Mystery Raid

[July 23rd, 2008] A federal raid on a Middle Eastern charity in Portland last week has alarmed the city’s Iranian-Americans—a community already shaken by strained relations between America and their homeland.

“I’m very worried, because I know that [the charity’s officials] have been really doing a great job in supporting kids that are in need,” says Goudarz Eghtedari, a local Iranian-American who’s a traffic engineer for the city of Vancouver.

An Iranian-American couple formed the charity, Child Foundation, in 1994 to sponsor poor children in developing countries, mainly Iran. It’s since grown to include Iraq, Turkey, Afghanistan, Indonesia and the United States, according to its website and staff, with $1.6 million in revenue in 2006.

The foundation’s Portland headquarters was the scene of the raid on the morning of July 15 when federal agents confiscated all five employees’ computers. The raid at their office on the fifth floor of the Terminal Sales Building at 1220 SW Morrison St. was witnessed by Dave Lister, a small-business owner and former Portland City Council candidate who was in the building visiting another office.

As first reported last week on WWire, Lister saw men in shirts that said “federal agent” hauling computers out of the office.

The FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office in Portland have declined to comment.

Hossein Salehi, office manager at Child Foundation, told WW he’s not sure which federal agency conducted the raid. Otherwise he declined to comment, as did Timothy Snider, Child Foundation’s attorney with Stoel Rives law firm in Portland.

The agents seized the computers the day before the charity was planning to move to a new office on the same floor of the building, according to two foundation employees who declined to give their names. The move happened as planned, but without the computers.

News of the raid stunned several in the local Iranian-American community, estimated at 5,000 to 10,000 people.

Yet it’s no surprise the feds would suspect an Iranian charity, says Ahmad Mostafavi, host of the local cable show My Iran. The United States and Iran have been locked in a diplomatic standoff since President Bush declared Iran part of an “axis of evil” along with Iraq and North Korea in 2002. More recent blowups have arisen over Iran’s nuclear program and alleged support for the Iraq insurgency.

“If an Iranian organization is collecting money and sending it to Iran, that is going to be of some concern for the United States,” says Mostafavi. “Any time you collect money and take it to other countries, there’s always a chance that it’s not really distributed in ways that they claim.”

But he and others are convinced Child Foundation does valuable work in countries where many charities don’t operate, such as helping victims of the 2003 earthquake in the southern Iranian city of Bam that killed 30,000.

Portland lawyer Neda Soofi has sponsored an Iranian girl for $30 a month through Child Foundation since last year and says she receives letters from the 10-year-old.

“It is not illegal to send charity money to countries such as Iran,” Soofi says. “You never know, with the U.S. government, they probably want to see what’s going on. This is the biggest Iranian charity in town.”

Soofi and Mostafavi say it’s unlikely that Salehi, the Child Foundation manager, is involved with the Iranian government. They know Salehi as a respected performer and composer who teaches local kids traditional Iranian music. Mostafavi says Salehi was a helicopter pilot for the Iranian military who likely burned his bridges with the regime when he left for America.

“He is a man with dignity, and he wouldn’t really get into something shady,” Mostafavi says. “It’s very unlikely that there is any cooperation between him and the Iranian government. Obviously he didn’t agree with what they were doing, otherwise he would have stayed.”

Child Foundation was founded by Mehrdad Yasrebi and Saideh Sharif-Kazemi, an Iranian-American husband and wife living in Clackamas. Yasrebi, 50, did not return a phone call seeking comment. According to the charity’s website, he’s a research scientist at Precision Castparts Corp. in its Milwaukie office; she works as a rehabilitation counselor in Portland.

Besides Yasrebi and Sharif-Kazemi, the charity’s five-member board of directors also includes an engineering professor at Pennsylvania State University, an engineer at ETA Inc. in Troy, Mich., and a Boeing consultant in Seattle, according to the website. All have Iranian names.

In an odd footnote to the raid on Oregon’s most prominent Iranian charity, the FBI is considering setting up a booth to recruit Farsi speakers at the ninth annual Iranian Festival in downtown Portland’s South Park Blocks on Aug. 2.

“The FBI nationwide is seeking Farsi linguists,” says Beth Anne Steele, spokeswoman for the Portland FBI office. “It’s not a secret that we’re recruiting linguists.”