Nilofar told Asia Times Online over a series of three interviews from last September to February: "When I arrived in Dubai, the other participants were very surprised to see me and told me that these workshops are only for activists. So I don't know how I got in, really, except if their selection process is not as stringent as they would make it out to be."

Once in Dubai, Nilofar was booked by one of two organizations running the program into the Holiday Inn. She recounts that the course organizers were a mixture of Los Angeles-based exiled Iranians, Americans who appeared to supervise the course and whose affiliation remained unclear throughout, and three Serbs who said they belonged to the Otpor democratic movement that overthrew the late Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic in 2000.

The highly secretive nature of the workshops meant that they were misleadingly advertised in the lobby of the hotel as a conference by the "Griffin Hospital". The organizers, instructors and students identified themselves through aliases and were instructed to communicate with one another after the course was over through Hushmail accounts, an encrypted e-mail service that claims to be hack-proof.

In class, the Serbian instructors organized role-playing games in which the participants would assume the personas of characters such an Iranian woman or a Shi'ite cleric. Throughout these exercises in empathy and psychology, stress was laid on the importance of ridiculing the political elite as an effective tool of demythologizing them in the eyes of the people.

"They taught us what methods they used in Serbia to bring down Milosevic," Nilofar said. "They taught us some of them so we could choose the best one to bring down the regime, but they didn't mention directly bringing down the regime - they just taught us what they had done in their own country."

Cyrus Safdari, an independent Iranian analyst, said: "As I gather, the idea was to fund and train activists to be agents provocateurs along the lines of the Otpor movement in Serbia. Their job was to utilize various techniques, such as anti-government graffiti etc, to embolden the student movement and provoke a general government crackdown, which could then be used as a pretext to 'spark' a mass uprising in Iran that appeared to be spontaneous and indigenous."

Nilofar's invitation to attend the Dubai sessions arrived last July, several months before the administration of US President George W Bush requested an extra US$75 million of funding from Congress to accelerate its efforts to achieve regime change inside Iran.

Last week, State Department deputy spokesman Adam Ereli announced that a newly established Office of Iranian Affairs within the department would focus on introducing democracy in Iran. The top officials behind the new policy are said to be Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns, Elizabeth Cheney (Vice President Dick Cheney's daughter), Scott Carpenter and David Denehy, in addition to the secretary of state herself, Condoleezza Rice.

Composed of up to 15 Farsi-speaking officers spread across US diplomatic posts neighboring Iran and in European capitals with large Iranian communities, the office would aim to develop Iran experts whose "primary language would be Farsi", Ereli said.

"We need to develop a cadre of foreign-service officers who speak Farsi, who understand the region - not just Iran, but the region where Iran has influence and reach - and understand Iran," Ereli said.

"The logic of putting people out in the field [is] to use the language, to develop the on-the-ground expertise so that 10, 15, 20 years from now, we've got - just like we have Arab experts ... we used to have Soviet experts - we've got a cadre of Iran experts."

The Iran office representative in Frankfurt, for example, will "be working with the Farsi speakers in Frankfurt and monitoring developments in Iran from that location", Ereli added.

According to Henry Precht, a former US diplomat who presided over the Iran desk during the Iran hostage crisis of 1979, the State Department intends "to beef up the training of officers in the history, language and culture of the country and put them in touch in Dubai with oppositionists".

The State Department's initiative will presumably complement the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers specializing in Iran who are based out of neighboring countries, such as the UAE, Turkey and Azerbaijan.

One such agent was Reuel Marc Gerecht, a CIA case officer in the 1980s who worked under diplomatic cover in the US Consulate in Istanbul. His job was to debrief would-be Iranian defectors and - as he describes in his book Know Thine Enemy - it often felt like a "chance to play God".

"I'd let hundreds of desperate Iranians languish in Turkey. People who'd given me insights never found in books. I'd watched mothers with children drop to their knees and beg for my help," he wrote. "They didn't want money, just a little kindness, a visa out of their personal hell ... [they met] a sympathetic man waiting in a warm room full of food, coffee, tea, alcohol and cigarettes. A US official who'd politely strip them of all their memories and every corpuscle of information and then reopen the street-side door."

Whether the State Department's new initiative proves successful or not, the huge publicity and acute suspicion that already surround it can only make its task harder.

"I guess the whole program had developed some serious leaks," commented Safdari, the Iranian political analyst, "since I heard about it repeatedly from various guests at various Iranian social functions who wanted to show off about how well connected to the CIA they had become."

Safdari added that the inspiration for the workshops such as the one in Dubai may find provenance in one of the right-wing Washington think-tanks that has a proven track record of providing inspiration for Bush administration policy initiatives in the Middle East.

As for the funding, he believes that it may come "only indirectly from the US government ... I'm not sure if that meant the project belonged to some 'political entrepreneurs' acting independently of the US government, or if these are just standard measures intended to create plausible deniability".

Nilofar is similarly unimpressed by the caliber of the trainees that she encountered in Dubai. She describes the majority as "power-hungry", mahrum - a Farsi word meaning deprived - and beset by temper tantrums.

"Of the political activists now in the country, many come from lower-class families who have been deprived of everything and now they've decided to overthrow the government," Nilofar said. "But what they don't understand is that the idiot students who are being beaten up now, they will not be tomorrow's leaders, they'll be pushed aside.

"The Iranians kept on drinking and drinking and drinking," Nilofar said. "And they made endless phone calls, thinking that the Americans would pay for them. But in the end, they didn't."