Keith Kellog, who will serve as an envoy for the Ukraine war in the incoming Trump administration, spoke at an event in Paris over the weekend hosted by the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an organization led by the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), a cult that seeks regime change in Iran.
Kellog said at the event that the world should reinstate “maximum pressure” on Iran. “These pressures are not just kinetic, just not military force, but they must be economic and diplomatic as well,” he said, according to Reuters.
Kellog said there was an opportunity “to change Iran for the better” but said it wouldn’t last for long. “We must exploit the weakness we now see. The hope is there, so must too be the action,” he said.
Opening the conference, Maryam Rajavi, MEK’s leader, claimed the “Iranian regime is on the brink of collapse” and cited several reasons, including the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, an ally of Tehran.
The MEK is known to pay its speakers very well and usually hosts a number of Western officials. Other notable speakers at the event included James Jones, who served as President Obama’s national security advisor from 2009 to 2010, Liz Truss, who was the UK’s prime minister for just a few weeks in 2022, and Tod Wolters, a retired US Air Force general who served as the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO until 2022.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry condemned the conference, saying, “The hosting of a terrorist group by France is a clear example of support for terrorism and a violation of the French government’s international legal obligation to combat terrorism.”
Kellog’s participation in the event signals the MEK may have a line into the incoming Trump administration, which is signaling it will be very hawkish on Iran.
While many Iran hawks in the US are friendly with the MEK and want them to take over Iran, the group has virtually no support inside Iran due to its history of carrying out terrorist attacks in the country and for siding with Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. The MEK is also suspected of cooperating with Israel in assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists that took place in 2012
For many years, the MEK was based in Iraq, but the US helped the group resettle in Albania, which began in 2013. The US government even donated $20 million to the UN’s refugee agency to help with the resettlement.
The MEK was founded as a Marxist Islamic organization in the 1960s by Massoud Rajavi, Maryam Rajavi’s husband, who has been missing since 2003.
A report about the MEK published by the RAND Corporation in 2009 concluded that the group has “many of the typical characteristics of a cult, such as authoritarian control, confiscation of assets, sexual control (including mandatory divorce and celibacy), emotional isolation, forced labor, sleep deprivation, physical abuse and limited exit options.”
