The Chameleon Conspiracy (16 page)

“So you could conclude that he was recruited not in spite of his American education, but probably because of it,” I said.
“After all he was assigned to perpetrate fraud in the U.S.”

“We don’t know that his mission was limited to defrauding banks,” said Casey.

“I’m willing to bet those SOBs would be more ambitious than that.”

“I wonder whether there could be additional graduates of the Tehran American School in Department 81,” said Bob Holliday,
touching his mustache.

“Well, first we discover that Rashtian recruited a team of agents to be infiltrated into the U.S.,” said Casey. “Then at the
same time we’ve got a shitload of unsolved cases of stolen identities of young Americans, and at least one of them ended up
with a strong Iranian connection. Next we hear from NSA that Kourosh Alireza Farhadi, who was one of Rashtian’s team, was
a graduate of the American School in Tehran.” He shook his head. “There’s too much of a coincidence here. We’ve got
to investigate if all other members of Rashtian’s team were also graduates of that school.”

“I need to set up another meeting with Benny Friedman,” concluded Casey Bauer. “It may be time to talk shop.” Casey knew when
we’d gone as far as we could with our resources and was decisive when it came to taking additional action. He wasn’t the type
to second-guess himself.

As they both left, leaving me and Nicole to clean up the mess, she asked, “How do we find out if additional ethnic Iranians,
graduates of the American School, were also recruited?”

“I have an idea that I need to check first.” I locked myself in my room with my notebook computer. I emerged two hours later.
Nicole was stretched on the couch reading a newspaper.

“Tell me what you think about this. I focused first on how to discover the individuals Iran sent to the U.S. Once we do that,
we can move on to identifying their mission.”

“Go on,” she said, putting the paper down.

“If we follow the theory that Iran has planted a sleeper cell in the United States, then let’s assume that what Casey Bauer
suggested is true: Department 81 enlisted a whole bunch of young Iranian men who had two things in common—they were all ethnic
Iranians, and they were graduates of the Tehran American School.”

“OK.”

“I did some research. Between 1950 and 1979 the American population in Tehran grew with the influx of many American companies
to Iran, mostly connected to aeronautical, engineering, and oil businesses. Bear in mind that during that period Iran was
a pleasant and hospitable place for Westerners to live, so the foreign employees brought along their families. The Tehran
American School had almost two thousand students and was one of the largest American schools outside the United States. About
a third of the school’s students were Iranians whose families wanted them to have an American education and perfect command
of English—families that could afford the hefty tuition.”

“So if you were to follow that theory, the single most
important common denominator of all of the ethnic-Iranian graduates was their perfect command of American English,” said Nicole.

“Exactly. After spending twelve, and sometimes fifteen years, if you count preschool classes, speaking and studying in English
from American teachers, and with all your friends speaking American English to you, there’s no wonder that all graduates spoke
English at the same level as first-generation American students in Chicago or in San Diego do.”

“Sounds right,” said Nicole. “That characteristic must have proven to be invaluable for the Iranians. But why stop at stealing
money from U.S. banks and investors? Is money all they cared about? What about old-fashioned espionage or modern-era terrorism?”

“I’m wondering about that too,” I conceded. “It’s more likely that if the Iranians picked up that idea, as the NSA report
and Casey suggested, these young men were sent to the United States as Iranian undercover sleeper agents also to gather information
or engage in sabotage when the order came from Tehran.”

“Now I see how it all falls into place,” said Nicole. “We may have two different cases here. We’ve got the case of the Chameleon
and company, the money thieves as part of the Iranian government’s strategic decision to siphon money from the United States.
And we may have a case of Iranian sleeper cells in the U.S. waiting for an order to sabotage, or what have you. These two
separate issues may or may not be related.”

“Think about that,” I said. “This is more than just a theory, if we adopt the idea that the Chameleon wasn’t the sole perpetrator
of the fraud, and that there were others, as the NSA report suggested. That theory, if substantiated, will deal another blow
to the FBI’s sole-perpetrator theory.”

“We have no proof yet, just a presumption. And ours is as good as the FBI’s,” said Nicole, cooling off my enthusiasm. “We
know that Kourosh Alireza Farhadi, a graduate of the American School, was a member of Department 81. But we don’t know
that other members of that department were also graduates of that school.”

I wasn’t deterred. “I agree. But let’s move on in developing our theory. Let’s assume for the moment that ethnic Iranians
drafted by Rashtian to Department 81 were graduates of the American School intended for surreptitious operations within the
U.S. We know that it was very difficult or actually impossible after 1979 to get U.S. visas on Iranian passports. Once the
U.S. was declared an enemy, Iran needed an easy way to infiltrate them by getting agents into the U.S. The Iranians had to
give their agents travel documents to make their stay in the U.S. look legal, so just sneaking them across the border was
probably not an option.”

Nicole contemplated this. “Of course, they could have used the visa stamps they captured at the embassy in Tehran, but in
all likelihood these stamps were kept as souvenirs by the mob, or just thrown into the fire.”

“Nicole, if what NSA tells us about Department 81 checks out, then it’s quite possible that to this day there are Iranian
sleeper cells in the U.S. waiting for an order to ‘wake up.’ That could come with instructions to sabotage American industry,
shopping centers, power plants, airlines, trains. There could be orders to plant hazardous chemicals in areas likely to create
panic and uncertainty—whatever you can imagine.”

“I just said that,” she said.

“But on the other hand, let’s not forget we’re building theories here, so let’s get to work. We need facts to support them.”
Now it was the lawyer in me speaking. “We’re looking for a group of Iranian graduates of the American School in Tehran. The
school was shut down in January 1979 immediately after the Islamic Revolution, when the embassy finally admitted that something
unusual was going on. The dependents were evacuated in early December just before Muharram, the first month of the Islamic
calendar. So the youngest of the graduates must have been born around 1961. If we identify the Iranian graduates, we’ll have
something to start working on.”

“If they graduated at eighteen,” Nicole said, once again as meticulous as possible. “The upper perimeter is too thin. We should
assume that some graduated at sixteen or seventeen; therefore their dates of birth could be 1962 or 1963. They would now be
in their early forties. We should also look at the possibility that older alumni were used, a few years after their graduation.
Let’s put the mark on 1950 as year of birth and 1968 as year of graduation.”

“Fine,” I said. “But bear in mind that we’ve just increased the number of the potential members of the target group.” I got
up to open the window shade. “It’s too dark in here.”

“OK, since we’ve got a pool of fifty to one hundred graduates each year and a twelve-year range, that means that we’ve got
to identify a group of twelve hundred to twenty-four hundred people,” Nicole said.

“No, only about half, or perhaps a little more,” I said. “The school was coed. I’d suspect that all the perpetrators were
males.”

“I suppose we can assume that,” she said. “OK. Then we are left with approximately six to twelve hundred people, possibly
all men. How do we identify them? The American School in Tehran no longer exists, but I’m sure there are records somewhere
with a list of the students.” Nicole paused for a moment and continued. “We can check that with the Office of Overseas Schools
at the State Department. I’ll place an inquiry.”

A day later, Nicole logged into a remote site and downloaded an encrypted file.

“Here it is,” she said. “The complete list of students who attended the school in the years 1960 through 1979. They didn’t
have records of students enrolled from 1954, the year the school was started, through 1959. But I think we’ve got more than
what we currently need.”

She projected the computer-screen image onto the opposite wall. It was a database sorted alphabetically, with 6,015 records.
Each line included the student’s first and last names, name of father or legal guardian, date of birth, sex, Social
Security or other national identification number, address, year enrolled, and year left or graduated.

“That’s fantastic,” I said. “We could sort out the Iranian ethnics.”

“How?” Nicole gave me a confused look.

“Iranians don’t usually have American Social Security numbers.”

“Nor would most other non-American students,” she said. “There were many other foreigners in the school, children of non-American
expats working for American and European companies such as Westing house, Phillips, or Standard Oil, or at their country’s
embassy.”

I wasn’t deterred. “I know that. But the lack of a Social Security number almost certainly flags out a non-American. That’d
eliminate many from the list.”

“I agree,” she said. “Although there could be instances where an ethnic Iranian had an SSN because he was born in the U.S.,
say, or lived in the U.S. while his parents were diplomats or working there, if his parents applied for one.”

“True,” I conceded. “We’ll simply have to work one by one.”

With a few clicks on her laptop computer Nicole isolated all names that didn’t specify an American SSN. From that shorter
list, she eliminated all females. “OK,” she said. “We now have 978 names of males who don’t have SSNs listed.”

I quickly looked at the list. Approximately a third had typical European names, as did their fathers. “Let’s get them off
the list too, just for now,” I suggested. An hour later we had narrowed down the list to 294 names.

“What do you suggest we do now?” Nicole asked. “We’re done with the easy part. Now how do we isolate from the list ethnic
Iranians to be investigated, twenty years after they were recruited, without going to Iran?”

“Then go to Iran,” I said. “Or better yet, ask your people in Iran to help us out. After all, this isn’t guarded military
or nuclear information. We’re talking about a bunch of Iranian civilians.”

“Too risky,” said Nicole. “Some of the graduates are now potential suspects under our new theory, but we don’t know which
ones. We can make benign-sounding inquiries and hit on some of them. That will immediately trigger the attention of the Iranian
security agencies, who’ll wonder why people are asking questions about these men.”

“Even with a perfect legend?” I asked.

“Making inquiries about one suspected individual could be a coincidence, but asking about two or three?”

“I agree that if we limit our inquiries to the suspected group, it will arouse suspicion. But we can broaden the inquiries
to include women as well. That might lessen the suspicions.” I paused for a moment and continued. “You’ve just given me an
idea. We should have one of the alumni do the inquiries, ideally unwittingly. The end result will be a list of names of the
ethnic-Iranian graduates provided by an innocent alumnus or alumna who, even if interrogated, will not be able to show any
hidden agenda for the inquiries, just a ‘legitimate’ one. That person can be remotely controlled by your people in Tehran.”

Nicole was quiet for a minute. “I think it’s a good idea, but I’m afraid it can’t be managed by our people in Iran.”

“What does that mean? How can something so simple be beyond the reach of the omnipotent CIA?”

She hesitated. “We’re a little short of assets in Iran these days, as I’m sure you heard during the Giverny conference. It’s
all been since the debacle of—” She stopped abruptly.

I raised my head. “What are you talking about?”

“A disaster,” she said.

“Can you tell me what happened?”

“Well, the Iranians know, so I guess there shouldn’t be any reason for you not to know. An officer at Langley mistakenly sent
an encrypted secret data flow to one of the Iranian agents in the CIA’s foreign-asset network directly to his high-speed personal
communications device. The Iranian who received the download was a double agent. He immediately turned the data over to his
handler at VEVAK—the Ministry
of Intelligence and Security, the feared security police—and in no time most of our network in Iran collapsed. Several of
our Iranian assets were arrested and jailed, and we still don’t know what happened to some of the others. That left us virtually
blind in Iran.”

“My god,” I said.

She nodded grimly. “Since then, and until we regroup, Iran is regarded as ‘denied’ territory for us. We’ve got no official
station inside Iran and, insofar as human intelligence is concerned, until we redeploy and recruit new assets, we depend on
sources outside that country.”

“What about SDLure?” I asked. “I remember hearing from my Mossad buddies, years after I left, about the CIA successfully recruiting
top Iranian government officials.”

“Gone with the revolution. The mob discovered their names at the U.S. Embassy. SDLure/1 was Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, the first
post–Islamic Revolution president. He fled the country. Another former prime minister, Mehdi Bazargan, was executed. And now
this.”

“On the bright side, for now we don’t have to limit our search to Iran. Some of our sources could also be in the U.S.,” I
said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, we’re communicating with alums. The American Overseas Schools in China, Iran, and elsewhere created a special bond
and affinity among their students, because they weren’t just places of study, but also cultural and social centers for the
children and their families. I’m sure if we interview the American alumni, we can cross-reference everybody in each of the
classes. That will do, at least in the beginning.”