Cyberwar, Deeper Truth on China’s Unit 61398

Posted on July 13, 2015July 13, 2015 by Denise Simon

The NSA has been hacking China for years, so it is a cyberwar. What the United States cyber experts have known at least since 2009 spells out that there has been no strategy to combat cyber intrusions much less a declaration that these hacks are an act of war.

The NSA Has A Secret Group Called ‘TAO’ That’s Been Hacking China For 15 Years

China hacking charges: the Chinese army’s Unit 61398
Operating out of a tower block in Shanghai, Unit 61398 allegedly hacks Western companies in support of the Chinese government’s political and economic aims.

From DarkReading:

According to the DOJ indictment, Huang Zhenyu was hired between 2006 and 2009 or later to do programming work for one of the companies (referred to as “SOE-2” in the indictment). Huang was allegedly tasked with constructing a “secret” database to store intelligence about the iron and steel industry, as well as information about US companies.

“Chinese firms hired the same PLA Unit where the defendants worked to provide information technology services,” according to the indictment, which the US Department of Justice unsealed Monday. “For example, one SOE involved in trade litigation against some of the American victims herein hired the Unit, and one of the co-conspirators charged herein, to hold a ‘secret’ database to hold corporate ‘intelligence.'”

The for-hire database project sheds some light on the operations of China’s most prolific hacking unit, Unit 61398 of the Third Department of China’s People’s Liberation Army (also known as APT1), where the alleged hackers work. US Attorney General Eric Holder announced an unprecedented move Monday: The Justice Department had indicted the five men with the military unit for allegedly hacking and stealing trade secrets of major American steel, solar energy, and other manufacturing companies, including Alcoa, Allegheny Technologies Inc., SolarWorld AG, Westinghouse Electric, and US Steel, as well as the United Steel Workers Union.

It has never been a secret, it has only been a topic debated with no resolutions behind closed doors. China has a database on Americans and is filling it with higher details, growing their intelligence on everything America.

China has launched a strategic plan when one examines the order of hacks of American companies, the timing and the data. A full report was published on Unit 61398.

New York Times report

Hacked in the U.S.A.: China’s Not-So-Hidden Infiltration Op

From Bloomberg: The vast cyber-attack in Washington began with, of all things, travel reservations.

More than two years ago, troves of personal data were stolen from U.S. travel companies. Hackers subsequently made off with health records at big insurance companies and infiltrated federal computers where they stole personnel records on 21.5 million people — in what apparently is the largest such theft of U.S. government records in history.

Those individual attacks, once believed to be unconnected, now appear to be part of a coordinated campaign by Chinese hackers to collect sensitive details on key people that went on far longer — and burrowed far deeper — than initially thought.

But time and again, U.S. authorities missed clues connecting one incident to the next. Interviews with federal investigators and cybersecurity experts paint a troubling portrait of what many are calling a serious failure of U.S. intelligence agencies to spot the pattern or warn potential victims. Moreover, the problems in Washington add new urgency to calls for vigilance in the private sector.

In revealing the scope of stolen government data on Thursday, Obama administration officials declined to identify a perpetrator. Investigators say the Chinese government was almost certainly behind the effort, an allegation China has vehemently denied.

‘Facebook of Intelligence’

Some investigators suspect the attacks were part of a sweeping campaign to create a database on Americans that could be used to obtain commercial and government secrets.

“China is building the Facebook of human intelligence capabilities,” said Adam Meyers, vice president of intelligence for cybersecurity company CrowdStrike Inc. “This appears to be a real maturity in the way they are using cyber to enable broader intelligence goals.”

The most serious breach of records occurred at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, where records for every person given a government background check for the past 15 years may have been compromised. The head of the government personnel office, Katherine Archuleta, resigned Friday as lawmakers demanded to know what went wrong.

The campaign began in early 2013 with the travel records, said Laura Galante, manager of threat intelligence for FireEye Inc., a private security company that has been investigating the cyber-attacks.

Stockpiling Records

By mid-2014, it became clear that the hackers were stockpiling health records, Social Security numbers and other personal information on Americans -– a departure from the country’s traditional espionage operations focusing on the theft of military and civilian technology.

“There was a clear and apparent shift,” said Jordan Berry, an analyst at FireEye.

Recognition came too late for many of the victims. Vendors of security devices say health-care companies are spending tens of millions of dollars this year to upgrade their computer systems but much of the data is already gone.

U.S. intelligence agencies were collecting information on the theft of personal data but failed to understand the scope and potential damage from the aggressive Chinese operation, according to one person familiar with the government assessment of what went wrong.

In the last two years, much of the attention of U.S. national security agencies was focused on defending against cyber-attacks aimed at disrupting critical infrastructure like power grids.

Numbers Even Backdoor to Front-door entry into U.S.

Posted on July 12, 2015July 12, 2015 by Denise Simon

There are almost 20 different visa applications forms, each for unique circumstances to enter into the United States. Some are easier and more likely used than others for fast processing and requiring less background investigations.

The State Department outsources the processing of visas and in some visa classifications there are annual quotas that can be finessed by waivers and or exemptions. There are even legal cottage industry members that handle the complex legal process with enough money, they know how to skirt the process and hasten the approval process.

Now, that these people have front-door entry, who are they and what happens if they overstay the visa time limit? Short answer is not much.

In March of 2012, John Cohen, the Deputy Counter-terrorism Coordinator for DHS provided written testimony to the House Sub-committee on DHS which fully explains the convoluted process and lack of resources. In the same hearing, Peter T. Edge, Deputy Executive Associate Director of DHS Investigations for ICE offered his written testimony on the scope of fraud of the visa program. This was in response to Amine el-Khalifi, an individual who allegedly attempted to conduct a suicide attack at the U.S. Capitol, is not the first time terrorists have exploited the visa process. In fact, el-Khalifi follows a long line of terrorists, including several of the 9/11 hijackers, who overstayed their visa and went on to conduct terror attacks.

Of particular note, the Visa Security program of 2002 is the basis of law today and reads in part from 2012 statistics:

The Visa Security Program
The Homeland Security Act of 2002 directs the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to assist in the identification of visa applicants who seek to enter the United States for illegitimate purposes, including criminal offenses and terrorism-related activities. The visa adjudication process often presents the first opportunity to assess whether a potential nonimmigrant visitor or immigrant poses a threat to the United States. The Visa Security Program (VSP) is one of several ICE programs focused on minimizing global risks.
Through the Visa Security Program (VSP), ICE deploys trained special agents overseas to high-risk visa activity posts in order to identify potential terrorist and criminal threats before they reach the United States. ICE special agents conduct targeted, in-depth reviews of individual visa applications and applicants prior to issuance, and recommend to consular officers refusal or revocation of applications when warranted. DHS actions complement the consular officers’ initial screenings, applicant interviews, and reviews of applications and supporting documentation.
ICE now conducts visa security investigations at 19 high-risk visa adjudication posts in 15 countries. In FY 2012 to date, VSP has screened 452,352 visa applicants and, in collaboration with DOS colleagues, determined that 121,139 required further review. Following the review of these 121,139 applications, ICE identified derogatory information on more than 4,777 applicants.

In 2012: The Obama administration doesn’t consider deporting people whose only offense is overstaying a visa a priority. It has focused immigration enforcement efforts on people who have committed serious crimes or are considered a threat to public or national security.

A House Homeland Security subcommittee is conducting an oversight hearing Tuesday. The panel’s chairwoman, Rep. Candice Miller, R-Mich., said El Khalifi “follows a long line of terrorists, including several of the 9/11 hijackers, who overstayed their visa and went on to conduct terror attacks.” His tourist visa expired the same year he arrived from his native Morocco as a teenager in 1999.

Going back to 2006, it was stated: “Many immigrants who are in the United States illegally never jumped a fence, hiked through the desert or paid anyone to help them sneak into the country. According to a recent study, 45 percent of illegal immigrants came here on a legal visa, and then overstayed that visa.” For the audio interview and Pew Research summary report, click here.

In closing, the LA Times proves the process on visa overstays with a few key cases.

* Laura Lopez first came to the U.S. at 15. She had joined a group of students from Guatemala who were visiting Orange County.

She remembers her first trip to Disneyland, eating at Taco Bell and strolling through the streets of downtown Santa Ana, with its impressive red sandstone courthouse.

“I felt so much energy,” said Lopez, now 30. “I looked around and saw that courthouse, and it was like something that spoke about freedom. I just didn’t want to leave.”

Lopez returned to Santa Ana two years later on a tourist visa. This time, she never left.

*Billy Lee came to California from South Korea with his mother when he was 5. Their trip included exploring Hollywood and spending time with relatives. “They told my mother they had great jobs, great schools — that this was a wonderful, open place to live and that we should take a risk and copy them,” said Lee, now 31.

So they stayed.

“Homeland Security Department officials estimate that up to 40% of the roughly 11 million people in the U.S. illegally arrived this way. Jorge-Mario Cabrera, spokesman for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles. “It happens all the time.”

Yet, he said, no system exists “to follow up on what these folks do once they’re in the States. There’s no process by which officials can track if someone stayed the proper amount of time or beyond that.” For more cases covered by the LA Times, click here.

In the Obama administration, nobody knows anything or for that matter really investigates or reports the numbers.

Nobody is sure how many people are in the U.S. on expired visas.

A long-standing problem in immigration enforcement — identifying foreigners who fail to go home when their visas expire — is emerging as a key question as senators and President Barack Obama chart an overhaul of immigration law. The Senate is discussing an overhaul that would require the government to track foreigners who overstay their visas. The problem is the U.S. currently doesn’t have a reliable system for doing this.

The Center for Immigration Studies is the best source for visa overstays, yet few listen.

The General Accountability Offices does offer some insight that is useful.

Lastly, the piece parts are offered here from a 2013 hearing.

Written testimony of ICE Homeland Security Investigations Executive Associate Director James Dinkins, CBP Office of Field Operations Acting Deputy Assistant Commissioner John Wagner, and NPPD Office of Biometric Identity Management Deputy Director Shonnie Lyon for a House Committee on Homeland Security, Subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security hearing titled “Visa Security and Overstays: How Secure is America?”

In closing, the system is broken simply due to lack of will, enforcement and resources. Adjustments do need to be made especially when it comes to ‘visa waiver companies and countries, which should both be terminated.

IRS Mafia Tactics Proven in Wisconsin Against Gov. Walker

Posted on July 12, 2015July 12, 2015 by Denise Simon

It begins with something in Wisconsin called the ‘Wisconsin Government Accountability Board’….what is in a name after all. How bad can it be?

Fire all of them and then prosecute all of them.

Alright, start here with the lawsuit against GAB and Kevin Kennedy.

From The Watchdog: Kevin Kennedy, the director of Wisconsin’s speech regulator integrally tied to the probe into dozens of conservative organizations, is a longtime “professional friend” of former IRS tax-exempt director Lois Lerner.

Lerner led the Obama administration’s IRS division accused of targeting conservative groups seeking 501(c)(4) nonprofit status. The Senate Finance Committee is looking into more than 6,000 emails from Lerner once thought to be lost.

The Wall Street Journal opinion piece published Thursday and headlined “Wisconsin’s friend at the IRS” reveals that Lerner and Wisconsin Government Accountability Board’s Kennedy were in contact between 2011 and 2013 — when the GAB assisted partisan prosecutors in investigating scores of conservatives and in raiding several of their homes.

“Emails we’ve seen show that between 2011 and 2013 the two were in contact on multiple occasions, sharing articles on topics including greater donor disclosure and Wisconsin’s recall elections,” the op-ed notes.

“The emails indicate the two were also personal friends who met for dinner and kept in professional touch. ‘Are you available for the 25th?’ Ms. Lerner wrote in January 2012. ‘If so, perhaps we could work two nights in a row.’”

Kennedy’s GAB is Wisconsin’s political speech regulator. It oversees elections, campaign finance and lobbying laws.

It is also the subject of a state lawsuit that claims the agency manipulated state campaign finance laws and regulations in advising Democrat Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm, his assistants and other prosecutors in their political probe.

The multi-year, multi-county investigation included pre-dawn, paramilitary-style raids at the homes of John Doe targets, including a raid that, according to a recent story in National Review, victimized a 16-year-old boy who was home alone at the time.

As Wisconsin Watchdog has reported, John Doe prosecutors conducted an extensive spying operation on conservatives described by one target as worse than the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program. Affidavits reviewed by Wisconsin Watchdog show prosecutors seeking and receiving warrants and subpoenas to tap into conservatives’ Internet service providers, some of whom still don’t know they were targets of the investigation.

The probe followed the partisan recall campaigns by unions and the Democratic Party of Wisconsin against Republican Gov. Scott Walker and several state senators. Walker and most of the senators survived.

But the secret John Doe investigation would drag Walker and his conservative allies through the political mud for years to come, thanks to many, many leaks.

POLITICAL SPEECH COP: Kevin Kennedy and the GAB are the subject of a state lawsuit alleging the agency manipulated campaign finance laws in an abusive investigation at taxpayers expense. Sources say top GAB officials have been deposed in the lawsuit.

Prosecutors confiscated more than 3 million records — a conservative count in a Wisconsin Watchdog analysis — of targets. The investigation has been based on the idea the groups illegally coordinated with Walker’s campaign during the recall campaigns. Multiple courts have rejected that theory, including the John Doe presiding judge, who tossed out several subpoenas because they had failed to show evidence a campaign finance crime had been committed.

While all of this was going on, the IRS was increasing its harassment of conservative nonprofits.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Lerner’s lawyer declined to comment. Kennedy, in an email, told the newspaper “Ms. Lerner is a professional friend who I have known for 20 years.” He declined to say more.

The opinion piece notes:

“In an email exchange in July 2011, Mr. Kennedy sent Ms. Lerner an article in the Racine Journal-Times on the declining relevance of public campaign financing amid more private and ‘special interest’ money. ‘Note the last paragraph where the paper supports more transparency,’ Mr. Kennedy writes to Ms. Lerner. ‘The Legislature has killed our corporate disclosure rules.’”

John Doe investigators asked the IRS to look into a conservative group that was a primary target of the probe, sources told the Journal.

“The IRS doesn’t appear to have followed up, but the request shows Wisconsin prosecutors saw their pursuit of independent groups as part of a common agenda with national Democrats,” the op-ed states.

That’s the point, the Wall Street Journal contends. John Doe transcends Wisconsin, with interconnections revealing “the use of tax and campaign laws to limit political speech was part of a larger and systematic Democratic campaign.”

President Obama laid it all out at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2010 when he blasted the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision.

“Thanks to a recent Supreme Court decision, (Republicans) are being helped along this year, as I said, by special interest groups that are allowed to spend unlimited amounts of money on attack ads. They don’t even have to disclose who’s behind the ads,” Obama said.

“Conservative nonprofits like the Wisconsin Club for Growth and Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce were later subpoenaed and bound by secrecy orders as their fundraising all but ceased,” the opinion piece notes.

“Liberals worked together to turn the IRS and the GAB into partisan political weapons.”

Earlier this week, Judicial Watch reported that newly discovered Department of Justice and IRS documents show there was “an October 2010 meeting between Lois Lerner, DOJ officials and the FBI to plan for the possible criminal prosecution of targeted nonprofit organizations for alleged illegal political activity.”

Eric O’Keefe, director of the Wisconsin Club for Growth, told Wisconsin Watchdog the Wall Street Journal has “exposed a whole new dimension of government abuse.”

“The permanent government does not believe that we, the people, are capable of governing ourselves. They want to control everything,” said O’Keefe, who is suing the GAB for its costly investigation.

Part 217 of 218 in the series Wisconsin’s Secret War

Many more details here. Consider: collusion, fraud, RICO, financial terror, targeting, who gave the orders and where it all leads. Imagine that the IRS got with the FBI and the DoJ to investigate and prosecute conservatives too. These are White House mafia tactics…..there is no dispute.

Pope Transforms Papacy to Political Pulpit

Posted on July 11, 2015July 11, 2015 by Denise Simon

Pope Francis has applied his authority and the Catholic Church altering Catholic doctrine and message to high stakes politics. He has solicited high stakes policy wonks on the matter of Climate Change and his team is mobilized.

His shepherds, his Bishops, his Cardinals will install United Nations approved language and actions into all sermons, visits and religious message.

What a shame, there was such hope for renaissance of the Vatican yet it was short lived.

Note: Naomi Klein is a social activist who is against corporate capitalism, and has the DNA of peace activism and her grandparents were communists. She admits to being labeled a red-diaper baby where social justice and racial equality is her continued bent. Climate change is her mission. Klein is an acolyte of Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky proven by the third book she authored titled The Shock Doctrine.

Hence, she successfully gained the attention of Pope Francis.

From the Guardian:

Pope Francis recruits Naomi Klein in climate change battle

Social activist ‘surprised but delighted’ to join top cardinal in high-level environment conference at the Vatican

She is one of the world’s most high-profile social activists and a ferocious critic of 21st-century capitalism. He is one of the pope’s most senior aides and a professor of climate change economics. But this week the secular radical will join forces with the Catholic cardinal in the latest move by Pope Francis to shift the debate on global warming.

Naomi Klein and Cardinal Peter Turkson are to lead a high-level conference on the environment, bringing together churchmen, scientists and activists to debate climate change action. Klein, who campaigns for an overhaul of the global financial system to tackle climate change, told the Observer she was surprised but delighted to receive the invitation from Turkson’s office.

“The fact that they invited me indicates they’re not backing down from the fight. A lot of people have patted the pope on the head, but said he’s wrong on the economics. I think he’s right on the economics,” she said, referring to Pope Francis’s recent publication of an encyclical on the environment.

Release of the document earlier this month thrust the pontiff to the centre of the global debate on climate change, as he berated politicians for creating a system that serves wealthy countries at the expense of the poorest.

Activists and religious leaders will gather in Rome on Sunday, marching through the Eternal City before the Vatican welcomes campaigners to the conference, which will focus on the UN’s impending climate change summit.

Protesters have chosen the French embassy as their starting point – a Renaissance palace famed for its beautiful frescoes, but more significantly a symbol of the United Nations climate change conference, which will be hosted by Paris this December.

Nearly 500 years since Galileo was found guilty of heresy, the Holy See is leading the rallying cry for the world to wake up and listen to scientists on climate change. Multi-faith leaders will walk alongside scientists and campaigners, hailing from organisations including Greenpeace and Oxfam Italy, marching to the Vatican to celebrate the pope’s tough stance on environmental issues.

The imminent arrival of Klein within the Vatican walls has raised some eyebrows, but the involvement of lay people in church discussions is not without precedent.

Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general, delivered the keynote address at a Vatican summit in April on climate change and poverty. Anticipating the encyclical, he said he was depending on the pope’s “moral voice and moral leadership” to speed up action.

When it came to the presentation of the document itself, the pontiff picked a five-strong panel, including a Rome school teacher and a leading scientist. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, who heads the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, used the time to give churchmen a lesson in climate science.

The pope has upset some conservatives for drawing people from outside the clergy into the heart of the debate, while critics have also argued the Catholic church should not be involved in an issue that should be left to presidents and policy-makers.

But Klein said the pope’s position as a “moral voice” in the world – and leader of 1.2 billion Catholics – gives him the unique ability to unite campaigners fighting for a common goal. “The holistic view of the encyclical should be a catalyst to bring together the twin economic and climate crises, instead of treating them separately,” she said.

Much of the pope’s discourse focuses on the need to give developing countries a greater voice in climate change negotiations, a view that sits uncomfortably among some in developed nations. “There are a lot of people who are having a lot of trouble in realising there is a voice with such global authority from the global south. That’s why we’re getting this condescending view, of ‘leave the economics to us’,” said Klein.

She views the rise of Francis as an environmental campaigner as marking a welcome shift not only in the international sphere but also at the Holy See: “We’re seeing the power base within the Vatican shift, with a Ghanaian cardinal [Turkson] and an Argentine pope. They’re doing something very brave.”

While the upcoming conference is centred on the pope’s encyclical, delegates will also be looking ahead to decisive international meetings this year. Before the Paris talks comes a UN summit, where states are due to commit to sustainable development goals, which will inevitably affect the environment.

The pope will fly into New York on the first day of the meeting and address the UN general assembly, reinforcing his message and emboldening countries worst affected by climate change.

For Klein, the papal visit will mark a much-needed change in the way negotiators discuss the environment. “There’s a way in which UN discourse sanitises the extent to which this is a moral crisis,” she said. “It cries out for a moral voice.”

Meet Vahid Alaghband, a Clinton Donor and Pelosi?

Posted on July 10, 2015July 10, 2015 by Denise Simon

I’m Iranian

Treasury Designates Iranian Commercial Airline Linked to Iran’s Support for Terrorism (2011)

Bloomberg: After completing the 1.1 billion euro ($1.4 billion) buyout of Germany’s Kloeckner & Co., the world’s largest independent steel distributor, Vahid Alaghband was a perfect candidate to address “cross-border mergers — challenges and pitfalls” at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

The Iranian-born founder and chairman of London-based steel trading company Balli Group Plc never got the chance. As he traversed the Zurich airport on Jan. 23, 2003, immigration police detained him on a German arrest warrant.

Without Alaghband’s knowledge, WestLB AG, Germany’s third-biggest state-owned bank and his partner in the Kloeckner takeover, had filed a criminal complaint almost a year earlier accusing him of unlawfully removing 120 million euros from Kloeckner.

Instead of starring in Davos, Alaghband, 53, spent the next 11 months in jail, first in Zurich and then in Duisburg, the German city where Kloeckner was based. In February 2003, the same prosecutor’s office that’s investigating Alaghband charged Deutsche Bank AG Chief Executive Officer Josef Ackermann with breach of trust for his role as a Mannesmann AG director in paying bonuses during Dusseldorf-based Mannesmann’s unsuccessful attempt to fend off a takeover by Vodafone Group Plc. In both cases, foreign acquirers bought German icons and suffered as a result.

Excerpt from I’m Iranian: Fifteen months after his release from jail, Alaghband is back to running Balli. Last year, the company increased revenue 50 percent to $2 billion as demand and prices for steel surged. Alaghband is busy as a member of the international council of the Asia Society, the New York-based organization that John D. Rockefeller founded to promote understanding between Asia and the U.S.

Alaghband says even if the Kloeckner acquisition ran afoul of German laws, he could have resolved the differences.

“In any cross-border merger, there are things that fall between the cracks,” he says. “When you have a plumbing problem, you fix it, not blow up the house.”

As for the circumstances that stripped the Iranian millionaire’s fortune in the 1970s and then allowed him to rebuild, only to have his freedom and his property seized again, Alaghband says: “I had lost my assets in Iran once. I didn’t think it was going to happen again in Germany, in the middle of Europe.”

Now the real read begins

Clinton Foundation Donor Violated Iran Sanctions, Tried to Sell 747s to Tehran

From the DailyBeast:

Vahid Alaghband’s firm did business with an Iranian airline accused of shipping guns and troops to Syria.

An Iranian businessman accused by the U.S. government of violating sanctions on Tehran donated money to the Clinton Foundation, The Daily Beast has confirmed.Vahid Alaghband’s Balli Aviation Ltd., a London-based subsidiary of the commodities trading firm Balli Group PLC, tried to sell 747 airplanes to Iran, despite a federal ban on such sales. The company pleaded guilty to two counts of criminal information in 2010. In its plea agreement with the Department of Justice, Balli Aviation agreed to pay a $2 million criminal fine, serve five years corporate probation, and pay an additional $15 million in civil fines. The hefty sum was “a direct consequence of the level of deception used to mislead investigators,” Thomas Madigan, a top Justice Department official, said at the time.

Alaghband is one of an array of questionable actors who’ve been found in recent months to give to the Clinton Foundation. The gifts – from foreign governments with human rights violations like Qatar, Algeria, Saudi Arabia and China as well as FIFA, soccer’s corrupt governing body – have complicated Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president and raised questions as to whether these entities were trying to curry favor with the former Secretary of State.

But Alaghband stands out from the rest, because the beneficiary of his firm’s deals with Tehran was an Iranian airline accused by the U.S. government of working with the regime’s foreign intelligence operatives and shipping arms and troops to Syria. Plus, if an agreement between Iran and the world’s major powers is concluded in the coming days – as is widely expected – operators like Alaghband could stand to benefit. Hillary Clinton will be put in the awkward position of either defending the act of the Obama administration in which she once served or criticizing the culmination of a U.S.-Iran rapprochement effort, which her State Department began.

One of the two counts against Balli Aviation was that it “conspired to export three Boeing 747 aircraft from the United States to Iran,” according to a Justice Department statement, without first obtaining the necessary export licenses from the U.S. government. The company then used its Armenian airline subsidiary to buy the 747s with financing obtained from Mahan Air, Iran’s largest private airline, which is thought by the State Department to be controlled by former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

In 2011, the Treasury Department sanctioned the airline for “providing financial, material and technological support to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force (IRGC-QF),” or the expeditionary arm of the Islamic Republic’s praetorian military division, now heavily active in both Syria and Iraq. At the time, the Treasury Department accused the Qods Force of “secretly ferrying operatives, weapons and funds” on Mahan flights.

On the Clinton Foundation website, Alaghband’s company is listed as a donor in the $10,001 to $25,000 bracket. Moreover, on the website for Balli Real Estate, a property investment and development subsidiary also based in the UK, his personal bio describes him as a member of the Clinton Global Initiative.

This affiliation, along with his donation to the Foundation, came as a surprise to Alaghband.

“I am not a member of the Clinton Global Initiative,” he told The Daily Beast from London. “I attended a few meetings. The last meeting was 10 years ago. I don’t recall having ever made a contribution.” Asked why he was listed as a member of the CGI on his own corporate website, he said: “I haven’t seen this website recently. If attending a few meetings makes you a member, I don’t know.”

A source familiar with the Clinton Foundation told The Daily Beast that “Vahid Alaghband was never a member of CGI in a personal capacity.” However, the source added, “In 2007, Balli Group paid a onetime CGI membership fee and they designated him as their delegate to the meeting.”

Alaghband did recall giving money to another influential organization — the Washington, D.C.-based think tank the Brookings Institution. The donation he gave was to Brookings’ former Middle East policy shop, the Saban Center, which had been named for its major benefactor, the Israeli billionaire Haim Saban. (Staunchly pro-Israel, Saban is also, coincidentally, an avowed supporter of Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions.)

In 2007, Alaghband offered to give a $900,000 donation to run for three years to Brookings via the U.S.-based PARSA Foundation, “the first Persian community foundation in the U.S. and the leading Persian philanthropic institution practicing strategic philanthropy and promoting social entrepreneurship around the globe,” as the foundation’s website describes it.

Keynote Speaker Pelosi

Emails obtained in the discovery process of a separate libel case show that Alaghband, who had already donated at least $50,000 to PARSA, initially intended to make a pass-through donation via the foundation to Brookings.

But Alaghband says that he never ultimately used PARSA as a conduit for his donation; instead made his contribution directly to the Saban Center. He claims that the amount given was “far less” than $900,000 but declined to specify how much. Furthermore, he insisted, the money wasn’t ear-marked for any specific project or research use. “Our donation went to the Saban Center and they had full discretion as to what to do with it,” Alaghband said. “Martin Indyk had discretion over the use of the funds.”

Indyk, who headed the Saban Center from 2002 to 2013, is today the Vice President and Director for Foreign Policy at Brookings. He also served— twice—as U.S. ambassador to Israel under the Clinton administration. In 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry named Indyk the U.S. envoy to the Middle East.

“When we took the donation nobody knew there were any problems with Alaghband,” David Nassar, the Vice President of Communications for Brookings, told The Daily Beast, speaking on behalf of the think tank. Nassar also specified that the donation came from Balli Group bank accounts, not from Alaghband’s personal accounts. (Full disclosure: Daily Beast executive editor Noah Shachtman previously did work as a non-resident fellow in Brookings’ foreign policy division.)

A former Brookings staffer with direct knowledge of the donation told The Daily Beast said that, on the contrary, Alaghband’s problems with the U.S. government were known to the think tank at the time and that the money helped finance the work of Suzanne Maloney, a former State Department policy advisor and Republican advocate of U.S.-Iranian rapprochement.

Nassar told The Daily Beast that the suggestion that Alaghband’s donation was intended to bolster Maloney’s pro-rapprochement research was false. “The money was general funding for the Persian Gulf Initiative and not directed at any particular issue or any particular scholar,” he said. Nevertheless, the Persian Gulf Initiative was a program run by the Saban Center and Maloney worked on it.

Maloney is married to Ray Takeyh, an Iran scholar who served in the Obama White House in 2009 and who, during that period, was one of the lead advocates of engagement with Tehran.

Since leaving the administration, Takeyh has emerged as a scathing critic of his former employer’s nuclear diplomacy. But in 2008, Maloney and Takeyh jointly published a 34-page white paper with the Saban Center titled, “Pathway to Coexistence: A New U.S. Policy toward Iran.” Arguing that the longstanding U.S. policy of containment “is actually obsolete because Iran is no longer an expansionist power,” they called not for a mere “policy shift but for a paradigm change” in Washington.

In many ways, the paper essentially forecasted what Obama administration’s approach to dealing with Iran, from the largely hands-off approach to Iran’s bloody 2009 Green Revolution to the present-day compromises on its nuclear program.

Alaghband’s legal troubles did not appear to affect his relationship with Brookings a year after Balli Aviation was hit by the U.S. Commerce Department with a temporary ban on his Iranian export business. In February 2009, he spoke at the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Doha, where Brookings has another Middle East center, this one bankrolled by the Qatari government. The forum, in fact, was organized by the Saban Center on behalf of that government.

Alaghband, for his part, insists that he did nothing wrong, despite his company’s guilty plea.

“The settlement [with the Justice Department] was one under which we did not have to accept liability. We just agreed to make a payment and settle out of court,” he told The Daily Beast. “We had to establish a compliance program and do all of those things. The transactions we were engaged in was reviewed by and subject to a legal to a legal opinion both in the UK and U.S. about the compliance of with sanctions. We proceeded on this basis.”

The settlement also represented the largest civil penalty ever imposed by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security.

PARSA’s second largest recipient of grants is the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), a Washington, D.C.-based lobby group close to the Iranian regime, which advocates an end to all U.S. sanctions on Iran. It received a total received a total of $591,500 from the foundation. Alaghband’s brother, Hassan Alaghband, who is also the CEO of the Balli Group, spoke at a organized conference in Tehran by one of NIAC’s founders in June 2007, at which he spoke about Western companies doing business in Iran and cited Balli’s client, Caterpillar, as a case study.

The Balli Group PLC had once been the world’s second-largest steel trader but it declared bankruptcy in 2013. A major reason for its folding? U.S. sanctions on Iran.