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How the CIA failed Iranian spies in its secret war with Tehran - Reuters
Sep 29, 2022 8 mins, 12 secs
There, the Iranian industrial engineer would meet his Central Intelligence Agency handlers.

Hosseini said he was brought to an empty VIP lounge and told to sit on a couch that had been turned to face a wall.

Not long after, Ministry of Intelligence agents entered the room and the interrogation began, punctuated by beatings, Hosseini recounted?

“These are things I never told anyone in the world,” Hosseini told Reuters.

Rather than betrayal, Hosseini was the victim of CIA negligence, a year-long Reuters investigation into the agency’s handling of its informants found.

A faulty CIA covert communications system made it easy for Iranian intelligence to identify and capture him.

Jailed for nearly a decade and speaking out for the first time, Hosseini said he never heard from the agency again, even after he was released in 2019.

In interviews with six Iranian former CIA informants, Reuters found that the agency was careless in other ways amid its intense drive to gather intelligence in Iran, putting in peril those risking their lives to help the United States.

One informant said the CIA instructed him to make his information drops in Turkey at a location the agency knew was under surveillance by Iran.

When these men were caught, the agency provided no assistance to the informants or their families, even years later, the six Iranians said.

But he said any unnecessary compromise of sources by the agency would represent both a professional and ethical failure.

intelligence officials with knowledge of Iran operations; reviewed Iranian government records and news reports; and interviewed people who knew the spies.

officials who spoke with Reuters confirmed or disclosed the identities of any CIA sources.

A spokeswoman said the CIA does its utmost to safeguard people who work with the agency.

Hosseini was the only one of the six men Reuters interviewed who said he was assigned the vulnerable messaging tool.

But an analysis by two independent cybersecurity specialists found that the now-defunct covert online communication system that Hosseini used – located by Reuters in an internet archive – may have exposed at least 20 other Iranian spies and potentially hundreds of other informants operating in other countries around the world.

Four former intelligence officers interviewed by Reuters said the agency is willing to take bigger risks with sources when it comes to spying on Iran.

You don’t get a much higher priority than that,” said James Lawler, a former CIA officer whose focus included weapons of mass destruction and Iran.

government,” Hosseini told Reuters.

CIA spokeswoman Tammy Kupperman Thorp declined to comment on Hosseini, the cases of other captured Iranians or any aspect of how the agency conducts operations.

But she said the CIA would never be careless with the lives of those who help the agency.

The son of a tailor, he grew up in Tehran and learned lathing and auto mechanics, he said, showing Reuters his trade-school diploma.

Along the way, teachers spotted Hosseini’s intelligence and pushed him to study industrial engineering at the prestigious Amirkabir University of Technology, he said.

Hosseini said a professor there put him in touch with a former student with ties to the Iranian government who eventually became his business partner.

The firm at first worked mainly with food and steel factories, Hosseini said, over time scoring contracts with Iran’s energy and defense industries.

Hosseini said the company’s success made his family affluent, allowing him to buy a large house, drive imported cars and go on foreign vacations.

Established companies often found themselves relegated to the role of subcontractors for these newcomers, Iranian democracy activists said, shrinking their slice of the pie.

As she sipped a glass of champagne, Chris told him they were the people Hosseini had been exchanging messages with over the past few months in Google’s chat platform. She asked Hosseini about his work.

Hosseini told Chris his firm was a subcontractor of Kalaye Electric, a company sanctioned in 2007 by the U.S.

Reuters could not determine whether the information provided by Hosseini assisted in that cyber sabotage or other operations.

In subsequent meetings, Hosseini said, the CIA asked him to turn his attention to a broader U.S.

As the relationship progressed, Hosseini said, Chris was replaced with a male handler who was accompanied by officials described as more senior in the CIA’s Iran operations, as well as technical experts able to keep up with his engineering jargon.

When Tavanir said it didn’t have enough electricity to meet the project’s giant demands, Hosseini asked the company to provide in-depth analyses of the national grid.

In August 2008, a year after becoming a spy, Hosseini said he met with an older, broad-shouldered CIA officer and others at a hotel in Dubai.

“We need to expand the commitment,” Hosseini recounted the officer saying.

The officer handed Hosseini a piece of paper and asked him to write a promise that he would not provide the information he was sharing to another government, a CIA practice intended to deepen a feeling of commitment from an informant, two former CIA officials said.

Another CIA officer in the meeting then showed Hosseini a covert communications system he could use to reach his handlers: a rudimentary Persian-language soccer news website called Iraniangoals.com.

When Hosseini lamented missing his daughter’s third birthday during one of the trips, he said a CIA officer bought him a teddy bear to give to the child.

“I felt that I had joined the team,” Hosseini told Reuters.

What Hosseini didn’t know was that the world’s most powerful intelligence agency had given him a tool that likely led to his capture.

Reuters then asked two independent cyber analysts – Bill Marczak of University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, and Zach Edwards of Victory Medium – to probe how Iran may have used weaknesses in the CIA’s own technology to unmask Hosseini and other CIA informants.

Each fake website was assigned to only one spy in order to limit exposure of the entire network in case any single agent wa captured, two former CIA officials told Reuters.

All told, these features meant the discovery of a single spy using one of these websites would have allowed Iranian intelligence to uncover additional pages used by other CIA informants.

Reuters confirmed the nature of the intelligence failure of the CIA’s cookie-cutter websites with three former national security officials.

Top-tier informants receive custom-made covert communications tools, built from scratch at agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to seamlessly blend into the life of a spy without drawing attention, three former CIA officers said.

Some former intelligence officers privately acknowledge that the CIA protects its informants on a sliding scale based on the perceived worth of the spy, an ever-shifting assessment almost never fully explained to the source.

The CIA will sometimes track down the child or spouse of an executed agent years afterward to offer million-dollar compensation and a discreetly marked agency medal to commemorate the sacrifice, former officers said.

officials told Reuters was standard procedure for handling such a “walk-in” looking to connect with the CIA.

The Iranian said he did ultimately meet with a CIA officer that day.

“We know you have had meetings at the consulate,” an Intelligence Ministry interrogator said following the arrest, Aghaei recounted to Reuters.

A veteran senior CIA intelligence officer said such a scenario is born from the reality that most volunteers ultimately fail to produce valuable intelligence and are often double agents.

After an Iranian drops off an application, diplomatic officers are instructed to examine whether their employment history or family ties could make them valuable.

As CIA officers, posing as consular officers, reel the applicant into increasingly probing meetings, they hold out the possibility that the visa application will be approved, according to the national security officials, all of whom were directly involved in such practices?

By the time the Iranian realizes he has given information to an intelligence officer, the unwitting informant has often made disclosures that could land him in jail.

A retired Iranian official, he had recently started a travel agency when he flew to Abu Dhabi with his wife in 2011 in order to visit the U.S.

But he was arrested in 2015 in Iran by the intelligence officials who somehow had learned of the liaison.

Would he work for Tehran as a double agent, his Iranian interrogators asked, to learn more about how the CIA recruits spies.

national security officials, however, confirmed details of how the visa ploy is used to gather Iranian intelligence.

The CIA was no longer interested in the information he collected on electrical grid vulnerabilities, Hosseini said the officer told him.

Going forward, he said, the officer wanted him to dig deeper into plans at the Fordow nuclear facility, where Hosseini said his company had recently won a contract.

Former CIA officers say shifts in intelligence priorities are common when a new president takes power.

Washington allots the CIA only around 100 visas a year to offer as a carrot to its spies throughout the world, three former intelligence officers said.

“This involves enormous resources and operational planning and will be reserved for the star of the star sources,” said Pillar, the former CIA intelligence analyst.

Almost a decade there took its toll, Hosseini said.

Hosseini said the CIA did provide him two ways to reach out for help if he got into trouble

And he feared repercussions if Iranian intelligence discovered him walking into a U.S

All six former spies interviewed by Reuters said that, given their sacrifices, they had hoped the U.S

intelligence officials said

“We have to ask, what is the best way to keep this guy alive, and sometimes the best answer is to leave them alone,” said a former senior intelligence officer who was involved in the CIA’s response to the compromise of its spies in Iran

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