GOING TO HEART OF EVIL
The most chilling moment was when he said Iran was stocking up for war with the U.S. U.S. agents grab merchant of death Book: How U.S. got him deep inside enemy territory
A RIVETING new book, “Operation Shakespeare,” tells the thrilling inside story of how an elite team of Homeland Security operatives snatched an Iranian arms dealer from the shadows in a triumph of American justice.
When Amir Ardebili stood before a judge in Wilmington, Del., in 2009 to be sentenced to five years in prison it was the result of a daring operation by agents willing to go to spy-novel lengths to snare their high-value target. John Shiffman, a an investigative reporter for Reuters, does a masterful job of laying bare “the secret war” the U.S. is fighting against the vast network of arms smugglers that put U.S. weaponry in the hands of our enemies.
To bring home the c cost of arms proliferation, Shiffman tells the tragic story of Lt. Seth D Dvorin, who even as a student td t at R Rutgers University talked about his sense of duty to his country. In Iraq, stationed 35 miles south of Baghdad, the 24-year-old commanded Outkast Platoon charged with clearing roads of “improvised explosive devices” (IEDs) in advance of Army convoys.
On the morning of Feb. 3, 2004, Dvorin saw what was possibly part of a tire rim in the roadway. He had time only to yell at his soldiers to move back before an insurgent triggered the device, killing him.
It was that year that timing devices later traced back to an American factory started showing up in the homemade bombs. At least 2,500 American soldiers have died in IED attacks, nearly half the total of those killed by hostile fire in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The weapons of modern warfare are miniature microchips, night vision scopes, trigger devices and such — and the United States indisputably has the technical advantage.
But Shiffman warns that advantage is evaporating as a vast network of smugglers illegally procure American-made military hardware for the Chinese, Pakistanis, Iranians or Russians.
Today, smugglers operate over the Internet. When not dealing with a U.S. defense company or high-tech manufacturer that knowingly turns a blind eye — billion-dollar Pentagon contractors have been convicted for doing so — they place duplicitous orders with firms claiming to be from a non-embargoed country. The freight — weapons or the electronics essential to manufacture them — is frequently shipped to open ports like Dubai, from where it’s covertly moved to its outlawed destination.
Untouchable in their home countries, the smugglers operate with impunity.
One day in 2004, Homeland Security Investigation supervisor John Malandra joined forces with federal prosecutor David Hall, operating in the backwater of Wilmington, Del., to envision and launch an incredibly audacious sting that would take the fight to foreign soil.
Together they mounted Operation Shakespeare, an expensive, complicated, riddled-with-risk venture that would successfully challenge the assumption that American agents wouldn’t go so far as to charge a foreigner for violating U.S. law outside of the U.S.
They were out to nail an insider, “someone living in Iran or China with intimate knowledge of their military’s supply network,” seize his files and bring him to justice in an American court.
The operation began in a modest storefront, actually an office, in Yardley, Pa., bearing the nameplate Cross International (C.I.) manned by a rookie agent, Patrick Lechleitner.
C.I. offered the highest quality in sophisticated American-made military-grade equipment and technology to foreign corporations that were usually state-run front companies.
Leichleitner quietly solicited tips from defense contractors and high-tech manufacturers regarding suspicious orders. Incredibly, one such tip revealed that Yasmin Ahmed, already arrested and convicted in the U.S. for smuggling munitions to embargoed countries in the Middle East, was back after serving time, doing business for Pakistan from overseas.
C.I. stepped in to offer its services, and Ahmed seemed interested. Around the same time, an email arrived from an Alex Dave, who claimed to be operating from Dubai though his email linked to a number in Iran. He was interested in American jet parts and radioisotopes.
By then Hall and Malandra had decided to pull in a coach, as it were, to train their agents in how to talk and think like arms smugglers. The unsavory character they brought on was a 70-year-old Brit named Clyde Pensworth, “a salesman to despots and dictators since 1962.” He was known in certain circles as The White Man.
Lechleitner and Pensworth traveled to the 2005 Dubai Airshow, where $35 billion in legitimate contracts was realized, and tens of millions on the black market. The White Man promised meetings with international arms traders and indeed Yasmin Ahmed materialized, inching their negotiations forward. It was a disappointment that Alex Dave was a no-show since his order inquiries had become prolific. But a major Tehran arms dealer, a Pensworth connection, seemed promising.
After Dubai, a U.S. Customs agent working undercover in Germany and using the pseudonym Darius joined the team. A brash, aggressive type other agents found difficult, he was the right man to establish a storefront in a former Soviet republic — though that location is still confidential.
From that point, Darius and Dave, in actuality Amir Ardebili,
began an intense email correspondence. The Iranian from Shiraz promised orders for everything, including sonar, night vision, distance finders and radar.
The investigation was in its third year, and Georgia was promising to host an undercover operation if the agents could lure an arms dealer from Iran, Dubai or Pakistan. That was a critical development. But the sting had to proceed flawlessly.
While the U.S. courts recognize a concept by which it can enforce law related to Americanmade technology anywhere in the world, it is difficult to execute and the standard for proof in illegal arms deals is incredibly high.
By now Yasmin Ahmed and the Tehran arms dealer had faded away. But on Oct. 1, 2007, Darius and Malandra tensely waited at the airport in Tbilisi, Georgia. Ardebili was flying in to take possession of a pair of F-4 fighter jet cockpit computers, a set of precision gyroscopes (required to steer rockets) and 1,000 radar microchips capable of tracking fighter planes.
What the agents didn’t know is that, among other major deals, Ardebeli had already smuggled the components that were showing up in IEDs in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Inside Suite 22 at the Old Tbilisi Hotel, Lechleitner waited, a camera placed in a hotel painting. A Pentagon agent was on the scene sharing the prep. A box of microchips, only the top layer real, the rest counterfeit, waited.
A grueling two days ensued, but Ardebili was a gold mine. He arrived with a long and sinister shopping list, looking for a major ongoing partnership. Fortunately for the agents who needed Ardebili to incriminate himself on a checklist of factors, he was voluble.
At one point he wrote down the names of two dozen Iraniancontrolled companies acquiring U.S. military gear. But the most chilling moment came when he confided that with the increased hostilities of the time, Iran was stocking up in expectation of war with the U.S.
Late in the second day after Ardebili signed a receipt for the gyroscopes, the checklist was complete. Four Georgian policemen stormed the room and pinned him to his chair.
His seized laptop yielded a stunning profile of the weaponry Iran was seeking to upgrade and expand its military. The intelligence was invaluable and the data would be exploited for U.S. investigations worldwide for years.
Ardebili fought extradition and Malandra had to pull some last-minute and somewhat shady footwork to get him out of the country. In the end, he pleaded guilty in a sealed courtroom in Philadelphia.
There was a moment during his five-year stint in Rochester, Minn., when it seemed he might be swapped for three American hikers held by Iran, but Ardebili served out his full sentence before being deported back to Iran in 2012.
“Operation Shakespeare: The True Story of an Elite International Sting” reads like a spy thriller — but Shiffman’s meticulous reporting leaves no doubt that he is telling nothing less than scary truth. The book is on sale July 8.