Escape From Iran

Her husband had been a journalist who worked for Amad News. In 2017, he had reported on the riots in Iran brought on by the weak economy and lack of improvement in conditions once Iran reached an agreement about nuclear weapons development with the P5+1 nations.

Maisil Yasdi had only honestly reported on the events that took place, but the Iranian government took a dim view of any journalist who gave the world a view other than that sanctioned by that government. Maisil was alerted by a friend in the local Iranian police force that the government had issued an arrest warrant for him. The charge was "corruption on earth".

Maisil knew that charge was just a catch-all used to imprison people in opposition to the policies of the Iranian government. He also knew it would probably mean a long prison sentence or worse. He and his wife, Friya Kirmani, were able to flee Iran and ended up in Paris, France where he continued to report on conditions in Iran based upon information from social media posts he received from friends still living in Iran. Because Friya had learned English and French in college, she assisted Maisil in translating Persian into French so he could publish his articles in the French press.

On August 7, 2018, Maisil did not return from his place of employment. Friya called the local police station to report her husband missing. Four days later, she learned he had left Paris on an Iranian private jet in the company of four men.

For a month, Friya heard nothing from or about Maisil. Then, she saw a report on French television that Maisil had confessed to attempting to overthrow the Iranian government and had been convicted and sentenced to death. A day later, the same television station reported that Maisil had been hanged.

Friya grieved for a week before grief became infuriated. She knew if she returned to Iran, it was likely she would meet a similar fate as Maisil, but she was determined to avenge his death in some way. The way she chose was to walk to the US Embassy in Paris and offer to return to Iran as an espionage agent for the US.

She was introduced to Harry Richards. Harry was, on paper, an aide to the US Ambassador to France, but in reality, was a member of the US CIA and the senior case officer in charge of espionage in the Middle East. After a week of interviews and a review of her family history conducted by US agents in Iran, Harry sent Friya to a vineyard outside of Moulins to learn the tradecraft of an agent. Three months later, she was flown to Kuwait City, Kuwait. There, she was taken to the coast of Iran by three Kuwait nationals in what appeared to be a fishing boat. Two Iranian nationals working for the US Intelligence Community met her there and took her to Tehran. The CIA placed her in a job in the Swiss Embassy as a cook in the embassy kitchen.

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That is where Friya met me, though she believed she was meeting a local Iranian man who worked as a translator. In reality, she met Harrison England, one of the CIA's principal agents in the Tehran area.

My great grandfather was an English Army officer who was stationed for a time in Pakistan. He met and fell in love with a Pakistani woman, and brought her back to England at the end of the period of British rule. They had two childen, my grandfather and my great aunt. Of the two, my grandfather favored my grandmother in skin tone and hair color. He, in turn passed those characteristics on to my father who passed them on to me.

My grandfather emigrated to the US in 1960 in order to take a position with one of the major aircraft companies there. He was a machinist by training and could operate the complex machines used at the time to manufacture the parts for jet engines. He brought his wife and my father to the US as well.

I was born in 1991, and as a result of being born in the US, I was a US citizen. I finished a college degree with a specialty in the history of the Middle East, and when my job prospects proved dim, I enlisted in the US Army. At that time, there was a very large need for people to analyze intelligence data coming from Russia and the Middle East. I volunteered for and was assigned to US Army Intelligence.

I found I enjoyed the work and that I was good at it. Because of my interest in the Middle East, I had taken classes in the Persian language in college so I could read books written in that language. My main task in military intelligence was to read and translate newspaper and magazine articles from the Middle East countries.

I was two months from the end of my enlistment when my supervisor called me to his office. Once I arrived, he left me with another man dressed in a simple black business suit. He introduced himself as Harry Richards and then offered me a seat at the desk. Once I was seated, he looked at me with a stern face.

"What we are about to discuss is to be considered extremely sensitive information. Do you understand the penalties that would result from your revealing even a small part of our conversation?"

I said I was aware of the rules for classified information. Harry smiled then.

"Harrison, I am looking for men who read, write, and speak Persian, who know something of the history of the Middle East, and who can pass for a native. You speak and read and write Persian and you've studied extensively about the history of the area. You also look Iranian.

"We would place you in the Swiss Embassy in Tehran posing as a translator. You would do that job as required, but your true task would be to manage a group of, shall we say, local information sources."

I smiled.

"You want me to supervise a group of spies?"

"We prefer to call them assets. You would be more manager than supervisor. It is important for their safety as well as for the safety of said manager if there is little direct contact with any of them. Your role would be to collect information those sources leave at locations you select, bring that information back to the Embassy, and then use your knowledge of the area and language to assist in interpreting what that information indicates about the present and the future. You will also arrange for payment of those sources with local currency provided by the Embassy."

I said I probably wasn't the man for the job because I knew nothing about how to do any of those things. He smiled again.

"We will arrange for sufficient training to enable you to fulfill your mission and then some."

I thought about his proposal for a while. Though I greatly enjoyed the study of History, and especially the history of the Middle East, my search for employment had not yielded anything other than teaching in a high school. Even then, I would have to agree to add the education required for a teaching certificate to my degree. When I thought of standing every day in a classroom full of students who probably didn't really care much about history, that career path didn't seem very promising.

I could continue my education and earn a Doctorate, but I would still be teaching. After what I'd done in the Army, teaching would probably be very boring. Maybe this would be better. It would at least be more exciting.

"It's an interesting proposal, and I hate to be blunt, but what's in it for me?"

Harry clasped his hands together.

"I can promise you a very good income for your efforts. You will also have the satisfaction of helping to protect the United States and the rest of the world from what appears to be a growing movement in Iran toward extending Islamic law into their neighboring countries. I am sure you are aware of what is taking place in Iraq by groups funded by Iran."

I was discharged from the US Army in the summer of 2014 and spent a week at home. My parents were interested in my future course in life, but all I could tell them was I intended to study abroad for a time. When they asked where, I couldn't tell them my true destination, so I said I would start in Turkey. I also told them not to expect regular letters from me as from what I understood, the Turkish postal service was pretty unreliable.

At the end of the week, I took a bus to Las Vegas, Nevada where I was met by a man wearing a Hawaiian style shirt, shorts, and sandals with white socks. He stepped in front of me as I was departing the bus.

"Mr. England, please come with me", is all he said.

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What followed was a year of intense training in the arts of espionage. To this day I do not know the location of the training camp. I was blindfolded both coming and going, and there was nothing visible from the camp except sand and mountains.

The first part of the training was much like my Basic Training in the Army and consisted of the same type of physical training except far more strenuous, training in the use of several types of weapons including improvised weapons, and the use of concealment and cover. The second half of the training was more specific to what I would be doing. It included training in photography, the use of various clandestine communication methods, and the psychology used to recruit "assets".

By far the most difficult part of the training was training in the methods of resisting interrogation. I was not prepared for the mental stress of the interrogation methods the instructors used, nor was I prepared for the various methods of torture they applied. They explained that those torture methods were limited as to the amount of pain caused, but to me, that pain was excruciating. I recognized the reason for the training when they were able to force me to tell them the secret I was supposed to have kept. I learned it wasn't a matter of what I would tell an interrogator. It was only a matter of when.

When I finished my training, I was flown from the training camp to New York and from there to Paris. At the airport in Paris, I was met by another agent who drove me to a house on the outskirts of the city. I was given an Iranian passport with the name Habib Eftekhari that gave my address as part of the poorer section of Tehran. I was also given six pairs of loose, white cotton pants, three long white robes, and six white headscarves with black bands made of rope called an egal to hold the scarf in place on my head. Two pairs of sandals completed the attire I'd need to fit in as a native.

The flight to Tehran was quiet and I sat by myself in the rear-most seat of the plane. None of the other four men on the plane even acknowledged I was there until the plane landed. The plane did not pull up to one of the normal gates. Instead, it taxied to the area where hangars were located. The four men led me to a waiting limousine and we drove to the Swiss Embassy. An hour after arriving I had changed from my jeans and dress shirt to the dress of an Iranian man. On October 22, 2015, I walked out a side door of the Embassy as Habib Eftekhari with papers allowing me to enter the embassy building as an interpreter, and began walking toward the address on my passport.

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It was three years later that I signed on to my Facebook page and looked at my messages. I knew most were messages sent by "friends" at CIA headquarters and were pictures of families and activities garnered from the billions of pictures on the internet. There were also a few from my "friends" that were words of support for the Iranian government. Those were to insure my status as a faithful follower of the Ayatollah. As the old Persian saying goes, "Walls have mice. Mice have ears."

One message caught my eye because of the picture of a small girl. The message at the bottom of the picture was another old Persian saying.

"A child is a bridge to heaven."

The key word in that message was "bridge". On my computer were several hidden software programs that enabled me to retrieve information encrypted into pictures, videos, certain video games, and emails. One of those programs was called "Lost Bridge".

That program was encrypted in a YouTube video file of the Ayatollah giving a speech. To anyone clicking on that file, it appeared to be just that. When I clicked on "share" and then typed "Lost Bridge" into the space for a URL, the program loaded.

What followed was a couple of minutes of my computer sorting the message from the digital encoding of the picture. It then appeared on my screen.

"New cook is asset Friya. Drop 1 employee locker 26 at 5 PM tomorrow."

At five 'til five the next afternoon, I slipped an envelope with twenty thousand rials in thousand rial bills through the louvers in Friya's locker, and then opened my locker and started rummaging inside.

At five, a woman dressed in a black burka with her face covered by a veil walked down the hall carrying a newspaper. If this was her first dead drop, she was doing well. She smiled at me and she didn't look nervous at all. A lot of new sources will swivel their head from side to side when approaching a dead drop. That's a sure give-away to any Iranian counterintelligence operative. Of course, there were no such operatives in the embassy. That's why Harry had picked this location for her first drop.

My location for Friya's next delivery of information would be a "live drop" where we would meet. The meeting would be brief, and she wouldn't actually see the man she knew as Bulldog, the name she'd been given as the codename of her handler. The meeting was just to reassure her that Bulldog was a real person and was looking out for her.

In the envelope with the currency was a bank deposit slip for Friya's bank. On that slip was a note written in invisible ink. When Friya got to her apartment and misted the deposit slip with a special perfume she'd been given, she'd see "Bridge Mellat Park 5PM." The message would be visible for only about thirty seconds. After that the special perfume would permanently erase the writing.

A couple of minutes later, the same woman walked out of the locker room with her purse on her arm. She didn't hurry, and in fact stopped to talk with another woman who was going toward the locker room. Harry had taught her well.

When Friya had walked out of the room, I picked up the newspaper she'd left in one of the wastebaskets.

She'd used the same invisible ink to write her information in the margins. It wasn't high priority information, just a couple items about Iranian troop movements in the city, but it was information that said Friya was watching and listening.

At five the next afternoon, I was standing in the trees near the bridge in Mellat Park. I'd been there about five minutes when a woman dressed in the traditional black burka walked onto the bridge. Her face was covered except for her eyes, so I couldn't tell if she was Friya or not. When she stopped in the center, I walked slowly up behind her.

"Don't turn around. My dog is a bulldog. Do you have a dog?"

She didn't turn to me, but I heard, "I do not have a dog, but I am told bulldogs are very fine dogs."

I moved a little closer, removed the envelope from my pocket and slipped it under her arm. She took the envelope, handed me another newspaper, and then walked off the bridge. The whole exchange had taken all of fifteen seconds. I waited on the bridge until she was out of sight and then went home.

As before, Friya's information was mostly things she'd heard from the kitchen workers or things she'd seen coming and going from the embassy. While none of it was very revealing, I knew it was still valuable information. When the analysts at the embassy put that information with all the other information I and other agents were sending them, it was possible a pattern would begin to develop, and that pattern might develop into an insight into what the Iranian government was planning to do.

That night, I used the same "Lost Bridge" software to encrypt the information into a picture of the Iranian soccer team and put it on my Facebook page. The same CIA "friends" who posted on my page would see my post and decrypt it.

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For six more months, I worked Friya and my other sources. I never got any messages that our information had resulted in anything, but I didn't expect to. The less I knew about the use of that information the better. If I was compromised I'd have less to tell an interrogator.

At times, I got text messages on my cell phone if there was a request for immediate specific information or a face to face meeting. The messages consisted of a few code words that were seemingly the innocent chatter between friends. One might say, "My son is five today. I am taking him to Imamzadeh Mosque." That meant I was to go to that mosque at five in the afternoon for a face to face meeting with my supervisor.

Another might say, "I talked to Jaron yesterday. He said he is going to be moving soon." Jaron was one of the code names for the Red Guards, and the statement about moving meant the analysts needed to know the location of the Red Guards in the area. My source for that type of information was a man who maintained the air conditioning equipment at the headquarters of the Red Guard. Upon getting a text message like that, I'd put the request on my Facebook page as a picture of a red rose. My source would see the rose and understand he needed to decode the picture.

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On a Wednesday afternoon in August, I received a text message that said, "My dog has broken his leash and has now bitten my neighbor and run away. Can you help me search for him?"

The chill hadn't yet finished running down my spine when my phone beeped again.

"My cook is out searching now."

The two text messages didn't give me any detail, but I understood the gist and the urgency. The dog in, "My dog has broken his leash", was the Iranian military responsible for counter-intelligence activities, and "bitten my neighbor" meant someone in my organization had been compromised and arrested. The parts of the message, "run away" and "Can you help me search" meant I'd been compromised too and needed to get out of Tehran as quickly as possible. "My cook is out searching" was telling me Friya had been uncovered too. It had to be Friya because she was the only cook in my group. I had to get Friya and myself out of Iran as fast as possible.

Like every agent is taught to do, as part of my contingency planning I'd looked at various escape routes and methods. I had assumed that if I was compromised, every border crossing would have my picture and if I tried to cross the Iranian border at a checkpoint, I'd be arrested. That meant I would have to cross the border at some remote location.

Where to cross the border was also something that had to be considered. To the West was Iraq, and while there was a large US presence in Iraq, there were still several insurgents in the area sponsored by the Iranian Red Guard, enough I didn't want to take the risk.

To the East of Tehran was the Caspian Sea. It would be faster to get to the Caspian Sea than to any other place, but then I'd have to find transportation to the nearest country outside of Iran -- Azerbaijan. Finding a boat would be a problem because once I was compromised, I couldn't trust any person in Iran. Even if they were part of the CIA espionage organization, they wouldn't risk being uncovered by helping someone on the run from Iranian Counterintelligence. Traveling to the Caspian Sea wasn't a viable option.

What seemed to me to be the best route was to travel up the plains of Iran to Turkey. I would drive to Urmia first. Urmia has a large population so it would be easier to blend in if we had to stay for a couple of days. From Urmia it would be a short trip to the border crossing at Serow that we'd make on foot. It would be tough going for the last kilometer or so, but not impossible. Once in Turkey, I'd make contact with one of the CIA agents there. Friya and I would be safe and could figure out where to go from there.

I figured we might have an hour at most to escape. We couldn't stay in the embassy. The Swiss were handling the affairs of the US in Tehran, but were staunchly neutral, at least in theory. If the Iranian police came looking for us, the Swiss would let them take us.