“They are trying to make a case to their own constituents, and to international constituents, that what has taken place has a foreign element behind it, so dual nationals, people with ties to Western NGOs, are targets,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a friend of Tajbakhsh. “I don’t believe for a second that they genuinely perceive Kian to be a threat to national security.”…

Friends said he [Kian] had purposely avoided the election-related turmoil, even abstaining from voting. “He felt confident there was no rationale for him to be imprisoned,” Sadjadpour said. Two days after the vote, Tajbakhsh wrote to him in an e-mail: “I’m keeping my head down. I have nothing journalistic to add to all the reports that are here.”…

“I can guess that they were digging into the velvet revolution file, and they needed a credible voice to talk about this velvet revolution, and the only person who was there was Kian,” [Haleh Esfandiari] said. “I’ve heard they have rooms full of charts about universities, think tanks, NGOs and are then drawing parallels from Georgia, Ukraine and so on. And then they go after truly, truly innocent people like Kian.”…

[Full article: With Iran Blaming West, Dual Citizens are Targets]

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Kian Tajbakhsh, Maziar Bahari, Washington Post, Karim Sadjadpour, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Haleh Esfandiari