Tortured? Amiri returns to Iran
Photo: AP
Ahmadinejad at Iranian nuclear facility (archives)
Photo: AP
US suspects Iranian nuclear scientist was double agent
Did Shahram Amiri, who was paid $5 million to disclose information on Tehran's nuclear program, plant false information? UK's Telegraph reveals CIA checking whether he was working for Iranian intelligence all along
The CIA is investigating whether Shahram Amiri, the Iranian nuclear scientist who provided Washington with information on Tehran's nuclear program, was a double agent, the Sunday Telegraph reported.
Amiri's decision to fly back to Iran voluntarily last week, claiming that he was kidnapped by CIA and Saudi agents during a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia last June and then tortured in the US, has prompted suspicions that he was a double agent working for Tehran all along, The Sunday Telegraph reported.
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According to the British newspaper, there are also questions about why the Iranian authorities allowed him to travel alone to Saudi Arabia, despite his sensitive work, and why he left his family behind if he was intending to leave Iran permanently.
Amiri's role as one of the sources for the now heavily disputed 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which claimed Iran had abandoned its nuclear program in 2003, has raised further doubts, the Sunday Telegraph reported.
The CIA nonetheless believed that Amiri was a genuine defector because he revealed information about how the Tehran university where he worked was the covert headquarters for the Islamic Republic's atomic program.
"The CIA would not have been paying $5 million unless they had vetted him carefully and believed he was genuine," Art Keller, a former agency case officer who worked on Iran's nuclear and missile programs, was quoted by the Telegraph as saying.
According to the report, even if Amiri was not a "double", there are fears that he will reveal key information to his Iranian interrogators about what US officials know about Tehran's nuclear program.
Following his decision to return to Iran, the Telegraph reported, US officials have been "unusually open" in releasing information about the scientist's dealings with the CIA.
Key information. Amiri upon his return to Iran (Photo: AP)
They disclosed details of the $5 million payment - funds which are now beyond his reach as financial sanctions mean he cannot access the money in the US. And they also said that he had been an informant inside Iran "for several years" before he disappeared on a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia last June.
A CIA analyst told the Telegraph that the returned scientist had become the center of a propaganda war and that the agency was "disinclined" to remain silent while Tehran scored points against Washington.
"It might look as if the CIA is taking revenge on Amiri for returning to Iran and that by telling the US media about his cooperation and long record as an agent they are simply signing his death warrant and ensuring that the Iranian authorities would eventually execute him," the analyst told the Telegraph. "But in reality, whatever the CIA says at this point will have little impact on Amiri's fate."
The British newspaper said the analyst also acknowledged that it was possible that Amiri was a double agent and that he had been sent to the US by Iranian intelligence to plant false information and that he always intended to return.
"If that is the case, he will become an Iranian hero and the CIA's charges will do him no harm," he was quoted by the Telegraph as saying. "If, on the other hand, he was a genuine defector who returned because he had a change of heart, there is nothing the CIA can do to protect him."
"Amiri will be subjected to intense interrogations that will quickly break his cover story about being drugged and kidnapped," said the analyst.
"When that happens, the Iranians will have to decide if they want to hang him as a traitor or carry on the fiction - for propaganda purposes - that he was the victim of a CIA plot."
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