Former US Air Force officer charged with spying for Iran
US authorities charged former Air Force intelligence officer Monica Witt on Wednesday with helping Iran launch a cyberspying operation that targeted her former colleagues after she defected from the US.
The US justice department said Witt, 39, assembled dossiers on eight US military intelligence agents she had worked with for Iranian hackers, who then used Facebook and e-mail to try to install spyware on their computers.
She defected to Iran in 2013 and presumably still lives there, US officials said.
“She decided to turn against the United States and shift her loyalty to Iran,” said Jay Tabb, the FBI’s executive assistant director for national security. “Her primary motivation appears to be ideological.”
Washington also charged four Iranian nationals who it said were involved in the cyberattacks. US officials also imposed sanctions on an Iranian firm, Net Peygard Samavat Company, it said conducted the hacking operation, and Iranian events company, New Horizon Organisation, which it said works to recruit foreign attendees.
Witt faces two counts of delivering military information to a foreign government and one count of conspiracy.
According to an indictment unsealed on Wednesday, Witt served as a counterintelligence officer in the Air Force from 1997 to 2008 and worked as a contractor for two years thereafter.
During that time, she was granted high-level security clearances, learned Farsi at a US military language school and was deployed overseas for counterintelligence missions in the Middle East.
Witt appears to have turned against the US sometime before February 2012, when she travelled to Iran to attend a New Horizon conference that featured anti-US propaganda.
When warned by the FBI on that trip that Iranian intelligence services were trying to recruit her, Witt allegedly promised she would not talk about her counterintelligence work if she returned to Iran.
But later that year, she helped an Iranian-American official produce an anti-American propaganda film. “I am endeavouring to put the training I received to good use instead of evil,” she told that person in an e-mail.
In February 2013, Witt returned to Iran for another New Horizon conference and told officials there she wanted to emigrate. She faced resistance for months.
“I just hope I have better luck with Russia at this point,” Witt wrote to her Iranian-American contact in July. “I am starting to get frustrated at the level of Iranian suspicion.”
She successfully defected in August 2013, after providing a CV and “conversion narrative” to her contact. “I’m signing off and heading out! Coming home,” she wrote as she was about to board her flight from Dubai to Tehran.
Provided with housing and computer equipment by the Iranian government, Witt tracked down US counterintelligence agents she used to work with on Facebook, the indictment reads, and disclosed the classified identity of at least one of them.
Iranian hackers then set up fake Facebook personas to befriend those agents and attempt to install spyware that would track their computer activity, the indictment reads. The hackers managed to gain access to a Facebook group of US government agents.
Iranian nationals Mojtaba Masoumpour, Behzad Mesri, Hossein Parvar and Mohamad Paryar were charged with computer intrusion and aggravated identity theft.