For some time The Lede has been wondering what sort of person works at the Web site of Press TV, Iran’s state-supported, English-language satellite channel. After all, to judge by what’s written on blogs and Twitter accounts by Web-savvy Iranians who speak English, that part of the country’s population seems to skew quite heavily against the current government, which owns Press TV and clearly exerts an influence over its reports.
Two weeks ago, The Times of London discovered that until recently, the man running Press TV’s Web site was an American who fled the United States in 1980 after carrying out a political assassination in the Washington suburbs on behalf of the Iranian government.
The man, who now uses the name Hassan Abdulrahman, was formerly known as known as Dawud Salahuddin — which is the name he took at the age of 18 when he converted to Islam and first got involved with Islamist radical movements in the United States. (Before that he was David Theodore Belfield, the son of a churchgoing Baptist family from Bay Shore, Long Island.)
