“That’s even better.”
The following evening, Casey Bauer walked into the safe apartment with Bob Holliday.
“Any answer on the prints yet?” I asked Nicole, hoping to give my new boss a welcome gift.
“Let me check,” said Nicole and went to the adjacent communication room. Ten minutes later she returned with a computer printout. “It’s from the FBI,” she said. “The encrypted message just came in.”
She read the summary at the top of the page: “The prints received from Dan Gordon, as well as those received directly from the Australian Police, matched the prints received yesterday from NSA marked as taken from Kourosh Alireza Farhadi, DOB August 19, 1960. All three sets of prints match each other. They were all taken from the same person.”
“That’s great!” said Casey, in an unexpected burst of joy. “Read out the whole thing!”
“That part of the report came from NSA through Langley,” said Nicole, and read the text. “Top Secret/Eyes Only/Sensitive Compartmented Information.” She raised her eyes and said, “Before any of you read this report, you must sign a Classified Information Nondisclosure Agreement, a Standard Form 312.” She handed us copies.
I read the form. In it I acknowledged that I was aware that the unauthorized disclosure of classified information by me could cause irreparable injury to the United States or could be used to advantage by a foreign nation, and that I would never divulge classified information to an unauthorized person. I further acknowledged that I would never divulge classified information unless I had officially verified that the recipient was authorized by the United States to receive it. Additionally, I agreed that, were I to be uncertain about the classification status of information, I needed to confirm from an authorized official that the information was unclassified before I could disclose it.
I signed. So did the others.
Nicole continued reading it. “This report is based on documents contained in Farhadi’s file, including a limited number of recently dated reports he had submitted.”
Farhadi’s file? Did NSA experts hack the Iranian security service’s computer? My level of appreciation for Dr. Feldman and his team skyrocketed.
Nicole continued reading. “Please note that the most recent report Farhadi filed in Tehran was on December 13, 2003.”
“Guys, look at the date,” I intervened. “I saw the Chameleon in a Sydney hospital bed on August 17, 2004. Based on what we just heard, and provided that all the reports were kept in one place and intercepted by NSA, it could mean that the Chameleon was either infrequent in his reports to Tehran, or that he simply decided he had done enough for Tehran, and now it was time to take care of himself. I guess from now on I’ll have to use his real name of Farhadi,” I said in feigned sorrow.
“Not so fast,” said Holliday, making sure he retained command. “This isn’t the end of it. He might have used additional identities, so for now, let’s stick to the name Chameleon. Let Nicole read out the entire report, so we can all have it at the same time,” he added, realizing how eager we all were. “Maybe there’s an answer to that in the narrative.”
Nicole read on:
Kourosh Alireza Farhadi, an ethnic Iranian, was born in Tabriz, in northern Iran, on August 9, 1953. His father, Ghorbanali, was a successful businessman in the rug trade; Kourosh Alireza Farhadi’s mother, Fariba, was a homemaker. Kourosh had two siblings, Vahraz and Rad, born 1957 and 1959, respectively. In September 1959 Kourosh was sent to live with his paternal grandparents in Tehran so that he could study at the American School. One year after his graduation in 1978, Kourosh was drafted to join Department 81.
Nicole folded the paper and shredded it, but held on to the three additional pages of the report.
“Aha, we’re getting closer to him,” I said, realizing that this was in de pen dent confirmation of the info Benny had given me.
“And how exactly do you find Farhadi?” asked Bauer.
It was time to reclaim my lost face and my smeared reputation.
“At the time, I reported from Australia that I had found the Chameleon in a hospital bed. But I was called on the carpet by David when he got an FBI report refuting my finding. The truth of the matter is that I didn’t make a mistake in identifying the Chameleon in the first place. I had found the right guy. The person I saw in Australia was the Chameleon,” I said, and picked up the pages. “Now, now we have his name—Kourosh Alireza Farhadi. The FBI must have compared the fingerprints they had in their database of the genuine Albert Ward with the prints of the guy in the hospital bed.”
“You mean the FBI’s lab goofed?” asked Casey. “I’m lost here. And you still say you got the right Albert C. Ward III?” Casey was a very straightforward guy. He’d been in this business too long to be embarrassed when he didn’t understand something. He wasn’t the kind of man who saw asking questions as a sign of weakness, and I liked that about him.
“No, the FBI lab was right. The prints didn’t match, because they were taken from two different people. When you steal the identity of a person, you can take almost everything he has, but not his fingerprints. The perpetrator of the eleven fraud cases was never Albert C. Ward III to begin with. That’s why the prints didn’t match—because they were compared with the prints of Albert C. Ward, an innocent young American. The fundamental reason that the FBI failed to make the connection is simple. He was an unremarkable young man who had no family to complain when he went missing, and unfortunately, there are an awful lot out there like him. The Iranian imposter apparently didn’t use the Ward alias in committing any of the banking scams. The Iranian devised a double-tier buffer. First, steal the identity of Albert C. Ward. Then assume another alias to carry out the scam. That way, there’s no reason for the FBI to know about him in the first place. But based on what we just heard, the identity of Albert C. Ward III was stolen and adopted by an imposter who conned banks using one or more stolen identities. The real Albert C. Ward III is still missing, probably dead in Iran, and so are the other individuals whose passports and identities were stolen by that imposter, or else by someone associated with him.” I paused. “We should also leave the door open to the possibility that there could be a few imposters.” There was silence in the room.
I continued. “This report confirms that I actually saw the Chameleon in Sydney. So instead of faded pictures from the late 1970s of people who aren’t the Chameleon, we’ve got a positive identification and a recent location for him.”
Casey was the first to react. “He may have slipped away from Australia, and he isn’t stupid enough to return to the U.S. So where the hell is the slippery bastard?” I noticed he had a habit of clenching his jaw tightly when he was thinking intently about something.
“He could be back in Iran. Or the clue to where he is is there,” I suggested.
“Hold on,” said Nicole, breaking her silence. “There’s an important item in the Chameleon’s résumé. He graduated from the American School in Tehran.”
“And why is it that significant?” asked Bauer, clearly engrossed in the affair.
“Because Iranian intelligence uses only ethnic Iranians who strictly adhere to the Ayatollah’s interpretation of Islam. That means studying in their religious schools and undergoing the necessary indoctrination to guarantee blind loyalty. And here we see an agent who spent twelve years in the educational institute of the Great Satan, and still he was recruited for a sensitive assignment.”
“So you could conclude that he was recruited not in spite of his American education, but probably because of it,” I said. “After all he was assigned to perpetrate fraud in the U.S.”
“We don’t know that his mission was limited to defrauding banks,” said Casey.
“I’m willing to bet those SOBs would be more ambitious than that.”
“I wonder whether there could be additional graduates of the Tehran American School in Department 81,” said Bob Holliday, touching his mustache.
“Well, first we discover that Rashtian
recruited a team of agents to be infiltrated into the U.S.,” said Casey. “Then at the same time we’ve got a shitload of unsolved cases of stolen identities of young Americans, and at least one of them ended up with a strong Iranian connection. Next we hear from NSA that Kourosh Alireza Farhadi, who was one of Rashtian’s team, was a graduate of the American School in Tehran.” He shook his head. “There’s too much of a coincidence here. We’ve got to investigate if all other members of Rashtian’s team were also graduates of that school.”
“I need to set up another meeting with Benny Friedman,” concluded Casey Bauer. “It may be time to talk shop.” Casey knew when we’d gone as far as we could with our resources and was decisive when it came to taking additional action. He wasn’t the type to second-guess himself.
As they both left, leaving me and Nicole to clean up the mess, she asked, “How do we find out if additional ethnic Iranians, graduates of the American School, were also recruited?”
“I have an idea that I need to check first.” I locked myself in my room with my notebook computer. I emerged two hours later. Nicole was stretched on the couch reading a newspaper.
“Tell me what you think about this. I focused first on how to discover the individuals Iran sent to the U.S. Once we do that, we can move on to identifying their mission.”
“Go on,” she said, putting the paper down.
“If we follow the theory that Iran has planted a sleeper cell in the United States, then let’s assume that what Casey Bauer suggested is true: Department 81 enlisted a whole bunch of young Iranian men who had two things in common—they were all ethnic Iranians, and they were graduates of the Tehran American School.”
“OK.”
“I did some research. Between 1950 and 1979 the American population in Tehran grew with the influx of many American companies to Iran, mostly connected to aeronautical, engineering, and oil businesses. Bear in mind that during that period Iran was a pleasant and hospitable place for Westerners to live, so the foreign employees brought along their families. The Tehran American School had almost two thousand students and was one of the largest American schools outside the United States. About a third of the school’s students were Iranians whose families wanted them to have an American education and perfect command of English—families that could afford the hefty tuition.”
“So if you were to follow that theory, the single most important common denominator of all of the ethnic-Iranian graduates was their perfect command of American English,” said Nicole.
“Exactly. After spending twelve, and sometimes fifteen years, if you count preschool classes, speaking and studying in English from American teachers, and with all your friends speaking American English to you, there’s no wonder that all graduates spoke English at the same level as first-generation American students in Chicago or in San Diego do.”
“Sounds right,” said Nicole. “That characteristic must have proven to be invaluable for the Iranians. But why stop at stealing money from U.S. banks and investors? Is money all they cared about? What about old-fashioned espionage or modern-era terrorism?”
“I’m wondering about that too,” I conceded. “It’s more likely that if the Iranians picked up that idea, as the NSA report and Casey suggested, these young men were sent to the United States as Iranian undercover sleeper agents also to gather information or engage in sabotage when the order came from Tehran.”
“Now I see how it all falls into place,” said Nicole. “We may have two different cases here. We’ve got the case of the Chameleon and company, the money thieves as part of the Iranian government’s strategic decision to siphon money from the United States. And we may have a case of Iranian sleeper cells in the U.S. waiting for an order to sabotage, or what have you. These two separate issues may or may not be related.”
“Think about that,” I said. “This is more than just a theory, if we adopt the idea that the Chameleon wasn’t the sole perpetrator of the fraud, and that there were others, as the NSA report suggested. That theory, if substantiated, will deal another blow to the FBI’s sole-perpetrator theory.”
“We have no proof yet, just a presumption. And ours is as good as the FBI’s,” said Nicole, cooling off my enthusiasm. “We know that Kourosh Alireza Farhadi, a graduate of the American School, was a member of Department 81. But we don’t know that other members of that department were also graduates of that school.”
I wasn’t deterred. “I agree. But let’s move on in developing our theory. Let’s assume for the moment that ethnic Iranians drafted by Rashtian to Department 81 were graduates of the American School intended for surreptitious operations within the U.S. We know that it was very difficult or actually impossible after 1979 to get U.S. visas on Iranian passports. Once the U.S. was declared an enemy, Iran needed an easy way to infiltrate them by getting agents into the U.S. The Iranians had to give their agents travel documents to make their stay in the U.S. look legal, so just sneaking them across the border was probably not an option.”
Nicole contemplated this. “Of course, they could have used the visa stamps they captured at the embassy in Tehran, but in all likelihood these stamps were kept as souvenirs by the mob, or just thrown into the fire.”
“Nicole, if what NSA tells us about Department 81 checks out, then it’s quite possible that to this day there are Iranian sleeper cells in the U.S. waiting for an order to ‘wake up.’ That could come with instructions to sabotage American industry, shopping centers, power plants, airlines, trains. There could be orders to plant hazardous chemicals in areas likely to create panic and uncertainty—whatever you can imagine.”
“I just said that,” she said.
“But on the other hand, let’s not forget we’re building theories here, so let’s get to work. We need facts to support them.” Now it was the lawyer in me speaking. “We’re looking for a group of Iranian graduates of the American School in Tehran. The school was shut down in January 1979 immediately after the Islamic Revolution, when the embassy finally admitted that something unusual was going on. The dependents were evacuated in early December just before Muharram, the first month of the Islamic calendar. So the youngest of the graduates must have been born around 1961. If we identify the Iranian graduates, we’ll have something to start working on.”
“If they graduated at eighteen,” Nicole said, once again as meticulous as possible. “The upper perimeter is too thin. We should assume that some graduated at sixteen or seventeen; therefore their dates of birth could be 1962 or 1963. They would now be in their early forties. We should also look at the possibility that older alumni were used, a few years after their graduation. Let’s put the mark on 1950 as year of birth and 1968 as year of graduation.”
“Fine,” I said. “But bear in mind that we’ve just increased the number of the potential members of the target group.” I got up to open the window shade. “It’s too dark in here.”
“OK, since we’ve got a pool of fifty to one hundred graduates each year and a twelve-year range, that means that we’ve got to identify a group of twelve hundred to twenty-four hundred people,” Nicole said.
“No, only about half, or perhaps a little more,” I said. “The school was coed. I’d suspect that all the perpetrators were males.”
“I suppose we can assume that,” she said. “OK. Then we are left with approximately six to twelve hundred people, possibly all men. How do we identify them? The American School in Tehran no longer exists, but I’m sure there are records somewhere with a list of the students.” Nicole paused for a moment and continued. “We can check that with the Office of Overseas Schools at the State Department. I’ll place an inquiry.”
A day later, Nicole logged into a remote site and downloaded an encrypted file.
“Here it is,” she said. “The complete list of students who attended the school in the years 1960 through 1979. They didn’t have records of students enrolled from 1954, the year the school was started, through 1959. But I think we’ve got more than what we currently need.�
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She projected the computer-screen image onto the opposite wall. It was a database sorted alphabetically, with 6,015 records. Each line included the student’s first and last names, name of father or legal guardian, date of birth, sex, Social Security or other national identification number, address, year enrolled, and year left or graduated.
“That’s fantastic,” I said. “We could sort out the Iranian ethnics.”
“How?” Nicole gave me a confused look.
“Iranians don’t usually have American Social Security numbers.”
“Nor would most other non-American students,” she said. “There were many other foreigners in the school, children of non-American expats working for American and European companies such as Westing house, Phillips, or Standard Oil, or at their country’s embassy.”
I wasn’t deterred. “I know that. But the lack of a Social Security number almost certainly flags out a non-American. That’d eliminate many from the list.”
“I agree,” she said. “Although there could be instances where an ethnic Iranian had an SSN because he was born in the U.S., say, or lived in the U.S. while his parents were diplomats or working there, if his parents applied for one.”
“True,” I conceded. “We’ll simply have to work one by one.”
With a few clicks on her laptop computer Nicole isolated all names that didn’t specify an American SSN. From that shorter list, she eliminated all females. “OK,” she said. “We now have 978 names of males who don’t have SSNs listed.”
I quickly looked at the list. Approximately a third had typical European names, as did their fathers. “Let’s get them off the list too, just for now,” I suggested. An hour later we had narrowed down the list to 294 names.
“What do you suggest we do now?” Nicole asked. “We’re done with the easy part. Now how do we isolate from the list ethnic Iranians to be investigated, twenty years after they were recruited, without going to Iran?”
The Chameleon Conspiracy Page 16
