Ben Carson says Mahmoud Abbas, Ali Khamenei, Vladimir Putin knew each other in 1968 Moscow

It sounds like the opening to a joke: A young Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and Russian President Vladimir Putin walk into a Soviet-era Moscow university … 

But it’s a claim that was made with a straight face by Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson — on national television, three times.

Really? Three future world leaders — and three people many Americans consider adversaries — found themselves kicking around a university in Moscow in 1968, building ties that would serve them decades later? We had to check it out.

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We did not hear back from the Iranian mission to the United Nations, but Ali Alfoneh, a researcher at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, looked into the question in 2012 when he was at the American Enterprise Institute. He wrote, “According to Khamenei’s official biography, he travelled to Iraq in 1957 to study at the Theological Seminary in Najaf. Since the People’s Friendship University was first established (as Lumumba) in 1960, the young Khamenei could not have used his journey to Iraq as a cover for his studies in the Soviet Union.”

On the other hand, Alfoneh continued, Khamenei’s biography says he spent a “clandestine life” in Tehran between March 1966 and March 1967, after which he was arrested by the police and imprisoned. The existence of this “clandestine” period may have fed the rumor that he spent time studying in Moscow. Certainly a period studying in the “godless” Soviet Union would be something Khamenei — the head of a theocracy — would want to keep under wraps.

In an interview, Alfoneh said he isn’t convinced of the Khamenei-in-the-Soviet-Union claim. “I'm very skeptical,” he said.

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Read the full article here.