Brian Hook, the United States’ point man on Iran, met with a representative of the anti-Iran Mujahidin-e-Khalq Organization (MKO) group both before and after Washington’s assassination of senior Iranian Commander Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani, a report says.
Hook, the U.S. special representative for Iran and senior adviser to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, held the meetings with Robert G. Joseph, who represents the so-called National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) in September 2019 and on January 31, American news and opinion website The Daily Beast reported on Tuesday.
On its website, the NCRI calls itself the MKO’s “umbrella coalition,” but many consider the two to be synonymous.
Joseph referred to the meetings in a semi-annual report he filed with the U.S. Justice Department earlier this week in line with the U.S.’s Foreign Agent Registration Act.
The U.S. assassinated General Soleimani, the former commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), and a number of others in a set of drone strikes targeting Baghdad’s civilian airport on January 3.
General Soleimani, who had earned reputation as the region’s most popular anti-terror military figure, was on an official visit to the Iraqi capital when the attack took place.
Joseph, a former senior State Department official under President George W. Bush, advises the NCRI at $15,000 a month. Relentlessly an Iran hawk, Joseph told a meeting of the group last March that he hoped that the Iranian government would soon fall.
Also in January, Giuliani told The Daily Beast that General Soleimani had been “directly responsible for killing some of my MEK (MKO) people,” adding, “We don’t like him very much.”