Hossein Mousavian

Hossein Mousavian
Mousavian in 2003
Senior Negotiator of Iran for Nuclear Issue
In office 2003–2005
President	Mohammad Khatami
Chief Negotiator	Hassan Rouhani
Preceded by	Office created
Succeeded by	Javad Vaidi
Iranian Ambassador to Germany
In office 1990–1997
President	Mohammad Khatami Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani
Personal details
Born	1957 (age 59–60) Kashan, Iran
Political party	Moderation and Development Party
Other political affiliations	Islamic Republican Party (1979–1987)
Alma mater	Iran University of Science and Technology Sacramento City College Sacramento State University University of Tehran University of Kent

Seyed Hossein Mousavian (born 1957 in Kashan) is an Iranian policymaker and scholar who served on Iran’s nuclear diplomacy team in negotiations with the EU and International Atomic Energy Agency. He currently resides in the United States, where he is a visiting research scholar at Princeton University.

Mousavian was born in 1957 to a prosperous carpet-dealing family in Kashan, a major carpet-manufacturing center. His family had close ties to the Motalefeh, a religiously oriented revolutionary movement that dated back to the early 1960s and was eventually absorbed into the Islamic Republican Party (IRP). Mousavian studied at the Iran University of Science and Technology, as well as Sacramento City College and Sacramento State University in the United States.

In 1981 he was awarded a Bachelor of Science degree in Engineering from Sacramento State University of California. He was awarded an MA in International Relations from the University of Tehran in 1998 and a PhD in the same subject from the University of Kent at Canterbury in 2002.

It has been speculated that Mousavian's father’s connections in Motalefeh helped him win access to leading IRP figures, as a consequence of which he was named editor-in-chief of the Tehran Times, the revolution's English-language newspaper, which was established by IRP founder Mohammad Hosseini Beheshti. During his editorial tenure, from 1980 to 1990, Mousavian authored more than 2,000 articles. He also held a number of positions in the Iranian government in the 1980s, including a stint as Vice President of the Islamic Propagation Organization (1981–1983), worked with future-President Hashemi Rafsanjani as Chairman of the Parliament Administration Organization (1983–1986), and was Head and then Director General of the West Europe department of the Foreign Ministry (1986–1989). During the 1980s, Mousavian played a major role in what he later described, in a 2012 book, as “Iran's humanitarian intervention to secure the release of Western hostages in Lebanon.” However, the hostage-takers (Hezbollah), had acted on instructions from the government in Tehran.