If the announcements from Tehran are to be believed, the United States Central Intelligence Agency lost at least 17 spies in Iran in the months leading up to March 2019.
According to Iran’s Ministry of
Intelligence, the Islamic Republic busted an alleged “CIA network”
operating in sensitive private sector companies and government agencies
that relate to defense, aerospace and energy. At least some of the 17
alleged spies have reportedly been sentenced to death, though their
exact number remains unknown.
Officials in Tehran said
on Sunday that all of the purported spies are Iranian nationals and
were lured by the CIA with promises of receiving visas to enter America.
Others were already in possession of visas and were “blackmailed” to
spy for the US in order to have them renewed by the US Department of
State, according to Iranian media reports. Visa applicants were
allegedly carefully selected based on their work in critical areas such
as Iran’s nuclear program or defense procurement.
A government-sanctioned
documentary,
which aired on Iran’s state owned television on Monday, claimed that
the 17 spies did not know each other, but all had been trained
independently in clandestine tradecraft. This allegedly included setting
up and using secret communications systems, as well as carrying out
dead drops without being detected. Dead drops utilized
containers
made to look like rocks, which were located “in parks and other
mountainous areas” in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East, according
to Iranian officials. Some of the assets communicated with their
handlers while attending science conferences through- out Europe, Africa
and Asia.
The
Iranian television documentary claimed that the 17 arrests had “dealt a lethal
blow to US foreign intelligence”. But US President Donald Trump said in a tweet
that Tehran’s allegations were “totally false” and contained “zero truth”, just
“more lies and propaganda” from Tehran.
Who is
right? To begin with, there is no question that the CIA recruits heavily in
Iran, given that the Islamic Republic is one of America’s —indeed the world’s—
primary intelligence targets. What is more, since 1979, when Washington lost
its embassy in Iran, the CIA have found it more difficult to collect accurate
information from inside the energy-rich country. Therefore, the need for
dependable assets inside Iran has increased exponentially, and has become even
more pressing now, given the importance placed on Iran by Donald Trump.
Additionally, the descriptions of CIA asset acquisition operations by the
Iranians ring true. In the absence of an embassy and diplomatic immunity, it is
dangerous for CIA case officers to operate inside Iran, so the spy agency
recruits many of its assets from among Iran’s Westernized elite that is able to
travel abroad.
But
losing 17 assets in one big sweep sounds fantastical. If it is true, it would
signify one of the biggest intelligence-collection disasters in the CIA’s
72-year history. Furthermore, given that —as the Iranians themselves have said—
the 17 alleged spies did not know each other, it would have taken a massive
amount of counterintelligence resources to detect, build cases and apprehend 17
separate foreign assets. What is more likely to have happened is that the
Iranians detected a small number of CIA spies —possibly no more than two or
three— and then slowly extended their counterintelligence investigation to
incorporate those three individuals’ close associates, relatives, or even
spouses. At that stage, Iranian authorities would have used their investigative
privileges to target employees of agencies or companies with access to
sensitive information who are deemed too pro-Western, have a history of making
critical remarks of the Iranian government, etc. That is probably how the
investigation grew to incorporate so many alleged spies.
What is
more worrying for the CIA is that the Iranians appear to have visually
identified a number of CIA case officers, whose job is to recruit and handle
foreign assets. These are ostensibly US Department of State diplomatic
personnel who are stationed in countries such as Austria, India, Turkey and
Zimbabwe. But the Iranians claim that these diplomats are in fact
official-cover CIA personnel and have now publicized their faces. At one point
during Monday’s television program, a blonde Caucasian woman is seen advising
an unidentified man about how to avoid surveillance by Iranian intelligence
officers in the United Arab Emirates. She is speaking Farsi with an
unmistakable American accent. If the Iranians are right, it means that these
individuals will need to be recalled back to Washington as soon as possible and
that their overseas careers are now at an end, since foreign
counterintelligence services know that they are in fact intelligence officers.
Additionally, the safety of their assets and foreign contacts will need to be
reassessed on a case-by-case base, and many human-intelligence operations —some
of them many years in the making— will need to be terminated. Thus, if the
Iranians are telling the truth, many offices at the CIA’s headquarters in
Langley, Virginia, will be in recovery mode for many months to come.
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