Brian Hook, the US special representative for Iran and senior adviser to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (Photo by AFP)

The United States’ point man on Iran met with a representative of the anti-Iran Mujahedin-e-Khalq Organization (MKO) terrorist group both before and after Washington’s assassination of senior Iranian commander Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani, a report says.

Brian Hook, the US’s special representative for Iran and senior adviser to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, held the meetings with Robert G. Joseph, who represents the so-called National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) in September and on January 31, American news and opinion website The Daily Beast reported on Tuesday.

On its website, the NCRI calls itself the MKO’s umbrella coalition, but many consider the two to be synonymous.

Joseph referred to the meetings in a semi-annual report he filed with the US Justice Department earlier this week in line with the US’s Foreign Agent Registration Act.

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The US assassinated General Soleimani, the former commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), and a number of others in a set of drone strikes targeting Baghdad’s civilian airport on January 3.

General Soleimani, who has earned reputation as the region’s most popular anti-terror military figure, was on an official visit to the Iraqi capital during the air raids.

Joseph, a former senior State Department official under President George W. Bush, advises the NCRI at $15,000 a month. Relentlessly an Iran hawk, Joseph told a meeting of the group last March that he hoped that the Iranian government would soon fall.

The MKO has a conducted a litany of assassinations and bombings against Iranian officials and civilians since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. It notoriously sided with former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein during Iraq’s Western-backed imposed war of 1980-88 against the Islamic Republic.

Out of the nearly 17,000 Iranians killed in terrorist assaults since the Revolution’s victory, about 12,000 have fallen victim to the MKO’s acts of terror.