In From the Cold
By streiff Posted in War — Comments (0) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
If reports are true the Iranians have suffered a devastating blow from which, given their parlous economic and social situations, they will not recover. This from the Times of London.
AN Iranian general who defected to the West last month had been spying on Iran since 2003 when he was recruited on an overseas business trip, according to Iranian sources.
This weekend Brigadier General Ali Reza Asgari, 63, the former deputy defence minister, is understood to be undergoing debriefing at a Nato base in Germany after he escaped from Iran, followed by his family.
A daring getaway via Damascus was organised by western intelligence agencies after it became clear that his cover was about to be blown. Iran’s notorious secret service, the Vavak, is believed to have suspected that he was a high-level mole.
Read on.
More than a mere spy or traitor, a long term defector in place is the worst nightmare of any counterintelligence agency. If the Times and other sources are correct, then for at least the past four years the Iranians have had a defector in place in their inner sanctum. Right now the lights are burning in Tehran as counterintelligence officers are feverishly conducting the mother of all damage assessments. Every document he has seen for four years must be assumed to be compromised. Every person he has worked with is being asked, without duress of course because we all know torture just doesn’t work, what they knew and when they knew it.
It appears that Asgari was the subject of a “false flag recruitment” by the Mossad. Calculating, probably correctly, that Asgari was vulnerable to recruitment but held enough animus towards Israel to scotch the deal, the Mossad recruiter apparently represented himself as being an American or Western European operative. It is probable that Asgari only discovered who was running him in the past week or so.
As the first major defector from Iran, we can probably imagine that Asgari is going through a fairly intense and unpleasant debriefing himself. There will always be the nagging doubt in the back of the mind that maybe, just maybe, Asgari is in fact a double agent and while he may have given a lot of real secrets those secrets have acted merely to lard the poison pill hidden inside. During the Cold War it was not uncommon for debriefings to take a year or more, and even then we didn’t really know if the defector was real or an agent. Yuri Nosenko, for instance, spent over three years in solitary confinement because of doubts about his bona fides.
Like with so much in life, timing is everything. Asgari played it perfectly and defected only as the dogs were closing in and he was able to bring out an extended family. Others stay a bit too long and don’t make the final trip to safety. Oleg Penkovsky. A GRU colonel, Penkovsky gave us a look at the other side’s cards during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He stayed beyond the point of wisdom and was arrested. According to the pseudonymous Viktor Suvorov'sThe Aquarium, after a brief show trial Penkovsky was fed alive into a crematorium.