New in SpyWeek: Iranian defector riddle
Also: Indian assassins, U.S. traitors, CIA-China spy wars, insider threats plugged, and much, much more
Devil’s Bargain: The intelligence business is often about tradeoffs. The CIA, like all intelligence agencies, sometimes has to cut deals with killers, thugs, and weapons dealers to gain critical insight into an adversary’s plans and capabilities.
The CIA allegedly made one such deal with Maj. Gen. Ali-Reza Asgari, a former senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps leader who is said to have been living in the United States for the past 17 years. Asgari reportedly was also a critical source of intelligence on Iran and Hezbollah, the Iran-funded terrorist group operating in Lebanon. As such, he also has the blood of Americans on his hands, possibly including one celebrated CIA spy.
Iran International, a London-based media outlet funded by the Saudi Royal family, reported that Asgari was recruited by U.S. intelligence in Thailand in 2005 and identified Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh as the key figure leading the Islamic regime's military and nuclear program. (Fakhrizadeh was assassinated in a CIA/Mossad operation in 2020. )
Asgari also played a central role in steering the United States away from plans to attack Iran over its nuclear program in 2007, Iran International reported, citing three unnamed U.S. intelligence sources and an anonymous senior European diplomatic source. The Times of London reported that Asgari’s debriefing was so sensitive that information went directly to the CIA director, Michael Hayden.
Author Kai Bird wrote in his 2014 book The Good Spy that Asgari had given the United States much more. The former IRGC commander revealed that Iran had built a new centrifuge enrichment plant near Natanz. He also provided evidence that convinced some in the CIA that Iran was helping Syria to develop nuclear weapons. (That intelligence reportedly led to a 2007 Israeli airstrike against a suspected Syrian reactor.)
Bird wrote that Asgari may have provided the information needed to carry out the 2008 CIA-Mossad assassination of Imad Mughniyeh, Hezbollah’s international operations chief. (SpyTalk editor Jeff Stein, then writing for Newsweek, reported that Mughniyeh was deeply implicated in the torture and murder of CIA Beirut station chief William Buckley’s in 1985.) It’s unclear whether Asgari received some or all of the $5 million reward posted by the State Department for Mughinyeh’s capture or killing. “Amazing that he is apparently still alive and here,” Bird told SpyTalk.
Asgari also possessed intimate knowledge of Hezbollah’s operations that Tehran no doubt wanted to keep the CIA from learning. In 2007, The Washington Post reported, citing former Mossad officials, that he commanded the Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon in the 1980s, where he helped establish and nurture Hezbollah.
Whatever intelligence he possessed, Asgari also had dirty hands. Former CIA officer Robert Baer wrote in TIME that “Asgari was in the IRGC’s chain of command when it was kidnapping and assassinating Westerners in Lebanon in the ‘80s.” Bird reported that he may have helped orchestrate the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut that killed 63 people, including legendary CIA spy Robert Ames and 16 others. Curiously, however, Iran International says Asgari wasn’t involved.
Asked about Bird’s reporting in 2014, a CIA spokesperson gave Jeff Stein an unusually firm denial: "As a general matter, the CIA does not comment on who may or may not have been a source for the agency, but we can categorically state that the assertion that CIA arranged the defection of Ali Reza Asgari to the United States or resettled him in the United States—as alleged in Kai Bird's book on Robert Ames—is false." Spokesperson Tammy Thorp told SpyTalk this week there’s been “no change” in the CIA’s position.
Thus, the status of Asgari remains murky. If the new allegations are true, the CIA may have to live with the knowledge that the price they paid for the intelligence on Iran was to allow Ames’ killer to roam free in the United States under their protection.
Long Arm of New Delhi: A tradeoff of a different kind lay behind the Biden White House’s decision to keep quiet about evidence that a plot last year to kill a Sikh activist in New York was directed from within India’s intelligence service.
An investigation by The Washington Post found that Vikram Yadav, an officer in India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), hired a hit team last year to kill a leading critic of the Indian government. According to the Post’s Greg Miller, Gerry Shih, and Ellen Nakashima, the U.S. intelligence community assessed that the operation was approved by the RAW chief at the time, Samant Goel.
Evidence linking RAW to the attempted assassination was found on the laptop and phone of Nikhil Gupta, an alleged Indian drug and weapons trafficker hired to carry out the plot. The killer Gupta hired was an informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Gupta was arrested in Prague on June 30 and is fighting extradition to the United States.
Yadav was also linked to the June 18 shooting death of a Sikh activist in Surrey, B.C., near Vancouver, that ruptured India-Canada relations. RAW officers have faced arrest and expulsion in Austria, Germany, and Britain. On Friday, Canadian police arrested three individuals connected to the shooting death of Sikh separatist leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar last year outside a gurdwara in British Columbia. An official told The Washington Post that the three, all Canadian Indians, are “part of an organized crime network that is acting on behalf of the Indian government and its intelligence apparatus.”
According to the earlier Post story, federal prosecutors and FBI agents pushed to indict Yadav, a move that would have implicated RAW in the murder-for-hire plot. Gupta’s indictment, unsealed in November, left out the name of the Indian official who directed him. The Biden White House says it leaves decisions about who to charge up to the Justice Department.
The Biden White House has been struggling to contain the fallout from India’s stunning pursuit of lethal operations on U.S. soil. The White House refrained from punishing India to avoid rupturing relations with the world’s most populous nation, which it views as a bulwark against a rising China. The assassination plot took shape the same month the White House honored Prime Minister Narendra Modi with a state dinner last June.
CIA Director Bill Burns was dispatched in August to New Delhi to give Modi’s government a chance to deal with the problem internally. It’s unclear whether Burns confronted his Indian counterparts on the CIA’s assessment that Ajit Doval, Modi’s national security adviser, “probably knew of or approved RAW’s plans to kill Sikhs his government considered terrorists,” the Post reported.
The White House reportedly took the extraordinary step of warning New Delhi that the Post was close to publishing its story—without notifying the newspaper.
Asked why India would risk attempting an assassination on U.S. soil, a Western security official said: “Because they knew they could get away with it.”
Russian espionage thwarted: The cases of two men caught trying to sell top-secret information to Russia underscored the ongoing problem of insider threats from military and intelligence insiders who view the Kremlin as an ally.
Former National Security Agency employee Jareh Sebastian Dalke was sentenced Monday to more than 21 years in prison for selling classified information to an undercover FBI agent posing as a Russian. Meanwhile, former defense contractor John Murray Rowe Jr. pleaded guilty Tuesday to disclosing classified information to another undercover FBI agent posing as a Russian.
According to the Justice Department, Rowe, a 65-year-old test engineer for multiple defense contractors, was identified as a potential insider threat and fired in 2018 after he was caught bringing a thumb drive into a classified space and inquiring whether he could simultaneously hold U.S. and Russian security clearances. Doh!
In March 2020, he met with the FBI “covert employee.” During this meeting, Rowe disclosed secret information regarding operating details of the electronic countermeasure systems used by U.S. military fighter jets. “I’ve been saying this to people. I said, ‘I’m gonna go work for the Russians.’ I’ve been saying that for the last two years,” Rowe told the undercover FBI agent.
Over the next eight months, Rowe exchanged over 300 emails with the purported Russian agent and confirmed his willingness to work for Moscow. “If I can’t get a job here then I’ll go work for the other team,” Rowe wrote.
It’s not clear what led the FBI to Dalke, who started working as an information systems security designer at the NSA in Maryland on June 6, 2022. He quit 26 days later after his request for family leave was denied.
Dalke’s repeated attempts to contact Russia may have landed him on the FBI’s radar. He told the undercover agent that he had “multiple published channels to gain a response. This included submission to the SVR TOR site.” (The SVR is Russia’s foreign intelligence service. TOR is a secure browser that enables anonymous communication.)
Dalke told the FBI agent, “[t]here is an opportunity to help balance the scales of the world while also tending to my own needs.” He said he questioned the United States’ role in causing damage in the world. He also told the agent that he was $237,000 in debt, $93,000 of which was “coming due very soon.” Court records show the 32-year-old former Army medic filed for bankruptcy in 2017.
FBI agents arrested Dalke at Union Station in Denver on Sept. 28, 2022, moments after he transmitted three highly classified documents in exchange for $85,000. Dahlke pleaded guilty last year and admitted that the information he sent would be used to injure the United States and benefit Russia.
In Monday’s sentencing, Judge Raymond Moore said he believed Dalke took the NSA job to sell secrets and hurt the United States. “It was as close to treasonous as you can get,” Moore said.
Spy and Tell: We’ve written before about the Biden administration’s growing use of disclosing intelligence, such as the warnings in 2021 about Russia’s impending invasion of Ukraine and Vladimir Putin’s planned pretexts for it. We’re all in favor of transparency as a strategic intelligence weapon, but two CIA veterans reminded us that there are downsides, too.
“The greatest risk with disclosures is the politicization of intelligence,” former CIA Acting Director Michael Morell and CIA analyst David Gioe wrote in Foreign Policy. When the Biden administration in December 2023 released the U.S. intelligence community’s estimate that Russia had suffered an astonishing 315,000 casualties since the invasion, it was silent on the Ukrainians’ high losses.
High Russian casualties advanced the administration’s policy; high Ukrainian casualties would not. “This preference is acceptable when trying to influence a foreign adversary, but not when the audience is the American people,” Morell and Gioe wrote. “Informing citizens is a laudable, apolitical act; trying to shape their views by cherry-picking intelligence is not.”
Another risk to public disclosures is the threat they pose to sources and methods. The growing volume of intelligence that has gone public, whether through an illegal mass leak or an authorized disclosure, has led some assets to walk away from the agency. Like many CIA case officers, Gioe said he has had the experience of listening to an asset ask if the information they provide might go public.
Another risk is releasing information that turns out to be wrong, damaging the reputation of the U.S. intelligence community. In a world of disinformation, the release of intelligence must represent the truth or what the intelligence community judges to be true. “Although it may be tempting to embed disinformation in a disclosure, that line should never been crossed,” Morell and Gioe wrote.
New on CIA-China Spywars: A new podcast debuting this week showcases the growing intelligence war between the United States and China. We got a sneak peek at one episode, which breaks some news about how China wiped out the CIA’s network of informants from 2010 to 2012.
Podcast host and former New York Times reporter Jane Perlez spoke with Asia scholar John Delury, author of Agents of Subversion: The Fate of John T. Downey and the CIA's Covert War in China, and Nigel Inkster, a former director of operations and intelligence for MI6. Inkster was based in Beijing in the 1980s and is well-versed in the operations of China’s Ministry of State Security, or MSS.
PERLEZ: There was one particular incident that I wanted to ask you about as the MSS became more robust, and that's the period between 2010 and 2012 when the U. S. suffered a huge intelligence failure. As many as two dozen Chinese providing information to the U. S. were executed or imprisoned, among them high-ranking Chinese officials. CIA has never admitted this, but what happened is now well known. How do you think this came about? How did the Chinese manage to do that?
INKSTER: Yeah, it's very interesting. I mean, prior to that period, I think the CIA had something of a purple patch when it came to recruiting in China. They had worked out that one way to enhance access of agents was to give them the money they needed to bribe their way up the promotion ladder. This actually was working out very well. I don't know for certain what happened between 2010 and 2012, or how it happened rather, but my best appreciation of what did happen was that a covert communication used by the CIA with an Iranian asset had been compromised. The Iranians shared the intelligence of that covert communications system with the Chinese and almost certainly with the Russians as well. So once the MSS knew what to look for, all of a sudden it became, you know, somewhat easier.
Inkster also said “things like social media, LinkedIn in particular, have been a godsend to the Chinese intelligence services.” Face-Off: The U.S. vs China debuts Tuesday on multiple platforms.
Speaking of Chinese spies, check out SpyTalk’s review of the latest thriller from David Ignatius, Phantom Orbit.
Pocket Litter:
A judge declared a mistrial Thursday in the trial of a military contractor accused of contributing to the abuse of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq two decades ago. A civil jury in Alexandria, Virginia, could not reach a verdict after eight days of deliberations. The trial was the first time a U.S. jury heard claims brought by Abu Ghraib survivors. (AP)
A new military assessment found that a U.S. drone strike in Syria last year killed a 56-year-old shepherd after confusing him for a terrorist leader. (The Washington Post)
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the National Security Agency to force the eavesdropping agency to hand over documents about its deployment of artificial intelligence. (Bloomberg)
An exhibition of Western military equipment captured from Kyiv forces during the fighting in Ukraine opened Wednesday in Moscow. The exhibit organized by the Russian Defense Ministry features over 30 pieces of Western-made heavy equipment, including a U.S.-made M1 Abrams battle tank and a Bradley armored fighting vehicle, a Leopard 2 tank and a Marder armored infantry vehicle from Germany, and a French-made AMX-10RC armored vehicle. (Fox News)
Pro-Russia “hacktivists” targeted and compromised small-scale industrial control systems in North American and European water and wastewater systems, dams, energy, and food and agriculture sectors. Some victims experienced minor tank overflow events; however, most victims reverted to manual controls in the immediate aftermath and quickly restored operations. (NSA)
An investigation by journalists and Amnesty International found evidence of extensive sales and deployment of spyware and other surveillance technologies in Indonesia sourced from Israel, Greece, Singapore, and Malaysia between 2017 and 2023. (Amnesty)
Jack Teixeira, the Massachusetts airman convicted of leaking classified government secrets via the social media site Discord, will face military criminal proceedings later this month. (The Washington Post)
A new documentary, Filming Under Fire: John Ford’s OSS Field Photo Branch, tells how Hollywood figures contributed to America’s victory in World War II through their service in the Office of Special Services, the predecessor of the CIA. A 2017 Netflix documentary, Five Came Back, recounted the roles of Ford and other prominent directors in filming Allied combat operations. (The Washington Times)
A new book claims that Anthony Blunt, one of the Cambridge Five spies, not only betrayed secrets to the Soviets but also may have alerted the Nazis to secret plans to drop 40,000 troops into the Netherlands to secure the Rhine. (The Times of London)
Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Tx, was indicted Friday for accepting bribes from an Azerbaijan-controlled oil company to “positively influence U.S. foreign policies for Azerbaijan.” Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., meanwhile, who’s battling charges that he took cash, gold, and a luxury car in exchange for using his influence to benefit the Egyptian and Qatari governments, wants a psychiatrist to testify about his habit of stockpiling cash. We so want that problem. (The Washington Post, CBS News)
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