Iranian spy’s saga ends in execution
Nuclear scientist recruited by CIA vanished after returning to Tehran
When Shahram Amiri emerged from the shadows into the spotlight six years ago, he was a young Iranian scientist who suddenly appeared on YouTube from a safe house, telling a bizarre story of having been kidnapped by the CIA.
Then, in another video that quickly followed, his story changed: He had come to the United States voluntarily to study but desperately missed his son back in Tehran.
Soon, father and son were reunited in Iran, in a joyous scene broadcast by the Iranian government.
Then Amiri disappeared, amid rumors that he had been imprisoned. Questions, of course, went unanswered: Was he a spy, recruited by the U.S. for his insider knowledge of the Iranian nuclear program? Or a double agent, sent by Tehran to spread disinformation or to learn what the Americans knew?
On Sunday, the case took what appears to be its final turn.
“Shahram Amiri was hanged for revealing the country’s top secrets to the
enemy,” Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejei, a spokesman for Iran’s Justice Ministry, said in Tehran.
Weeks after Amiri returned to Iran, U.S. intelligence officials described the events on ground rules of anonymity to reporters. Their story was that Amiri had been a voluntary recruit, interviewed and then placed in the agency’s equivalent of a witness protection program. When he first told his CIA handlers that he planned to return, they warned him, according to the intelligence agency’s account, that it would probably end with his head in a noose.
Amiri was 32 in 2009 when he left a university post to go on what he declared was a pilgrimage to Mecca. He disappeared when he got to Medina, in Saudi Arabia. He had left his shaving kit in an empty hotel room, and the Iranians guessed he was with the Americans and accused the U.S. of kidnapping.
Resettled in Arizona
Amiri was an unlikely spy, a bit bumbling and nervous. As a specialist in measuring nuclear radiation, he had been to a number of sensitive Iranian sites, all of great interest to intelligence officials.
According to officials familiar with his debriefing, he was among the sources who told the Americans about the internal Iranian debate over whether the country needed a nuclear weapon or just a “threshold capability” to build one on short notice without violating the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and inviting a military backlash.
By 2009, the CIA had apparently decided that the chances he would be detected were rising and offered to get him out of the country. The agency promised him $5 million and a new identity. Amiri believed his estranged wife would never leave Iran, and he decided to go alone, without his son.
After he was interviewed in Washington, he ended up near Tucson, Ariz., under the agency’s national resettlement program, which provides cover and protection for cooperative foreign spies.
But he immediately missed his young son and began calling home. Iranian intelligence agencies pressured his family and by one account threatened to harm his son.
The CIA told Amiri to make a videotape claiming he had been kidnapped. He did, using a webcam to declare that he had been kidnapped in Medina “in a joint operation by the terror and abduction units” of the CIA and Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service. He said he had been drugged and tortured. Two months later, in 2010, the video showed up on Iranian state television.
The CIA made its own video with Amiri, filmed in the friendly setting of a study. In that one, Amiri contradicted what he had said in the first. “I am free here,” he said, “and I assure everyone that I am quite safe.”
His estranged wife told Iranian television that the second video must have been faked. A few weeks later the Iranians broadcast a third video, in which Amiri returned to the story that he had been kidnapped but had escaped his captors.
Reunited with son
The CIA’s resettlement program has clear rules that if a defector wants to return home, there is no legal basis for the United States to force him to stay. So in July 2010, Amiri ended up in a taxi to a side office of the Pakistani Embassy in Northwest Washington, near the vice president’s residence.
He landed in Tehran on July 15, 2010, and his young son was there to embrace him. The heartwarming picture was broadcast throughout the country. Amiri told Iranian journalists that he had been offered millions of dollars to stay in the United States and reveal all he knew about the nuclear program but had not done so.
Weeks later, he disappeared.
His mother said on the BBC Persian service over the weekend that he had initially been sentenced to 10 years in prison, though Iranian officials had never announced that. Last month, she said, that punishment was changed to a death sentence. She said he had tried to console her, saying he would finally be free and at peace.