U.S. spy suspect was drawn to Iran
Monica Witt, a former U.S. Air Force intelligence specialist, made her way through the gleaming doors and majestic lobby of one of Tehran’s largest luxury hotels in 2013, on her way to a conference that was all about bashing American culture.
There, in a crowd filled with fringe academics, Holocaust deniers and the lover of the terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal, Witt at last found herself among people as critical of her country as she was.
“What she said was she had been involved in horrific war crimes with the Air Force,” said Kevin Barrett, a controversial scholar of Islam who had an extensive conversation with Witt in the gilded lobby of the Parsian Azadi hotel. “And she just felt really bad about it.”
Less than seven months after the Tehran conference, according to an indictment unsealed Wednesday, Witt defected and became a spy for the Iranian security service. It was the climax of a radicalization that was rooted in Witt’s military service and that accelerated while she was in graduate school.
“There weren’t warning signs in terms of ‘go to authorities’ warning signs,” said Cory Ellis, who knew Witt when they were enrolled in the same master’s degree program at George Washington University. Still, he said, she did not hide her strong feelings against U.S. foreign policy. “Everyone just kind of sat and watched it.”
U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials have been left to cope with the repercussions of what several of them have publicly described as a “betrayal” by Witt, now 39. Officials suspect she remains in Iran, out of reach of U.S. law enforcement.
Former intelligence officials familiar with the case described the damage to national security as severe, in part because she is suspected of revealing the names of double agents run by the United States, and U.S. authorities have struggled to conclude exactly why she turned on her country.
But an examination of Witt’s background, along with public records and interviews with friends, acquaintances and current and former U.S. officials, shows that her enchantment with Middle Eastern culture turned into active treachery against her country and may have made her an enticing prospect for an avowed adversary of Washington.
More than a year before the United States said she became a spy, authorities said, Witt met with Marzieh Hashemi, a Louisiana-born journalist who had moved to Iran and was regarded by the U.S. government as a socalled spotter: a recruiter for a foreign intelligence service.
“She wasn’t in it for the money; this wasn’t a fee-for-task thing,” Douglas Wise, who was deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said of Witt. “At some point, she took an ideological left turn to become aligned with the Persians.”
Witt, who was born in El Paso, Texas, enlisted in the Air Force and entered active duty about eight months after her 18th birthday, in 1997, just after the death of her mother. Slender, with straight brown hair, she was quickly assigned to the crew of an RC-135 spy plane — a jet packed with reconnaissance equipment.
She first deployed to the Middle East in 2002, when she was sent to Saudi Arabia. Other missions followed: to Diego Garcia, a British atoll in the Indian Ocean of immense strategic value to Western militaries, and to Greece. In 2005, she served an almost six-month deployment to Iraq at a time of growing sectarian violence and insurgent attacks. The next year, she began a roughly seven-month tour in Qatar.
In June 2008, the same month she left the Air Force, she earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Maryland University College, and later worked for two national security contractors. Eventually, she entered graduate school at George Washington, an academic proving ground for aspiring diplomats and researchers near the State Department’s headquarters.
Members of Witt’s family, who did not respond to messages after her indictment was announced. According to Ellis, her classmate, she seemed to have drifted from her relatives.
Connie Shields, who lives near Witt’s father, Harry Witt, in Longwood, Florida, said there had been little discussion of Monica Witt’s intelligence work. “It just was not talked about,” Shields said. “I don’t think Harry knew too much about where she was or what she was doing.”
She was only somewhat less mysterious at George Washington. To classmates, many of whom were far younger than her, she appeared shaken by her time in Iraq, withdrawn, even alienated. She sometimes hung around after class, talking about her time in the military.
“She would talk about how she couldn’t sleep at night, the stuff she saw and was a part of,” said Ellis. Witt, he remembered, would mention drone strikes, extrajudicial killings and atrocities against children, all of which she claimed her colleagues in the military would brag about. She seemed distressed by what she called “gross incompetence” by her superiors during her time abroad.
Other students who knew her described conversations in which she said she felt like she didn’t fit in. But it was in 2012, she returned from a trip to Tehran to attend a conference, that she transformed.
Suddenly she was wearing a hijab, her classmates said, announcing her conversion to Islam and talking excitedly about Iran like a tourist.
The conference, called “Hollywoodism,” focused on how the American film industry maligned Iranian culture.
The same month as her commencement, FBI agents contacted Witt, according to the indictment against her. They brought a grave warning: Iran’s intelligence services considered her a target for recruitment. Witt rebuffed the agents’ concerns and told them that, if she returned to Iran, “she would refuse to provide any information” about her work with the Air Force.