly issued forbidding the development of nuclear weapons as un-Islamic. Some Western officials have questioned the legitimacy of the fatwa.

It appears that she then began a meteoric rise among various university faculties, NGOs, and the RAND Corporation, although so far, the precise dates of all these connections have proven difficult to pin down. The Wikipedia entry suggests that at least by 2021, she'd attracted the attention of Robert Malley:

After the Biden administration took office in January 2021, she joined the US negotiating team in nuclear negotiations with Iran, but together with Richard Nephew, she left the team after a few months due to differences with Robert Malley, the head of the US negotiating team, and also because they believed that US would lift too many sanctions on Iran and consequently the possible agreement would not be strong enough.

The precise timing and details of the working relationship between Malley and Tabatabai before 2021 and after the apparent split while she worked for him in the State Department are unclear. Richard Nephew, with whom she apparently worked while on the Iran negotiating team, is listed on the US State Department website as follows:

Secretary Blinken announced Richard Nephew as the Department of State’s Coordinator on Global Anti-Corruption on July 5, 2022. Nephew is returning to the Department from Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, where he was a Senior Research Scholar. He is a published author, including of a book, chapters for edited volumes, and articles on sanctions, deterrence, and nuclear proliferation. Prior to his tenure at Columbia, Nephew served as deputy special envoy for Iran, Principal Deputy Coordinator for Sanctions Policy, and Director for Iran on the National Security Staff. He also served in the Department’s Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, as well as in the Office of Nonproliferation and International Security at the Department of Energy. Nephew holds an MA in Security Policy Studies and a BA in International Affairs from The George Washington University.

For now, the most I can surmise from this sketchy information is that Ariane Tabatabai and Richard Nephew are new members of a strange menagerie associated with Antony Blinken, a group we've so far come to know includes Amos Hochstein, Robert Malley, and Blinken himself. Blinken, Hochstein, Malley, and Tabatabai in particular appear to be part of a supranational elite, born or educated outside the US, with strong international connections that appear to have fast-tracked them through academic and diplomatic careers from the start. All have prestigious credentials related to Iran, national security, and energy.

It's mildly reassuring that in addition to the letter to Blinken from the House Oversight Committee that I linked yesterday, other Republicans are on the case:

Sen. James Risch (R., Idaho) and Rep. Michael McCaul (R., Texas)—the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, respectively—are asking the State Department for information on whether Malley was compromised by the Iran Experts Initiative (IEI), a vast Iranian government-controlled propaganda operation that allegedly includes at least three of the diplomat's close associates, including one who works at the Pentagon and has a security clearance.

Although the letter refers specifically to an Iranian influence operation called the Iran Experts Initiative (IEI), it isn't clear that Tabatabai was ever part of the IEI. The Iran International piece shows her sending Zahrani links to articles she'd published in 2014 advocating Iran's position on the nuclear negotiations, but I would question whether IEI or other enablers assisted in these publications. She seems in fact to have had a large number of well-placed enablers who could put her, hardly over 30 and with little experience outside the classroom, into prestigious and influential positions in universities, the Rand Corporation, NGOs, and ultimately the Defense Department, despite what some commentators have noted were security red flags on her record.

We're only at the base of this learning curve.