May 20, 2022
The federal government has arrested two men, one with a distinctly Iranian name, and accused them of impersonating federal law enforcement officers with the Department of Homeland Security.
Documents filed with the courts say the pair were giving gifts including a television, iPhones, a drone, a gun locker and a generator and befriending members of the Secret Service, but did not give any reason for their efforts to get close to Secret Service agents.
Since the Secret Service provides protection to the president and vice president, the charge raises the specter of a plot to assassinate the president. However, the US media have not engaged in that line of speculation, nor have investigators.
The two men arrested April 6 are Arian Taherzadeh, 40, and Haidar Ali, 35. The FBI said both men are American citizens, but did not say where they were born. It said Ali had a US passport with visas for Iran and Pakistan. It is those visas that have sparked the most media interest. Ali’s US passport contained two pairs of exit/entry stamps from the Mashhad International Airport, though it is normal for Iranian intelligence to bring people into the country without having their passports stamped.
The US media has not caught on to the fact that Taherzadeh is an Iranian name, so there has been no talk of potential Iranian terrorism.
However, there has been much speculation about potential terrorism, especially given the fact that Ali visited Iran, according to his passport, and that one of the cards found on him is a Pakistani National Identity Card.
But the speculation hit a brick wall when the judge handling the case, G. Michael Harvey, did not see some great threat to national security but rather suspected childish behavior by the two men arrested. He called them “sophomoric.” He rejected the government’s request that they be jailed before trial and freed the two men, on condition that they stay under house arrest at their parents’ homes in Virginia—an interesting rule given their ages but in keeping with the judge’s judgment that they were acting immaturely more than criminally.
Taherzadeh’s father, Masoud, assured the court that he would stay at home to supervise his son and make sure he complied with the court’s restrictions. The Daily Mail of London, which covered the case extensively, said the Taherzadeh family home in Sterling, Virginia, is distinguished from others in the neighborhood by a large cross on the front door.
Judge Harvey, of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, said he was not convinced by the government’s lawyers that there was any national security issue involved, noting that the pair only faced charges of impersonating a law enforcement officer, which carries a maximum penalty of three years in prison. Charges of possessing illegal high-capacity ammunition magazines were later added to both men.
Judge Harvey called many of the claims aired in court by federal prosecutors “overblown.” He said the efforts to ingratiate themselves with federal agents were relatively benign, commenting that the government had “proffered zero evidence that defendants intended to infiltrate the Secret Service for nefarious purposes.”
Judge Harvey said there is “no evidence of any foreign involvement in this case,” adding that Ali’s claims to friends that he had “ties” to Pakistani intelligence were not reliable. The judge said, “There was a lot of bravado here.”
Taherzadeh and Ali began their two-year caper in February 2020, according to court documents. They got apartments in a very upscale apartment house, the Crossing, located in Washington, DC, near the Capitol, the Navy Yard and the Washington Nationals baseball stadium.
They said they were law enforcement officers with the Department of Homeland Security. No one questioned that claim and they were able to ingratiate themselves with both the management of the apartment house and some real law enforcement personnel who lived there, especially Secret Service agents involved in protecting the president and senior US leadership.
A former employee of the apartment house told the Daily Mail that a number of apartments were given to Taherzadeh and Ali for free because they were government agents running a security operation from the apartment house. The men had said they were running gang-related investigations and also were part of the probe into the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.
When arrested, they had a list of everyone who lived in the apartment house and access codes for all the apartments. The apartment house security people were contacting the two men when they saw something suspicious on their security cameras. The apartment house management believed the pair were conducting a security investigation from the apartment house.
The pair had provided free apartments for two Secret Service agents and had showered them and two other Secret Service agents with gifts. Those four men have all been put on leave by the Secret Service.
Perhaps most serious, the FBI said it found the pair had possession of equipment to create Personal Identification Verification cards that are needed to access sensitive law enforcement computers.
None of the various law enforcement agents Taherzadeh and Ali befriended voiced any suspicions of the pair. It was a US Postal Service inspector who first was suspicious. The inspector came to the apartment house after a letter carrier reported being assaulted there. The inspector was told by building management about two Homeland Security agents living in and running an operation from the apartment house. The inspector was suspicious and contacted the Department of Homeland Security. The story being told by Taherzadeh and Ali then quickly unraveled.
No one has yet given an explanation of a) why the two men were so eager to befriend law enforcement officers, b) where the substantial sums of money they spent came from, or c) whether the pair ever sought anything from the Secret Service agents.
The Daily Mail reported that Taherzadeh was charged in July 2013 with “strangulation resulting in wounding” and “assault and battery on a family member,” involving his then-wife. The Washington Post reported that Taherzadeh was sued frequently and chased by collection agencies over the past two decades in Missouri and the Washington, DC, area for unpaid rent and other bills. It also said Taherzadeh was involved more than two decades ago in a car crash in Missouri that killed a 17-year-old.
The Secret Service was created in 1865 as one of the federal government’s first law enforcement agencies. It was charged with fighting counterfeiting, which had become a huge problem during the Civil War. In 1901, after the third assassination of a president, the Secret Service was given the additional duty of protecting the president.
