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Here is an excellent article on our friend Banafsheh as it appeared, as I understand, in the Washington Post....

Profile: One woman's work for Iran

By Eli J. Lake
UPI State Department Correspondent

WASHINGTON, July 8 (UPI) -- On the first Thanksgiving after Sept. 11, 2001, Siamak Pourzand was abducted for the fourth time in 22 years by Iran's internal security services on charges that he was having an affair with the receptionist of the cultural center he was running.

While he was in prison, the septuagenarian film critic and journalist was kept in a roughly 6-by-6-foot cell with no windows. His captors played recordings of imams reading from the Koran at all hours, he was shocked repeatedly with electrical prods, and his guards would occasionally urinate in his mouth, according to his daughter. A year later he was released, but only after appearing several pounds lighter on a national television show called "Second Identity," where he was forced to admit to he had ties with exiled monarchists.

"It is really tough to see a parent in that state," Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi said, her voice trembling, fighting back tears. Zand-Bonazzi lives in New York and has not been in Iran for over 20 years. But the experience of fighting for her father's release from prison has reconnected her with her native land. "I realized that in order to fight for my father, I had to fight for my country."

Now she and a handful of other Iranian are working overtime to provide support for the burgeoning democracy movement there. Since the beginning of last month, Zand-Bonazzi has spent her evenings on the phone with contacts in Iran checking on the progress of the intermittent demonstrations in the country in the lead up to a general strike planned for Wednesday on the fourth anniversary of student protests. "You should see my phone bill," she says.

A curator by trade, Zand-Bonazzi is part of a network of Iranian Americans trying to raise funds for individuals that have taken their case to the Iranian diaspora. This network lobbies governments to withdraw support for the clerical regime in Tehran and Qom, often through the media.

"This is to support their demonstrations and their movement," Zand-Bonazzi said.

Zand-Bonazzi's work could prove a critical link between Washington and Tehran as the National Security Council continues to debate the prudence of the United States providing more direct support to the indigenous democrats fighting the mullahs. Since November, an ambitious policy directive on Iran has been deadlocked in debate as the State Department and members of the NSC staff have attempted to broach a dialogue with the Iranian regime.

The stakes are high. The same day that the activists in the country are planning a general strike, the International Atomic Energy Agency's Director General Mohammed ElBaradei is expected to arrive in Tehran to oversee another round of inspections of the country's nuclear-energy facilities. Last month, his agency issued a report that found numerous questions unanswered regarding whether certain facilities were cover for a weapons program.

Meanwhile, the demonstrators appear to be getting more restless. Zand-Bonazzi and others have developed a network of between 300 and 400 individuals on the ground in Iran who can distribute funds raised in the West.

"Over the last few years, a couple of hundred thousand dollars has been raised and sent to different leaders," she said. When asked for their names she said, "We'd rather have leaders who are alive and unknown, then famous and dead."

The choice for getting money to activists on the ground is often through simple wire transfers. Unlike Iraq, where the state kept close tabs on money wired from the West, it is fairly easy to get amounts under a $1,000 to individuals without the government knowing about it in Iran. "We wire it to somebody who then distributes it. We have a few people who do this," she said.

But sometimes this process is corrupted. She says there have been instances of individuals who were out for personal gain pocketing cash that was meant for students. Zand-Bonazzi also talks ominously about agents of the Islamic Republic working in other Iranian-American organizations. "We have identified people working for the mullahs. We know who they are."

But her work has not ended there. She has distributed pictures from Iran of recent demonstrations and a room at one university that has started a hunger strike. In addition, Zand-Bonazzi has worked closely with Sen. Brownback, R-Kan., and his staff for the passage of the Iran Democracy Act, a bill that would create a $50 million fund largely for broadcasts from California into Iran through satellite television and radio stations.

Within the Iranian-American community, the topic of direct U.S. funding for internal dissident groups is controversial. Assad Homayoun, a former diplomat under the shah who runs the Azadegan Foundation said in an interview, "We should get moral support and political support of the United States, but not money. Any national leader should depend on Iranian money."

Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi is trying her best to see to it that Iran's next leaders will get plenty of it today.