Iran has accused a leading American academic, who has been in a Tehran prison for the last two weeks, of seeking to promote a “soft” revolution against the country’s Islamic government, The New York Times reported today. Iran’s Intelligence Ministry made the accusation against Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, in a statement reported on Iranian state television.

Ms. Esfandiari, who is 67 and a dual citizen of the United States and Iran, had been under house arrest since shortly after she arrived in the Iranian capital last December to visit her 93-year-old mother. Since May 8 she has been incarcerated in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison.

In their statement on Monday, the Iranian authorities said that Ms. Esfandiari and the Wilson center had been working with similar groups, including the Soros Foundation, toward the “soft-toppling of the country.” The statement said the scholar had confirmed that the Wilson center “invited Iranians to attend conferences, offered them research projects, scholarships … and tried to lure influential elements and link them to decision-making centers in America.”

Ms. Esfandiari’s detention and Monday’s accusation have brought widespread condemnation from American academics, including Noam Chomsky at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Juan Cole at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and the American Association of University Professors. Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian human-rights lawyer and Nobel Peace Prize winner, has reportedly been denied permission to represent the imprisoned scholar. —Burton Bollag