Princelings of Persia

I used to dismiss what I thought was an urban myth that, to help sell Tehran on the nuke deal, President Barack Obama granted thousands of Iranian spies a backdoor path to residence and ultimately citizenship in the United States. After all, visas and green cards are not like the letters of transit in Casablanca, where you fill in your name and hop on the plane to Lisbon. U.S. consular rules would block such individuals from getting here anyway. Yet in the years after the Iran deal (known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA), this story got traction, even as Obama’s spokesmen naturally denied it.

But this year, this supposed myth was given new credibility with the arrest in Los Angeles of Shamim Mafi, an Iranian arms trafficker who came to California in 2013 and was given permanent residency under the Obama administration three years later. And it turns out Mafi is small potatoes compared to what a recent wave of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests and deportations has exposed: that upper Iranian terrorist nobility has been prospering all over the United States.

“They have eyes and ears everywhere,” Iranian American author and human-rights activist Elham Yaghoubian told me about the regime. “It peaked under Obama.”

For a prime example, look first to the $2 million five-bedroom, five-bath modern gray-and-white clapboard house in suburban Los Angeles that has been causing firestorms all over Iranian social media. Its most recent occupants have posted a two-and-a-half-minute video online showing off the grand front, the sprawling interior, and the adjoining elm-shaded McMansions. The camera loiters over the kitchen and dining room surfaces laden with an acre of holiday goodies, a great room of flat-screen TVs and speakers blaring performances nearly drowned out by clapping, while breakfronts full of bric-a-brac reflect, through their glass backing, glimpses of the LA woman documenting the vastness of her lavish residence.