He helped stop Iran from getting the bomb

From the article:

Chalker’s strategy for clearing his reputation—which had been the foundation of his lucrative business—was unexpected, to say the least. It is nearly unheard of for ex-spies to divulge their past activities. But Chalker spoke in detail, aware that I would vet his narrative. As we talked, I sensed a certain resentment. The C.I.A., despite all the crucial and dangerous work he claimed to have done, had offered him no help as the lawsuit ruined his life. I wondered how much of his story I could trust.

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The C.I.A. program that Chalker described to me became publicly known in 2007, when the Los Angeles Times reported on the existence of an agency project called Brain Drain. But the details of the “invitations” to Iranian scientists have not previously been reported. (The C.I.A., which jealously guards its sources and methods, declined to comment on Chalker’s account.)

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Chalker said that, at least for him, the curious-scientist ruse never worked. He told me that every actual scientist he approached immediately guessed that he was a spy, from either the U.S. or Israel. “Every time I walk up and say, ‘Salaam habibi, how are you?,’ they just think, Oh, this is it, and they assume I am there to kill them.” Most of the time, he said, the terrified scientist was “compliant” enough to at least sit down in a café. Chalker typically had about ten minutes to explain, as gently as possible, that he was from the C.I.A., that he had the power to secure the scientist and his family a comfortable new life in the U.S.—and that, if the offer was rejected, the scientist, regrettably, would be assassinated. (Chalker tried to emphasize the happier potential outcome.)

Killing a civilian scientist would violate international law. The American government has denied ever doing it, and I found no evidence that the U.S. has carried out any such murders. A former senior agency official familiar with the Brain Drain project told me all that mattered was that Iranian scientists had believed they would be killed, regardless of whether the U.S. actually made good on the threat. And Israel had been conducting a campaign to assassinate Iranian scientists, which made the prospect of lethal reprisal highly plausible. Other former officials with knowledge of the project told me that the C.I.A. sometimes shared intelligence with Mossad which enabled its operatives to locate and kill a scientist. Such information exchanges were kept vague enough to preserve deniability if a more legalistic U.S. Administration later took office.

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The Iranian news media has blamed the deaths of at least eighteen scientists in the past two decades on Israeli and American spies; Israeli officials have done little to hide Mossad’s role in the assassinations, many of which were carried out with the assistance of internal Iranian opposition groups. In 2007, Ardeshir Hosseinpour, a physicist in his mid-forties, was killed in Isfahan, either by radiation or by poisonous gas. In 2010, a bomb planted on a parked motorcycle in Tehran killed Massoud Ali Mohammadi, who was fifty. Later that year, a bomb affixed to the car of Majid Shahriari, another scientist in his mid-forties, killed him and injured his wife. In 2011, gunmen on motorcycles shot and killed Darioush Rezaeinejad, aged thirty-five, as he and his wife were picking up their daughter from school; his wife was also wounded. In 2012, yet another bomb affixed to a car killed the thirty-two-year-old Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, along with his driver. And so on.

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The most salient reason for his success, though, was surely his existential offer: defect or die. One of Chalker’s colleagues told me that, against the backdrop of so many Israeli assassinations, Chalker’s interactions with Iranian scientists could almost be considered humanitarian—he had been “throwing them a lifeline.” Of the many scientists he approached, three-quarters ultimately agreed to coöperate.

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Cumulatively, Chalker’s defectors contributed to what several former senior officials told me had been a dramatic leap forward in the U.S. government’s understanding of Iran’s nuclear ambitions in those years. The consequences were manifold. Around 2010, U.S. and Israeli spies used that intelligence to help carry out the Stuxnet cyberattack, which reportedly destroyed a thousand centrifuges used to enrich uranium. In 2015, the Obama Administration also relied on the intelligence as it negotiated a diplomatic agreement to constrain Iran’s nuclear-weapons program. Gary Samore, a former senior official in the Obama Administration who worked on the deal, told me that negotiators had felt confident the agreement would restrict all of Iran’s uranium enrichment because, in the previous decade, the C.I.A. had achieved such a comprehensive understanding of the program, with “tremendous penetration” into its facilities, sometimes including details “down to the blueprints.” Although Samore personally never knew which information had come from any “specific defector,” he told me that the “picture was very complete.”

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On December 27, 2017, Robin Rosenzweig, the wife of Elliott Broidy and a legal adviser to his investment firm, received what appeared to be a security alert from Google, asking for her Gmail password. It was a phishing attempt, and when she fell for it hackers took over her account and gained access to Broidy’s. Within months, they had leaked tranches of his private messages to multiple journalists, including me. In addition to revealing his efforts to profit by turning the White House against Qatar, the disclosures forced him to plead guilty to conspiring to act as an unregistered foreign agent for the Chinese government and a Malaysian financier, for which he agreed to forfeit $6.6 million to the U.S. He might have faced a further penalty, or even jail time, but before he was sentenced—or made to forfeit the money—he received a pardon from President Trump. (Years earlier, in 2009, Broidy had also pleaded guilty to bribing New York State pension-fund managers, and agreed to pay the state eighteen million dollars.)