Foreign influence does not always begin with espionage, clandestine payments, or orders delivered behind closed doors. In Washington, it can be much less conspicuous. It can take shape through the people considered authoritative on Iran, the arguments that find a home in major newspapers and think tanks, the experts invited into policymakers’ offices, and the assumptions that gradually harden into conventional wisdom about U.S. foreign policy.

That possibility requires careful distinctions. An analyst who agrees with Tehran on a particular issue is not necessarily working for Tehran. Contact with Iranian officials is not, by itself, proof of foreign direction. Researchers, journalists, advocates, and diplomats regularly exchange information with governments, including adversarial ones. The meaningful question is whether Iranian state institutions have tried to cultivate relationships within the networks that produce expertise and policy advice, and, if so, when legitimate exchange begins to resemble organized influence.

The Kiyan circle offers a useful starting point, though not because it was an Iranian influence operation. Kiyan was an influential intellectual journal and network that emerged in Iran during the 1990s, closely associated with the country’s “religious intellectuals.” These thinkers questioned rigid interpretations of the Islamic Republic and debated democracy, pluralism, civil society, political development, and the relationship between religious authority and government power.

Encyclopaedia Iranica describes the “Kiyan circle” as a prominent expression of the pro-democracy Islamic reformist discourse of the period. It associates the circle with figures including Abdolkarim Soroush, Mohammad Mojtahed-Shabestari, Mohsen Kadivar, Alireza Alavitabar, Saeed Hajjarian, and Abbas Abdi. They were hardly interchangeable. Each brought a different intellectual background, political outlook, and degree of engagement with Iran’s institutions.

Soroush became one of the country’s most influential religious intellectuals. Hajjarian combined political theory with the practical demands of reformist politics and became a central figure in debates about “political development.” Academic research published by Cambridge University Press characterizes him as an important reformist strategist whose ideas helped shape political discourse during Mohammad Khatami’s presidency, from 1997 to 2005.

Kiyan’s significance extended beyond the pages of a journal. Historian Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi describes Iranian reformism as developing through a partly institutionalized network of scholars, journalists, activists, reading groups, periodicals, research circles, and think tanks.

After Khatami’s election in 1997, members of these overlapping circles moved into national newspapers and other institutions, bringing arguments previously confined to smaller intellectual communities before a broader public.

But the history has limits that matter. There is no solid evidence that Kiyan was created to serve a foreign-influence strategy or to groom people for roles in Western institutions. Those involved ultimately followed sharply divergent paths: some entered government, others worked in journalism or academia, and still others experienced imprisonment, exile, or open opposition to the Islamic Republic. To turn that complicated history into a tale of a coordinated state operation would obscure more than it explains.

What the circle does illustrate is the emergence of Iranian thinkers and political intermediaries able to translate debates within the Islamic Republic into a language recognizable beyond it: democracy, civil society, political development, religious freedom, and human rights. Their arguments were often directed at Iranian audiences, but the ability to interpret Iran across intellectual and political cultures would later become especially valuable abroad.

Washington, meanwhile, has built an elaborate marketplace for expertise. Universities, think tanks, advocacy organizations, newsrooms, congressional offices, and executive-branch agencies routinely exchange personnel, research, and arguments. Within that marketplace, expertise can become political capital. A person who understands the Islamic Republic’s internal dynamics while speaking fluently in the idiom of American foreign policy can help shape how officials and the public understand events thousands of miles away.

Iranian Americans and Iranian émigrés entered that world through countless independent routes, often motivated by experiences and convictions at odds with Tehran’s. Their presence in U.S. institutions cannot reasonably be treated as evidence of Iranian state influence. The narrower, more defensible question is whether officials in Iran recognized the strategic value of access to this community and sought to build relationships with some of its members. The available evidence suggests that parts of Iran’s diplomatic establishment did.

The controversy surrounding the National Iranian American Council, or NIAC, illustrates why the distinction between political advocacy and foreign agency must be maintained. NIAC became a prominent voice in Washington debates about U.S.-Iran diplomacy, sanctions, and Iranian-American political participation. Its positions also attracted intense scrutiny and accusations about its relationship with Tehran.

One pivotal dispute was National Iranian American Council v. Daioleslam, decided at the district-court level in 2012, and the subsequent appeal, Parsi v. Daioleslam, in 2015. NIAC and its founder, Trita Parsi, sued Hassan Daioleslam over writings portraying them as secretly lobbying for the Iranian government. The U.S. District Court granted summary judgment in Daioleslam’s favor. Crucially, however, that ruling was not a judicial finding that NIAC or Parsi were Iranian agents. The legal issue was defamation, particularly whether the plaintiffs could prove “actual malice.”

The proceedings did yield serious findings about discovery. In 2015, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit described repeated failures to produce relevant material and upheld most of the monetary sanctions imposed by the lower court. Those findings should not be minimized.

Neither should they be transformed into a ruling on Iranian agency that the courts did not make. Litigation misconduct and foreign-government direction are different claims, requiring different evidence.

Parsi later co-founded the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, which openly promotes diplomatic engagement and military restraint in American foreign policy. Its initial supporters included the Open Society Foundations and the Charles Koch Foundation, among other donors. Quincy says it does not accept funding from foreign governments. The institute’s policy preferences, like NIAC’s, may sometimes coincide with positions favored by Tehran. That overlap alone establishes nothing about who directs an organization’s work.

Indeed, disagreement over sanctions, military intervention, or regime change is a normal part of American politics. Treating those views as evidence of foreign allegiance would substitute ideological suspicion for investigation. The more revealing issue is not whether experts express conclusions Iran might welcome, but whether Iranian officials actively sought to establish and use relationships with experts operating inside Western institutions.

The Iran Experts Initiative, or IEI, brings that question into clearer focus. In 2023, Semafor reported on a cache of Iranian Foreign Ministry correspondence obtained by Iran International. According to Semafor, Iran International translated the Persian-language documents, and Semafor’s reporters independently verified them. The correspondence, however, may not represent the complete record, a limitation that matters when trying to reconstruct the purposes, scope, and outcomes of the initiative.

In a March 5, 2014, email, Iranian diplomat Saeed Khatibzadeh described the IEI as a core group of approximately six to ten second-generation Iranians affiliated with leading academic institutions and think tanks, principally in the United States and Europe. In subsequent correspondence, he said he had discussed the initiative with academics Ariane Tabatabai and Dina Esfandiary. Those messages provide a documentary basis for examining contacts between Iranian diplomats and Western-based researchers. They do not, on their own, establish that the researchers were taking instructions from Tehran.

The initiative’s character remains disputed. The International Crisis Group, which employed some of the individuals named in the correspondence, told Semafor that the IEI was an informal platform for researchers, not an Iranian Foreign Ministry-controlled project. Crisis Group said European institutions and a European government provided its financial support. Later reporting identified that government as the United Kingdom. These competing accounts make the provenance and governance of the initiative important questions, not settled conclusions.

Other emails, however, point to substantive exchanges with Iranian officials. Semafor reported that International Crisis Group analyst Ali Vaez sent a draft article about nuclear negotiations to Iranian official Mostafa Zahrani before publication. Vaez acknowledged sharing the draft but rejected the implication that Tehran controlled his analysis. He said the published piece criticized both sides and was not substantively changed as a result of the exchange. Crisis Group likewise says its analysts’ published conclusions are determined internally, not by governments.

The reporting also indicated that Iranian officials followed the publications, interviews, and media appearances of people connected to the IEI correspondence. That activity is significant, even if its meaning remains open to debate. Why would diplomats want to identify specialists inside influential Western institutions, maintain contact with them, and monitor their reach? What did Iranian officials hope those relationships would accomplish? And did monitoring ever translate into meaningful influence over what was published or recommended?

The documents do not answer every question. They provide, nonetheless, a firmer basis for investigating an influence strategy than simply compiling a list of analysts whose views happen to align with Tehran’s. The difference is between examining records of relationships and imputing motives from opinions.

Soft power, in this context, may be less about recruiting public defenders than about gaining a place in the conversation where policy options are defined. An unmistakably pro-government spokesperson can have little credibility with skeptical audiences in Washington. A connection to a respected researcher or an established policy institution may offer access to discussions that official messaging cannot easily enter. That possibility is not evidence that every such contact is improper. It is a reason to examine how contacts are initiated, maintained, and used.

A government seeking influence might not need to dictate an analyst’s conclusions. It might instead try to make certain facts, frames, arguments, or policy choices more visible to the people who shape public debate. Influence of that kind can be difficult to distinguish from ordinary diplomacy, which also involves communicating perspectives, cultivating contacts, and seeking an audience. The distinction turns on conduct, institutional relationships, transparency, and evidence of coordination, rather than on whether a particular opinion is politically convenient for a foreign government.

An investigation should therefore ask concrete questions. Who proposed a network, and who selected its participants? Were unpublished drafts or policy recommendations shared with officials? Did officials request feedback, suggest changes, or track how their preferred arguments circulated? Were financial or institutional ties involved? Did participants disclose relevant relationships to employers, audiences, or government bodies where disclosure was required? And, most importantly, what evidence shows that any interaction went beyond the exchange of information?

Such questions help distinguish legitimate scholarship and diplomacy from stronger forms of coordinated influence without casting entire communities of researchers or advocates under suspicion. They also prevent the inquiry from collapsing into a partisan exercise in which a person’s position on diplomacy becomes the chief evidence against them.

This is where the Kiyan circle and the IEI must be kept apart. The available evidence does not establish that they belonged to a single operation, nor does it show a direct organizational chain from Iranian reformist circles of the 1990s to researchers working in Western capitals decades later. Their connection is analytical, not operational.

Kiyan demonstrates how an intricate network of intellectuals, journalists, and political figures developed new ways to understand and debate the Islamic Republic. The Iranian diaspora subsequently brought a wide variety of experiences and expertise into Western universities, media organizations, and policy institutions. Those developments arose from numerous political and personal circumstances, including opposition to the Iranian state. Neither is proof of government direction.

The IEI documents add a different, more concrete element: evidence that Iranian diplomats understood the potential value of relationships with specialists situated within Western policy debates. How those relationships worked, what influence they may have produced, and whether particular interactions crossed legal or ethical lines require careful case-by-case scrutiny. The record cannot support a blanket indictment of reformists, Iranian-American advocates, or Western specialists on Iran.

The real question, then, is not who can be branded an “Iranian agent.” It is how the Islamic Republic has attempted to gain access to the institutions in which knowledge becomes authority and authority can shape U.S. policy. That inquiry is most credible when it follows documents, exchanges, funding, disclosures, and demonstrable outcomes. The story of Iranian soft power is not a shortcut to identifying villains. It is a test of whether Washington can distinguish the circulation of ideas from the deliberate cultivation of influence.