Last week I wrote a column about Shahram Amiri – the defecting Iranian nuclear scientist who unexpectedly un-defected – speculating that he was a double agent. The semi-official Iranian news agency Fars now quotes an unnamed source in the Iranian intelligence community confirming that Amiri was a double agent.
U.S. officials have claimed that Amiri was an informant for the CIA “for years” while in Iran, passing along vital information on the Iranian nuclear program. Last year he disappeared while visiting Islamic holy sites in Saudi Arabia. The CIA claims he voluntarily defected. Tehran claimed at the time he was kidnapped. Amiri made YouTube videos claiming he had been kidnapped and tortured. Now he is back in Iran.
Was he a US spy we kidnapped, tortured, and then left to wander around unsupervised until he finally asked to go home? Unlikely.
Was he a double-agent whose defection and then return was planned all along? Maybe, but that would be an odd ploy, since it would eliminate him as a future Iranian conduit of false intelligence to the CIA.
Was he a genuine defector who had a change of heart and decided to play along with Iranian intelligence to get back in their good graces? Maybe, but that means this is largely his creation and I don’t like his long-term chances back in Iran.
He’s certainly a double agent now. The question remains, how long has that been the case? Any way you slice it, everyone ends up looking kind of stupid, each player to a greater or lesser degree depending on which scenario you buy into.
The unnamed Iranian intelligence source described this goat rodeo as “an intelligence battle between the CIA and us that was designed and managed by Iran. . . . We had set various goals in this battle and, by the grace of God, we achieved all our objectives without our rival getting any real victory. . . . We sought to obtain good information from inside the CIA. While Amiri was still in the U.S., we managed to establish contact with him in early 2010 and obtained very valuable information accordingly. He was managed and guided (by us).”
Here are articles from the New York Times, Global Security Newswire, and CNN with most of what is known about this in open sources. Oh, to be a fly on the wall in Langley, Virginia right about now.
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ADN said:
Well HUMINT is by its very nature a somewhat spectulative affair, and sometimes it will go wrong as one team outwits another one. For anyone to have a 100% record would be unimaginable. Whatever the facts in this case – and it’s impossible to tell from public press – Iran has at least a propaganda advantage over the US right now. So it goes. Don’t sweat it. Sometimes CIA win too, just *apparently* not this time. So far.
The slightly scary part about this is how much of US national policy seems – as viewed externally – to be based on HUMINT when *NOT* substantiated by other sources, notably invading Iraq in 2003 (*). The formerly all-powerful DCI became DCIA in 2005-ish and a DNI was parachuted in above everyone, so allegedly CIA are no longer sole top dogs. Really? Observe that the serving DNI resigned May 28th citing administrative in-fighting. Also, observe that for most of the time since DNI was created DCIA has been a serving 4 star general and, e.g. DIRNSA, a serving 3 star general. For DCI(A) to be a military man is unusual, and in this case it appears to make it clearer than is normally the case whose view is more likely to have prevailed in the innermost circle.
(*) Of course if you prefer to believe any of the myraid conspiracy theories then the publicly admitted intelligence picture was just a front for some other reason and CIA in particular got shafted by politicians. Hmmm.
July 23rd, 2010 at 6:14 pm
Frank Chadwick said:
Andy, always a pleasure to hear your perspectives, particularly on intelligence subjects. I suppose what struck me about this was not so much that the CIA looked foolish as how unprepared and unprofessional our State Department seemed. Hopefully they were just having a bad day.
I suspect I’m going to do a major column on the mushrooming US intelligence apparatus next week, provided something dire doeas not happen in the mean time, and I’ll be interested in your take on that.
July 27th, 2010 at 2:09 pm
ADN said:
Thanks for the vote of confidence Frank. I always look forwards to reading this site: many thought-provoking pieces!
On State Department apparently looking amateur: there are lots of reasons why that could be, including that no-one else managed to tell them anything useful between the chap skipping and the press phoning and demanding a statement. This event appeared to unfold very quickly in real time, so it seems entirely possible to me that even if there is prompt, full, and frank disclosure of everything between agencies within the enormous US IC, the message might not have gotten soon enough to the poor sod who was stuck in front of a camera saying “I don’t know” in so many words.
July 28th, 2010 at 12:55 pm