March 26, 2021
Newly filed court documents show the FBI suspects Arizona-born Amir Hekmati, held prisoner in Evin prison for 4-1/2 years, did not fly to Iran to visit his grandmother but to sell classified secrets to the Islamic Republic.
Hekmati vigorously disputes the allegations and the FBI has never brought criminal charges against him. But the US government is refusing to pay him any money due to victims of terrorism because of the suspicions.
Hekmati said in a sworn statement that allegations he sought to sell out to Iran are ridiculous and offensive. His lawyers say the government’s suspicions, detailed in FBI reports and letters from the fund’s special master denying payments, are groundless and based on hearsay. Records show that an investigation was opened 10 years ago while Hekmati was still imprisoned in Iran and that Hekmati was interviewed by FBI agents upon his release, and yet federal prosecutors have brought no case.
“In this case, the US government should put up or shut up,” said Scott Gilbert, a lawyer working for Hekmati. “If the government believes they have a case, indict Amir. Try Amir. But you, the US government, won’t do that because you can’t do that. You don’t have sufficient factual evidence to do that.”
Gilbert said the allegations against Hekmati are based on a couple of “reports by the FBI agents who interviewed Amir at the height of his PTSD without a lawyer present.”
He said, “A fundamental precept of our system of justice [is], if the government believes you did something wrong, you have the right to confront those who accuse you. You can’t prove a negative. And that is exactly what the government’s been doing here. Again, it is beyond belief.”
Gilbert declined to make Hekmati available to the AP for an interview while Hekmati’s lawsuit seeking payment is pending.
Hundreds of pages of documents filed in the case show the FBI opened an espionage investigation into Hekmati as far back as 2011, the year he was detained in Iran on Iran’s suspicion he was spying for the CIA.
Hekmati, who was raised in Michigan and served as an infantryman and interpreter in Iraq before being honorably discharged from the Marines in 2005, says he went to Iran to visit an ailing grandmother after a brief, unsatisfying stint as a Defense Department contractor conducting intelligence analysis in Afghanistan.
But the FBI concluded that he went to Iran intent on selling Iran classified information, according to a five-page summary of the investigation.
The assessment is based partly on accounts from four unnamed sources who say Hekmati approached Iranian officials offering classified information, as well as the fact he abruptly resigned his contracting position and left for Iran without notifying supervisors, the FBI says. An FBI computer forensics search concluded that while in Afghanistan, he accessed hundreds of classified documents on Iran that agents believe were outside the scope of his job responsibilities, the documents also say.
Hekmati says he researched Iran openly to cultivate an expertise on Iranian influence in Afghanistan. “Everyone knew” about the work he was doing, he said at a hearing last year, and supervisors didn’t place any restrictions pn him. He says he’d already quit his job when he left for Iran and therefore wasn’t obligated to tell colleagues of his trip. At no point in Iran, he said, did he meet with any Iranian officials or try to sell government secrets.
Hekmati’s lawyers say the FBI’s suspicions are impossible to square with the treatment he endured in prison, which included torture, such as being whipped and chained to a table and being forced to record a coerced but bogus confession. Were he actually spying for Iran, Gilbert said, “You’d think the guy would have been a valuable asset, they actually would have wanted to do something with him” rather than abuse him.
He was initially sentenced to death, but the punishment was ultimately cut to 10 years.
In January 2016, after 4-1/2 years behind bars, he was freed with several other American citizens, including Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian.
Months later, Hekmati sued Iran over his torture. A federal judge in Washington entered a $63.5 million default judg-ment after Iran failed to contest the claims. Hekmati subsequently applied to collect through a Justice Department-run fund for terror victims financed by assets seized from US adversaries. He was awarded the statutory maximum of $20 million, his lawyers say.
The fund’s special master then was Kenneth Feinberg, renowned for overseeing payments to victims of the September 11 attacks. In December 2018, he authorized an initial payment of more than $839,000.
But for months, no money came. After Hekmati’s lawyers warned they’d have to sue, the Justice Department cryptically indicated it was seeking a reconsideration of the award.
In January 2020, Feinberg formally revoked Hekmati’s eligibility for the fund, saying that his application contained errors and omissions and that information from the Justice Department supported the conclusion that Hekmati visited Iran with the intent of selling classified information.
A second letter last December didn’t repeat that precise allegation but said Hekmati had given “evasive, false and inconsistent statements” during three FBI interviews, failed to “credibly refute” that most of the classified information he accessed related to Iran and “traveled to Iran for primary purposes other than to visit his family.”
The correspondence had been secret until January when Hekmati’s lawyers filed it in the Court of Federal Claims in Washington as part of a lawsuit seeking compensation. Hundreds of additional pages of documents have since been filed outlining the investigation.
The documents include summaries of FBI interviews from 2016 in Germany, on Hekmati’s way home from Iran, and in Michigan that show FBI agents grilling him with increasing suspicion, according to the AP.
One summary says Hekmati refused to answer when asked if he’d ever accessed classified information on Iran and replied the FBI could figure it out itself. In a follow-up interview, an agent confronted Hekmati with the FBI’s assessment that he went to Afghanistan to obtain classified information that he could sell to Iran. After a long back-and-forth, Hekmati told the FBI that he accessed the material to become a subject matter expert on the topic.
Hekmati and his lawyers state the FBI interviews shouldn’t be considered credible in part because he was suffering from the effects of post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) at the time.