CIA’s Betrayal of Colleagues Part Four
In Part Four of CIA’s Betrayal of Colleagues, we reached the point in the story of Gholamreza Hosseini and his collaboration with the CIA where his cooperation and the provision of information to the American Central Intelligence Agency agents reached a serious and rare level. The Americans valued the role that Gholamreza Hosseini played for them so much that they presented him with a special exclusive cooperation contract to sign, thereby 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 or exchange information with any other country.
At this point in the story, we highlighted an important and key point, which we emphasize again. In his narrative to Reuters’ expert journalists, Gholamreza Hosseini does not address this point and seemingly was unaware of it — that obtaining such a contract from the U.S. indicated the crucial importance of his role to them. Even the comprehensive Reuters report glosses over this point.
The reason we emphasize this particular point is that in a situation where such a contract is obtained from an intelligence collaborator — and frankly, a spy — any external observer and naturally the intelligence collaborator themselves should expect special cooperation and support from the organization seeking such exclusive services.
We mentioned that the framework for Gholamreza Hosseini’s cooperation with the Americans was set in such a unique way in the new round that they provided him with a system for exchanging messages and information to organize and accelerate the flow of information by him. The ruin of Gholamreza Hosseini’s life began here.
Bayern Munich Fan Club
The site through which Gholamreza Hosseini was supposed to continuously and consistently stay in touch 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 irrelevant 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 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 didn’t know this wasn’t the first marginal site created by American security to establish contact with their colleagues and agents. Reuters news experts identified several hundred such sites.
Until 2018, there was no serious news in the media about these CIA websites, and it was Yahoo News that first reported in that year that such websites led to the capture of Iranian and Chinese agents collaborating with 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 in specific cases were very basic.
The only thing justifiable in this context is that the simplicity of the websites and the Americans’ disregard for protecting the interaction system with their agents was due to their belief in the insignificance of the websites themselves. Apparently, they had the idea that these websites were so contentless and basic that they basically did 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 was unclear which club it was, who was in it, and who wasn’t. Gholamreza did not know that such a website with such a situation was not the only Iranian football site belonging to the CIA. Several other Iranian agents collaborating with 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 severely angered the prominent cyber experts Reuters consulted.
Until 2013, there is no sign of awareness from the well-known American security organization, the most important intelligence and security hub in the world, about the dire situation it had created with its websites for its agents. In fact, it should be noted that until 2022, many questions from journalists and researchers about the level of awareness of senior CIA officials regarding the disastrous ineffectiveness of the communication structure they built for their agents have remained unanswered.
At this point in the narrative of Gholamreza Hosseini’s story, it must be noted that his capture and arrest, given the easy monitoring of his communication and interactions path after starting to use the football site, seems completely natural. When we narrate Gholamreza’s arrest, we must place it alongside the American narrative of the behavior of their security organizations with non-American agents and their spies. It is then that the sorrow of any compassionate Iranian arises.
So far, the series of articles on CIA’s Betrayal of Colleagues has been published in four parts. You have read Part Four. To read the other parts, click on the links below.
- CIA’s Betrayal of Colleagues Part One
- CIA’s Betrayal of Colleagues Part Two
- CIA’s Betrayal of Colleagues Part Three