(José Niño, Headline USA) The CIA secretly spent millions of dollars staging fake academic conferences around the world to lure Iranian nuclear scientists out of their homeland and pitch them to defect, ProPublica reported in a 2017 story that’s going viral again.
In one operation about a decade ago, the agency funded and staged a conference at an unsuspecting foreign scientific institution, invited speakers and guests, and planted operatives among the kitchen staff just to entice a nuclear expert out of Iran, separate him from his Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps minders, and pitch him one on one. A last minute snag nearly derailed the plans when the target switched hotels because the conference’s preferred hotel cost $75 more than his superiors in Iran were willing to spend.
After confirming through audio and visual surveillance that the scientist’s guards were sleeping, a CIA agent knocked softly on the hotel room door.
“Salam habibi,” the agent said when the Iranian answered. “I’m from the CIA, and I want you to board a plane with me to the United States.”
The scientist started to ask a question, but the agent interrupted him. “First, get the ice bucket.”
“Why?”
“If any of your guards wake up, you can tell them you’re going to get some ice.”
ProPublica reported that the agency sought to delay Iran’s development of nuclear weapons by exploiting academia’s internationalism and pulling off a mass deception on the institutions that hosted the conferences and the professors who attended them. The people at these gatherings had no idea they were acting in a drama simulated from afar.
Beginning under President George W. Bush, the government had “endless money” for covert efforts to delay Iran’s nuclear weapons program, according to the Institute for Science and International Security’s David Albright. One program was Operation Brain Drain, which sought to spur top Iranian nuclear scientists to defect.
The CIA would set up conferences at prestigious scientific institutes through cutouts, typically businessmen, who would underwrite each symposium with $500,000 to $2 million in agency funds. The conferences would focus on aspects of nuclear physics with civilian applications that dovetailed with target scientists’ research interests.
“The more clueless the academics are, the safer it is for everybody,” a former intelligence officer familiar with the operation told ProPublica.
CIA officers assigned to cases would pose as students, technical consultants, or exhibitors. Their first job was to peel guards away from scientists. In one instance, kitchen staff recruited by the CIA poisoned the guards’ meal, leaving them incapacitated by diarrhea and vomiting.
Officers would prepare for pitches by reading files and cultivating access agents close to targets. If a scientist expressed doubt he was really dealing with the CIA, the officer could prove it by revealing intimate personal details. One officer told a potential defector, “I know you had testicular cancer and you lost your left nut.”
Once scientists agreed to defect, the CIA would coordinate visas and flight documents with allied intelligence agencies and resettle families in the United States, including paying for children’s education through graduate school.
Enough scientists defected through academic conferences and other routes to hinder Iran’s nuclear weapons program, according to a former officer familiar with the operation.
One engineer who assembled centrifuges for Iran agreed to defect on one condition. He wanted to pursue a doctorate at MIT. The agency had spirited him out of Iran without credentials like diplomas and transcripts, but MIT eventually agreed to waive its usual screening procedures. Professors grilled the defector, he aced the oral exam, was admitted, and earned his doctorate.
“I do know of a young man that was here in our lab,” MIT mechanical engineering professor Timothy Gutowski told ProPublica. “Somehow I learned that he did work on centrifuges in Iran. I started thinking, ‘What went on here?'”
“Every intelligence service in the world works conferences, sponsors conferences, and looks for ways to get people to conferences,” a former CIA operative told ProPublica.
José Niño is the deputy editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/JoseAlNino
