The Betrayal of CIA to Its Colleagues Part Four
In Part Four of The Betrayal of CIA to Its Colleagues, we reached the point in the story of Gholamreza Hosseini and his collaboration with the CIA, where the level of cooperation and information sharing by Gholamreza with the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States reached a serious and unprecedented level. The Americans valued the role Gholamreza Hosseini played for them so much that they presented him with a special and exclusive cooperation agreement to sign, thus officially promising that the sensitive and key information he gathered from inside Iran would be collected solely for the United States and exclusively for the CIA, and that he would not collaborate with or exchange information with any other country.
At this point in the story, we highlighted an important and key point, which we emphasize again. Gholamreza Hosseini, in narrating his story to Reuters expert journalists, does not address this point and apparently was unaware of it: obtaining such a commitment from the United States meant his role was of key importance to them. Even the comprehensive Reuters report passes over this point lightly.
The reason for our emphasis on this specific point is that in a situation where such a commitment is obtained from an intelligence partner, and frankly, a spy, any external observer, and naturally the intelligence partner themselves, should expect special cooperation and support from the organization that desires such exclusive services.
We mentioned that the groundwork for Gholamreza Hosseini’s cooperation with the Americans was set in a special way in the new phase, where they provided him with a system for exchanging messages and information to facilitate and expedite the flow of information by him. The ruin of Gholamreza Hosseini’s life began from this point.
Bayern Munich Fan Club
The site through which Gholamreza Hosseini was supposed to continuously and consistently be in contact with his American colleagues was a very simple football site entirely in Persian. A simple look at this rudimentary site shows that even by the standards of sports sites of those years, the content, links, and images never had high appeal. The scattered and disorganized links and unrelated content were easily recognizable.
It was as if an American football fan had set up a football site for Iranian football, and indeed, that was really the case. Gholamreza Hosseini did not know that he was not the first person to connect to the CIA through these marginal and insignificant sites, just as he did not know that this was not the first marginal site the American security forces had created to establish contact with their colleagues and agents. Reuters news experts identified several hundred such sites.
Until 2018, no serious news could be found in the media about these CIA websites, and it was Yahoo News that first reported that year that such websites had led to the capture of Iranian and Chinese agents working with the Americans. Reuters researchers consulted two prominent experts to examine the structure and security protections of these websites, and what these two experts found astonished them. The contact links were easily identifiable, and the website coding systems were, in some cases, very rudimentary.
The only justifiable thing in this context is that the simplicity of the websites and the Americans’ disregard for protecting their interaction system with their agents was due to their belief in the insignificance of the websites themselves. Apparently, the idea in their minds was that these websites were so contentless and basic that they would not attract anyone’s attention.
All This Football
The site through which Gholamreza Hosseini connected to the Americans had its best and only useful link as the Bayern Munich Club Fan Club, which no one knew which club it was, who was in it, or who wasn’t. Gholamreza didn’t know that such a website, in such a state, was not the only Iranian football website belonging to the CIA. Several other Iranian agents working with the Americans were also connected to such childish and ridiculous football websites, and the names of the websites were similar. This is a special point that greatly angered the prominent cybersecurity experts Reuters consulted.
Until 2013, there is no indication of awareness from the famous American security organization, the most important intelligence and security hub in the world, of the dire situation it had created for its agents with its websites. In fact, it should be noted that until 2022, many questions from journalists and researchers about the level of awareness of senior CIA agents regarding the disastrous inefficiency of the communication structure they built for their agents remain unanswered.
At this point in the story of Gholamreza Hosseini, it should be noted that his capture and arrest, given the simple tracking of his contact paths and interactions after starting to use the football site, seems completely natural. When we narrate the story of Gholamreza’s arrest, we must place it alongside the American narrative of how their security organizations treat non-American agents and spies. That’s where the sigh of every compassionate Iranian rises.
So far, the series of articles on the CIA’s Betrayal of Its Colleagues has been published in four parts. You have read Part Four. To read the other parts, click on the links below.
- The Betrayal of CIA to Its Colleagues Part One
- The Betrayal of CIA to Its Colleagues Part Two
- The Betrayal of CIA to Its Colleagues Part Three
