Because it was hard to approach the scientists in Iran, the CIA enticed them to academic conferences in friendly or neutral countries, a former intelligence officer familiar with the operation 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 $2 million 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. The institute would invite many academics to give and attend presentations, with the CIA ensuring through its contacts that the scientist was on the list.
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 to send scientists to conferences about peaceful uses of nuclear power,” Ronen Bergman told 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 was to peel the guards away from the scientist. In one instance, kitchen staff recruited by the CIA poisoned the guards’ meal, causing massive diarrhea and vomiting. The hope was that they would attribute their illness to airplane food or an unfamiliar cuisine.
With luck, the officer would catch the scientist alone for a few minutes, and pitch him. He had 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—and prove it. “I know you had testicular cancer and you lost your left nut,” one officer told a potential defector.
Even after the scientist agreed to defect, he might reconsider and run away. “You’re constantly re-recruiting the guy.” 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 United States—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. Most of the defectors had doctorates and presumed that their children would someday, too.
* * *
ENOUGH SCIENTISTS DEFECTED to the United States, through academic conferences and other routes, to hinder Iran’s nuclear weapons program, the ex-officer familiar with the operation told me. He said an engineer who assembled centrifuges for Iran’s nuclear program agreed to defect on one condition: that he pursue a doctorate at MIT. 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 denied any knowledge of the episode. “I’m completely ignorant of this,” said Gang Chen, chairman of mechanical engineering. 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 program received a doctorate from MIT in mechanical engineering.
However, two academics corroborated key elements of the story. Timothy Gutowski, an MIT professor of mechanical engineering, said, “I do know of a young man that was here in our lab. The thing about him, somehow I learned that he did work on centrifuges in Iran. I started thinking, What went on here?” Gutowski, who didn’t recall the Iranian’s name, described him as tall and handsome, with an engaging smile.
Another Iranian nuclear scientist, Shahram Amiri, disappeared on a religious pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia in 2009. He returned to Iran in 2010, claiming that the CIA had kidnapped him. U.S. officials said he defected by choice and was paid $5 million for information, but missed his family and decided to return home. Emails released in 2015, which were sent in 2010 to then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton from her aides, appear to support the U.S. version. After convicting Amiri of providing the United States with vital intelligence, Iran hanged him in August 2016.
Rather than abduct scientists, the CIA may have used other leverage. One impetus for defectors may have been fear of the consequences of saying no. According to the ex–intelligence officer, the CIA told them that if they stayed in Iran, they would be assassinated.
“You’re a dead man walking,” a CIA agent would warn a wavering scientist. “The U.S. and Israel have identified you as a key member of Iran’s nuclear development program.”
According to the same source, one scientist spurned the CIA because he didn’t believe it would protect his children. “My children will have a better chance of living if they stay in Tehran,” he told the CIA agent pitching him.
“We’ll kill you,” the agent replied.
“Only I will die,” the Iranian said. “Otherwise, the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] will kill all of us.”
The scientists had to take the CIA’s threats seriously. Four Iranian nuclear scientists were assassinated between 2010 and 2012, and another wounded. The killings likely had two purposes: to deplete Iran’s thin cadre of nuclear weapons experts, and to deter other Iranian scientists from joining the program. Iran accused the United States and Israel of complicity in the assassinations, which the United States denied. Iran convicted a man whom it described as a Mossad agent of one of the murders, and executed him in 2012.
The killings drew praise from a prominent right-wing politician. “On occasion scientists working on the nuclear program in Iran turn up dead,” former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum said in 2011, while seeking the Republican presidential nomination. “I think that’s a wonderful thing.”
Under certain conditions, the U.S. government allows itself to assassinate foreigners. The U.S. ban on assassinations—imposed by executive order after the Church Committee disclosed that the CIA had tried to eliminate Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders—has been interpreted to exempt killings in self-defense against an imminent threat. Military force against “legitimate targets” in peacetime, “where such individuals or groups pose an immediate threat” to national security, “does not constitute assassination,” a memorandum by lawyers for U.S. military and intelligence agencies concluded in 1989.
Still, it seems unlikely that the CIA itself assassinated the scientists. Since Congress authorized the use of force against those responsible for the September 11, 2001, attacks, the federal government has approved killing members of Al Qaeda and affiliated terrorist groups. But Iranian scientists were a different matter. Despite the covert U.S. campaign to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program, including infecting its operations with the Stuxnet computer virus, the two countries were not at war, and the scientists were not terrorists. According to national security lawyers whom I consulted,
the United States could lawfully have bombed Iranian nuclear facilities if the president determined that Iran was building a weapon for use against the United States or an ally, and killed researchers in the buildings or bunkers, but targeting a scientist directly would have stretched the rules.
Intelligence agencies sometimes make death threats as an intimidation tactic, without necessarily intending to follow through. According to David Albright, the CIA or an allied espionage service left two letters at the Switzerland home of German engineer Gotthard Lerch, a key lieutenant in the nuclear proliferation network of Pakistani physicist Abdul Qadeer Khan. The first warned Lerch of “grave consequences” if he sold centrifuge designs to Iran; the second bluntly stated that his body would be found in a river. Lerch continued to purvey nuclear technology, and was unharmed.
Bergman said it was likely that Israel assassinated the Iranian scientists, “with some sort of wink and nod from the Americans.” He speculated that the United States “would inform Israel of its attempts to recruit this scientist or the other. While this is done, Israel wouldn’t kill the guy. If it fails, Israel would have been notified and could make a call on whether to kill him.”
U.S. intelligence did once lure a nuclear scientist to an academic meeting with the intention of killing him. However, the operation took place in wartime, when assassinating a civilian who contributes to the war effort may be justifiable as self-defense under international law. During World War II, the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, sent renowned spy and former major league catcher Moe Berg to a 1944 lecture that Werner Heisenberg, the head of Nazi Germany’s atomic bomb program, had been persuaded to deliver in neutral Switzerland.
Switzerland was “the only place outside their own country where German scientists could attend scientific meetings, which they liked to do, not least because the schnapps, cheeses, and chocolates that were no longer available in Germany were still in ample supply in Zurich and Bern,” Nicholas Dawidoff wrote in The Catcher Was a Spy, a 1994 biography of Berg.
The multilingual Berg, who posed as a Swiss physics student, carried a pistol. He had orders to shoot Heisenberg if the scientist gave any clue that Germany was close to making an atomic bomb. Heisenberg didn’t, and “the pistol stayed in Berg’s pocket.”
At least two Iranian nuclear scientists traveled abroad to an academic conference less than a year before they were assassinated. Masoud Ali-Mohammadi, a professor of elementary particle physics at the University of Tehran, was killed outside his home in January 2010 by a remote-controlled bomb attached to a motorcycle parked next to his car. Ten months later, Majid Shahriari, a professor at Shahid Beheshti University, was being chauffeured down a Tehran boulevard when an assailant on a motorcycle pulled up next to his Peugeot, attached a bomb to the car, and blew him up.
Ali-Mohammadi “had participated in projects linked with Iran’s nuclear program and had extensive information about it,” Bergman said. Shahriari “played a key role in enabling Iran to increase its level [of] uranium enrichment,” Sahimi told me in a December 2015 email.
Both professors had participated in a conference in December 2009 in Jordan of Project SESAME (Synchrotron-light for Experimental Science and Applications in the Middle East), a regional research center intended to foster scientific excellence and build bridges between countries. “Iranian intelligence is convinced that … the Mossad used this conference in order to either try to recruit them to become Israeli agents or bolster surveillance over the two scientists,” according to Bergman.
Sahimi told me he finds it “plausible” that the CIA approached Ali-Mohammadi and Shahriari at the SESAME conference and asked them to defect. They would have refused, he said. “Both were Iranian patriots.”
9
HIDDEN IN THE IVY
In his application to Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, Kenneth Moskow wrote that his favorite hobby was climbing mountains with friends in foreign countries. And that’s how he died, years later, collapsing of altitude sickness as he neared the volcanic rim of Mount Kilimanjaro, a two-hour hike from the summit, with a group of buddies, including former CIA colleagues. They took turns trying to resuscitate him, without success, and no medical support helicopter could fly up in the thin air.
More than one thousand mourners attended a memorial service at Harvard. Illinois U.S. senator Barack Obama, only six weeks away from being elected president, took time from campaigning to console Moskow’s widow, writing to praise his “zest for life” and “adventurous and energetic spirit.” As a tribute to his patriotism, his family was given the flag that flew over the U.S. Capitol on the day of his death.
The obituaries hailed Moskow as a CIA legend. He had grown up in a Boston suburb, with an itch for travel, studying abroad in Spain and hitchhiking Kerouac-style around the United States. After his undergraduate days at Harvard, where he’d won a bout in a Golden Gloves boxing tournament, he scrapped plans for law school—“there are enough lawyers,” he said—and joined the agency. Dispatched to Spain, he disguised himself in a wig and tooled around Madrid in a red Mustang convertible.
He was always in a hurry. Following his next posting, in Cyprus, he enrolled in the Kennedy School’s mid-career program, which offers a one-year master’s degree in public administration, even though, at thirty years old, he was still early in his career and one of the youngest students. There he mingled with future government, business, and military leaders both from the United States and abroad. Fluent in Spanish, he fraternized with Latin American classmates, including ex–Guatemalan defense minister Héctor Gramajo and José María Figueres, who would soon be president of Costa Rica. “He had an awful lot of good connections from the school,” his widow, Shelagh Lafferty Moskow, told me.
For many of his former Kennedy School classmates, his death in September 2008 at the age of forty-eight was a double jolt. Not only were they saddened by his premature passing—“he was a very popular guy, affable, clean-cut, smile on his face, good handshake,” said one—but they were startled to learn that he had been a spy. He had told classmates and professors that he was a State Department diplomat, which was the same cover he used overseas. The photo roster for his Kennedy School class listed his experience as a political officer in the U.S. embassies in Madrid and Nicosia, Cyprus, and State Department foreign affairs officer, with “areas of interest” in “Government @ Business” and “International Affairs/Security.”
“At least in my circle, I don’t believe anyone knew that he worked for the CIA,” said a Kennedy School classmate, Barbara Grob, who runs media campaigns for nonprofit groups in the San Francisco area. “Nobody said, ‘By the way, did you hear Ken was in the CIA?’”
Caught in an awkward social situation, he did confide in one Kennedy School classmate. Clyde Howard, an actual State Department foreign-service officer, was eager to get to know someone he presumed was a colleague. “When I learned that Ken was supposedly an FSO, I introduced myself and asked him about his career at State, to see if we had friends in common,” Howard recalled in an email. “He told me he was with the Agency, and asked me to keep that to myself. I had worked overseas with CIA guys who were under State cover, so I was used to that arrangement.… I didn’t talk about him with my classmates.”
As intelligence agencies invade universities, they’ve penetrated not just conferences and laboratories but the very core of the academic endeavor—the classroom. Moskow is one in a long line of CIA officers who have enrolled undercover at the Kennedy School, generally with Harvard’s knowledge and approval, gaining access to up-and-comers worldwide. In a single year, 1991–92, at least three CIA clandestine officers attended the Kennedy School’s mid-career program, all posing as State Department employees. For four decades the CIA and Harvard have concealed this practice, which raises larger questions about academic boundaries, the integrity of class discussions and student interactions, and whether an American university has a responsibility to accommodate U.S. intel
ligence.
Foreign services have placed undercover agents at the Kennedy School, too, but without its knowledge. At the most famous and prestigious public policy school in American academia, you never quite know whom you’re sitting next to—or who they’re working for.
Intelligence services flock to the Kennedy School because it’s both the epitome of globalization and a conduit to the highest echelons of the U.S. government. Alumni have risen to become presidents or prime ministers in at least a dozen countries, from Ecuador to Liberia, Bolivia to Bhutan. No fewer than five graduates have served in Japan’s cabinet since 2014. Closer to home, Obama’s secretary of defense Ashton Carter was on leave from his regular job as a Kennedy School professor.
The notices on a hallway bulletin board one random morning in 2015 illustrated the school’s vast and eclectic reach. They invited students to meet a Saudi prince; attend panels on leadership, organizing, and advocacy in Japan, Serbia, and Jordan; listen to television journalist Marvin Kalb on Vladimir Putin and Harvard professor/New Yorker writer Jill Lepore on the press and the polls; and learn about crisis communications inside the office of South Carolina governor Nikki Haley.
“The whole world comes to you,” says one awed graduate.
That includes the CIA. Since the standoff between Derek Bok and Stansfield Turner in the 1970s, Harvard and the agency have kissed and made up. Papering over the differences between their cultures has required compromise on both sides, with the CIA becoming more transparent, and Harvard less so.
The newfound intimacy is most evident at the Kennedy School, where the relationship benefits both sides. As a professional school, its mission is to prepare students for government jobs, and the CIA is an important employer, as well as a source of expertise, funding, guest speakers, and a certain cachet. Long dominated by Ivy Leaguers, the CIA favors Harvard as a training ground for employees. It also wants to hire Kennedy School graduates, consult its professors, and cultivate its foreign students.
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