When the press minister at Pakistan’s Washington embassy was woken on Monday night by a journalist asking him to confirm that an Iranian nuclear scientist had sought refuge there after fleeing from the CIA, he was astonished. “It sounded like a spy movie,” he said.
Shahram Amiri told Pakistani officials he had been kidnapped in the holy Saudi city of Medina during a pilgrimage in June last year, and drugged. He woke up in Arizona.
The US State Department insisted he had defected of his own accord and American officials dismissed his abduction story as a “fairy tale”, saying he had been paid $5m (£3.3m) by the CIA.
Amiri, 32, told the Pakistanis he wanted to go home because he missed his seven-year-old son and was worried about threats to his wife. He is now a pawn in a vicious propaganda war between Iran and the US, with one side claiming he was a double agent while the other says he spilled the secrets of the Iranian nuclear programme for years.
When the CIA arranges defections, it usually gets the families out. In this case, something went wrong. “The opportunity was lost,” said a US official. That failure left Amiri angry, prompting him to make contact with his wife and boy through YouTube videos.
The family were reunited on Thursday amid joyful scenes at Tehran airport. “I am so happy to be back in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” Amiri said.
But while he may have saved the lives of his family, he must wonder what his own fate holds.
“I can imagine what he’s going through,” said Reza Kahlili, who defected to the US in the early 1990s after working for the CIA inside Iran, where he was a computer scientist with the Revolutionary Guard. His information apparently included the revelation that Iran had acquired designs for a bomb from Pakistan.
“I had no illusion that if they caught me I would be endangering my wife and family,” he said. “I had many, many nightmares about it. It was an emotional rollercoaster. When I finally defected I made sure my family were out first.”
Kahlili, which is not his real name, now lives in California and wears a disguise to this day. He speaks through a voice modulator so that he cannot be tracked down. “The regime is ruthless about assassinating those who have betrayed it, even overseas,” he said.
While Amiri’s story, like Kahlili’s, raises many questions, it has provided a rare glimpse of a secret US-led war aimed at stopping Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.
President Barack Obama publicly pursued engagement with the Iranian regime at first. When that failed, he went for tougher sanctions at the United Nations security council. But behind the scenes, the darkest arts of the intelligence world have been applied to slowing Iran’s pursuit of the bomb.
Amiri appears to have been part of a “brain drain” programme that began several years ago to lure Iranian scientists away from their country.
He was a researcher at Malek-Ashtar University of Technology, which is said to be linked to Iran’s defence ministry. Its head was identified by the UN in 2006 as involved in the nuclear programme.
Operation Brain Drain has intensified since 2005, when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected and began ratcheting up the programme. According to a former CIA official, the operation has been stepped up further since Ahmadinejad’s bitterly disputed re-election exposed cracks in the regime last year. An aggressive campaign has been mounted to recruit scientists through relatives living in America. Iran has responded by letting its scientists travel far less.
According to Michael Adler, an expert on Iran’s nuclear programme at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, the US, Israel, Britain and France have been involved in far more than luring scientists. “There is an active sabotage programme under way,” he said, “tracking front companies to interfere with supplies”.
Only half of the centrifuges Iran uses to enrich uranium are working — the latest figures show 3,936, down from 4,920 a year ago.
“The number of centrifuges actually producing enriched uranium has been dropping over the past year and a half, and nobody is quite sure why,” said Mark Fitzpatrick of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. “It would appear to me they’re breaking at a greater rate. This may be due to the inferior quality of the centrifuges or because there are faulty components that have been introduced.”
Perhaps most effective is the campaign by a special department of the US Treasury to close down companies and block supplies. “They are continually trying to find out who owns this ship or that company, and we see prosecutions all the time of companies discovered to have been fronts,” said Elliott Abrams, a key adviser on Iran at the National Security Council under President George W Bush.
In 2007, the US national intelligence estimate said that Iran had ceased trying to design a warhead. Last week, The New York Times reported that Amiri had been one of the Americans’ sources for this controversial report while he was still working in Tehran. The leak seemed to be part of a concerted attempt by American officials to blacken his name.
Amiri was publicly received as a hero on his return, with blanket media coverage of the event and the official line that he had been forcibly abducted by the CIA.
Many Iranians were sceptical. The most popular television show in Tehran is 24, and they did not believe that Amiri could have walked away without being tracked down by Jack Bauer or his ilk.
If he had been held forcibly and tortured, as he claimed, how did he send back YouTube videos in which he looked well fed? How did he escape from the CIA? Why would the US allow him to get on a commercial flight back to Iran if the CIA didn’t want him to leave?
Amiri was being debriefed this weekend. “We first have to see what has happened in these two years, and then we will determine if he’s a hero or not,” Iran’s foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, was quoted as saying.
Iranian sources were insisting yesterday that Amiri had been a double agent all along — that he had been “turned” after his spying for America was exposed, and had been sent by Iran’s intelligence services to give the US false information and find out how much it knew.
What seems clear from the US response to his departure is that Americans officials involved in Amiri’s case are extremely angry. First, the CIA let it be known that he had received his reward package worth $5m. Then on Friday The New York Times reported that he had been sending intelligence for years.
Yesterday’s Washington Post claimed that Amiri was among half a dozen sources who had provided information to the CIA from inside Iran’s nuclear programme and had subsequently been resettled in the United States. All were given generous reward packages.
Some had been brought out because they wanted to relocate, but Amiri and a second informant had been pressed to leave Iran after coming under suspicion from the country’s ministry of intelligence.
“There was fear of exposure,” a former senior US intelligence official familiar with the cases told the Post. According to this official, one of them had become “sloppy” in his communications with the agency, but even when told of the risk of exposure had remained in Iran “longer than we thought prudent”.
This version was corroborated by a retired security official in Tehran who is still active in counterintelligence. The official said Amiri had been rumbled by the intelligence ministry.
“Amiri was leaking seemingly important, but dead intelligence about nuclear activities to the CIA,” the official said. “The data was dead by the time it reached them.”
Others have questioned how much Amiri actually knew. According to a British official, his information “was of little use as he was low level”, and the Americans had decided to let him go. The British official suggested that his return may have been part of negotiations for the release of three American hikers being held by Iran.
Whatever the real story, Amiri’s time with his beloved family may be limited.
“If you ask me, he’s kaput,” said Abrams. Kahlili, the Iranian defector, agrees. “The regime will use him for propaganda, then one way or another they’re going to dispose of him. Once some time has passed, we’ll get a report that he’s committed suicide.”
Additional reporting: Marie Colvin and Uzi Mahnaimi, Tel Aviv
Motives
Why are US officials disclosing damaging details about Shahram Amiri if he spied for America, as they claim? Possible reasons include:
- They want other defectors in the United States to know their activities will be exposed if they go home
- They are telling Iran’s nuclear scientists that they, like Amiri, could receive $5m for defecting
- They have discovered that Amiri fed them false information as a double agent
