Right Web

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The Foundation for Democracy in Iran (FDI) is a Bethesda, Maryland-based advocacy group that appears to be the personal project of Kenneth Timmerman, an active supporter of a number of hardline pro-Israel organizations affiliated with the neoconservative political faction in the United States, including the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs and the Committee on the Present Danger. Founded in 1995 with support from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), FDI claims to "promote democracy and internationally-recognized standards of human rights in Iran." Although its website is regularly updated with news about "threats" from Iran, the top section of the FDI homepage was reserved (as of December 2007) for publicizing Timmerman's books and his purported Nobel Peace Prize nomination in 2006. He was nominated, along with John Bolton, by former Swedish Deputy Prime Minister Per Ahlmark, a board member of the hardline pro-Israel group UN Watch (February 7, 2006).

According to its website, "key FDI personnel" include Nader Afshar, the president of Middle East Consulting Associates who has worked with the now-defunct U.S. Information Agency and the Voice of America Farsi Service, and William Nojay, a former election monitor for the International Republican Institute. FDI lists three former, "founding members" of its board: Joshua Muravchik, a leading neoconservative writer at the American Enterprise Institute; Peter Rodman, a Henry Kissinger protégé associated with neoconservative formations like the Project for the New American Century; and Mehdi Rouhani, described by FDI as "the spiritual leader of the Shiite community in Europe."

During the George W. Bush presidency, FDI has served as a conduit for bad news on Iran, often bemoaning what it regards as the lack of initiative by U.S. leaders in taking aggressive action against Tehran. A November 8, 2007 news bulletin posted on FDI's website related the opinion of former State Department official Scott Carpenter, who argued that giving money to the controversial Office of Iranian Affairs in the State Department "pretty much kills the Iran Democracy Program." According to the Sun (November 8, 2007) : "Mr. Carpenter, who headed the Middle East Partnership Initiative and was a deputy assistant secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs until he left the Bush administration this summer, predicted the $20 million devoted to supporting the activities inside the Islamic Republic would be relegated to what he called 'safe initiatives' such as student exchange programs, and not the more daring projects he and his deputy, David Denehy, funded, such as training for Web site operators to evade Internet censorship, political polling, and training on increasing recruitment for civil society groups." Said Carpenter: "There is not the expertise, there is not the energy for it [at the Iran office]. The Iran office is worried about the bilateral policy. I think they are not committed to this anymore."

A news blurb from May 4, 2006, posted on the FDI website quoted a Timmerman article published in the rightist, David Horowitz-associated FrontPageMag.com. Direct talks with the Tehran regime, wrote Timmerman, "are not just a bad idea. They are a monumentally bad idea, whose wrong-headedness has been proven time and again over the past 26 years." A few days earlier, on May 1, 2006, FDI highlighted a Human Events interview with Reza Pahlavi, son of the late shah of Iran, who said that he hoped to finalize within the next two to three months the organization of a movement aimed at overthrowing the Islamic regime in Tehran and replacing it with a democratic government.

FDI's selected news items sometimes feature unsubstantiated claims about Iranian activities, including this undated item from early 2006: "Separate sources in the United States and Iran have told FDI recently that the Iranian regime is planning a nuclear weapons test before the Iranian New Year on March 20, 2006." A similar FDI post from January 19, 2006, claimed: "FDI has learned from sources in Iran that the high command of the Revolutionary Guards Air Force have issued new orders to Shahab-3 missile units, effective since Tuesday, Jan. 16, ordering them to move mobile missile launchers every 24 hours in view of a potential pre-emptive strike by the United States or Israel. FDI's source says the launchers move only at night." These items led to the newswire service UPI publishing an alarmist article stating that, "Tehran is planning a nuclear weapons test before the Iranian new year on March 20, 2006, says [FDI,] a group opposed to the regime in Tehran" (UPI, January 19, 2006).

FDI's other activities include: publicizing anti-Iran events; promoting "opposition activities" of Iranian-American organizations and exile political groups; and publicizing human rights abuses committed in Iran. When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visited Columbia University in New York in September 2007, FDI promoted a protest rally through an ad on its homepage showing Adolf Hitler and Ahmadinejad standing side by side, reading, "The Torch has Been Passed from One Genocidal Leader to Another."

FDI's website also offers one-year subscriptions to the "Iran Brief," a monthly newsletter, for $1,100. Stephen Bryen is blurbed on the subscription page promoting the newsletter as " The only source of inside information on what business is doing in Iran ... and what Iran is doing to business." Although the offer is made on FDI's website, credit for publishing the Iran Brief is given to Timmerman's Middle East Data Project, which, also via the FDI website, offers a consulting service. It is unclear whether the newsletter continues to be published; the most current issue synopses available on the website date from 1999.

Among the other items prominently featured on the FDI website as of December 2007 was a January 2007 article written by Timmerman for FrontPageMag.com titled "How to Topple the Mullahs," which harshly criticized the Baker-Hamilton Study Group Report. Responding to the study group's conclusion that the United States should pursue negotiations with Iran and Syria to help stabilize Iraq, Timmerman wrote: "For now, the nutty recommendation of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group that the United States should engage in direct talks with Syria and Iran appears to have been mooted by events on the ground. U.S. military forces have caught Iran red-handed—twice—over the past few weeks in Iraq. No one can possibly doubt any longer what I and many others have been saying for some time: that Iran is involved on the ground in Iraq and is aiding both Sunni and Shia insurgents in an effort to blow that country apart. ... It is regrettable and truly astonishing that President Bush has not applied to Iran and to Syria the same global vision he has so eloquently displayed in regards to Iraq and other fronts in the global war against the Islamic jihad. Because there is a clear alternative to the capitulation offered by Baker, Hamilton, and their advisers."

Funding. There is little information available on FDI's funding sources. FDI has received a number of grants from the National Endowment for Democracy, including its initial start-up grant in 1995 for $50,000. According to NED's description of its 1996 grant to FDI for $25,000: "The Foundation for Democracy in Iran (FDI) received Endowment support to monitor and document the human rights situation in Iran. FDI acquires much of its information from sources inside Iran, including local Iranian news reports not normally available in the West. FDI will publish regular reports on human rights conditions in Iran for distribution to the international media, other human rights groups, and policy makers. To inform the Iranian public on their basic human and political rights, the information will be aired through international broadcast services such as the Voice of America and the BBC, in both English and Farsi, as well as through television networks. FDI also maintains an Internet Web site that facilitates international dissemination of its reports, including inside Iran."