Another Suspected Iranian Mole Unmasked Inside the Biden Administration
Another Suspected Iranian Mole Unmasked Inside the Biden Administration
Just how many Friends of Tehran are working in top government jobs for Biden-Harris?
“Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: ‘Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it's enemy action’.”
- Goldfinger, Ian Fleming (1959)
On the eve of America’s election, Democrats and their media wing are putting in overtime suppressing stories that are unflattering to Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. As this newsletter just reported, Walz has longstanding ties to the People’s Republic of China which are highly concerning from a counterintelligence perspective. Just don’t expect the mainstream media to investigate any of this, especially so close to the election.
However, when it comes to espionage, Democrat problems with Iran are even worse than with China. Going where the legacy media fears to tread, Top Secret Umbra has exposed the shocking extent of Iranian penetration of the current White House, which extends back to President Barack Obama’s two terms in the Oval Office. Regarding the all-important matter of cadres, President Joe Biden represents Obama’s third term, while Harris would be his fourth.
Take the astonishing case of Rob Malley, Obama’s Iran fixer, the academic-turned-bureaucrat who made the Iran Deal, formally the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, a reality in 2015. Pres. Biden brought Malley back into the White House in 2021 to revive JCPOA, which Pres. Trump killed in 2018. As the top mullah-whisperer for Team Obama-Biden-Harris, Malley hoped to deliver better relations with Tehran, but that fell apart in the spring of 2023 when Malley’s top-level security clearances were yanked, and he was escorted from his office at the State Department. Malley fell under suspicion for espionage and was placed under FBI scrutiny.
It's been 18 months since Malley’s high-flying government career fell apart, but we still don’t know what happened. Repeated inquiries by Congress about the status of the FBI investigation into Malley’s misdeeds have been stonewalled by the White House. The Beltway rumor mill has it that Malley illegally downloaded classified information to his personal email, which then got hacked by Iranian spies. Making the bad situation worse, Malley then lied to the FBI about his actions.
The Biden administration is running out the clock on the Malley scandal, hoping it fades away. As it might. Malley’s been soft-landed back into elite academia, a cushy gig at Princeton, while the Democrats and their media helpers have shown no interest in ascertaining what exactly was going on between Tehran and Team OBH’s top Iran expert. At best, Malley is uncomfortably close to the mullahs and their clerico-fascist regime; at worst, he’s his generation’s Alger Hiss. It’s not like the legacy media is going to ask questions anyway.
Regrettably, the Biden-Harris administration is packed with friends and protégés of Malley’s. The absurd case of Ariane Tabatabai is illustrative. Another academic-turned-bureaucrat, the Iranian-born Tabatabai was appointed to a very sensitive job in the Pentagon by the Biden White House. As the chief of staff to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, Tabatabai enjoyed access to an astonishing array of highly classified information, particularly regarding covert action. She was unmasked in Sept. 2023 as an agent for Tehran going back a decade. Tabatabai worked for a front for Iranian intelligence called the Iran Experts Initiative, which sought to improve the regime’s image in the West. Despite this, the Biden administration kept Tabatabai in her ASD SOLIC job. After her exposure as Iran’s agent, Tabatabai visited the White House at least eight times, for (presumably classified) meetings. Just as with Malley, the administration stalled Congressional inquiries into the Tabatabai case, while the Democrats and their media wing showed no interest in the scandal. Last week, this newsletter revealed that, at last, Tabatabai has been removed from ASD SOLIC and “kicked upstairs.” She’s been named the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Force Education and Training, which is a promotion yet with reduced access to Pentagon secrets.
Then there’s Phil Gordon, another Democrat foreign policy maven who’s bounced between government and the Council on Foreign Relations for many years. He’s long been close to Kamala Harris and has served as the vice president’s National Security Adviser since 2022. Gordon’s been chummy with Malley for decades, while they worked together to deliver Pres. Obama his Iran Deal. Under Obama, Gordon held top jobs on the National Security Council and at the State Department. Gordon co-authored several op-eds with Ariane Tabatabai, all of them with a pro-Tehran bent. He is also close with the National Iranian American Council, an NGO which advocates for the mullah regime and is considered a front for Tehran by Western counterintelligence. Gordon addressed NIAC’s leadership conferences in 2014 and 2016. Gordon seems a shoo-in to hold a top job in a Harris administration. Again, Congress has asked what’s going on between Gordon and Iran, which the White House refuses to answer, while the legacy media ignores the issue.
The Biden White House official who should be fretting over all these Friends of Tehran holding top jobs in the administration is Maher Bitar, who’s the NSC’s senior director for intelligence programs. As such, Bitar is the White House’s top coordinator with the Intelligence Community. Another Malley protégé, Bitar worked in plum jobs for the Obama administration. He’s anything but a hardliner on Iran. When he was a student a Georgetown University, Bitar held a leadership role with Students for Justice in Palestine, a radical activist group that’s pro-HAMAS. Since the Gaza War, SJP has organized anti-Israel protests on college campuses nationwide. It’s no mystery why Bitar isn’t purging the Biden-Harris administration of Friends of Tehran.
The real mystery here is why the Biden White House, like the Obama administrations before it, is crawling with Iranian agents and their apologists. Counterintelligence seems to exist only in theory for Team OBH, at least when Iran is involved. People who are known to be cuddly with America’s enemies shouldn’t be eligible for TOP SECRET security clearances, much less top national security jobs. But that’s exactly what’s happened since 2009 under three Democrat administrations. With so many of these troubling cases, this pro-Iranian pattern cannot be deemed a coincidence or accident, rather a design.
How many Iranian moles are operating in the upper echelons of the Biden-Harris administration? Officially, nobody knows, while nobody in the legacy media will ask. Counterintelligence experts in Washington, DC, do ask, that’s their job, albeit in hushed tones. Counterspies inside the Beltway tell me that another suspected Friend of Tehran recently was unmasked, and the implications of this case are deeply alarming for U.S. national security.
His name is Lawrence W.K. Casselle, and he’s one of the top officials in the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service. Although little known to the public, DSS are Foggy Bottom’s cops, the federal agents who guard American diplomats abroad as well as foreign government dignitaries when they visit the U.S. Importantly, DSS also provides counterintelligence oversight to the State Dept.
Casselle, a native of Las Vegas, joined the State Dept. as a Diplomatic Security special agent in 2003, following graduation from Hampton University on an ROTC scholarship, then four years on active duty with the U.S. Army as an infantry officer. Casselle’s DSS career has been very successful, with tours at home and abroad, including serving on the protective detail of then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from 2006 to 2008. He served as a Regional Security Officer in Kabul, then as senior RSO based in Belize. Casselle got important international experience in 2018-19 when he served in Baghdad as the DSS liaison to the Department of Defense’s Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve (that’s the Pentagon’s term for our war against the Islamic State in the Middle East). Following that, he got the White House plum job of NSC Director for Counterterrorism (2019-20), then was promoted to be chief of staff for all DSS (2021-23).
Casselle was then promoted to be DSS regional director for the Near East (2023-24), including elevation to the Senior Foreign Service (State’s version of the Senior Executive Service for diplomats, equivalent to general officer rank in the military), to be moved up to Deputy Assistant Director of DSS in May of this year. Then, everything fell apart for this Foggy Bottom high-flyer. Casselle this summer came under suspicion for his ties to Tehran. When he was serving in the Middle East, apparently during his tour in Baghdad, Casselle became close with a foreign woman. They developed a romantic relationship, IC insiders tell me, and Casselle used his powerful job and State Dept. connections to help his new friend. Inconveniently, his paramour turned out to be an operative for Iranian intelligence.
How compromised Casselle is by this scandal isn’t yet known. IC counterspies tell me that they are trying to establish how close to Tehran Casselle got during his close relationship with that Iranian spy, but the State Dept. isn’t cooperating energetically with the counterintelligence investigation. If one of Foggy Bottom’s rising stars turns out to be an Iranian mole, the embarrassment to the department will be serious. Casselle’s superiors want this mess to simply go away.
Casselle isn’t just a top U.S. diplomat, he’s African American, which puts him perfectly in tune with the Biden-Harris emphasis on DEI in the federal government. In 2022, he was highlighted in a State Dept. press release, amplifying DSS recruitment efforts as they seek to hire more female and minority agents. Casselle is a face of the new, less white, more diverse State Dept. In July, he appeared on a podcast where he extolled his adventures as a DSS agent. Since 2015, he’s been a State Dept. representative to the American Foreign Service Association, the professional association (and de facto union) for the Foreign Service, which has featured Casselle in its promotional material.
There are dire national security consequences if Casselle went rogue. In his DSS position he holds TOP SECRET-plus security clearances, while during his two-decade career he’s held several jobs offering access to a wide array of U.S. intelligence secrets. In particular, there was his 2018-19 DoD liaison tour in Baghdad, followed by his NSC director’s job, both of which brought access to very sensitive top-level national security information. Before that, in 2016-18, Casselle was Deputy Director for Counterintelligence at the State Dept.’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Known as INR, this analysis shop is the only Foggy Bottom component that’s part of the Intelligence Community. As INR’s CI boss, Casselle enjoyed access to an alarming array of secrets from across the IC.
If Casselle was coopted by Iranian intelligence through his unwise love life, Tehran could have gotten its eyes on a massive number of American secrets from numerous agencies far beyond Main State. We don’t yet know how bad this espionage scandal is. However, we know two things already. First, the Biden-Harris White House will seek to cover up yet another Iranian spy scandal, hiding important information from Congress and the public, as they have with several related counterintelligence disasters. Second, the Democrats can rely on their media allies to suppress this scandal while attacking anyone who asks relevant questions. If Donald Trump is reelected president tomorrow, his new administration may choose to purge Washington of the multiple Friends of Tehran who have been promoted into top government jobs since 2009. However, a Harris administration will keep those Iranian agents in place while continuing to cover up this ugly scandal.
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