Sen. Robert Torricelli (D-N.J.) is facing what could be the toughest
election campaign of his life, embroiled in a series of
campaign-finance scandals that Republican challenger Douglas
Forrester skillfully has exploited.
The real surprise in this campaign is not Torricelli's sleazy New
Jersey politics or his relationship to David Chang, the businessman
who has admitted in court to making illegal campaign contributions to
the "Torch" [see "Taking
on 'The Torch,'" Sept. 23]. It has come from revelations,
first aired by the American Spectator magazine in 1998 and
picked up by the Forrester campaign, that Torricelli took more than
$136,000 in hard campaign contributions from members and supporters
of a group of thugs in the pay of Saddam Hussein.
Torricelli's friends are known as the People's Mujahedin Organization
of Iran, or MEK (Mujahedin-e Khalq). They want to overthrow the
ruling clerics in Iran and replace them with an even-more radical
Islamic-Marxist regime. The State Department has accused them of
murdering Americans in Iran in the 1970s and, more recently, of
carrying out dirty work for Saddam against legitimate antiregime
groups in Iraq.
By no rational accounting can they be called America's friends. An
FBI penetration agent who trained at the group's bases inside Iraq
tells Insight the MEK also has helped Saddam hide
weapons of mass destruction from U.N. weapons inspectors. Iraqi
opposition sources in London claim that at Saddam's command the MEK
recently provided sanctuary to top al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri,
who managed to escape from Afghanistan and flee across Iran under a
false identity.
Torricelli insists that he has never been duped by the group and that
the violence they advocate will be necessary to overthrow the ruling
clerics in Iran. During a Sept. 12 debate with Forrester, the senator
continued to defend his support for the MEK. Torricelli claimed
erroneously that all the money he had taken in campaign contributions
from members and supporters of the group had arrived before the MEK
was blacklisted by the State Department.
A Torricelli spokesman, Ken Snyder, ate those words the next day,
noting that the Senator "misspoke
in the heat of the moment."
Over a three-year period from 1993-1996, Torricelli took $136,000 in
precious hard money from known MEK members and supporters, according
to Federal Election Commission records. His MEK supporters also
kicked in $23,000 in soft money to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign
Committee (DSCC), which helped Torricelli in his successful U.S.
Senate bid in 1996. In exchange, Torricelli became the group's most
outspoken champion on Capitol Hill at a time when the State
Department had placed it on its blacklist of international terrorist
organizations.
Perhaps Torricelli was just cynical and figured the "anything-goes"
morality of the Clinton administration would excuse his own
campaign-finance lapses. But on June 21, 1994, just after the State
Department officially designated the MEK as an international
terrorist organization, Torricelli wrote to then-assistant secretary
of state Robert Pelletreau, requesting that the State Department
"consult" with the MEK.
Two weeks after his letter was sent, top MEK members Shahriar
Kiamanesh, Fazeleh Rassouli and Mansoureh Zamani paid him back with
another round of contributions that resulted in 11 checks -- each for
$1,000 -- which his campaign logged in on July 5, 1994. A similar
pattern -- letters of support by Torricelli to U.S. government
agencies, followed by campaign contributions from MEK supporters to
Torricelli -- continued for several years.
As the American Spectator wrote in its initial article, "Many
of these contributions are likely to be outright illegal, since they
were made directly by members of a foreign organization as part of a
campaign to influence U.S. policy."
The FBI long has tracked MEK activitives in the United States,
launching a penetration of the group, known as Operation Suture, in
the late 1980s. During the last two years, the FBI has broken up
several rings of MEK document-forgers and smugglers operating in the
United States. Despite this, the group continued to operate a
public-relations bureau out of the National Press Building in
Washington, as well as numerous front companies posing as
computer-service and communications companies in Fairfax and Loudon
counties in Virginia.
Kenneth R. Timmerman is a senior writer for
Insight magazine.