Ex-intel official accused of giving secrets to Iran
WASHINGTON — A former U.S. Air Force counterintelligence specialist who defected to Iran despite warnings from the FBI has been charged with revealing classified information to the Tehran government, including the code name and secret mission of a Pentagon program, prosecutors said Wednesday.
The Justice Department also accused Monica Elfriede Witt, 39, of betraying former colleagues in the U.S. intelligence community by feeding details about their personal and professional lives to Iran. Four hackers linked to the Iranian government, charged in the same indictment, used that information to target the intelligence workers online, prosecutors said.
Witt had been on the FBI’S radar at least a year before she defected after she attended an Iranian conference and appeared in anti-american videos. She was warned about her activities but reassured agents that she would not provide sensitive information about her work if she returned to Iran. She was not arrested.
“Once a holder of a topsecret security clearance, Monica Witt actively sought opportunities to undermine the United States and support the government of Iran — a country which poses a serious threat to our national security,” said FBI executive assistant director Jay Tabb, the bureau’s top national security official.
Tabb said “she provided information that could cause serious damage to national security,” though he did not provide specifics.
Witt remains at large in Iran, as do the four hackers, who prosecutors say were acting on behalf of the government-linked Iranian Revolutionary Guard, prosecutors said. That group has been designated by the U.S. government as promoting terrorism.
The hackers, using imposter Facebook personas, then targeted those same officials and were even able at one point to join a private Facebook group composed primarily of retired government workers, the indictment says. The hackers sent the targets messages and emails that purported to be legitimate but instead contained malicious software that, if opened, would have given them access to the officials’ computer and network.
The Texas native served in the Air Force between 1997 and 2008, where she was trained in Farsi — the predominant language of Iran — and was deployed overseas on classified counterintelligence missions, including to the Middle East. She then found work as a Defense Department contractor.
She defected to Iran in 2013 after being invited to two allexpense-paid conferences in the country that the Justice Department says promoted anti-western propaganda and condemned American moral standards. She was a Defense Department contractor at the time.
The Treasury Department on Wednesday sanctioned the New Horizon Organization, which sponsored the conferences Witt attended. American officials say the conferences, which promote Holocaust denial and conspiracy theories, serve as a platform for Iran to recruit and collect intelligence.
Witt first traveled to a “Hollywoodism” conference in 2012. She was warned that May by FBI agents that she was a potential target for recruitment by Iranian intelligence.
“She chose not to heed our warning that travel to Iran could potentially make her susceptible to recruitment,” Tabb said.
She attended the same conference the following year and was hired by an unnamed individual to assist in the filming of an anti-american propaganda commercial.
Given free housing and computer equipment, she went to work for the Iranians, turning over information about a classified Defense Department program and assembling into “target packages” research she conducted into the family lives, locations and missions of former colleagues.
U.S. officials would not elaborate on why the indictment was brought six years after her detection, except to say that they had to move classified intelligence into an unclassified format to be used in a pending criminal proceeding.
The Justice Department officials would not say whether Witt’s prosecution was connected to Marzieh Hashemi, an American-born Iranian television anchorwoman who was recently released after being detained by the FBI as a material witness in an undisclosed U.S. case.