Shadow force: The secret history of the U.S. intelligence community's battle with Iran's Revolutionary Guard by zachsdorfman
The hackers pretended to be professors, appealing to Achilles’ heel of academics: their egos. Posing as admiring colleagues from other universities, they emailed their targets, claiming they had enjoyed their articles and wanted to read more of their work. The emails contained links to articles the “professors” claimed they could not access.
Many countries have military and intelligence agencies that operate abroad, but few are as far-reaching or prolific as the Revolutionary Guard, which has been involved in everything from conducting espionage campaigns in Europe and the Americas to supporting proxy forces in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen.
Trump administration officials blame the Revolutionary Guard for those attacks, though the regime has denied responsibility. But the guard has claimed responsibility for the recent shooting down of a U.S. drone that Iran claims entered its airspace, and for seizing a British-flagged oil tanker in the Persian Gulf on Sunday.
Dealing with the Revolutionary Guard was “complicated,” said Richard Nephew, an Iran director at the National Security Council from 2011 to 2013 who helped lead the Obama administration’s sanctions policy. “We looked at the IRGC as being a regional force that employed tactics that were both conventional and unconventional, including direct support for terrorism,” he said. “Simply to say they are a terrorist group — well, yes, one can say that.
In the aftermath of 9/11, al-Qaida fighters — and bin Laden family members — sought refuge in Iran from over the Afghan border. According to “The Exile,” a 2017 book by Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy, Quds Force operatives provided these fighters and family members safe harbor and the freedom to funnel fighters back into Afghanistan and, later, Iraq.
One major point of the negotiations, which continued intermittently after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, involved the U.S. request that the Iranians hand over al-Qaida figures under house arrest in Iran. Tehran countered that the U.S. should give Iran the leadership of the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq — a violent anti-regime group on a U.S. terrorism list from 1997 to 2012 — then living under American authority in Iraq. U.S.
In the meantime, Iran was able to exploit a power vacuum in Iraq left when the United States seemed to lack a coherent transition plan. This involved political influence schemes but also direct support by the IRGC’s Quds Force for Shiite militias, who waged a vicious insurgency against American troops in the postwar years. Some attacks — like the raid on a U.S. military facility in Karbala, Iraq, in 2007 that killed five U.S.
The first was the “Green Revolution” — the massive wave of pro-reform protests after the 2009 Iranian presidential election, and the brutal crackdown that followed, spearheaded by the IRGC. “There was never a sense of naiveté around the challenge the IRGC presented to the United States, but it was a turning point. It hardened a lot of views, and displayed what we were dealing with,” said Magsamen.
“The uptick was in the pressure to steal IP,” recalled a former counterintelligence executive. “There was more of an aggressive effort in technology transfer.” Iranian operatives were also keenly focused on obtaining centrifuges, and computer technology related to Iran’s missile program, said this former official.
Washington and Tehran have not had diplomatic relations since 1979, so Iran cannot insert intelligence officers into the United States via “official cover,” that is, placement in embassies or consulates. Instead, the regime relies on travelers, students and others for conducting espionage on U.S. soil.
Though U.S. officials did confirm a few cases of actual intelligence officers entering the country under the student visa program, Iran relied on co-opted students, and not formal spies, for its intelligence-collection efforts at universities, said the former counterintelligence executive. The large Iranian-American population in the Los Angeles area — one of the biggest in the world outside Iran itself — made the city a particular target, recalled the former senior national security official. “One of the IRGC’s missions in the U.S. is to infiltrate the diaspora and find past and present enemies of the Iranian regime,” said this person. “We would hear about stuff like that all the time from informants or cooperating individuals in the Persian community.
Of course, the FBI has also sought to leverage the Iranian community in California for critical information, said former senior officials. For instance, two former officials described a case during the second term of the Obama administration when the FBI entered into discussions with an Iranian asset based in Los Angeles who claimed to serve as a backchannel to the regime regarding information about Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent.
U.S. officials concluded that the backchannel was “concocted” by the Iranians, said these two former officials — the second of whom recalled “major issues” with the source, who may have even been a double agent. The Iranians were trying to “play” the bureau, said this person, in a gambit for cash and plane parts. The negotiations, in the end, were dropped.
As Washington and Tehran moved forward with negotiating a nuclear deal, Iranian intelligence operations continued to evolve, pursuing aggressive operations against U.S. targets, and even turned to foreign partners for help. Around 2013, CIA personnel also began to notice improvements in other Iranian intelligence efforts, including in online targeting and strategic messaging, and counterintelligence — leading to discussions within the CIA about what was driving these changes on the Iranian side.
Iran also began ramping up its online strategic messaging and disinformation operations, becoming more active on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, in an effort to sway public opinion in a pro-Iran direction, recalled two former U.S. officials.
Donald Trump was elected in November 2016 on the heels of a political campaign that focused on blasting the nuclear accord, which he called “the worst deal ever,” and calling for a ban on immigration from Muslim-majority countries. Once in office, he quickly fulfilled his promise on the second matter, issuing a ban on seven countries, including Iran.
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