Haggai Harmon - The Chameleon Conspiracy

“Hold on,” said Nicole, breaking her silence. “There’s an important item in the Chameleon’s resume. He graduated from the American School in Tehran.”

“And why is it that significant?” asked Bauer, clearly engrossed in the affair.

“Because Iranian intelligence uses only ethnic Iranians who strictly adhere to the Ayatollah’s interpretation of Islam. That means studying in their religious schools and undergoing the necessary indoctrination to guarantee blind loyalty. And here we see an agent who spent twelve years in the educational institute of the Great Satan, and still he was recruited for a sensitive assignment.”

“So you could conclude that he was recruited not in spite of his American education, but probably because of it,” I said. “After all he was assigned to perpetrate fraud in the U.S.”

“We don’t know that his mission was limited to defrauding banks,” said Casey.

“I’m willing to bet those SOBs would be more ambitious than that.”

“I wonder whether there could be additional graduates of the Tehran American School in Department 81,” said Bob Holliday, touching his mustache.

“Well, first we discover that Rashtian recruited a team of agents to be infiltrated into the U.S.,” said Casey. “Then at the same time we’ve got a shitload of unsolved cases of stolen identities of young Americans, and at least one of them ended up with a strong Iranian connection. Next we hear from NSA that Kourosh Alireza Farhadi, who was one of Rashtian’s team, was a graduate of the American School in Tehran.” He shook his head. “There’s too much of a coincidence here. We’ve got to investigate if all other members of Rashtian’s team were also graduates of that school.”

“I need to set up another meeting with Benny Friedman,” concluded Casey Bauer. “It may be time to talk shop.” Casey knew when we’d gone as far as we could with our resources and was decisive when it came to taking additional action. He wasn’t the type to second-guess himself.

As they both left, leaving me and Nicole to clean up the mess, she asked, “How do we find out if additional ethnic Iranians, graduates of the American School, were also recruited?”

“I have an idea that I need to check first.” I locked myself in my room with my notebook computer. I emerged two hours later. Nicole was stretched on the couch reading a newspaper.

“Tell me what you think about this. I focused first on how to discover the individuals Iran sent to the U.S. Once we do that, we can move on to identifying their mission.”

“Go on,” she said, putting the paper down.

“If we follow the theory that Iran has planted a sleeper cell in the United States, then let’s assume that what Casey Bauer suggested is true: Department 81 enlisted a whole bunch of young Iranian men who had two things in common-they were all ethnic Iranians, and they were graduates of the Tehran American School.”

“OK.”

“I did some research. Between 1950 and 1979 the American population in Tehran grew with the influx of many American companies to Iran, mostly connected to aeronautical, engineering, and oil businesses. Bear in mind that during that period Iran was a pleasant and hospitable place for Westerners to live, so the foreign employees brought along their families. The Tehran American School had almost two thousand students and was one of the largest American schools outside the United States. About a third of the school’s students were Iranians whose families wanted them to have an American education and perfect command of English-families that could afford the hefty tuition.”

“So if you were to follow that theory, the single most important common denominator of all of the ethnic-Iranian graduates was their perfect command of American English,” said Nicole.

“Exactly. After spending twelve, and sometimes fifteen years, if you count preschool classes, speaking and studying in English from American teachers, and with all your friends speaking American English to you, there’s no wonder that all graduates spoke English at the same level as first-generation American students in Chicago or in San Diego do.”

“Sounds right,” said Nicole. “That characteristic must have proven to be invaluable for the Iranians. But why stop at stealing money from U.S. banks and investors? Is money all they cared about? What about old-fashioned espionage or modern-era terrorism?”

“I’m wondering about that too,” I conceded. “It’s more likely that if the Iranians picked up that idea, as the NSA report and Casey suggested, these young men were sent to the United States as Iranian undercover sleeper agents also to gather information or engage in sabotage when the order came from Tehran.”

“Now I see how it all falls into place,” said Nicole. “We may have two different cases here. We’ve got the case of the Chameleon and company, the money thieves as part of the Iranian government’s strategic decision to siphon money from the United States. And we may have a case of Iranian sleeper cells in the U.S. waiting for an order to sabotage, or what have you. These two separate issues may or may not be related.”

“Think about that,” I said. “This is more than just a theory, if we adopt the idea that the Chameleon wasn’t the sole perpetrator of the fraud, and that there were others, as the NSA report suggested. That theory, if substantiated, will deal another blow to the FBI’s sole-perpetrator theory.”

“We have no proof yet, just a presumption. And ours is as good as the FBI’s,” said Nicole, cooling off my enthusiasm. “We know that Kourosh Alireza Farhadi, a graduate of the American School, was a member of Department 81. But we don’t know that other members of that department were also graduates of that school.”

I wasn’t deterred. “I agree. But let’s move on in developing our theory. Let’s assume for the moment that ethnic Iranians drafted by Rashtian to Department 81 were graduates of the American School intended for surreptitious operations within the U.S. We know that it was very difficult or actually impossible after 1979 to get U.S. visas on Iranian passports. Once the U.S. was declared an enemy, Iran needed an easy way to infiltrate them by getting agents into the U.S. The Iranians had to give their agents travel documents to make their stay in the U.S. look legal, so just sneaking them across the border was probably not an option.”

Nicole contemplated this. “Of course, they could have used the visa stamps they captured at the embassy in Tehran, but in all likelihood these stamps were kept as souvenirs by the mob, or just thrown into the fire.”

“Nicole, if what NSA tells us about Department 81 checks out, then it’s quite possible that to this day there are Iranian sleeper cells in the U.S. waiting for an order to ‘wake up.’ That could come with instructions to sabotage American industry, shopping centers, power plants, airlines, trains. There could be orders to plant hazardous chemicals in areas likely to create panic and uncertainty-whatever you can imagine.”

“I just said that,” she said.

“But on the other hand, let’s not forget we’re building theories here, so let’s get to work. We need facts to support them.” Now it was the lawyer in me speaking. “We’re looking for a group of Iranian graduates of the American School in Tehran. The school was shut down in January 1979 immediately after the Islamic Revolution, when the embassy finally admitted that something unusual was going on. The dependents were evacuated in early December just before Muharram, the first month of the Islamic calendar. So the youngest of the graduates must have been born around 1961. If we identify the Iranian graduates, we’ll have something to start working on.”