Iran Arms Trip Informant in Court

The man who leaked news of last November’s secret trip to Tehran by former U.S. National Security Adviser Robert C. McFarlane and Lt. Col. Oliver L. North is being tried in a “spiritual court,” Iran’s official news agency said Saturday.

The Islamic Republic News Agency, IRNA, said Mehdi Hashemi went on trial in Tehran on Thursday and is charged with murder, kidnaping and plotting to topple the government.

Hashemi, former head of the Global Islamic Movement that is in charge of exporting Iran’s fundamentalist revolution, was also charged with weapons smuggling, IRNA reported in a broadcast monitored in Nicosia.

Hashemi’s arrest, which came almost immediately after word was leaked of the U.S. trip, at first clouded the political future of his brother-in-law, the Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, the handpicked successor to Iran’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Hashemi allegedly used Montazeri’s office as a base for subversive operations. Montazeri himself was eventually cleared of any suspicion when Hashemi appeared on Iranian television last November and confessed that he abused Montazeri’s confidence by leaking to a Lebanese weekly magazine the news of the U.S. trip.

Hashemi and his colleagues were reportedly dismayed at the secret contacts between U.S. officials and such Iranian leaders as Speaker of the Parliament Hashemi Rafsanjani, reportedly the mastermind behind the arms deal.