Amir Mirzai Hekmati, a 28-year-old former Marine born in Arizona to Iranian parents, was “sentenced to death for cooperating with a hostile nation, membership of the CIA and trying to implicate Iran in terrorism,” the judge ruled, according to both the Fars and Iranian Students news agencies.
Hekmati has 20 days to appeal. In addition, Iranian law requires the Supreme Court to review and approve all death sentences.
Hekmati was sentenced by Judge Abol-Qasem Salavati, a magistrate who has handled many political cases, including the mass trials of those arrested for allegedly fomenting the post-election protests in 2009.
The United States swiftly and firmly denied that Hekmati had ever been a US spy. “Allegations that Mr. Hekmati either worked for or was sent to Iran by the CIA are false,” said White House spokesman Tommy Vietor. “The Iranian regime has a history of falsely accusing people of being spies, of eliciting forced confessions, and of holding innocent Iranian-Americans for political reasons.”
Behnaz Hekmati, the mother of the accused, issued a statement saying she and her husband are “shocked and terrified” by the death sentence. The verdict is “the result of a process that was neither transparent nor fair.… Amir is not a criminal. His very life is being exploited for political gain.”
Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told The New York Times he doubted Iran would ever execute Hekmati because it would then lose the bargaining chip it now has. “The Iranian regime is desperate for any leverage it can get vis-à-vis the United States,” he said. “For that reason, it is highly unlikely that they will execute Mr. Hekmati. For he would then cease to be a bargaining chip.”
Hekmati went to Iran last August. His family said it was his first visit to Iran and was to see his grandmothers and other relatives. Within weeks, he was arrested.
He did not surface for 3 1/2 months. On December 18, he was shown on state television saying in fluent Farsi and English that he was a Central Intelligence Agency operative sent to infiltrate Iran’s intelligence ministry.
In his sole trial hearing, on December 27, prosecutors relied on Hekmati’s “confession” to say he tried to penetrate the intelligence ministry by posing as a disaffected former US soldier with classified information to give. Although the trial was for espionage, the confession did not relate to spying but rather to a plot to try to plant false information with Iranian intelligence.
The death sentence comes after the case of three other Americans who were held in Iran on spying charges after hiking in 2009 along the unmarked Iran-Iraq border. All three were eventually released, one in 2010 and the other two in September 2011, after being sentenced to eight years in prison.
Earlier, Roxana Saberi, who was born in the United States to an Iranian father and a Japanese mother, was also sentenced to eight years for having classified documents in her possession. She was freed after 100 days in jail.
The Islamic Republic has a history of announcing the arrests of American spies in large numbers, but rarely is anything further heard about those cases, which appear to be largely propaganda.
In May, Intelligence Minister Heydar Moslehi announced the arrests of 30 American spies. Last month, he spoke of 15 US spies soon to be tried. On Monday, he said Iran had broken up a US-linked spy network that planned to “fuel unrest” ahead of the March parliamentary election. “The detained spies were in contact with foreign countries through cyberspace,” Moslehi said. He gave no information about the nationalities and the number of those detained.
Iran is not known to have ever executed any American-born “spies.”
Hekmati’s family says it was unable to hire a lawyer for their son, and he was defended by a state-appointed advocate whom he met for the first time at the trial.
The telecast confession had several problems. Hekmati spoke in the video in both English and Farsi. But most of the substance of the broadcast was voiced by an announcer purporting to be translating Hekmati’s words. At the very beginning, Hekmati was shown speaking in English and saying he joined the Marines out of high school and became an infantryman. The announcer says in Farsi that Hekmati joined American military intelligence.
US Marine Corps personnel records show Hekmati was in the infantry throughout his four years on duty and finished service as a sergeant.
Later in the broadcast, the announcer says that Hekmati was taken to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan to prepare him to enter Iran, but that Iranian agents who had infiltrated Bagram discovered what was going on. Several minutes later, as the announcer describes Hekmati’s alleged approach to the Iranian Intelligence Ministry in Tehran, the announcer says Iranian intelligence assessed the information Hekmati gave them and “recognized the deception.” The advance word from Iranian agents inside Bagram is no longer mentioned.
The broadcast also said Hekmati worked for several US spy agencies, including “DARPA.” DARPA is the Defense Advanced Research Pro-jects Agency. It is world-famous as a technological development agency and is not an intelligence agency. A woman who worked on a DARPA contract, not for DARPA itself, said Hekmati assisted on her project to develop an electronic translator for US troops.
The question now is what happens to Hekmati next. Will the regime make a lot of propaganda noise and then free Hekmati after milking the case for as much as they can? Or has anger over US economic sanctions risen to such a high level that the regime will actually carry out the execution?
Gala Riani, an analyst at the forecasting firm IHS Global Insight said Iran could “hold on to Hekmati and use him—as they have with previous foreign detainees—as a pawn in their rivalry with the United States, rather than execute him immediately and thereby raise tensions with the US even more.”
The Swiss embassy, which handles US business in Tehran, has asked three times to see Hekmati and been turned down all three times by the Iranian government, despite international law authorizing such visits. Hekmati’s grandmothers have been allowed to visit him a few times.