Seyed Hossein Mousavian

Seyed Hossein Mousavian (, born in 1957 in Kashan) is an Iranian policymaker and scholar who served on Iran's nuclear diplomacy team in negotiations with the EU and International Atomic Energy Agency.

He resides in the United States and is a visiting research scholar at Princeton University.

Mousavian was born in 1957 to a prosperous carpet-dealing family in Kashan, a major carpet-manufacturing center.

His family had close ties to the Motalefeh, a religiously oriented revolutionary movement that dated back to the early 1960s and was eventually absorbed into the Islamic Republican Party (IRP).

Mousavian studied at the Iran University of Science and Technology, as well as Sacramento City College and Sacramento State University in the United States.

During his editorial tenure, from 1980 to 1990, Mousavian authored more than 2,000 articles.

He also held several positions in the Iranian government in the 1980s, including a stint as Vice President of the Islamic Propagation Organization (1981–1983), worked with future President Hashemi Rafsanjani as Chairman of the Parliament Administration Organization (1983–1986), and was Head and then Director General of the West Europe department of the Foreign Ministry (1986–1989).

During the 1980s, Mousavian played a major role in what he later described, in a 2012 book, as “Iran's humanitarian intervention to secure the release of Western hostages in Lebanon.” However, the hostage-takers (Hezbollah), had acted on instructions from the government in Tehran.

In 1981 he was awarded a Bachelor of Science in Engineering from Sacramento State University of California.

Mousavian was Iran's Ambassador to Germany from 1990 to 1997.

Mousavian meanwhile continued his education in the late 1990s, receiving a master's degree from the University of Tehran in 1998, and a Ph.D. from the University of Kent in the UK in international relations in 2002.

He helped to secure the release of two German hostages held by Hezbollah in Lebanon from 1990 to 1993 and American and other Western hostages held in Lebanon from 1998–1999, as well as contributing to the mediation of the largest-ever humanitarian exchange between Israel and Lebanese Hezbollah under Germany's auspices (1995–1996).

Four Iranian dissidents were murdered at Berlin's Mykonos restaurant in 1992, and five years later, a German court concluded that Iran's Special Affairs Committee had ordered the murders and that the supreme leader, president, foreign minister, and intelligence minister of Iran were all active members of that committee.

The court found an Iranian intelligence officer and three Lebanese men guilty and issued an arrest warrant for Iran's intelligence minister.

Also, Germany expelled four Iranian diplomats and asked that Mousavian be recalled to Iran; he did return to Tehran shortly thereafter.

After the issuance of the arrest warrant for the intelligence minister, which Mousavian described as an insult to the entire population of Iran, Iranian news agencies made veiled threats against Germans abroad.

Mousavian echoed, saying that if European nations kept treating Iran as America and Israel did, then they would be treated the same way by Iran.

During Mousavian's ambassadorial tenure, the Salman Rushdie affair took place, and Mousavian went on German radio to announce that Iran would not lift its fatwa against the writer.

In the same interview, he expressed skepticism that Germany would risk its trade relations with Iran by protesting the Rushdie fatwa.

Because of this statement, Social Democratic politician Freimut Duve called for Mousavian's expulsion, saying that he had, in effect, publicly expressed agreement with the fatwa; politicians from other parties echoed Duve's call.

The German Foreign Ministry, moreover, summoned Mousavian to a meeting.

Subsequently, he headed the Foreign Relations Committee of the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) of Iran during the eight years of Mohammad Khatami's presidency.

He was awarded an MA in International Relations from the University of Tehran in 1998 and a Ph.D. in International Relations from the University of Kent at Canterbury in 2002.

Reuel Marc Gerecht of The Weekly Standard has speculated that Mousavian's father's connections in Motalefeh helped him win access to leading IRP figures and led to his being named editor-in-chief of the Tehran Times, the revolution's English-language newspaper, which was established by IRP founder Mohammad Hosseini Beheshti.

Mousavian also played a role in Iran's cooperation with the US in Afghanistan against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in 2001.

From 2003 to 2005, Mousavian was the Spokesman of the Iranian nuclear negotiation team, which in 2003 agreed for Iran to provisionally suspend uranium enrichment and allow inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency at its nuclear sites as confidence-building measures.

In 2004, while head of the negotiating team, Mousavian asserted Iran's sovereign right to pursue nuclear technology for civilian use and expressed satisfaction that the U.S. had been “isolated” by the IAEA in its attempt to pressure Iran.

He later served as Foreign Policy Advisor to Ali Larijani, Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council (2005-7), and Vice President of the Center for Strategic Research and in a variety of capacities for the Expediency Discernment Council's Center for Strategic Research (CSR) from 2005 to 2008.

During this period, he was Editor-in-Chief or a member of the Editorial Board for numerous CSR publications, including the Journal of Human Rights Studies, Journal of International Security and Terrorism, Rahbord (Strategy) Magazine, and Journal of Disarmament.

Mousavian played a role in several key developments during his more than two decades working on Iranian foreign affairs.

Mousavian's team was replaced shortly before the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as President in 2005, in tandem with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's announcement that Iran would resume enrichment activities.

Mousavian was arrested and briefly jailed by the Ahmadinejad administration in 2007 and publicly accused by the president of espionage for allegedly providing classified information to Europeans, including the British Embassy, before being cleared by the judiciary.

There was speculation that his arrest was part of a factional struggle between Ahmadinejad and a triumvirate of his opponents: Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Mohammad Khatami, and Hassan Rouhani, of whom Mousavian was considered an ally.

After a year, a spokesman of Iran's judiciary announced that Mousavian had been cleared of the espionage charge after an investigation by three different judges.

However, the third of those judges had sentenced him to a suspended term of two years in prison and to a five-year ban from official diplomatic posts because of his confessed opposition to President Ahmadinejad's foreign and nuclear policy.

Mousavian has been a visiting research scholar at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs since 2009.

Mousavian expressed deep concern about developments in Iran after that country's 2009 presidential election but continued "to press for the U.S. to engage Tehran in a bid to reduce regional tensions," according to a 2010 article by Jay Solomon in the Wall Street Journal.

Mousavian believes that any future Iranian government will continue to pursue a nuclear fuel program, and that the U.S. should therefore improve relations with Tehran as a safeguard against an atomic weapons program.

Accusations were renewed on August 22, 2010, when the Ministry of Intelligence issued a statement repeating the old claims publicly announced by Ahmadinejad in 2007.

Mousavian's lawyer has questioned this development, arguing that the Ministry of Intelligence statement ran contrary to the verdict reached three years earlier by the Iranian judiciary.