In order to tempt
nuclear scientists from countries such as Iran or North Korea to defect, US spy
agencies routinely send agents to academic conferences – or even host their own
fake ones.
By Daniel Golden
The CIA agent tapped
softly on the hotel room door. After the keynote speeches, panel discussions
and dinner, the conference attendees had retired for the night. Audio and
visual surveillance of the room showed that the nuclear scientist’s minders
from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were sleeping, but he was still
awake. Sure enough, he opened the door, alone.
According to a
person familiar with this encounter, which took place about a decade ago, the
agency had been preparing it for months. Through a business front, it had
funded and staged the conference at an unsuspecting foreign centre of
scientific research, invited speakers and guests, and planted operatives among
the kitchen workers and other staff, just so it could entice the nuclear expert
out of Iran, separate him for a few minutes from his guards, and pitch him
one-to-one. A last-minute snag had almost derailed the plans: the target
switched hotels because the conference’s preferred hotel cost $75 more than his
superiors in Iran were willing to spend.
To show his
sincerity and goodwill, the agent put his hand over his heart. “Salam habibi,”
he said. “I’m from the CIA, and I want you to board a plane with me to the
United States.” The agent could read the Iranian’s reactions on his face: a mix
of shock, fear and curiosity. From prior experience with defectors, he knew the
thousand questions flooding the scientist’s mind: What about my family? How
will you protect me? Where will I live? How will I support myself? How do I get
a visa? Do I have time to pack? What happens if I say no?
The scientist
started to ask one, but the agent interrupted him. “First, get the ice bucket,”
he said.
“Why?”
“If any of your
guards wake up, you can tell them you’re going to get some ice.”
In perhaps its most
audacious and elaborate incursion into academia, the CIA has secretly spent
millions of dollars staging scientific conferences around the world. Its
purpose was to lure Iranian nuclear scientists out of their homeland and into
an accessible setting, where its intelligence officers could approach them
individually and press them to defect. In other words, 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 and spoke at them. The
people attending the conference had no idea they were acting in a drama that
simulated reality but was stage-managed from afar. Whether the national
security mission justified this manipulation of the professoriate can be
debated, but there’s little doubt that most academics would have balked at
being dupes in a CIA scheme.
More than any other
academic arena, conferences lend themselves to espionage. Assisted by globalisation,
these social and intellectual rituals have become ubiquitous. Like stops on the
world golf or tennis circuits, they sprout up wherever the climate is
favourable, and draw a jet-setting crowd. What they lack in prize money, they
make up for in prestige. Although researchers chat electronically all the time,
virtual meetings are no substitute for getting together with peers, networking
for jobs, checking out the latest gadgets and delivering papers that will later
be published in volumes of conference proceedings. “The attraction of the
conference circuit,” English novelist David Lodge wrote in Small World, his
1984 send-up of academic life, is that “it’s a way of converting work into
play, combining professionalism with tourism, and all at someone else’s
expense. Write a paper and see the world!”
The importance of a
conference may be measured not just by the number of Nobel prize-winners or
Oxford dons it attracts, but by the number of spies. US and foreign
intelligence officers flock to conferences for the same reason that army
recruiters concentrate on low-income neighborhoods: they make the best hunting
grounds. While a university campus might have only one or two professors of
interest to an intelligence service, the right conference – on drone
technology, perhaps, or Isis – could have dozens.
“Every intelligence
service in the world works conferences, sponsors conferences, and looks for
ways to get people to conferences,” said one former CIA operative.
“Recruitment is a
long process of seduction,” says Mark Galeotti, senior researcher at the
Institute of International Relations Prague and former special advisor to the
British foreign office. “The first stage is to arrange to be at the same
workshop as a target. Even if you just exchange banalities, the next time you
can say, ‘Did I see you in Istanbul?’”
The FBI warned
American academics in 2011 to be cautious about conferences, citing this
scenario: “A researcher receives an unsolicited invitation to submit a paper
for an international conference. She submits a paper and it is accepted. At the
conference, the hosts ask for a copy of her presentation. The hosts hook a
thumb drive to her laptop, and unbeknownst to her, download every file and data
source from her computer.”
The FBI and CIA
swarm conferences, too. At gatherings in the US, says one former FBI agent,
“foreign intelligence officers try to collect Americans; we try to collect
them”. The CIA is involved with conferences in various ways: it sends officers
to them; it hosts them through front companies in the Washington area, so that
the intelligence community can tap academic wisdom; and it mounts sham
conferences to reach potential defectors from hostile countries.
The CIA monitors
upcoming conferences worldwide and identifies those of interest. Suppose there
is an international conference in Pakistan on centrifuge technology: the CIA
would send its own agent undercover, or enlist a professor who might be going
anyway to report back. If it learns that an Iranian nuclear scientist attended
the conference, it might peg him for possible recruitment at the next year’s
meeting.
Intelligence from
academic conferences can shape policy. It helped persuade the George W Bush
administration –mistakenly, as it turned out – that Saddam Hussein was still
developing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. “What our spies and informants
were noticing, of course, was that Iraqi scientists specialising in chemistry,
biology and, to a lesser extent, nuclear power kept showing up at international
symposia,” former CIA counterterrorism officer John Kiriakou wrote in a 2009
memoir. “They presented papers, listened to the presentation of others, took
copious notes, and returned to Jordan, where they could transmit overland back
to Iraq.”
Some of those spies
may have drawn the wrong conclusions because they lacked advanced degrees in
chemistry, biology or nuclear power. Without expertise, agents might
misunderstand the subject matter, or be exposed as frauds. At conferences
hosted by the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna on topics such as
isotope hydrology and fusion energy, “there are probably more intelligence
officers roaming the hallways than actual scientists,” says Gene Coyle, who
worked for the CIA from 1976 to 2006. “There’s one slight problem. If you’re
going to send a CIA guy to attend one of these conferences, he has to talk the
talk. It’s hard to send a history major. ‘Yes, I have a PhD in plasma physics.’
Also, that’s a very small world. If you say you’re from the Fermi Institute in
Chicago, they say: ‘You must know Bob, Fred, Susie.’”
Instead, Coyle says,
the agency may enlist a suitable professor through the National Resources
Division, its clandestine domestic service, which has a “working relationship”
with a number of scientists. “If they see a conference in Vienna, they might
say, ‘Professor Smith, that would seem
natural for you to attend.’”
“Smith might say: ‘I
am attending it, I’ll let you know who I chatted with. If I bump into an
Iranian, I won’t run in the opposite direction.’ If he says, ‘I’d love to
attend, but the travel budget at the university is pretty tight,’ the CIA or
FBI might say: ‘Well, you know, we might be able to take care of your ticket,
in economy class.’”
A spy’s courtship of
a professor often begins with a seemingly random encounter – known in the trade
as a “bump” – at an academic conference. One former CIA operative overseas
explained to me how it works. I’ll call him “R”.
“I recruited a ton
of people at conferences,” R told me. “I was good at it, and it’s not that hard.”
Between assignments,
he would peruse a list of upcoming conferences, pick one, and identify a
scientist of interest who seemed likely to attend after having spoken at least
twice at the same event in previous years. R would assign trainees at the CIA and
National Security Agency to develop a profile of the target – where they had
gone to college, who their instructors were, and so on. Then he would cable
headquarters, asking for travel funding. The trick was to make the cable
persuasive enough to score the expense money, but not so compelling that other
agents who read it, and were based closer to the conference, would try to go
after the same target.
Next he developed
his cover – typically, as a businessman. He invented a company name, built an
off-the-shelf website and printed business cards. He created billing, phone and
credit card records for the nonexistent company. For his name, he chose one of
his seven aliases.
R was no scientist.
He couldn’t drop in a line about the Riemann hypothesis as an icebreaker.
Instead, figuring that most scientists are socially awkward introverts, he
would sidle up to the target at the edge of the conference’s get-together
session and say, “Do you hate crowds as much as I do?” Then he would walk away.
“The bump is fleeting,” R said. “You just register your face in their mind.” No
one else should notice the bump. It’s a rookie mistake to approach a target in
front of other people who might be minders assigned by the professor’s own
country. The minders would report the conversation, compromising the target’s
security and making them unwilling or unable to entertain further overtures.
For the rest of the
conference, R would “run around like crazy”, bumping into the scientist at
every opportunity. With each contact, called “time on target” in CIA jargon and
counted in his job-performance metrics, he insinuated himself into the
professor’s affections. For instance, having done his homework, R would say he
had read a wonderful article on such-and-such topic but couldn’t remember the
author’s name. “That was me,” the scientist would say, blushing.
After a couple of
days, R would invite the scientist to lunch or dinner and make his pitch: his
company was interested in the scientist’s field, and would like to support
their work. “Every academic I have ever met is constantly trying to figure how
to get grants to continue his research. That’s all they talk about,” he
explained. They would agree on a specific project, and the price, which varied
by the scientist’s country: “$1,000 to $5,000 for a Pakistani. Korea is more.”
Once the CIA pays a foreign professor, even if they are unaware at first of the
funding source, it controls them, because exposure of the relationship might
imperil their career or even their life in their native country.
Scientific
conferences have become such a draw for intelligence agents that one of the
biggest concerns for CIA operatives is interference from agency colleagues
trapping the same academic prey. “We tend to flood events like these,” a former
CIA officer who writes under the pseudonym Ishmael Jones observed in his 2008
book, The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture.
At one 2005
conference in Paris that he anticipated would be a “perfect watering hole for
visiting rogue-state weapons scientists”, Jones recalled, his heart sank as he
glanced across the room and saw two CIA agents (who were themselves
professors). He avoided their line of sight while he roamed the gathering,
eyeballing nametags and trawling for “people who might make good sources”,
ideally from North Korea, Iran, Libya, Russia or China.
“I’m surprised
there’s so much open intelligence presence at these conferences,” Karsten Geier
said. “There are so many people running around from so many acronyms.” Geier,
head of cyber security policy for the German foreign office, and I were
chatting at the Sixth Annual International Conference on Cyber Engagement, held
in April 2016 at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. The religious art,
stained-glass windows and classical quotations lining Gaston Hall enveloped the
directors of the NSA and the FBI like an elaborate disguise as they gave
keynote addresses on combating one of the most daunting challenges of the 21st
century: cyber attacks.
The NSA’s former top
code breaker spoke, as did the ex-chairman of the National Intelligence
Council, the deputy director of Italy’s security department, and the director
of a centre that does classified research for Swedish intelligence. The name
tags that almost all of the 700 attendees wore showed that they worked for the
US government, foreign embassies, intelligence contractors or vendors of
cyber-related products, or they taught at universities.
Perhaps not all of
the intelligence presence was open. Officially, 40 nations – from Brazil to
Mauritius, Serbia to Sri Lanka – were represented at the conference, but not
Russia. Yet, hovering in the rear of the balcony, a slender young man carrying
a briefcase listened to the panels. No name tag adorned his lapel. I approached
him, introduced myself, and asked his name. “Alexander,” he said, and, after a
pause, “Belousov.”
“How do you like the
conference?”
“No,” he said,
trying to ward off further inquiries. “I am from Russian embassy. I don’t have
any opinions. I would like to know, that’s all.”
I proffered a
business card, and requested his, in vain. “I am here only a month. My cards
are still being produced.”
I persisted, asking
about his job at the embassy. (A check of a diplomatic directory showed him as
a “second secretary”.) He looked at his watch. “I am sorry. I must go.”
When the CIA wants
Prof John Booth’s opinion, it phones him to find out if he is available to
speak at a conference. But the agency’s name is nowhere to be found on the
conference’s formal invitation and agenda, which invariably list a
Washington-area contractor as the sponsor.
By hiding its role,
the CIA makes it easier for scholars to share their insights. They take credit
for their presentations on their CV without disclosing that they consulted for
the CIA, which might alienate some academic colleagues, as well as the
countries where they conduct their research.
An emeritus
professor of political science at the University of North Texas, Booth
specialises in studying Latin America, a region where history has taught officials
to be wary of the CIA. “If you were intending to return to Latin America, it
was very important that your CV not reflect” these kinds of presentations,
Booth told me in March 2016. “When you go to one of these conferences, if there
are intelligence or defence agency principals there, it’s invisible on your CV.
It provides a fig leaf for participants. There’s still some bias in academia
against this. I don’t go around in Latin American studies meetings saying I
spent time at a conference run by the CIA.”
The CIA arranges
conferences on foreign policy issues so that its analysts, who are often
immersed in classified details, can learn from scholars who understand the big
picture and are familiar with publicly available sources. Participating
professors are generally paid a $1,000 honorarium, plus expenses. With
scholarly presentations followed by questions and answers, the sessions are
like those at any academic meeting, except that many attendees – presumably,
CIA analysts – wear name tags with only their first names.
Of 10 intelligence
agency conferences that Booth attended over the years – most recently a 2015
session about a wave of Central American refugee children pouring into the US –
the CIA and Office of the Director of National Intelligence [ODNI] ran only one
or two directly. The rest were outsourced to Centra Technology Inc, the leader
of a growing industry of intermediaries in the Washington area –“cutouts” in
espionage parlance – that run conferences for the CIA.
The CIA supplies
Centra with funding and a list of people to invite, who gather in Centra’s
Conference Center in Arlington, Virginia. It’s “an ideal setting for our
clients’ conferences, meetings, games, and collaborative activities,” according
to Centra’s website.
“If you know
anything, when you see Centra, you know it’s likely to be CIA or ODNI,” said
Robert Jervis, a Columbia University professor of international politics and
longtime CIA consultant. “They do feel that for some academics thin cover is
useful.”
Established in 1997,
Centra has received more than $200m in government contracts, including $40m
from the CIA for administrative support, such as compiling and redacting
classified cables and documents for the five-year Senate Intelligence Committee
study of the agency’s torture programme. In 2015, its executive ranks teemed
with former intelligence officials. Founder and chief executive Harold
Rosenbaum was a science and technology adviser to the CIA. Senior vice
president Rick Bogusky headed the Korea division at the Defense Intelligence
Agency. Vice president for research James Harris managed analytic programmes at
the CIA for 22 years. Peggy Lyons, director of global access, was a longtime
CIA manager and officer with several tours in East Asia. David Kanin, Centra
analytic director, spent 31 years as a CIA analyst.
Like Booth, Indiana
University political scientist Sumit Ganguly has spoken at several Centra
conferences. “Anybody who works with Centra knows they’re in effect working for
the US government,” he says. “If it said CIA, there are others who would fret
about it. I make no bones about it to my colleagues. If it sticks in their
craw, it’s their tough luck. I am an American citizen. I feel I should proffer
the best possible advice to my government.”
Another political
scientist, who has given four presentations for Centra, said he was told that
it represented unnamed “clients”. He didn’t realise the clients were US
intelligence agencies until he noticed audience members with first-name-only
name tags. He later ran into one or two of the same people at an academic
conference. They weren’t wearing name tags and weren’t listed in the programme.
Centra strives to
mask its CIA connections. It removed its executives’ biographies from its
website in 2015. The “featured customers” listed there include the Department
of Homeland Security, the FBI, the Army and 16 other branches of the federal
government – but not the CIA. When I phoned Rosenbaum and asked him about
Centra holding conferences for the CIA, he said: “You’re calling the wrong
person. We have nothing to do with that.” And then he hung up.
I dropped by
Centra’s offices on the fifth floor of a building in Burlington, Massachusetts,
a northern suburb of Boston. The sign-in sheet asked visitors for their
citizenship and “type of visit”: classified or not. The receptionist fetched
human resources director Dianne Colpitts. She politely heard me out, checked
with Rosenbaum, and told me that Centra wouldn’t comment. “To be frank,” she
said, “our customers prefer us not to talk to the media.”
For Iranian
academics escaping to the west, academic conferences are a modern-day
underground railroad. The CIA has taken full advantage of this vulnerability.
Beginning under President George W Bush, the US government had “endless money”
for covert efforts to delay Iran’s development of nuclear weapons, the
Institute for Science and International Security’s David Albright told me. One
programme was the CIA’s Operation Brain Drain, which sought to spur top Iranian
nuclear scientists to defect.
Because it was hard
to approach the scientists in Iran, the CIA enticed them to conferences in
friendly or neutral countries, a former intelligence officer told me. In
consultation with Israel, the agency would choose a prospect. Then it would set
up a conference at a prestigious scientific institute through a cutout,
typically a businessman, who would underwrite the symposium with $500,000 to
$2m in agency funds. The businessman might own a technology company, or the
agency might create a shell company for him so that his support would seem
legitimate to the institute, which was unaware of the CIA’s hand. “The more
clueless the academics are, the safer it is for everybody,” the ex-officer told
me. Each cutout knew he was helping the CIA, but he didn’t know why, and the
agency would use him only once.
The conference would
focus on an aspect of nuclear physics that had civilian applications, and also
dovetailed with the Iranian target’s research interests. Typically, Iran’s
nuclear scientists also held university appointments. Like professors anywhere,
they enjoyed a junket. Iran’s government sometimes allowed them to go to
conferences, though under guard, to keep up with the latest research and meet
suppliers of cutting-edge technology – and for propaganda.
“From the Iranian
point of view, they would clearly have an interest in sending scientists to
conferences about peaceful uses of nuclear power,” Ronen Bergmantold me. A
prominent Israeli journalist, Bergman is the author of The Secret War with
Iran: The 30-Year Clandestine Struggle against the World’s Most Dangerous
Terrorist Power, and is working on a history of Israel’s central intelligence
service, the Mossad. “They say, ‘Yes, we send our scientists to conferences to
use civilian technology for a civilian purpose.’”
The CIA officer
assigned to the case might pose as a student, a technical consultant, or an
exhibitor with a booth. His first job would be to peel the guards away from the
scientist. In one instance, kitchen staff recruited by the CIA poisoned the guards’
meal, leaving them incapacitated by diarrhoea and vomiting. The hope was that
they would attribute their illness to aeroplane food or an unfamiliar cuisine.
With luck, the
officer would catch the scientist alone for a few minutes, and pitch to him. He
would have boned up on the Iranian by reading files and courting “access
agents” close to him. That way, if the scientist expressed doubt that he was
really dealing with the CIA, the officer could respond that he knew everything
about him, even the most intimate details – and prove it. One officer told a
potential defector: “I know you had testicular cancer and you lost your left
nut.”
Even after the
scientist agreed to defect, he might reconsider and run away. “You’re
constantly re-recruiting the guy,” the ex-officer said. Once he was safely in a
car to the airport, the CIA coordinated the necessary visas and flight
documents with allied intelligence agencies. It would also spare no effort to
bring his wife and children to the US – though not his mistress, as one
scientist requested. The agency would resettle the scientist and his family and
provide long-term benefits, including paying for the children’s college and
graduate school.
Enough scientists
defected to the US, through academic conferences and other routes, to hinder
Iran’s nuclear weapons programme, the ex-officer familiar with the operation
told me. He said an engineer who assembled centrifuges for Iran’s nuclear
programme agreed to defect on one condition: that he pursue a doctorate at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Unfortunately, the CIA had spirited him
out of Iran without credentials such as diplomas and transcripts. At first, MIT
refused the CIA’s request to consider him. But the agency persisted, and the
renowned engineering school agreed to accommodate the CIA by waiving its usual
screening procedures. It mustered a group of professors from related
departments to grill the defector. He aced the oral exam, was admitted, and
earned his doctorate.
MIT administrators
deny any knowledge of the episode. “I’m completely ignorant of this,” said Gang
Chen, chairman of mechanical engineering. However, two academics corroborated
key elements of the story. Muhammad Sahimi, a professor of petroleum engineering
at the University of Southern California who studies Iranian nuclear and
political development, told me that a defector from Iran’s nuclear programme
received a doctorate from MIT in mechanical engineering. Timothy Gutowski, an
MIT professor of mechanical engineering, said: “I do know of a young man that
was here in our lab. Somehow I learned that he did work on centrifuges in Iran.
I started thinking: ‘What went on here?”
With Iran’s
agreement in 2015 to limit nuclear weapons development in return for the
lifting of international sanctions, recruitment of defectors from the programme
by US intelligence lost some urgency. But if President Trump scraps or seeks to
renegotiate the deal, which he denounced in a September speech to the United
Nations General Assembly, CIA-staged conferences to snag key Iranian nuclear
scientists could make a clandestine comeback.
