WASHINGTON — When waves of protests last swept through Iran, after the murder of a young woman standing on the sidelines of an anti-government rally in 2009, Barack Obama balked at publicly supporting the anti-government movement. government lest Tehran claim the CIA was secretly sparking the unrest.
Thirteen years later, in remarkably similar circumstances, President Biden took a radically different approach. He publicly sided with the protesters in his speech at the United Nations last week. The United States moved quickly last week to impose sanctions on the nation’s vice police. And the administration allowed the activation of satellite links and other Internet services in the hope of restoring communications between protesters, despite attempts by Iranian officials to keep them in the dark.
Now the race is on to get communications equipment into the hands of protesters – no small feat in a country where the government is determined to shut down any view the outside world might have of the depth of its crackdown after the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, 22, accused of violating the headscarf law.
On Friday, the State Department and Treasury rushed to lift sanctions that blocked much of this US-designed technology from entering the country — sanctions that were part of a broader effort to to cut Iran off from the world until a new nuclear deal is negotiated. and the country cut off aid to terrorist groups.
The nuclear deal – which President Trump pulled out of in 2018 – now looks almost dead anyway. And over the weekend, Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, who was a top adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the time of the 2009 uprising, acknowledged that he and others had learned a bitter lesson about the cost of being overly cautious.
“Part of the reason there was a different kind of approach in 2009 was the belief that one way or another, if America spoke out, it would undermine protesters, not help them. “, he said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“What we learned as a result of this is that you can overthink these things, that the most important thing for the United States to do is to be firm, clear and principled in response to citizens of any country who demand their rights and dignity.”
But openly supporting the protesters is one thing. Defeating Iran’s well-honed ability to shut down the internet is another. Hours after the administration suspended the sanctions settlement, Elon Musk released a statement, through Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment, saying his Starlink satellite systems were “activated in Iran.”
It seemed like a major achievement: After Russia removed a European satellite system used by the Ukrainian government, as part of a wider effort to blindside the country just before the February 24 invasion, it was Starlink which reconnected Ukraine. Top US intelligence officials marveled at the speed with which the Ukrainians obtained and activated the Starlink boxes, which have small antennae – about 12 inches in diameter – that connect to thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit .
Within days, Ukrainian ministries were back online. Today, these boxes provide some of the most reliable internet service in Ukraine.
But in Ukraine, the government was eager to get the boxes in. They were flown to neighboring countries, loaded onto trains and trucks and shipped across the border.
Mr. Sadjadpour noted on Twitter that Mr. Musk and the US government “sent over 15,000 Starlink kits to Ukraine, but the Ukrainian government is a close ally and has cooperated eagerly. The Iranian regime wants to ban the internet so it can suppress people in the dark.
Indeed, there is no such access to Iran – and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the mullahs and the Basij, the forces uniting to quell the protests, are determined to keep them out. ‘walk in. And it’s far from clear that the United States or Israel would devote the kind of effort to smuggling Starlink systems and less sophisticated “internet in a box” technologies that they have devoted to a series of covert programs aimed at undermine the country’s nuclear enrichment facilities. .
But that task may soon fall to US intelligence agencies. On Monday, there were hints that the administration was looking for ways to get Starlink, in particular, into the hands of protesters.
Officials wouldn’t say how, but they did acknowledge that the administration had been in contact with Starlink and that discussions were clearly underway about how to get the powerful satellite systems into the hands of anti-government officials. Different options have been floated, with some exploring whether the systems could be smuggled in – along with many other contraband goods – or dropped by drones. Satellite systems are illegal in Iran, although satellite dishes are ubiquitous.
Whether or not the Biden administration succeeds in helping protesters communicate and organize, US officials seem driven by a unifying thought: to act faster than they did in 2009.
On June 20 of that year, a 26-year-old philosophy student, Neda Agha-Soltan, got out of a car to witness the street unrest following a clearly rigged election. She was shot in the chest by a sniper and videos showed her dying in the street. As the images went viral, the protests accelerated.
It was the first major human rights crisis of the new Obama administration, and the incident occurred just as Mr. Obama was taking part in a secret exchange of letters with the supreme leader of the Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who ultimately led the negotiations behind the 2015 nuclear deal.
Dennis Ross, a top adviser on Iran to the National Security Council at the time, said Monday that while launching negotiations was a consideration, “we were hearing people from the green movement” – the anti- -governmental – “outside of Iran that we would be playing into the government’s narrative that the protests were instigated by the United States” if Mr. Obama forcefully backed the protesters.
“People inside the movement in Iran told us otherwise,” he said. “We should have taken them more seriously. Many of us regret having moved too slowly.
Mr. Biden’s advisers, many of whom participated in those early discussions, seem to agree. They say they have decided not to take any hits or worry about the fate of reviving the nuclear deal.
Iranian leaders themselves seem determined to crush the protests; The country’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, looked visibly angry when the subject was brought up during a press conference at the United Nations General Assembly last week in New York.
In an interview with The New York Times over the weekend, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian admitted that “one of our daughters, a child from my country, was detained for a short time and ‘She died after three days’. He offered no theory on how it happened and said the country must quell any violent protests.
“We are not going to allow instigation and also propaganda from outside and from the media to endanger the stability and security and safety of our people,” he added.
Alan Yuhas contributed reporting from New York.