Alum Javad Zarif: The New National Icon of Pro-reform Iranians

YOUR MIDDLE EAST -- Javad Zarif was the permanent representative of Iran to the United Nations from 2002 until July 2007 when Ahmadinejad removed him from his post less than two years after being elected president. However, he had been working with Iran’s mission to New York since 1982, the same year he graduated from San Francisco State University with a Master of Arts in International Relations. Having lived in the United States since he was 17, Zarif developed a remarkable English fluency and made many contacts in the political and diplomatic circles of the United States, and the Iranian mission to New York, seeking to absorb young interns and junior diplomats with revolutionary mindset — Iranians had just dethroned the U.S.-backed monarch Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in their popular uprising in 1979 and installed an Islamic Republic in Tehran — would graciously welcome a recent International Relations graduate who spoke English as proficiently as his mother tongue.