Chris Murphy and the Tehran Whisperer

On the evening of April 20, 2026, with American sailors enforcing a naval blockade of Iran in the middle of an active war, United States Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut pulled up his phone and typed a single word in response to a report that 26 Iranian shadow fleet vessels had slipped past the U.S. Navy.

“Awesome.”

The post he was amplifying came from Ali Vaez, the Iran Project Director at the International Crisis Group. Murphy would later claim the word was sarcasm. But the more interesting question isn’t what Murphy meant. It’s who Murphy was boosting, and why a sitting U.S. senator on the Foreign Relations Committee keeps finding himself in the orbit of a man whose own words, in his own emails, describe a loyalty that does not run to the United States.

Ali Vaez is the public name of Alireza Vaezzadeh. That isn’t a secret. He published scientific research under the longer name at Geneva University, signed a 2009 Tehran Bureau open letter as “Alireza Vaezzadeh, Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School, PhD, Pharmacology,” and Georgetown still lists him in its course catalog as Alireza Vaezzadeh. It’s just that when he pivoted from biomedicine to Iran policy, the shorter name traveled with him into the op-ed pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, and the green rooms of CNN, BBC, NPR, and Al Jazeera.

Born in Iran, Vaez was a student activist during the 1999 protests, then left for Europe. He earned a PhD from the University of Geneva in biomedicine and nuclear physics, did a postdoc at Harvard from 2008 to 2010, and pivoted to Washington think-tank work during the Obama administration. He landed first at the Federation of American Scientists, then at the International Crisis Group, where he became Iran Project Director and senior adviser to ICG’s president and a man named Robert Malley.

That detail matters, because Malley would become the center of one of the most consequential national security scandals of the Biden era and Vaez would be standing next to him the entire time.

On October 2, 2014, Vaez sat down to write a long email to Mohammad Javad Zarif, then the foreign minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Zarif had apparently complained about an ICG report he found too tough on Tehran. Vaez, in his reply, reassured Iran’s top diplomat about where his loyalties lay.

The email, which Semafor has seen and which Iran International obtained from a cache of leaked Iranian Foreign Ministry correspondence, stressed that ICG’s mission was to find “middle ground” and that its credibility depended on being seen as neutral by all sides. Then Vaez pivoted.

“As an Iranian,” he wrote to Zarif, “I considered it my national and patriotic duty to offer His Excellency help to publicly oppose the breakout time concept, and to help your team prepare a report on the practical needs of Iran.”

Read that sentence twice. It isn’t a journalist’s paraphrase, a translation issue, or Iranian regime spin about what was said to them. It is Ali Vaez, in his own words, pledging his “national and patriotic duty” to Iran’s foreign minister and offering to conduct a “public campaign” against an American negotiating position.

That American negotiating position was the one-year nuclear breakout window, the metric U.S. negotiators and outside nuclear experts, including former U.N. weapons inspector David Albright, argued was essential to any meaningful deal. Zarif’s team was, as Semafor’s reporting documents, “dead set against it.”

And Vaez delivered. Throughout 2014 and 2015, he wrote opinion pieces and gave public presentations opposing the breakout concept, even debating a top American nuclear expert on the question. In a March 2015 post on Crisis Group’s website, he declared that “five common misperceptions make breakout time a misleading gauge of the potential threat.” He had promised Tehran a campaign. He ran one.

This was not a one-off. Four months before the Zarif email, on June 4, 2014, Vaez had sent a draft op-ed, in Farsi, to Mostafa Zahrani, the head of Iran’s Foreign Ministry think tank IPIS and a Revolutionary Guards veteran. “I look forward to your comments and feedback,” Vaez wrote. Zahrani forwarded the draft to Zarif the same day. Twelve days later, the piece ran in The National Interest under a slightly different title, with “minor wording changes.” American readers of that magazine had no idea they were reading a piece Iranian diplomats had reviewed before publication.

A month before that, in April 2014, Zahrani wrote to Zarif about an upcoming Vienna meeting. “Following the order of his previous boss Malley,” Zahrani told the foreign minister, “Ali Vaez will come to Vienna. Who from our group do you instruct to have a meeting with him?”

The emails quoted above are part of a much larger cache obtained by Iran International, a Persian-language news channel banned inside Iran, and shared with Semafor. The emails revealed that in the spring of 2014, Zarif’s Foreign Ministry launched what it internally called the “Iran Experts Initiative” (IEI), a network of Iranian-born analysts embedded in Western think tanks whose job, according to an Iranian diplomat’s own description, was to serve as “a core group of 6 to 10 distinguished second-generation Iranians who have established affiliation with the leading international think-tanks and academic institutions, mainly in Europe and the US.”

The core members, named in the Iranian correspondence, included Ariane Tabatabai, Dina Esfandiary, and Ali Vaez. Tabatabai would later be hired into the Biden State Department by Robert Malley, then move to the Pentagon as chief of staff for the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations. Esfandiary would be hired at ICG by Malley shortly before Malley himself joined the Biden White House.

ICG and Vaez have disputed the characterization of the IEI as an Iranian-run operation, saying it was an informal European-funded network. Semafor’s own co-founder later published a column noting the British government was one of the European donors. That is a real qualification, and a serious exposé notes it.

But it doesn’t change what Vaez wrote in his own emails. Whatever the IEI’s org chart looked like on paper, Vaez told Iran’s foreign minister in writing that he felt a patriotic duty to Iran and would run public campaigns against U.S. positions on Tehran’s behalf. The question isn’t whether the IEI was a formal Iranian program. The question is what a man who writes emails like that is doing with a Georgetown adjunct appointment, a Crisis Group portfolio, and the cell phone numbers of Jake Sullivan’s staff.

When Joe Biden took office in January 2021 and appointed Malley as Special Envoy for Iran, Malley tried to bring Vaez with him into the State Department. He couldn’t. According to two sources familiar with the situation and a former colleague who spoke to Iran International, Vaez was unable to obtain the security clearance required for the appointment, which was quietly cancelled.

The U.S. government looked at Ali Vaez’s background and said no.

That should have been the end of Vaez’s proximity to the American government. It wasn’t. Malley kept him as a confidant outside the formal chain. Two people familiar with the situation told Iran International that Vaez drafted Malley’s tweets while Malley was America’s top Iran negotiator. And, remarkably, Vaez himself gained repeated access to the Biden White House.

White House visitor logs reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon show Vaez entering the grounds at least five times. In April and June 2022, he was escorted into the West Wing by Hazel Castillo and Kimberly Lang, personal assistants to National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. On February 3 and February 8, 2023, he met with Brett McGurk, the administration’s Middle East and North Africa coordinator. In March 2023, he attended a Nowruz event.

The Washington Examiner’s later review of the logs found Vaez, Esfandiary, and Tabatabai made ten White House visits combined between April 2022 and December 2023. Sullivan and McGurk were the two officials most responsible for the subsequent $6 billion prisoner-ransom deal with Iran.

A man the U.S. security apparatus wouldn’t clear to work for the State Department was walking into the West Wing to counsel the people shaping America’s Iran policy.

Vaez doesn’t operate in a vacuum. His employer, the International Crisis Group, has its own relationship with the Iranian Foreign Ministry that is difficult to square with the NGO’s claim of neutrality.

In 2016, ICG signed a formal Memorandum of Understanding with IPIS, the same Iranian Foreign Ministry think tank run by Zahrani. The agreement called for regular exchanges of academics, quarterly visits to Tehran by ICG’s top Iran analyst, and a commitment that ICG would host an annual conference for IPIS in Brussels or Istanbul. ICG never publicly disclosed the agreement. When Iran International’s reporting surfaced it, ICG’s chief advocacy officer Elissa Jobson declined to say whether the MOU was still in force.

Context: more than 50 Western research institutions had boycotted IPIS after Tehran hosted a notorious Holocaust denial conference in 2006. ICG was one of only two organizations that reversed course and formally partnered with IPIS a decade later. The current head of IPIS, Mohammad Hasan Sheikholeslami, congratulated Hamas two weeks after the October 7, 2023 massacre for their “glorious victory.”

In March 2024, ICG hired Mercury Public Affairs, its first registered Washington lobbying firm since the first quarter of 2015. The timing was not subtle. That February, Representatives Jim Banks, Elise Stefanik, and Mike Waltz had written to the Department of Justice asking for a formal investigation of ICG under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

A single email, damning as it is, isn’t the whole case. The real indictment is the consistency of Vaez’s public advocacy over a decade. On every major point where Iran’s stated interests diverge from American interests, Vaez has taken Iran’s side.

On nuclear breakout: opposed it publicly, after promising Zarif he would.

On maximum pressure sanctions: called them an “abject failure.”

On Republican opposition to reviving the JCPOA: said those Republicans “have no ground to stand on.”

On Israeli concerns about Iranian nuclear progress: declared “there is no deal that would ever satisfy Israel’s demands,” framing Israel, not Iran, as the obstacle to peace.

On the 2022 Mahsa Amini protests and Iran’s bloody crackdown: his co-authored book, How Sanctions Work, makes the case that sanctions don’t work and that economic pressure on Iran should be eased.

That is not the pattern of an analyst who “talks to all sides” and lets the chips fall. It’s the pattern of a man doing exactly what he told Zarif he would do, helping Iran publicly and assisting with the preparation of “reports on practical needs of Iran.”

Which brings us back to Chris Murphy.

The “awesome” tweet was not Chris Murphy’s first brush with the Islamic Republic. It was not even his tenth.

In February 2020, during Donald Trump’s first term, Murphy met secretly with Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif at the Munich Security Conference, the very same Zarif to whom Vaez had pledged his patriotic duty in 2014. The meeting was first exposed by The Federalist. Murphy did not disclose it before the fact. When it became public, he defended himself in a Medium post, arguing it is “dangerous not to talk to one’s enemies” and that “Congress is a co-equal branch of government, responsible along with the Executive for setting foreign policy.” A senator had decided, on his own authority, that he would conduct freelance diplomacy with an adversary whose regime was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of American service members.

In 2021, Murphy met with Iran’s U.N. Ambassador Majid Takht-Ravanchi, one of Zarif’s top deputies on the original nuclear negotiating team. He made it official: a readout posted on his Senate website.

In April 2022, Murphy went on MSNBC and argued that the United States should remove Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from the Foreign Terrorist Organization list if that was the price of restoring the nuclear deal. The IRGC is the force responsible, per declassified reporting, for the deaths of over 600 American service members in Iraq via its backed militias. Murphy called the FTO designation “practically insignificant.” Nine hundred Gold Star families and wounded veterans publicly wrote to President Biden begging him not to take the step Murphy was urging.

And then on April 20, 2026, with the U.S. Navy enforcing a wartime blockade against Iran, Murphy saw a tweet from Ali Vaez, the same analyst who had pledged patriotic duty to Zarif, who lost a U.S. security clearance, who advised Malley off the books, who ghostwrote the Iran envoy’s tweets, and replied: “Awesome.”

Murphy’s office, after the backlash, put out a statement saying the tweet was “sarcasm” about Trump’s handling of the war. “Chris obviously thinks it’s terrible that Donald Trump continues to mishandle every aspect of a war he started but clearly has no strategy to end,” a spokesperson told Fox News Digital. Murphy himself told reporters “Twitter” is a “cesspool” where “sarcasm is not something, I guess, that’s allowed.”

Why was Chris Murphy, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, reading and amplifying Ali Vaez to begin with? Why is the default source for a U.S. senator’s commentary on a U.S. military operation a man the U.S. government wouldn’t clear? Why does Murphy’s long record, Munich, Takht-Ravanchi, the IRGC delisting push, meetings with the architects of Iran’s influence network, suggest that his sympathies in the war between Tehran and Washington are unusually complex for a sitting American senator?

By the time Murphy hit send, Fox News chief foreign correspondent Trey Yingst was already reporting from the region that there was no evidence any Iranian ships had actually moved through the Strait of Hormuz. The claim Vaez amplified was contested, and may have been Iranian information operations. Murphy couldn’t possibly have known whether it was true. He only knew whose claim it was. And he celebrated it.

The failure here isn’t Vaez’s. Vaez has been remarkably consistent about who he is. The failure is American institutional: the think tanks that credential him as neutral, the green-room bookers who call him an independent analyst, the universities that put “adjunct professor” next to his name without an asterisk, the White House staff that waves him through the gate, and the United States senators who reflexively retweet him because he tells them what they want to hear about the president they hate.

Chris Murphy reposted Ali Vaez and wrote “awesome” because, the alignment between them is real. That and if itself is the actual problem here. Murphy doesn’t need to be a foreign agent to be a bad senator. He just needs to keep treating men like Vaez as friends, and American policy against Iran as the enemy.

He has been doing both, in the open, for more than six years.

Sources: Semafor’s investigation “Inside Iran’s Influence Operation” (Sept. 2023) and “How Iran used its ties to a top global NGO” (Feb. 2024); Iran International’s “Inside Tehran’s Soft War” and “Covert Ties Between Iran and the International Crisis Group”; Washington Free Beacon reporting on White House visitor logs; Tablet Magazine, “High-Level Iranian Spy Ring Busted in Washington”; The Dispatch, Jewish Policy Center, and Foreign Relations Committee letters from Sens. Risch, Hagerty, and Reps. McCaul and Mast; Washington Examiner, “Iranian influence network members scored 10 Biden White House visits”; Washington Post opinion section on the IRGC FTO designation; The Federalist, “Chris Murphy Met Secretly With Iran’s Foreign Minister”; State Department OIG Special Review of the Malley clearance suspension.