CIA’s Betrayal of Colleagues Part Two

CIA’s Betrayal of Colleagues Part Two

CIA’s Betrayal of Colleagues Part Two: In the first part of the story of Gholamreza Hosseini, we reached the point where his commercial and technical activities were practically destroyed by the era of Ahmadinejad, leaving him disillusioned with everything around him and hopeless about the country’s situation.

This hopelessness and despair led him one day to send an email through a basic contact link on the CIA’s website, writing in Persian that he was an engineer working at the Natanz facility and had information.

From this point on, Gholamreza Hosseini’s story becomes one of the most bizarre transformations of events in the life of an Iranian. It might still be hard for him to believe that such a simple email received a response within a month, and according to the plans and strategies given to him, three months after sending the Persian email to the Americans, he boarded a plane to Dubai.

This trip was planned following extensive conversations on internet messengers with the capabilities of 2007. In Dubai, Gholamreza met with an American woman and her translator in a restaurant in Jumeirah, marking his first face-to-face contact with CIA agents.

Gholamreza Hosseini, who shared his story with Reuters investigative journalists, skillfully recounted a specific part of the original story, which was nothing but his level of information and expertise on the Natanz facilities, during his first meeting with CIA agents. The first meeting at a restaurant in Jumeirah involved face-to-face introductions and initial questions from the American agent, and the second meeting took place in Gholamreza’s hotel room in Dubai.

It was there that Gholamreza, who had spoken about his company’s significant collaborations in the technical and electrical sections of the Natanz facilities during the first meeting, shocked the American agent. He unfolded a map of the electrical system connected to the facilities and reactors in front of the American agent. The map detailed the electrical connections, the overall map of power transmission lines, and the flow of electricity in the lines.

During this same period, when Gholamreza Hosseini was holding his first meeting with a CIA agent, the Natanz facility was the focus of attention for the United States and Israel. It was during this time that plans for targeting Iran’s nuclear facilities with cyberattacks were developed, which were executed in the following years.

At this point in Gholamreza’s story, it should be noted that those in the CIA’s task force dealing with Iran who were handling his case took his role and the extent of his information about the Natanz facility seriously, as well as his background in contracts and technical activities in Iran’s power network, with caution and planning, yet with seriousness.

They were so hopeful about the potential use of Gholamreza that even in the first few face-to-face meetings, they asked him precise questions about Iran’s national power grid and naturally the sections connected to the country’s nuclear facilities.

As Gholamreza narrated to investigative journalists, and there is no reason to doubt his accounts, the Americans spoke openly, without beating around the bush or hiding their intentions, about how to target, disable, and destroy the power network and nuclear program.

Gholamreza’s meetings with the CIA agent and his translator in Dubai naturally gave this young Iranian engineer the main idea and nature of the cooperation taking shape. The Americans explicitly asked him to provide strategies and information on how to target Iran’s power network. The psychological pressure Gholamreza endured in Iran and the hope he had for better days in collaboration with the Americans can be understood from this part of the story.

He was explicitly asked about the strategic points of Iran’s power network and was informed that their aim was to destroy it, even mentioning a military attack on this network. These American statements did not shake Gholamreza as an Iranian. Encouraged by the meetings in Dubai, he held numerous meetings with the Americans over three years, with some of them taking place in Thailand and Malaysia.

Higher-ranking agents from the CIA’s task force dealing with Iran made contact with Gholamreza. From this point on, he pursued the story of collaboration with the Americans more seriously and decisively. He resolved to overlook all the bitterness caused by the damage that rent-seeking companies during the Ahmadinejad era inflicted on him.

And by accepting the corrupt rules of the military-connected companies linked to the Ahmadinejad network and the dark activities of the Executive Headquarters of Imam’s Directive, he entered into sincere cooperation with them to secure contracts, however they wanted, and with all the costs he had to pay to the contract brokers. Gholamreza Hosseini targeted the Tavanir company.