the only such intelligence center created to keep watch over just one country, The Washington Post reported Sunday.
The Iran Operations Division—unofficially known within the US intelligence community as “Persia House”—was created a few years when the Iran specialists were moved out from under the CIA’s Near East Division.
It was started around 2007 with several dozen staff members, but has now grown to several hundred, the Post reported.
The newspaper said it got its information from interviews with seven current and retired intelligence officials.
Michael V. Hayden, who was CIA director at the time, agreed to allow his name to be used. He said, “We put the best people on the job and put the most talented people in charge. Then we said, ‘Tell us what you need to get the job done’.”
Others told the Post that Persia House became assembling a network of informants that stretched not only across he Middle East but also into South America and other distant spots of the world.
There was also a lot of input from technological intelligence, including the RQ-170 stealth drone that was flown over Iran to check out suspected nuclear sites.
An RQ-170 was downed in Iran in December. The Islamic Republic claimed its experts fooled the drone into landing in Iran. But the CIA just laughs at that and says it went down because of a malfunction.
But the crash hasn’t changed the project. Drones still fly over Iran, the Post quoted the officials as saying. There was no indication how often flights are launched.
In Tehran two days after the Post story appeared, Brig. Gen. Amir Esmaili, the commander of Iran’s air defense command, denied any American drones were flying over Iran. “No drone has entered Iran’s airspace,” he said. “No drone has the right or would dare to enter the country’s airspace. If one did, we would provide the media with photographs of its downed wreckage. One of these aircraft wanted to cross into the Islamic Republic, and you saw what happened to it.”
The Islamic Republic says that drone last December was the first and last American drone to enter Iranian airspace. US officials have said it was neither the first nor the last.
One US official familiar with the program said there had been a debate before the first drone was sent over Iran. Some wanted to put an explosive package on board so the drone would blow up if it ever flew off course. Others said that would add too much weight to the plane and require removing some intelligence gathering gear. The decision was to pack the plane only with spy gear.
The Persia House effort, however, has many facets for collecting intelligence besides spies on the ground and drones in the sky. The Post quoted its interviewees as saying that email is read and telephone calls listened to. Satellites pass overhead every day—and it was a satellite that first picked up the construction of an enrichment plant inside the mountain at Fordo.
The intelligence effort also seeks to recruit informants inside Iran’s nuclear program. One who was recruited was Shahram Amiri, who was enticed to defect in 2009 for $5 million. But a year later, he changed his mind and was allowed to return to Iran. He was given a raucous welcome on his return—and has not been seen or heard from since.
Amiri was not handled by Persia House, the Post’s sources said. He was handled by the CIA’s Counterproliferation Division after he approached US officials in Vienna and volunteered to spy. That division continues to oversee scientists and technical people who volunteer to help the United States. Persia House concentrates on the regime’s leadership and on its military and security services.
One source told the Post Amiri provided much useful information. Iran claims it learned a great deal after he returned. But intelligence officials have long scoffed at that. All Iran could learn is what Amiri was questioned about. And that wouldn’t tell them much since interrogators always ask about things they know all about to test that the informant really knows what he is talking about and not just making things up.
A key point of the massively expanded effort, the Post was told, is that the US government now feels confident that it would not be in the dark if the Iranian state decides to rush ahead and build a nuclear weapon. “There is confidence that we could see activity indicating that a decision had been made,” one current official told the Post. “Across the board, our access has been significantly improved.”
Hayden said the decision to create Persia House and expand the intelligence operation by several orders of magnitude was made after a meeting in the White House with the bungle on Iraq’s nuclear program hanging over everyone. President George W. Bush turned to Hayden and said, “I don’t want any US president to be faced with only two choices when it comes to Iran”—bomb the country or accept a nuclear Iran.
As a result, an extensive effort at sabotage is included in the Persia House mandate.