Spy Versus Spy: Update

The man who betrayed Iran to the CIA

"Reza Kahlili, a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps who spied for the US, says ultimately Shahram Amiri, the nuclear scientist who has returned to Iran amid claims he was kidnapped, will be killed."

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"His nom de guerre is Reza Kahlili and he was a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the powerful military unit responsible for protecting Iran’s clerical regime. He also says he was a CIA spy. And not even his wife knew about his double life."

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"He was well aware of the price he would pay if caught. Traitors had a specific punishment: his wife and son would have been raped in front of him in a prison cell, Mr Kahlili’s eyes would then be gouged out and he would be hanged. But he was willing to take a chance because of disillusionment with the Islamic Revolution and what he described as its brutality towards critics."

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"Mr Amiri returned home to Tehran on Thursday and was reunited with his wife and seven-year-old son at Imam Khomeini International Airport. Appearing haggard, he immediately gave a press conference insisting that he was a simple university researcher kidnapped by Saudi and American intelligence agents while on pilgrimage in Medina in June last year. He was tortured and then offered US$60 million (Dh220m) to betray his country and give an interview on CNN, he said.

But the Americans have a different version of events.

Unnamed sources told The New York Times that Mr Amiri, 32, was in fact a spy in Iran for several years, who passed on important information to the US about how the Malek e Ashtar University had become a covert operation for Iran’s suspected nuclear arms programme. He was offered a $5 million (Dh18m) package to defect but got cold feet. Only Mr Amiri knows the truth.

But Mr Kahlili offered a grim prediction of what will happen once the fanfare of his return has faded.

“He is going to be used as a propaganda tool by the Iranian government for as long as they can. But ultimately they are going to dispose of him. One scenario would be a fake suicide but I want you to know that they will ultimately kill him.”"

Inside the CIA's slush fund informants

"As news broke of Amiri’s appearance in Washington, D.C., and subsequent return to Tehran, a number of unidentified U.S. officials highlighted the fact that Amiri received $5 million from the United States and that this amount was indicative of the value of the information he gave intelligence officials.

“Payments like this don’t happen every day,”  one U.S. official told NBC News. “This information was original and stood up well. We don’t give $5 million away for nothing.”

Others, however, said the figure was pretty normal, suggesting that hype around the $5 million exchange was overblown."

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"Reidel said U.S. authorities likely leaked that Amiri had received $5 million in order to rebut his claims he had been abducted and to counteract Iranian spin on the event."

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"When he returned to Tehran on Thursday morning, Amiri told local media he had been kidnapped and tortured by U.S. and Israeli authorities, and that the CIA had offered him $50 million to stay in the United States, which he said he turned down.


Several U.S. officials told NBC News, however, that Amiri had been in contact with his family and that they may have felt threatened by the Iranian government, which knew of this contact."

Iranian Scientist's Propaganda Value Booms - For Now

"The unnamed Washington sources revealed that the scientist-turned-spy sneaked out secrets that eventually appeared in a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear capabilities, which predicted the regime would be able to build a bomb between 2010 and 2015. They also stated that Amiri described in detail how the college where he taught -- Malek Ashtar University outside Tehran, which has previously been linked with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard -- became the headquarters of the regime's atomic program.

These intelligence releases are designed to undermine allegations Amiri has made since he arrived home Thursday. In a succession of interviews with Iranian media, the academic claimed he was snatched at gunpoint by American agents while on pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia in June 2009 and whisked away to the U.S., where he was tortured and ordered to reveal details of Iran's nuclear push. He claims he said nothing despite being offered $50 million and a new home in Europe by the CIA."

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"But while Amiri may look like the regime's darling at the moment, that could soon change. "Maybe in a few months time, when his propaganda value has been depleted, he will be in for a surprise," Khosrokhavar says. "Perhaps he will die in a tragic car accident. These things happen in Iran.""

Iran defector could spend the rest of his life in fear

"U.S. officials countered aggressively, releasing glints of revealing information intended to chip away at Amiri's credibility.

They have called Amiri's story a "fairy tale" and said the scientist was paid $5 million to provide the CIA with information about its suspected nuclear weapons program. They have said Amiri, who ran a radiation detection program in Iran, provided the CIA with significant information and had stayed here for months of his own free will.

All of this will make it harder for Amiri to convince Iranian intelligence officials of his claims that he was the victim of a forced rendition — the intelligence phrasing for a stealthy abduction.

How did he manage to escape from the CIA and make a series of videos questioning his treatment, and then make his way to the Pakistan Embassy in Washington, former U.S. officials said, if he was being held captive? Why would the U.S. allow him to get on a commercial flight back to Iran if the CIA didn't want him to leave?"

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"Even Iran's foreign minister reportedly told the BBC somewhat skeptically that "we first have to see what has happened in these two years and then we will determine if he's a hero or not."

Eventually, former CIA officials said, Amiri's value in the propaganda war will wane and he will then face hard questions while under some form of house arrest. Amiri won't have a lot of room to maneuver because his wife and young son are in Iran, a leverage point U.S. officials say that the Iranians used to lure him back home.

"He will be in huge trouble, and he will be in confinement, of some form, for a very long time," said Charles S. Faddis, who headed the weapons of mass destruction unit at the CIA's Counterterrorism Center until he retired in May 2008. "I assume they are going to be a little restrained for public relation reasons because this thing has become such a high-profile incident."

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"Former CIA officials pointed to the case of Vitaly Yurchenko, a Soviet KGB agent who defected to the U.S. in 1985 only to re-defect back to the Soviet Union three months later.

Like Amiri, Yurchenko also claimed he had been drugged by his CIA "torturers." Yurchenko managed to escape to the Soviet Embassy in Washington. He, too, held a crowded news conference, and, again like Amiri, claimed the CIA tried to pay him to stay — in his cases, $1 million.

Yurchenko soon became yesterday's news.

"He'll fade away like Yurchenko," said Joseph Wippl, a former senior CIA officer. "He'll be alive but there will be times where he won't be sure it was such a good idea.""

U.S. Says Scientist Aided C.I.A While Still In Iran

"While still in Iran, he was also one of the sources for a much-disputed National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s suspected weapons program, published in 2007, the officials said. For several years, Mr. Amiri provided what one official described as “significant, original” information about secret aspects of his country’s nuclear program, according to the Americans.

This account by the Americans, some of whom are apparently trying to discredit Mr. Amiri’s tale of having been kidnapped by the C.I.A., provides the latest twist in one of strangest tales of the nuclear era. It also provides the first hint of how the United States acquired intelligence from Iranian scientists, besides its previously reported penetrations of Iranian computer systems."

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"American officials, clearly embarrassed that he had left a program that promised him a new identity and benefits amounting to about $5 million, said his accusations that he had been kidnapped and drugged were manufactured, and an effort to survive what will almost certainly be a grilling by the Iranian authorities.

 “His safety depends on him sticking to that fairy tale about pressure and torture,” insisted one of the American officials, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified while discussing a classified operation to attract Iranian scientists. “His challenge is to try to convince the Iranian security forces that he never cooperated with the United States.”

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On Thursday, even as Mr. Amiri was publicly greeted at home by his 7-year-old son and held a news conference, Iran’s foreign minister gave the first official hints of Iranian doubts about his story. “We first have to see what has happened in these two years and then we will determine if he’s a hero or not,” the BBC quoted the foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, as saying to a French news agency. “Iran must determine if his claims about being kidnapped were correct or not.”

After more than a year of denying any knowledge of Mr. Amiri while he was living undercover in Tucson and then briefly in Virginia, American officials in recent days have been surprisingly willing to describe their actions in the case. That may be in part to fend off charges that the handling of the Amiri case was badly bungled."

The Washington Post first reported that Mr. Amiri had been given $5 million, which officials described Thursday as standard for someone who had provided essential information. But the money would have been paid over an extended period, the officials said, and Mr. Amiri was not able to take it with him because American sanctions prohibited financial transfers to Iran.

It is unclear how Mr. Amiri’s information fed into the 2007 intelligence estimate. That document contended that Iran halted its design work on a nuclear weapon in 2003. A new national intelligence estimate, which has been repeatedly delayed this year, is likely to back away from some of the conclusions in the earlier document. For example, American intelligence officials now believe the design work on a weapon was resumed and continues to this day, though likely at a slower pace than earlier in the decade."

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"Administration officials conceded that Mr. Amiri’s decision to come out of hiding and return to Iran was both a large embarrassment and a possible disincentive to future defections.

But the incident is also an embarrassment for Iran. Analysts said that even if he is publicly greeted as a hero, Mr. Amiri will probably be viewed with suspicion by the Iranian government.

After Mr. Amiri arrived in Tehran, he added details to his claims that he had been abducted by the C.I.A. and Saudi intelligence officers on a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia in June 2009. He said that he had no connection with Iran’s nuclear program and that he was the victim of an American conspiracy to wage “psychological warfare” against Iran."

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"Mr. Amiri refused to describe how, if he was under armed guard, he had been able to release video messages in which he said that he had been kidnapped. He also did not answer questions about how he had eventually escaped detention."

CIA says it moved Iranian scientist, 2nd informant to US over safety concerns

"The Iranian scientist who returned to his homeland this week was one of two CIA informants whisked out of Iran last year by the agency amid concerns that the Tehran government had discovered they were providing secrets to the United States, current and former U.S. officials said.

Before his abrupt departure for Iran, Shahram Amiri was among half a dozen sources who had provided information to the CIA from inside Iran's nuclear program and were subsequently resettled in the United States, officials said. All were given reward packages -- including the $5 million set aside for Amiri -- administered by financial firms outside the CIA's control."

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"Amiri has alleged that he was drugged and abducted by the CIA before being brought to the United States and was subjected to coercive interrogations on Iran's nuclear program. U.S. officials have adamantly denied Amiri's assertions, saying he defected voluntarily and is concocting stories to enable his return to a country that he betrayed."

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"The CIA is expected to conduct a damage assessment to determine whether any sources or methods were compromised by Amiri's return. "They have to go over everything he did provide and put a big caveat on it," said a former high-ranking CIA official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the case.

If Amiri's information was being used in a widely anticipated assessment of Iran's nuclear weapons plans that has already missed several deadlines, the assessment could again be delayed, officials said."

Yup. Just like the old days.