USA trained units of the Mujaheddin e Khalq, although it's is on the list of terror groups

  Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, the Iranian nuclear scientist who was killed in Tehran on January 11. Ahmadi Roshan, who was the last of the five Iranian nuclear scientists who got killed, is here pictured with his little his son, Alireza. AFP/Getty Images


An interesting report by Seyour Hersh in The New Yorker about secret training that the Bush administration provided to the Mujaheddin e Khalq, an Iranian opposition movement, that fell out with Khomeiny in 1979, murdered scores of people linked to the government of the Islamic republic and fought against Teheran with the troops of Saddam Hussein from a base (Al-Ashraf) within Iraq:


The US Department of Energy maintains a secret site in Nevada, some sixty-five miles northwest of Las Vegas, which was once used for nuclear testing, and now includes a counterintelligence training facility and  private airport 

It was here that the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) conducted training, beginning in 2005, for members of the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a dissident Iranian opposition group known in the West as the M.E.K.

 In spite of the fact that the MEK is still on the US-list of terrorist organizations,

''they got “the standard training,” he said, “in commo, crypto [cryptography], small-unit tactics, and weaponry—that went on for six months,” the retired general said.

 However: 

Khodabandeh told me that he had heard from more recent defectors about the training in Nevada. He was told that the communications training in Nevada involved more than teaching how to keep in contact during attacks—it also involved communication intercepts. The United States, he said, at one point found a way to penetrate some major Iranian communications systems. At the time, he said, the U.S. provided M.E.K. operatives with the ability to intercept telephone calls and text messages inside Iran—which M.E.K. operatives translated and shared with American signals intelligence experts. He does not know whether this activity is ongoing.

 These last years however it seems that Israel has become the main sponsor of the M.E.K:

Five Iranian nuclear scientists have been assassinated since 2007. M.E.K. spokesmen have denied any involvement in the killings, but early last month NBC News quoted two senior Obama Administration officials as confirming that the attacks were carried out by M.E.K. units that were financed and trained by Mossad, the Israeli secret service.

It is not the first time that the MEK has been mentioned as working for the Mossad. Also attacks on a basis of the Pasdaran and a missile base near Tehran have been ascribed to collaboration of the MEK and the Mossad. But it's the first time someone reports about the secret training in the USA of units of this group, which among other things is known for its quite frightening personality cult for the leaders Massoud and Maryam Rajavi.