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American spies are trying to figure out what made an Air Force sergeant defect to Iran and help the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps try and hack her old coworkers. Monica Witt left the Air Force in 2008, but after appearing at a handful of conferences in Iran, prosecutors say she fled to the country to help its cyberoperators target Americans. Witt has left few clues behind about her motivations but The Daily Beast found some of her writings that hint at why Witt began to have doubts about her life and her career in the military.
In her own words: Witt’s personal website from 2012, written under the name she took when she converted to Islam, features a brief narrative of her upbringing in Nebraska, her career in the military, and what she says was one of the “many defining moments” that led her to question her life in the U.S. military and her faith.
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She described growing up as the child of two parents from very different backgrounds, a “very outspoken atheist” German father who liked to belittle religion and a Korean mother who belonged to a “very fundamentalist Christian church run by Koreans.” In Witt’s telling, the church offered Witt’s mother a relief from her homesickness for Korea and a chance to escape the “harsh and unaccepting” environment immigrants to America can experience.
For her part, Witt says she maintained a basic belief in a higher power but didn’t embrace a particular organized religion. She said a desire to travel, “do something good with my life,” and a “need to give back to my country” as the daughter of immigrants led her to a career in the Air Force.
Corroboration: The website account lines up with Witt’s service record, duty history, and deployments released by the Air Force. Witt served a 178-day tour in Iraq from February through August 2015, later deploying to Qatar. Before that she put her Persian language skills to work as a course developer and an airborne cryptologic linguist. Her service also took her on deployments to Saudi Arabia, Greece, and Diego Garcia.
Pivot point: Witt pointed to one incident as pivotal in her turn away from her career in the military. During her deployment in Iraq with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, Witt says she worked with local authorities to find “potential threats to Kurdish or American assets” there. Despite her training, she was “completely unprepared for what I had to face” and felt a similar lack of preparedness among fellow troops “had dire if not deadly consequences.”
In 2005 her unit responded to the scene of an improvised explosive device bombing that killed two people. She recalled watching a group of local children witnessing the gory scene, seemingly unaffected, and began to wonder. “After watching these children, I began to question how this war in Iraq and our actions there would influence the future of these people. I began to wonder if we were doing the right thing.”
Douglas Wise, who served as deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency when Witt defected, said he wasn’t briefed on the details of the investigation into her case but said he couldn’t recall post-traumatic stress or emotional disturbances related to her service in Iraq surfacing as an issue. Witt doesn’t mention any clinical mental health issues in the post either, but it’s clear the incident had some kind of impact on her thinking. Chastened by her ignorance and unpreparedness, Witt’s narrative leaves off with her determined to learn more about the region through a PhD program.
A little help from her friends: Many people in the U.S. military either practice or have converted to Islam. Many have also witnessed traumatic scenes. But the overwhelming majority of those people haven’t defected to Iran and become spies. So what makes Witt different? It’s unclear what other push factors drove Witt to embrace the Iranian government, but one pull factor is apparent: Individual A.
Witt’s indictment mentions an Individual A whom Witt was particularly close to from 2012 to 2013. Individual A is described as a dual citizen of Iran and the U.S. who lived in Iran, worked with documentaries, and “engaged in acts consistent with serving as a spotter and assessor on behalf of the Iranian intelligence services.” The New York Times reported that mystery person is Marzieh Hashemi, an anchor on Iran’s state-run English language propaganda channel who was detained during a January trip to America to appear before a sealed grand jury proceeding. But there’s more evidence tying her to Witt.
Prosecutors say that in 2012, Witt worked with Individual A on an “anti-American propaganda film that was later aired in Iran.” The Daily Beast located the film in question, a Press TV documentary directed and produced by Hashemi called “The Facade of the American Dream.” Witt is credited as a production assistant on the film alongside Reza Hashemi Niasari, Marzieh Hashemi’s son. In the summer of 2013, Iran featured Witt at the Tehran International Holy Quran Exhibition in a special exhibit on notable “seekers” who had converted to Islam, in the same display where Hashemi had been featured the year before.
Zero to Sixty: Witt went from being a figure of curiosity and suspicion for Tehran to being brought in to consult on a sensitive Iranian intelligence operation. In July 2013, as Hashemi and Witt “communicated regularly” and discussed her possible defection to Iran, Hashemi confessed that Iranian officials were “suspicious that on one hand, you said u had no money and on the other hand u r going from country to country,” according to the indictment. Witt said she was “starting to get frustrated at the level of Iranian suspicion” and floated the idea of reaching out to WikiLeaks for help defecting to Russia instead.
That kind of suspicion of would-be defectors isn’t necessarily unusual for a spy agency. “Any intelligence service would take a reasonable and prudent approach to someone who defected,” Wise told The Daily Beast. “They're a tremendous resource in theory but they're a tremendous risk as well. Because the minute they re-defect, they re-defect with a tremendous amount of knowledge of what you asked them about.”
And re-defection does happen sometimes. It happened in 1985 when Vitaly Yurchenko, a KGB officer who had defected and resettled in the U.S. with the help of the CIA, walked out on his minders and into the Soviet embassy. It also happened in 2010 when Shahram Amiri, an Iranian nuclear scientist who defected to the U.S., returned back to Iran
Proving ground: But just two and a half years later, after Iran overcame its initial suspicion of Witt, according to The New York Times, she was involved in the interrogation of 10 U.S. Navy sailors who were captured after their boat broke down and allegedly strayed into Iranian waters. The Times reported that Witt helped out with Iranian intelligence interrogation of the sailors after their capture. So how did she go from being held at arm’s length to participating in a sensitive interrogation operation in such short order?
“I have to believe she had to prove in some way her bona fides,” Wise told The Daily Beast. And her participation in a hacking campaign targeting U.S. defense and intelligence officials may have just been what convinced Iranian intelligence she was trustworthy.
More shoes to drop? There may be more to that hacking campaign than the Justice Department lets on. Around about the same time that Witt was helping Iranian hackers do reconnaissance to break into her former colleagues’ computers, cybersecurity firm iSight had identified an Iran-linked hacking operation dubbed “Newscaster.” Like the sock puppet accounts used to try and spearphish Witt’s Air Force colleagues, the Newscaster campaign used fake social media profiles and potemkin news organizations to target U.S. government officials and reporters.
The hacking group behind the Newscaster campaign, referred to as APT 35, may also be tied to one of the Iranian men indicted alongside Witt. Prosecutors say Behzad Mesri set up the infrastructure used to target Witt’s colleagues and helped orchestrate the campaign. Mesri, whom prosecutors previously charged with hacking into HBO and leaking a Game of Thrones script, has close links to the APT 35 hacking group behind the Newscaster campaign.
Foreign influence: The Witt case could not have come at a worse time for Iran’s TV propaganda channel. The Justice Department has already forced state-backed Chinese and Russian channels aimed at U.S. audiences to register as foreign agents. Back in January, when Hashemi testified before a grand jury, we got a hint that something similar may be in the works for Press TV when a U.S. official told Reuters that it was a “propaganda outlet that failed to register with the Justice Department as an agent of a foreign government.”
The U.S. has had plenty of not-so-nice things to say about foreign propaganda channels in Russia and China. But what separates the likes of RT and CGTN from Press TV is that no one in the U.S. government has yet accused employees of those channels of doing anything more sinister than lame propaganda. Hashemi’s alleged evolution from propagandist to a talent spotter for Iranian intelligence may land both her and the channel a new round of unwelcome scrutiny.
