The visitor was there to restore order, but his presence highlighted the protesters’ biggest grievance: He was Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, head of Iran’s powerful Quds Force, and he had come to persuade an ally in the Iraqi Parliament to help the prime minister hold on to his job.

It was not the first time Suleimani had been dispatched to Baghdad to do damage control. Tehran’s efforts to prop up Abdul-Mahdi are part of its long campaign to maintain Iraq as a pliable client state.

Now leaked Iranian documents offer a detailed portrait of just how aggressively Tehran has worked to embed itself into Iraqi affairs, and of the unique role of Suleimani. The documents are contained in an archive of secret Iranian intelligence cables obtained by The Intercept and shared with the New York Times for this article, which is being published simultaneously by both news organizations.

The unprecedented leak exposes Tehran’s vast influence in Iraq, detailing years of painstaking work by Iranian spies to co-opt the country’s leaders, pay Iraqi agents working for the Americans to switch sides, and infiltrate every aspect of Iraq’s political, economic, and religious life.

Many of the cables describe real-life espionage capers that feel torn from the pages of a spy thriller. Meetings are arranged in dark alleyways and shopping malls or under the cover of a hunting excursion or a birthday party. Informants lurk at the Baghdad airport, snapping pictures of American soldiers and keeping tabs on coalition military flights. Agents drive meandering routes to meetings to evade surveillance. Sources are plied with gifts of pistachios, cologne, and saffron. Iraqi officials, if necessary, are offered bribes. The archive even contains expense reports from intelligence ministry officers in Iraq, including one totaling 87.5 euros spent on gifts for a Kurdish commander.

Left/Top: Iraqi soldiers surround anti-government protesters outside the local government headquarters in Basra, Iraq, on Oct. 28, 2019. Right/Bottom: Thousands flood Tahrir Square in Baghdad for an anti-government protest on Nov. 1, 2019. Photos: AFP via Getty Images; Ivor Prickett/The New York Times via Redux

According to one of the leaked Iranian intelligence cables, Abdul-Mahdi, who in exile worked closely with Iran while Saddam Hussein was in power in Iraq, had a “special relationship with the IRI” — the Islamic Republic of Iran — when he was Iraq’s oil minister in 2014. The exact nature of that relationship is not detailed in the cable, and, as one former senior U.S. official cautioned, a “special relationship could mean a lot of things — it doesn’t mean he is an agent of the Iranian government.” But no Iraqi politician can become prime minister without Iran’s blessing, and Abdul-Mahdi, when he secured the premiership in 2018, was seen as a compromise candidate acceptable to both Iran and the United States.

The leaked cables offer an extraordinary glimpse inside the secretive Iranian regime. They also detail the extent to which Iraq has fallen under Iranian influence since the American invasion in 2003, which transformed Iraq into a gateway for Iranian power, connecting the Islamic Republic’s geography of dominance from the shores of the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean Sea.

The trove of leaked Iranian intelligence reports largely confirms what was already known about Iran’s firm grip on Iraqi politics. But the reports reveal far more than was previously understood about the extent to which Iran and the United States have used Iraq as a staging area for their spy games. They also shed new light on the complex internal politics of the Iranian government, where competing factions are grappling with many of the same challenges faced by American occupying forces as they struggled to stabilize Iraq after the United States invasion.

And the documents show how Iran, at nearly every turn, has outmaneuvered the United States in the contest for influence.

The archive is made up of hundreds of reports and cables written mainly in 2014 and 2015 by officers of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, or MOIS, who were serving in the field in Iraq. The intelligence ministry, Iran’s version of the CIA, has a reputation as an analytical and professional agency, but it is overshadowed and often overruled by its more ideological counterpart, the Intelligence Organization of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which was formally established as an independent entity in 2009 at the order of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

In Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria, which Iran considers crucial to its national security, the Revolutionary Guards — and in particular its elite Quds Force, led by Suleimani — determine Iran’s policies. Ambassadors to those countries are appointed from the senior ranks of the Guards, not the foreign ministry, which oversees the intelligence ministry, according to several advisers to current and past Iranian administrations. Officers from the intelligence ministry and from the Revolutionary Guards in Iraq worked parallel to one another, said these sources. They reported their findings back to their respective headquarters in Tehran, which in turn organized them into reports for the Supreme Council of National Security.

Cultivating Iraqi officials was a key part of their job, and it was made easier by the alliances many Iraqi leaders forged with Iran when they belonged to opposition groups fighting Saddam. Many of Iraq’s foremost political, military, and security officials have had secret relationships with Tehran, according to the documents. The same 2014 cable that described Abdul-Mahdi’s “special relationship” also named several other key members of the cabinet of former Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi as having close ties with Iran.

A political analyst and adviser on Iraq to Iran’s government, Gheis Ghoreishi, confirmed that Iran has focused on cultivating high-level officials in Iraq. “We have a good number of allies among Iraqi leaders who we can trust with our eyes closed,” he said.

Three Iranian officials were asked to comment for this article, in queries that described the existence of the leaked cables and reports. Alireza Miryusefi, a spokesperson for Iran’s United Nations mission, said he was away until later this month. Majid Takht-Ravanchi, Iran’s U.N. ambassador, did not respond to a written request that was hand-delivered to his official residence. Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif did not respond to an emailed request.

When reached by telephone, Hassan Danaiefar, Iran’s ambassador to Iraq from 2010 to 2017 and a former deputy commander of the Revolutionary Guards’ naval forces, declined to directly address the existence of the cables or their release, but he did suggest that Iran had the upper hand in information gathering in Iraq. “Yes, we have a lot of information from Iraq on multiple issues, especially about what America was doing there,” he said. “There is a wide gap between the reality and perception of U.S. actions in Iraq. I have many stories to tell.” He declined to elaborate.

According to the reports, after the American troop withdrawal in 2011, Iran moved quickly to add former CIA informants to its payroll. One undated section of an intelligence ministry cable shows that Iran began the process of recruiting a spy inside the State Department. It is unclear what came of the recruitment effort, but according to the files, Iran had started meeting with the source, and offered to reward the potential asset with a salary, gold coins, and other gifts. The State Department official is not named in the cable, but the person is described as someone who would be able to provide “intelligence insights into the U.S. government’s plans in Iraq, whether it is for dealing with ISIS or any other covert operations.”

“The subject’s incentive in collaborating will be financial,” the report said.

The State Department declined to comment on the matter.

In interviews, Iranian officials acknowledged that Iran viewed surveillance of American activity in Iraq after the United States invasion as critical to its survival and national security. When American forces toppled Saddam, Iran swiftly moved some of its best officers from both the intelligence ministry and from the Intelligence Organization of the Revolutionary Guards to Iraq, according to the Iranian government advisers and a person affiliated with the Guards. President George W. Bush had declared Iran to be part of an “axis of evil,” and Iranian leaders believed that Tehran would be next on Washington’s list of regime-change capitals after Kabul and Baghdad.

700 Pages of Documents

Around the world, governments have had to contend with the occasional leak of secret communiqués or personal emails as a fact of modern life. Not so in Iran, where information is tightly controlled and the security services are widely feared.

The roughly 700 pages of leaked reports were sent anonymously to The Intercept, which translated them from Persian to English and shared them with the Times. The Intercept and the Times verified the authenticity of the documents but do not know who leaked them. The Intercept communicated over encrypted channels with the source, who declined to meet with a reporter. In these anonymous messages, the source said that they wanted to “let the world know what Iran is doing in my country Iraq.”

Like the internal communications of any spy service, some of the reports contain raw intelligence whose accuracy is questionable, while others appear to represent the views of intelligence officers and sources with their own agendas.

Some of the cables show bumbling and comical ineptitude, like one that describes the Iranian spies who broke into a German cultural institute in Iraq only to find they had the wrong codes and could not unlock the safes. Other officers were browbeaten by their superiors in Tehran for laziness, and for sending back to headquarters reports that relied only on news accounts.

But by and large, the intelligence ministry operatives portrayed in the documents appear patient, professional, and pragmatic. Their main tasks are to keep Iraq from falling apart; from breeding Sunni militants on the Iranian border; from descending into sectarian warfare that might make Shia Muslims the targets of violence; and from spinning off an independent Kurdistan that would threaten regional stability and Iranian territorial integrity. The Revolutionary Guards and Suleimani have also worked to eradicate the Islamic State, but with a greater focus on maintaining Iraq as a client state of Iran and making sure that political factions loyal to Tehran remain in power.

This portrait is all the more striking at a time of heightened tensions between the United States and Iran. Since 2018, when President Donald Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal and reimposed sanctions, the White House has rushed ships to the Persian Gulf and reviewed military plans for war with Iran. In October, the Trump administration promised to send American troops to Saudi Arabia following attacks on oil facilities there for which Iran was widely blamed.

Tell Them We Are at Your Service

With a shared faith and tribal affiliations that span a porous border, Iran has long been a major presence in southern Iraq. It has opened religious offices in Iraq’s holy cities and posted banners of Iran’s revolutionary leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, on its streets. It supports some of the most powerful political parties in the south, dispatches Iranian students to study in Iraqi seminaries, and sends Iranian construction workers to build Iraqi hotels and refurbish Iraqi shrines.

But while Iran may have bested the United States in the contest for influence in Baghdad, it has struggled to win popular support in the Iraqi south. Now, as the last six weeks of protests make clear, it is facing unexpectedly strong pushback. Across the south, Iranian-backed Iraqi political parties are seeing their headquarters burned and their leading operatives assassinated, an indication that Iran may have underestimated the Iraqi desire for independence not just from the United States, but also from its neighbor.

In a sense, the leaked Iranian cables provide a final accounting of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. The notion that the Americans handed control of Iraq to Iran when they invaded now enjoys broad support, even within the U.S. military. A recent two-volume history of the Iraq War, published by the U.S. Army, details the campaign’s many missteps and its “staggering cost” in lives and money. Nearly 4,500 American troops were killed, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died, and American taxpayers spent up to $2 trillion on the war. The study, which totals hundreds of pages and draws on declassified documents, concludes: “An emboldened and expansionist Iran appears to be the only victor.”

Iran’s rise as a power player in Iraq was in many ways a direct consequence of Washington’s lack of any post-invasion plan. The early years following the fall of Saddam were chaotic, both in terms of security and in the lack of basic services like water and electricity. To most observers on the ground, it appeared as if the United States was shaping policy on the go, and in the dark.

Among the most disastrous American policies were the decisions to dismantle Iraq’s armed forces and to purge from government service or the new armed forces any Iraqi who had been a member of Saddam’s ruling Baath Party. This process, known as de-Baathification, automatically marginalized most Sunni men. Unemployed and resentful, they formed a violent insurgency targeting Americans and Shias seen as U.S. allies.

As sectarian warfare between Sunnis and Shias raged, the Shia population looked to Iran as a protector. When ISIS gained control of territory and cities, the Shias’ vulnerability and the failure of the United States to protect them fueled efforts by the Revolutionary Guards and Suleimani to recruit and mobilize Shia militias loyal to Iran.

According to the intelligence ministry documents, Iran has continued to take advantage of the opportunities the United States has afforded it in Iraq. Iran, for example, reaped an intelligence windfall of American secrets as the U.S. presence began to recede after its 2011 troop withdrawal. The CIA had tossed many of its longtime secret agents out on the street, leaving them jobless and destitute in a country still shattered from the invasion — and fearful that they could be killed for their links with the United States, possibly by Iran. Short of money, many began to offer their services to Tehran. And they were happy to tell the Iranians everything they knew about CIA operations in Iraq.

In November 2014, one of them, an Iraqi who had spied for the CIA, broke and terrified that his ties to the Americans would cost him his life, switched sides. The CIA, according to the cable, had known the man by a nickname: “Donnie Brasco.” His Iranian handler would call him, simply, “Source 134992.”

Turning to Iran for protection, he said that everything he knew about American intelligence gathering in Iraq was for sale: the locations of CIA safe houses; the names of hotels where CIA operatives met with agents; details of his weapons and surveillance training; the names of other Iraqis working as spies for the Americans.

Source 134992 told the Iranian operatives that he had worked for the agency for 18 months starting in 2008, on a program targeting Al Qaeda. He said he had been paid well for his work — $3,000 per month, plus a one-time bonus of $20,000 and a car.

But swearing on the Quran, he promised that his days of spying for the United States were over, and agreed to write a full report for the Iranians on everything he knew from his time with the CIA.

“I will turn over to you all the documents and videos that I have from my training course,” the Iraqi man told his Iranian handler, according to a 2014 Iranian intelligence report. “And pictures and identifying features of my fellow trainees and my subordinates.”

The CIA declined to comment.

Iranian spies, Iraqi officials say, are everywhere in the south, and the region has long been a beehive of espionage. It was there, in Karbala in late 2014, that an Iraqi military intelligence officer, down from Baghdad, met with an Iranian intelligence official and offered to spy for Iran — and to tell the Iranians whatever he could about American activities in Iraq.

“Iran is my second country and I love it,” the Iraqi official told the Iranian officer, according to one of the cables. In a meeting that lasted more than three hours, the Iraqi told of his devotion to the Iranian system of government, in which clerics rule directly, and his admiration for Iranian movies.

He said he had come with a message from his boss in Baghdad, Lt. Gen. Hatem al-Maksusi, then commander of military intelligence in the Iraqi Ministry of Defense: “Tell them we are at your service. Whatever you need is at their disposal. We are Shia and have a common enemy.”

Maksusi’s messenger continued, “All of the Iraqi Army’s intelligence — consider it yours.” He told the Iranian intelligence officer about secret targeting software the United States had provided to the Iraqis, and offered to turn it over to the Iranians. “If you have a new laptop, give it to me so I can upload the program onto it,” he said.

And there was more, he said. The United States had also given Iraq a highly sensitive system for eavesdropping on mobile phones, which was run out of the prime minister’s office and the headquarters of Iraqi military intelligence. “I will put at your disposal whatever intelligence about it you want,” he said.

In an interview, Maksusi disputed saying the things attributed to him in the cables and denied ever working for Iran. He praised Iran for its help in the fight against ISIS, but said he had also maintained a close relationship with the United States. “I worked for Iraq and did not work for any other state,” he said. “I was not the intelligence director for the Shias, but I was intelligence director for all of Iraq.”

When asked about the cable, a former American official said the United States had become aware of the Iraqi military intelligence officer’s ties to Iran and had limited his access to sensitive information.

The Americans’ Candidate

By late 2014, the United States was once again pouring weapons and soldiers into Iraq as it began battling the Islamic State. Iran, too, had an interest in defeating the militants. As ISIS took control of the west and the north, young Iraqi men traveled across the deserts and marshes of the south by the busload, heading to Iran for military training.

Some within the American and Iranian governments believed that the two rivals should coordinate their efforts against a common enemy. But Iran, as the leaked cables make clear, also viewed the increased American presence as a threat and a “cover” to gather intelligence about Iran.

“What is happening in the sky over Iraq shows the massive level of activity of the coalition,” one Iranian officer wrote. “The danger for the Islamic Republic of Iran’s interests represented by their activity must be taken seriously.”

The rise of ISIS was at the same time driving a wedge between the Obama administration and a large swath of the Iraqi political class. Barack Obama had pushed for the ouster of Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Maliki as a condition for renewed American military support. He believed that Maliki’s draconian policies and crackdowns on Iraqi Sunnis had helped lead to the rise of the militants.

Left/Top: Iraqis carry portraits of Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Maliki as they gather in support of him at Firdos Square in Baghdad, on Aug. 13, 2014. Right/Bottom: U.S. President Barack Obama, right, meets with Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi during the 69th U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 24, 2014, in New York City. Photos: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images; Allan Tannenbaum/Getty Images

Maliki, who had lived in exile in Iran in the 1980s, was a favorite of Tehran’s. His replacement, the British-educated Haider al-Abadi, was seen as more friendly to the West and less sectarian. Facing the uncertainty of a new prime minister, Hassan Danaiefar, then Iran’s ambassador, called a secret meeting of senior staffers at the Iranian Embassy, a hulking, fortified structure just outside Baghdad’s Green Zone.

As the meeting progressed, it became clear that the Iranians had little cause to worry about the new Iraqi government. Abadi was dismissed as “a British man,” and “the Americans’ candidate,” but the Iranians believed that they had plenty of other ministers in their pocket.

One by one, Danaiefar went down the list of cabinet members, describing their relationships to Iran.

Ibrahim al-Jafari — who had previously served as Iraqi prime minister and by late 2014 was the foreign minister — was, like Abdul-Mahdi, identified as having a “special relationship” with Iran. In an interview, Jafari did not deny that he had close relations with Iran, but said he had always dealt with foreign countries based on the interests of Iraq.

Iran counted on the loyalty of many lesser cabinet members as well.

The report said the ministers of municipalities, communications, and human rights “are in complete harmony and at one with us and are our people.” The environment minister, it said, “works with us, although he is Sunni.” The transportation minister — Bayan Jabr, who had led the Iraqi Interior Ministry at a time when hundreds of prisoners were tortured to death with electric drills or summarily shot by Shia death squads — was deemed to be “very close” to Iran. When it came to Iraq’s education minister, the report says, “we will have no problem with him.”

The former ministers of municipalities, communications, and human rights were all members of the Badr Organization, a political and military group established by Iran in the 1980s to oppose Saddam. The former minister of municipalities denied having a close relationship with Iran; the former human rights minister acknowledged being close to Iran, and praised Iran for helping Shia Iraqis during Saddam’s dictatorship and for help defeating ISIS. The former minister of communications said that he served Iraq, not Iran, and that he maintained relationships with diplomats from many countries; the former minister of education said that he had not been supported by Iran and that he served at the request of Abadi. The former environment minister could not be reached for comment.

Iran’s dominance over Iraqi politics is vividly shown in one important episode from the fall of 2014, when Baghdad was a city at the center of a multinational maelstrom. The Syrian civil war was raging to the west, ISIS militants had seized almost a third of Iraq, and American troops were heading back to the region to confront the growing crisis.

Against this chaotic backdrop, Jabr, then the transportation minister, welcomed Suleimani, the Quds Force commander, to his office. Suleimani had come to ask a favor: Iran needed access to Iraqi airspace to fly planeloads of weapons and other supplies to support the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad in its fight against American-backed rebels.

It was a request that placed Jabr at the center of the longstanding rivalry between the United States and Iran. Obama administration officials had been lobbying hard to get the Iraqis to stop Iranian flights through their airspace, but face to face with the Quds chief, Iraq’s transportation minister found it impossible to refuse.

Suleimani, Jabr recalled, “came to me and requested that we permit Iranian airplanes to use Iraqi air space to pass on to Syria,” according to one of the cables. The transportation minister did not hesitate, and Suleimani appeared to be pleased. “I put my hands on my eyes and said, ‘On my eyes! As you wish!’” Jabr told the intelligence ministry officer. “Then he got up and approached me and kissed my forehead.”

Jabr confirmed the meeting with Suleimani, but said the flights from Iran to Syria carried humanitarian supplies and religious pilgrims traveling to Syria to visit holy sites, not weapons and military supplies to aid Assad as American officials believed.

Meanwhile, Iraqi officials known to have a relationship with the United States came under special scrutiny, and Iran took measures to counter American influence. Indeed, many of the files show that as top American diplomats met behind closed doors with their Iraqi counterparts in Baghdad, their conversations were routinely reported back to the Iranians.

Throughout 2014 and 2015, as a new Iraqi government settled in, the American ambassador, Stuart Jones, met often with Salim al-Jabouri, who was speaker of the Iraqi Parliament until last year. Jabouri, although he is Sunni, was known to have a close relationship with Iran, but the files now reveal that one of his top political advisers — identified as Source 134832 — was an Iranian intelligence asset. “[I] am present in his office on a daily basis and carefully follow his contacts with the Americans,” the source told his Iranian handler. Jabouri, in an interview, said he did not believe that anyone on his staff had worked as an agent for Iran, and that he fully trusted his aides. (Jones declined to comment.)

The source urged the Iranians to develop closer ties to Jabouri, to blunt American efforts to nurture a new class of younger Sunni leaders in Iraq and perhaps bring about reconciliation between Sunnis and Shias. The source warned that Iran should act to keep the parliament speaker from “slipping into a pro-American position, since one of Salim al-Jabouri’s characteristics is credulousness and making hasty decisions.”

Another report reveals that Nechervan Barzani, then the prime minister of Kurdistan, met with top American and British officials and Abadi, the Iraqi prime minister, in Baghdad in December 2014, and then went almost immediately to meet with an Iranian official to tell him everything. Through a spokesperson, Barzani said he did not recall meeting with any Iranian officials at the time and described the cable as “baseless and unfounded.” He said he “absolutely denies” telling the Iranians details about his conversations with American and British diplomats.

Sometimes, the Iranians also saw trade value in the information they received from their Iraqi sources.

One report from the Jabouri adviser revealed that the United States was interested in gaining access to a rich natural gas field in Akkas, near Iraq’s border with Syria. The source explained that the Americans might eventually try to export the natural gas to Europe, a major market for Russian natural gas. Intrigued, the intelligence ministry officer, in a cable to Tehran, wrote, “It is recommended that the aforementioned information be used in exchange with the Russians and Syria.” The cable was written just as Russia was significantly stepping up its involvement in Syria, and as Iran continued its military buildup there, in support of Assad.

And although Iran was initially suspicious of Abadi’s allegiances, a report written a few months after his rise to the premiership suggested that he was quite willing to have a confidential relationship with Iranian intelligence. A January 2015 report details a private meeting between Abadi and an intelligence ministry officer known as Boroujerdi, held in the prime minister’s office “without the presence of a secretary or a third person.”

During the meeting, Boroujerdi homed in on Iraq’s Sunni-Shia divide, probing Abadi’s feelings on perhaps the most sensitive subject in Iraqi politics. “Today, the Sunnis find themselves in the worst possible circumstances and have lost their self-confidence,” the intelligence officer opined, according to the cable. “The Sunnis are vagrants, their cities are destroyed and an unclear future awaits them, while the Shias can retrieve their self-confidence.”

Iraq’s Shia were “at a historical turning point,” Boroujerdi continued. The Iraqi government and Iran could “take advantage of this situation.”

According to the cable, the prime minister expressed his “complete agreement.” Abadi declined to comment.

Sweetness Into Bitterness

Ever since the start of the Iraq War in 2003, Iran has put itself forward as the protector of Iraq’s Shias, and Suleimani, more than anyone else, has employed the dark arts of espionage and covert military action to ensure that Shia power remains ascendant. But it has come at the cost of stability, with Sunnis perennially disenfranchised and looking to other groups, like the Islamic State, to protect them.

A 2014 massacre of Sunnis in the farming community of Jurf al-Sakhar was a vivid example of the kinds of sectarian atrocities committed by armed groups loyal to Iran’s Quds Force that had alarmed the United States throughout the Iraq War, and undermined efforts at reconciliation. As the field reports make clear, some of the Americans’ concerns were shared by the Iranian intelligence ministry. That signaled divisions within Iran over its Iraq policies between more moderate elements under President Hassan Rouhani and militant factions like the Revolutionary Guards.

Jurf al-Sakhar, which lies just east of Fallujah in the Euphrates River Valley, is lush with orange trees and palm groves. It was overrun by the Islamic State in 2014, giving militants a foothold from which they could launch attacks on the holy cities of Karbala and Najaf.

Jurf al-Sakhar is also important to Iran because it lies on a route Shia religious pilgrims use to travel to Karbala during Muharram, the monthlong commemoration of the death of Prophet Muhammad’s grandson, Imam Hussein, a revered figure for Shias.

When Shia militias supported by Iran drove the militants out of Jurf al-Sakhar in late 2014, the first major victory over ISIS, it became a ghost town. It was no longer a threat to the thousands of Shia pilgrims who would pass by, but Iran’s victory came at a high cost to the town’s Sunni residents. Tens of thousands were displaced, and a local politician, the only Sunni member on the provincial council, was found with a bullet hole through his head.

One cable describes the damage in almost biblical terms. “As a result of these operations,” its author reported, “the area around Jurf al-Sakhar has been cleansed of terrorist agents. Their families have been driven away, most of their houses have been destroyed by military forces and the rest will be destroyed. In some places, the palm orchards have been uprooted to be burned to prevent the terrorists from taking shelter among the trees. The people’s livestock (cows and sheep) have been scattered and are grazing without their owners.”

The Jurf al-Sakhar operation and other bloody actions led by Iran’s proxies and directed by Tehran further alienated Iraq’s Sunni population, according to one report, which notes that “destroying villages and houses, looting the Sunnis’ property and livestock turned the sweetness of these successes” against ISIS into “bitterness.” One of the Jurf al-Sakhar cables cast the impact of Shia militias in particularly stark terms: “In all the areas where the Popular Mobilization Forces go into action, the Sunnis flee, abandoning their homes and property, and prefer to live in tents as refugees or reside in camps.”

The intelligence ministry feared that Iran’s gains in Iraq were being squandered because Iraqis so resented the Shia militias and the Quds Force that sponsored them. Above all, its officers blamed Suleimani, whom they saw as a dangerous self-promoter using the anti-ISIS campaign as a launching pad for a political career back home in Iran. One report, which states at the top that it is not to be shared with the Quds Force, criticizes the general personally for publicizing his leading role in the military campaign in Iraq by “publishing pictures of himself on different social media sites.”

Doing that had made it obvious that Iran controlled the dreaded Shia militias — a potential gift to its rivals. “This policy of Iran in Iraq,” the report said, “has allowed the Americans to return to Iraq with greater legitimacy. And groups and individuals who had been fighting against the Americans among the Sunnis are now wishing that not only America, but even Israel, would enter Iraq and save Iraq from Iran’s clutches.”

At times, the Iranians sought to counter the ill will generated by their presence in Iraq with soft-power campaigns similar to American battlefield efforts to win “hearts and minds.” Hoping to gain a “propaganda advantage and restore Iran’s image among the people,” Iran devised a plan to send pediatricians and gynecologists to villages in northern Iraq to administer health services, according to one field report. It is not clear, however, if that initiative materialized.

Just as often, Iran would use its influence to close lucrative development deals. With Iraq dependent on Iran for military support in the fight against ISIS, one cable shows the Quds Force receiving oil and development contracts from Iraq’s Kurds in exchange for weapons and other aid. In the south, Iran was awarded contracts for sewage and water purification by paying a $16 million bribe to a member of Parliament, according to another field report.

Today, Iran is struggling to maintain its hegemony in Iraq, just as the Americans did after the 2003 invasion. Iraqi officials, meanwhile, are increasingly worried that a provocation in Iraq on either side could set off a war between the two powerful countries vying for dominance in their homeland. Against this geopolitical backdrop, Iraqis learned long ago to take a pragmatic approach to the overtures of Iran’s spies — even Sunni Iraqis who view Iran as an enemy.

“Not only doesn’t he believe in Iran, but he doesn’t believe that Iran might have positive intentions toward Iraq,” one Iranian case officer wrote in late 2014, about an Iraqi intelligence recruit described as a Baathist who had once worked for Saddam and later the CIA. “But he is a professional spy and understands the reality of Iran and the Shia in Iraq and will collaborate to save himself.”

Document excerpts have been retyped to avoid identifying markings.

Additional reporting: Matthew Cole and Laura Secor for The Intercept; Rick Gladstone, Falih Hassan, and Alissa J. Rubin for the New York Times

Correction: November 18, 2019, 3:02 p.m.
An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that Lt. Gen. Hatem al-Maksusi, a onetime commander of military intelligence in the Iraqi Ministry of Defense, had retired. Maksusi is still a government official, overseeing military engineering.

The post Leaked Iranian Intelligence Reports Expose Tehran’s Vast Web of Influence in Iraq appeared first on The Intercept.

In early June, the extremist group stunned the world by taking control of the Iraqi city of Mosul, home to more than 1.2 million people. Days later, ISIS fighters broadcast scenes from a gruesome massacre of more than 1,500 Iraqi army cadets at a former U.S. military base near Tikrit. By the end of the month, ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had declared himself head of a new proto-state, the “caliphate,” as his fighters continued their genocidal rampage across northern Iraq, killing and enslaving members of the Yazidi minority and seizing Western hostages, among them an American journalist named James Foley.

As the international community groped for a response, ISIS fighters reached the borders of Iraqi Kurdistan, within striking distance of the glass high-rises of the bustling Kurdish capital, Erbil. It was there, from a dusty, remote Kurdish military base nicknamed “Black Tiger” outside the town of Makhmour, that ISIS was finally confronted by Kurdish Peshmerga in a battle that began to turn the tide against the extremists.

“Makhmour was the first place that we took territory from ISIS,” Staff Col. Srud Salih, the Kurdish commander of the Black Tiger base, told The Intercept this summer. “The victories of the Peshmerga began from here.”

The battle of Makhmour represented another important milestone in the war against ISIS: It was the place where two foreign military interventions began. One was directed by the U.S.-led international coalition, which provided air support and later, heavy weaponry. The other, in the form of ammunition, training, and intelligence support, came from Iran. Over the course of a few short days that August, coalition airstrikes hit ISIS positions in the parched desert hills near Makhmour, leveling the playing field between the heavily armed extremists and the Kurdish fighters.

Since the election of Donald Trump, the United States and Iran have grown increasingly fractious, exchanging provocations that have fueled fears of war. But in the early days of the fight against ISIS under President Barack Obama, these longtime rivals were focused on a common goal: halting the Islamic State’s advance and destroying its so-called caliphate.

While the broad outlines of the conventional war against ISIS have long been known, the details of Iran’s covert war against the militants have not. A portrait of this secret war emerges from a trove of Iranian intelligence reports provided to The Intercept by an anonymous source. The reports come from Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, or MOIS, the country’s primary intelligence agency.

A Secret Battle

Alongside the U.S.-led military campaign against the Islamic State, Iran’s MOIS was waging a parallel, clandestine campaign, spying on ISIS gatherings, providing covert aid to its enemies, and working to break its alliances with other insurgent factions, according to the leaked documents.

In many ways, the Iranian intelligence campaign against ISIS mirrored the U.S. strategy for dealing with Iraq. In addition to an overt military confrontation with the group and support for Shia militias and the Iraqi Army, the Iranians also worked to cultivate Sunni and Kurdish partners whom they perceived as moderate — or at least willing to work with them. From the outset, the MOIS kept its eyes on the day the war would end, when local partners from all sides would be needed to patch together a functional Iraq.

To an extent, the agency played a good-cop role in contrast to the more brutal measures employed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which reports directly to Iran’s supreme leader. While the MOIS has been pragmatic, subtle, and willing to look past sectarianism, the Revolutionary Guards, through its Iraqi proxies, has been blamed for carrying out waves of extrajudicial killings and ethnic cleansing. In some cases, it has been accused of treating entire Sunni communities as enemies, trapping them in an impossible choice between religious extremists and a hostile Iraqi government.

In many ways, the Iranian intelligence campaign against ISIS mirrored the U.S. strategy for dealing with Iraq.

This sectarian conflict came to a head during the brutal violence of the ISIS war. But for those Sunnis — whether militants or politicians — willing to accept a place in an Iranian-dominated Iraq, the MOIS showed itself ready to help.

According to the leaked Iranian intelligence documents, there was also frustration on the Iranian side about the lack of direct U.S. cooperation with Tehran in the anti-ISIS war effort. The Iranians noted with approval the impact of U.S. airstrikes against ISIS but wanted to coordinate more closely.

“The Americans’ insistence on not cooperating with Iran in the war against ISIS and not participating in the meetings of the 10 countries of the region — the Arabs and Turkey — as well as the Western and Arab countries’ extreme positions on the presence and role of Iran in Iraq has had a negative influence,” one secret report noted.

Although the Iranian contribution was ultimately more modest than that of the Americans, Iran was nimbler in backing the Iraqi Kurds. “Iran’s security institutions are often able to make decisions and act more quickly in an emergency than their U.S. counterparts, who have to navigate a web of bureaucracy,” a Kurdish analyst who was present during the battle, and asked for anonymity to discuss issues related to Iran, told The Intercept. “When ISIS attacked Makhmour, the Iranian help came first. It took a day or two after the battle began for the Americans to join in with air support.”

The punishing American airstrikes made a vital difference in Makhmour, where the Kurdish Peshmerga ultimately triumphed over ISIS and drove it out of the area. But in the weeks and months before the battle, some of the Peshmerga who fought in Makhmour had received assistance from Iranian advisers connected with the MOIS.

Spying on ISIS

In its propaganda videos and statements, ISIS liked to project an image of complete ideological discipline and authoritarian control. But from early on, the organization appears to have been penetrated by both Iranian and Kurdish intelligence.

On the evening of September 18, 2014, a case officer from the MOIS left his base and headed to the home of an asset living in Erbil. At the time, ISIS was still near the height of its power, and the city was teeming with foreign military and intelligence officials helping coordinate the war effort against the militants. The MOIS officer took precautions to avoid surveillance as he made his way to the meeting. “I left the base by foot an hour before holding the meeting and after twenty minutes walking on foot and carrying out the necessary checks, took two taxis through the neighboring streets to the site of the meeting,” he wrote in his report.

The Iranian spy had two goals that night: to learn as much as possible about how Iraq’s Sunni leaders viewed the ISIS threat and to create a “detailed and precise biography of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi through his classmates and people who had been imprisoned with him.” The meeting was one of many being conducted by MOIS officers trying to develop an operational picture of ISIS. In a December 2014 rendezvous with a source in the Kurdish city of Sulaimaniyah, another MOIS officer received a flash drive containing information about ISIS, according to one of the reports. The officer instructed the source, who is only identified as a senior deputy official in Iraqi intelligence, to send the Iranians daily reports on ISIS activities.

The MOIS’s intelligence sources about ISIS were not limited to outsiders; they had penetrated the group’s leadership as well. A report provided to the MOIS by a source in Mosul contains an account of internal deliberations from a December 2014 meeting of senior ISIS leaders, including Baghdadi. At the time, ISIS was bracing for an attack from the Iraqi Army, Shia militia groups, and the Kurdish Peshmerga on the group’s territories in Nineveh Province. The attack was planned for the early months of 2015, and ISIS leaders feared that it would be heavily backed by both the U.S.-led coalition and Iran.

The prospect of facing so many adversaries at once bred justified paranoia inside the militant group. It also raised fears that ISIS leaders with past ties to the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussain might feed intelligence to the group’s enemies, or even defect. “Some ISIS amirs who have a Baathist record have established relations with the Kurdish Democratic Party to flee to the Kurdish region and not fall into the hands of the Shia Iraqi army,” the MOIS source said, according to the intelligence report, which cites a meeting of the “Central Council of the Caliphate presided over by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.”

In at least one case, the militant group’s fears had already come to fruition. ISIS commanders in two districts north of Mosul had made contact with American and Kurdish forces, given them GPS coordinates of ISIS positions, and revealed the group’s attack plans, according to the MOIS report.

In response, ISIS had cut “all telephone and internet connections” for commanders in those areas, and the group wanted to further limit the communications of other front-line commanders. One of the districts named in the MOIS document, Zumar, was the site of heavy coalition air activity in support of a Peshmerga offensive during this period.

“A sharia court determined that greater control should be exercised over contacts between ISIS amirs and that all means of communication, especially at the fronts, should be cut,” the MOIS source reported.

Divide and Conquer

As Iran worked to weaken the Islamic State, it embarked on a strategy that, deliberately or not, echoed the U.S. playbook for dealing with Iraq. Nearly a decade earlier, the United States had defeated Al Qaeda in Iraq — the precursor to ISIS — by arming Sunni tribal groups opposed to the extremists. This tribal rebellion, termed “the Awakening,” was credited with helping fracture Al Qaeda’s ties to other Sunni Arab militants. The Awakening helped stabilize the country during the final years of the U.S. occupation, allowing a tenuous new political order to take shape.

Like Al Qaeda before it, the Islamic State belonged to a broad coalition of Sunni Arab factions that were ideologically diverse but united in their opposition to an Iraqi government they viewed as sectarian, corrupt, and beholden to Iran. Many of the most powerful non-ISIS factions could be described as ideologically neo-Baathist in their shared longing for a restoration of the pre-2003 order in Iraq.

The groups initially cooperated, but by the summer of 2014, deadly firefights were reported between ISIS and Sunni militants who did not accept the group’s leadership of the insurgency against Baghdad. Iran was ready to capitalize on these divisions. By the fall of 2014, the MOIS was surveilling and communicating with disaffected insurgents, with the goal of reconciling them with the Iraqi government and turning them against ISIS.

But the Iranians found that the Sunni militants could be deceptive, the MOIS documents show. In September 2014, the agency intercepted a communication from some of these militants to their followers that included derogatory statements about Iran and called on fighters to take advantage of a recent halt in Iraqi government airstrikes to escalate their insurgency.

“We should try to weaken their position and show how untrustworthy they are in claiming that they have changed and become moderate and care for Iraq.”

“Since we are supposed to meet Baathists next week, and considering the principles fixed by the honorable General Director to get answers from them — naturally some of the answers are clear from the text of this statement,” a MOIS officer wrote dryly. “We should try to weaken their position and show how untrustworthy they are in claiming that they have changed and become moderate and care for Iraq. Put this statement in front of them and then ask them to be explicit and clear in their view.”

Iranian officials closely monitored efforts by Sunni Arabs to organize themselves politically throughout the war, including at several meetings held at the Sheraton and Rotana hotels in Erbil in late 2014. An Iranian spy who attended a two-day meeting at the Sheraton in September reported that a former Baath Party member now living in the United States came to the meeting bearing an intriguing message: The Americans were willing to support political autonomy for Sunni-majority regions of Iraq once the fighting had ended. The MOIS was deeply concerned about Iraq breaking apart along sectarian lines and viewed any efforts that might lead to such fragmentation with suspicion.

Three months later, in December, a delegation of Iraqi politicians including former parliament speaker Salim al-Jabouri traveled to Iran for negotiations with high-ranking Iranian officials. The trip went well, according to a MOIS report, but there was a tense moment when members of the Iraqi delegation were berated by Ali Shamkhani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. Shamkhani told the visitors that Sunnis in Iraq had already received “much more than you deserve,” including the leadership of numerous ministries, seats in the Iraqi parliament, and control of a large number of militia fighters. “Whether you want it or not,” he told them, Iran would “cleanse Iraq of the presence of [ISIS].”

Some members of the Iraqi delegation were “offended” by Shamkhani’s remarks, according to the cable.

Initial efforts by the highly unpopular Nouri al-Maliki-led Iraqi government to coax some Sunni tribes nominally allied with ISIS back onto its side with money and weapons had limited results. But a change of leadership in Iraq coupled with the brutality of life under ISIS did eventually lead some Sunni insurgents to explore switching sides. By 2015, the Iraqi government was said to be holding secret talks in Qatar and Tanzania with anti-ISIS Sunni insurgents, reportedly mediated by the United States and other countries in the Middle East.

“They Put Into Practice the Lessons They Had Learned”

On the morning of December 7, 2014, a delegation of Iranian intelligence officers paid a condolence visit to the headquarters of the Kurdistan Socialist Democratic Party, a small movement based in the Kurdish city of Halabja. In addition to the Kurdish Regional Government, Iran cultivated ties with marginal parties like the KSDP that lacked strong connections and military support from Western powers — part of a broader strategy of projecting influence through textured personal and political relationships across the Middle East. Such ties, sometimes pragmatically cultivated on a nonsectarian basis, have given Iran an advantage in its conflicts with the United States, Israel, and the Gulf Arab countries.

The head of the KSDP, Mohammed Haji Mahmoud, also known as “Kaka Hama,” is a legendary Kurdish nationalist who spent decades in the mountains of Kurdistan helping lead a resistance movement against the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. When ISIS attacked Kurdistan in 2014, Mahmoud himself joined battles at the front.

In late November of that year, Mahmoud’s son was killed fighting ISIS near Kirkuk. A week and a half later, spies from the MOIS showed up at Mahmoud’s office.

“A delegation of colleagues of the consulate went to the political office of KSDP and recited [prayers] and offered our condolences and paid our respects to Mohammed Haji Mahmoud over his martyred son who achieved martyrdom in the suburbs of Kirkuk in an attack against ISIS,” according to a secret Iranian intelligence report. An Iranian official present expressed the ministry’s grief over the death of Mahmoud’s son and “wished his family patience and tranquility.”

In January, about six weeks after their condolence visit, MOIS officers met with Mahmoud again. According to their report, the Kurdish leader thanked the Iranians for providing “special military and security training” to some 30 of his party’s Peshmerga fighters based in Sulaimaniyah. The training, according to the report, had been conducted in honor of Mahmoud’s son, and the Iranian-backed fighters had been sent to a front near Makhmour, where they helped rout ISIS. “They played a good role in defeating the takfiris,” Mahmoud told the Iranians, using an Arabic word to denote extremists, “and they put into practice the lessons they had learned.”

The MOIS case officer who wrote the report expressed satisfaction with Mahmoud’s comments. “God willing, we will benefit from the existence of these brothers in future training in Iraq toward the struggle with ISIS.”

Mahmoud could not be reached for comment for this story.

Friends in Fair Weather

The Iranians would turn out to be less than durable friends to the Iraqi Kurds. Their dealings bear some resemblance to the United States’ own tortured relationship with Kurdish militants in neighboring Syria.

Not long after the war against ISIS began, Tehran started shifting the bulk of its support to the Iraqi central government and its allied Shia militias. The major break came in 2017, when Iraqi Kurds held a referendum on the question of full independence, their long-held dream. Kurdish voters overwhelmingly approved the referendum, but the vote alarmed Iran and other countries in the region that feared Kurdish secession.

Instead of independence, the referendum led to war between the Iraqi government and Kurdish forces. In a reversal of their role during the ISIS war, the Iranians worked against the Kurds, and the Iraqi offensive snuffed out any imminent hopes for Kurdish self-determination. In October 2017, the Peshmerga lost the town of Makhmour again — this time to an Iraqi government advance backed by Iran.

Gen. Bahram Arif Yassin was one of the Peshmerga commanders who led the fight against ISIS in northern Iraq. On a grassy hilltop in front of his home in the Kurdish city of Souran, surrounded by his military staff, he reflected on the bitter aftermath of the ISIS war and Kurdistan’s thwarted independence bid. “We expected support after the sacrifices we had made on behalf of the whole world fighting ISIS,” Yassin said. “Instead, we were opposed by surrounding countries that did not respect the Kurdish people’s voice.”

“When the independence vote happened, even Turkey didn’t close its borders to us,” Yassin continued. “Iran did.”

Although Makhmour remains under Iraqi control today, the sprawling Black Tiger base in the hills outside the town is still manned by Kurdish Peshmerga forces who are based in a few prefabricated bunkers. A giant Kurdish national flag flies from a pole above the base and a large hangar contains Humvees and other armored vehicles provided by the U.S.-led coalition. Modified vehicles taken from ISIS during the battle for Makhmour broil under the glaring sun. Among them are captured Iraqi army pickup trucks retrofitted with rusted armor plates and artillery pieces emblazoned with the black flag of the Islamic State.

The Peshmerga are still fighting ISIS militants hiding in the arid, brown Qara Chokh mountain range nearby, and Kurdish forces say they are grateful for periodic U.S. airstrikes on ISIS positions. Kurdish commanders at the base who fought in the Makhmour battle still consider the U.S.-led coalition their best ally, they said. The support Iran supplied to the Iraqi Kurds against ISIS in 2014 is a distant memory, overshadowed by Iran’s contribution to the more recent Iraqi conquest of Makhmour.

Iran’s MOIS predicted this rupture with the Kurds, though the reasons for the split were not what they had expected. The September 2014 report that bemoaned the lack of coordination between the U.S. and Iran in the fight against ISIS also noted that Tehran’s global isolation might force the Kurds to “keep their distance” from Iran when the war was over. “Our country might undergo a bitter experience yet again,” the document said, revealing the officer’s suspicion of even close Kurdish allies, as well as a note of pathos about Iran’s place in the world.

Ultimately, however, a combination of factors led to Iran’s renewed isolation. The U.S. decision to pull out of the Obama-era nuclear deal ended Iran’s brief rapprochement with the West. But it was Iran’s decision to work against Kurdish independence that squandered any goodwill the Iranians had won during the war against ISIS. Today, Iran finds itself cornered once more.

The destruction of the Islamic State may also prove to be a transient victory. Recent reports have suggested that the militants are quietly regrouping in Iraq, biding their time for a future resurgence. If the extremists do return, the United States and Iranian intelligence may find themselves once more in the strange position of tacitly working together — two enemies drawn into alignment by crises in Iraq that both helped generate, but neither seems capable of ending.

The post While U.S.-Led Forces Dropped Bombs, Iran Waged Its Own Covert Campaign Against the Islamic State appeared first on The Intercept.

The 2014 summit brought together the foreign military arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, known as the Quds Force, and the Muslim Brotherhood, a sprawling Islamist political movement with significant influence throughout the region.

The Quds Force represents the world’s most powerful Shia-dominated nation, while the Muslim Brotherhood is a stateless but influential political and religious force in the Sunni Muslim world. The Trump administration designated the Revolutionary Guards a foreign terrorist organization in April, and the White House has reportedly been lobbying to add the Muslim Brotherhood to the list as well.

The disclosure that two such polarizing organizations on either side of the Sunni-Shia divide held a summit is included in a leaked archive of secret Iranian intelligence reports obtained by The Intercept.

There were public meetings and contacts between Iranian and Egyptian officials while Muslim Brotherhood-backed Mohamed Morsi was president of Egypt from 2012 to 2013. But Morsi was forced from power in a coup supported by the Egyptian Army in July 2013 and later arrested. The regime of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi launched a crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, and many of its leaders have since been imprisoned in Egypt or are living in exile.

An Iranian intelligence cable about the 2014 meeting provides an intriguing glimpse at a secret effort by the Muslim Brotherhood and Iranian officials to maintain contact — and determine whether they could still work together — after Morsi was removed from power.

The cable about the summit, from the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security, or MOIS, reveals the fraught political dynamics that separate powerful Sunni and Shia organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood and the Quds Force. Above all, the cable and the story of the summit expose the maddening complexities of the political landscape in the Middle East and show how difficult it is for outsiders, including U.S. officials, to understand what’s really going on in the region.

On the surface, the Quds Force and the Muslim Brotherhood would appear to be archenemies. The Quds Force has used its covert power to help Iran expand its influence throughout the Middle East, backing Shia militias that have committed atrocities against Sunnis in Iraq, while siding with the brutal regime of Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian civil war. The Muslim Brotherhood, by contrast, has been a key player in Sunni Arab politics for decades, bringing a fundamentalist Islamist approach to a long battle against autocratic governments in Egypt and elsewhere. Along the way, extremists have left the Muslim Brotherhood to form splinter groups, like Hamas, that have sometimes veered into terrorism.

The summit came at a critical moment for the Quds Force and the Muslim Brotherhood, which may explain why the two sides agreed to talk.

But the summit came at a critical moment for both the Quds Force and the Muslim Brotherhood, which may explain why the two sides agreed to talk. When the meeting was held in April 2014, the Islamic State was tearing across the Sunni-dominated regions of northern Iraq. The Iraqi Army was melting away in the face of the terrorist group’s brutal tactics, and ISIS was threatening the stability of the Iraqi government in Baghdad.

The threat of ISIS prompted the Quds Force to intervene on behalf of the Shia-dominated government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in Iraq. The Quds Force began leading Shia militias into battle against ISIS, but Maliki was widely seen as an Iranian puppet and had stoked deep anger and resentment among Iraqi Sunnis. He would soon be pushed aside.

At the same time, the dream of the Arab Spring had turned into a nightmare. War was raging in Syria while in Egypt, the ouster of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government had led to a new dictatorship under Sisi. Morsi died in an Egyptian courtroom in June after nearly six years in solitary confinement.

Weakened by its losses in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood probably viewed an alliance with the Iranians as an opportunity to regain some of its regional prominence.

Spy Games

What neither side knew was that there was a spy in the summit. Iran’s MOIS, a rival of the Revolutionary Guards within the Iranian national security apparatus, secretly had an agent in the meeting who reported everything that was discussed. The MOIS agent not only attended but “acted as coordinator of this meeting,” according to the MOIS cable. The MOIS envied the Revolutionary Guards’ power and influence and secretly tried to keep track of the Guards’ activities around the world, the leaked archive shows.

Turkey was considered a safe location for the summit, since it was one of the few countries on good terms with both Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood. Yet the Turkish government still had to worry about appearances, so it refused to grant a visa to the highly visible chief of the Quds Force, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, according to the MOIS cable. With Suleimani unable to enter Turkey, a delegation of other senior Quds Force officials — led by one of Suleimani’s deputies, a man identified in the cable as Abu Hussain — attended the meeting in his place.

The Muslim Brotherhood was represented by three of its most prominent Egyptian leaders in exile: Ibrahim Munir Mustafa, Mahmoud El-Abiary, and Youssef Moustafa Nada, according to the document. (After 9/11, the George W. Bush administration and the United Nations suspected that Nada had helped finance Al Qaeda; his bank accounts were frozen and his movement restricted. In 2009, the U.N. sanctions against him were lifted because no proof of his alleged ties to terrorism could be found.)

In a recent interview, Nada told The Intercept: “I never attended such a meeting anywhere. I never heard about such a meeting anywhere.” Mustafa and El-Abiary could not be reached for comment.

The Muslim Brotherhood delegation opened the meeting with a boast, pointing out that the outfit “has organizations in 85 countries in the world.” Perhaps that was an effort to counter the Iranian government’s support for the Quds Force, since the Muslim Brotherhood had no similar national power backing it up.

“Differences between Iran as a symbol and representative of the Shia world and the Muslim Brotherhood as a representative of the Sunni world are indisputable,” the Brotherhood members noted, according to the MOIS cable. But they emphasized that there “should be a focus on joint grounds for cooperation.” One of the most important things the groups shared, the Brotherhood representatives said, was a hatred for Saudi Arabia, “the common enemy” of the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran.

Perhaps, the Brotherhood delegation said, the two sides could join forces against the Saudis. The best place to do that was in Yemen, where an insurgency by the Iranian-backed Houthis against the Saudi-backed Yemeni government was about to escalate into full-scale war.

“In Yemen, with the influence of Iran on Houthis and the influence of the Brotherhood on the armed tribal Sunni factions, there should be a joint effort to decrease the conflict between Houthis and Sunni tribes to be able to use their strength against Saudi Arabia,” the Brotherhood delegation argued.

One of the most important things the groups shared, the Muslim Brotherhood representatives said, was a hatred for Saudi Arabia.

Meanwhile, the Brotherhood wanted peace in Iraq, the delegation said. If there was one place in the region where help bridging the Sunni-Shia divide was needed, it was there, and maybe the Brotherhood and the Quds Force could cooperate to stop the war.

“On Iraq, it is good to lessen the tension between Shia and Sunni and give Sunnis a chance to participate in the Iraqi government as well,” the delegation said, according to the MOIS cable.

While denying any knowledge of the 2014 meeting, Nada said that the Muslim Brotherhood does want to reduce tensions between Sunni and Shia Muslims, as was suggested by the cable. “As far as I know, [the Muslim Brotherhood] are interested to defuse, not only reduce, any conflict between Sunni and Shia,” Nada said.

But the Brotherhood also recognized that there were limits to regional cooperation with the Quds Force. Syria, for example, was such a complicated mess that the Brotherhood simply threw up its hands. “Of course, the issue of Syria currently is out of the hands of Iran and the Brotherhood, and there is nothing particular to be done about it,” the cable noted.

And while the Muslim Brotherhood had been pushed out of power the year before the summit by the Egyptian Army, the group didn’t want Iranian support in Egypt. “On the issue of Egypt, we as Brotherhood are not prepared to accept any help from Iran to act against the government of Egypt,” the delegation said. The Brotherhood leaders probably recognized that they would be discredited in Egypt if they sought Iranian aid to regain power in Cairo.

Despite their apparent eagerness to forge an alliance, the Brotherhood leaders still managed to insult the Quds Force officials, according to the MOIS cable. During the meeting, the delegation emphasized that the Brotherhood was committed to a “reformist and peaceful approach” to change in the Middle East. The observation seemed to imply that the Quds Force was not. The delegation then quickly added that members of the Brotherhood have “trained ourselves to be more patient than Iranians.”

Ships in the Night

The Brotherhood has indeed historically been averse to violence, in contrast to the Quds Force, which is part of a military organization. Some experts have objected to the Trump administration’s desire to designate the Brotherhood a terrorist organization, arguing that it does not engage in terrorist activities.

“The fact that the Trump administration has not [designated the Muslim Brotherhood] suggests that maybe rationality won the day,” observed Ned Price, a former CIA official. “To say you are going to designate the Muslim Brotherhood misrepresents what the Muslim Brotherhood is today, and it risks partnerships we have in countries where the Muslim Brotherhood does have influence.”

In one of his last columns in the Washington Post before he was murdered, Saudi journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi criticized the Trump administration for targeting the Muslim Brotherhood and for failing to understand that it played an essential democratic role in the Middle East. “The United States’ aversion to the Muslim Brotherhood, which is more apparent in the current Trump administration, is the root of a predicament across the entire Arab world,” Khashoggi wrote in August 2018, just two months before his death at the hands of a hit team in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. “The eradication of the Muslim Brotherhood is nothing less than an abolition of democracy and a guarantee that Arabs will continue living under authoritarian and corrupt regimes.”

Maybe the Muslim Brotherhood leaders decided to be candid with their Iranian counterparts during the summit because they could already sense that the Quds Force representatives were not really interested in forming an alliance. That is certainly how the meeting played out. In fact, it soon became clear that the two sides were talking past each other.

“Friends of the Quds Force who were present in this meeting disagreed that there should be an alliance of Shia and Sunni,” according to the MOIS report on the meeting. At the same time, somewhat mysteriously, the Quds Force representatives insisted that they “never had any differences with the Brotherhood.”

The Brotherhood representatives were clearly irked by that unrealistic statement. “This view was not accepted by the Brotherhood delegation,” the cable noted.

Despite the apparent failure of the talks, the MOIS agent spying on the summit noted that he was willing to “travel again to Turkey or Beirut to be present” in any follow-up meetings. It is not clear from the leaked archive whether further meetings of this kind occurred.

The post Iran’s Quds Force and the Muslim Brotherhood Considered an Alliance Against Saudi Arabia appeared first on The Intercept.

“The U.S. can overthrow Saddam Hussein,” said Aziz, an Iraqi Christian and one of the most senior figures in Saddam’s government. “You can destroy the Baath Party and secular Arab nationalism.” But, he warned, “America will open a Pandora’s box that it will never be able to close.” The iron-fisted rule of Saddam, draped in the veneer of Arab nationalism, he argued, was the only effective way to deal with forces like Al Qaeda or prevent an expansion of Iranian influence in the region.

When the U.S. invaded, Aziz was the eight of spades in the card deck the Pentagon created to publicize its high-value targets. He was ultimately captured, held in a makeshift prison at the Baghdad airport, and forced to dig a hole in the ground to use as a latrine. He died in custody of a heart attack in June 2015. But Aziz lived long enough to watch exactly what he warned of come to pass, accusing U.S. President Barack Obama of “leaving Iraq to the wolves.”

The 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq marked the moment when the U.S. lost control of its own bloody chess game. The chaos unleashed by the U.S. invasion allowed Iran to gain a level of influence in Iraq that was unfathomable during the reign of Saddam. Secret documents from the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security, obtained by The Intercept, give an unprecedented picture of how deeply present-day Iraq is under Iranian influence. The sovereignty once jealously defended by Arab nationalists has been steadily eroded since the U.S. invasion.

The country that Iran assumed influence over had been shattered by decades of war, military occupation, terrorism, and economic sanctions. Iraq is still struggling with the legacy of years of sectarian bloodshed, the emergence of violent jihadi groups, and widespread corruption unleashed by the U.S. invasion and occupation. In the face of this national tragedy, some citizens express nostalgia for the authoritarian stability of Saddam’s regime. Navigating this chaotic situation is no easy task for any foreign power.

In the years after the 2003 invasion, some U.S. politicians cited the “Pottery Barn” analogy to justify a continued long-term presence in Iraq. It was the invasion that broke Iraqi society. So, as the analogy went, having broken the country, the United States now needed to buy it. In reality, the U.S. shattered Iraq and ultimately walked away. It was Iran that ended up figuring out what to do with the pieces.

The Disaster of De-Baathification

A little over a decade before George W. Bush decided to overthrow the Iraqi government, his father’s administration had taken a very different path. After mercilessly destroying Iraq’s civilian and military infrastructure in a bombing campaign during the 1991 Gulf War, George H.W. Bush was persuaded that it would be too dangerous to march on Baghdad. Not because of the potential human costs, or deaths of U.S. soldiers in combat, but because Saddam was a known quantity who had already proven valuable in the 1980s when he attacked Iran and triggered the brutal Iran-Iraq War. During that eight-year conflict, the U.S. armed both countries but overwhelmingly favored Baghdad. More than a million people died in trench warfare reminiscent of World War I. Henry Kissinger put a fine point on the U.S. strategy in that war when he quipped that it is “a shame there can only be one loser.”

Even after the war had ended, the American fear of Iran outweighed any appetite for regime change in Iraq. So Saddam remained.

Bush’s son took a different view. In the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, high-ranking figures in his administration began falsely connecting Saddam’s regime to Al Qaeda. In reality, the religious extremists were mortal enemies of the Baathists. But the process for Saddam’s removal had already been determined by neoconservatives who had been bent on waging war against Iraq years before 9/11.

Left/top: In Tikrit, Iraq, on April 30, 2003, women of the household watch as U.S. soldiers arrest a man who the commander of the 1st Brigade identified as a prominent Baath Party member. Right/bottom: A U.S. marine watches a statue of Saddam Hussein being toppled in downtown Baghdad on April 9, 2003. Photos: Saurabh Das/AP; Jerome Delay/AP

Within weeks of the 2003 invasion, Saddam was out of power and on the run. A right-wing ideologue who had cut his teeth working under Kissinger was placed in charge of Iraq for a period after the invasion. The country’s new “viceroy,” L. Paul Bremer, once referred to himself as “the only paramount authority figure — other than dictator Saddam Hussein — that most Iraqis had ever known.” Though a longtime diplomat, Bremer had never served in the Middle East and had no expertise in Iraqi politics. But he had become obsessed with the idea that the Baath Party was analogous to the German Nazi Party and needed to be eliminated in its entirety. Under his leadership at the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S. implemented one of the most disastrous policies in the modern history of postwar decision-making: liquidating the Iraqi Army as part of a policy known as de-Baathification.

In his book on the Iraq War, “Night Draws Near,” the late Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anthony Shadid wrote, “The net effect of Bremer’s decision was to send more than 350,000 officers and conscripts, men with at least some military training, into the streets, instantly creating a reservoir of potential recruits for a guerrilla war. (At their disposal was about a million tons of weapons and munitions of all sorts, freely accessible in more than a hundred largely unguarded depots around the country.)” A U.S. official, quoted anonymously by the New York Times Magazine at the time, described Bremer’s decision more bluntly: “That was the week we made 450,000 enemies on the ground in Iraq.”

The impact of Bremer’s decision can be discerned in the secret Iranian intelligence cables written more than a decade later. Many of the Sunni insurgents who went to war against the government of Nouri al-Maliki in 2013 are described in the documents as “Baathists,” a reference to militant groups led by former Iraqi military officers. These groups have nostalgically identified themselves with the pre-2003 political order. The documents show that the Iranians have worked to either destroy them or co-opt them into the fight against the Islamic State.

As the leaked intelligence reports show, the sectarian bloodletting that started with the U.S. invasion has never really ended.

Many former Baathists also found themselves fighting in the ranks of ISIS itself, an organization whose military leadership has included senior officials from Saddam’s disbanded military.

De-Baathification coincided with another ugly development in Iraq: the rise of sectarian politics. The United States played a critical role in this phenomenon as well. To take one example, the U.S. occupation authorities after the invasion went on the offensive against a Shia cleric named Moqtada al-Sadr. Sadr, whose father and brothers were assassinated by Saddam’s henchmen, was an Iraqi nationalist who spoke the language of the people, though he was often at odds with other Shia clerical leaders. Iranian intelligence cables from 2014 cite pro-Iranian individuals in Iraq expressing continued frustration with Sadr for refusing to go along with their program. He remains a thorn in the side of the current Iraqi government and Iranian interests generally, despite having lived and studied in Iran for many years.

Following the U.S. invasion, Sadr’s popularity rose after he organized social services and infrastructure to address the abysmal conditions faced by Iraqis, particularly in the Shia slums that had been brutally repressed by Saddam. When the Sunni city of Fallujah was first attacked by the U.S. in April 2004, following the killing of four Blackwater mercenaries, Sadr organized blood donations and aid convoys and condemned the American aggression. For a brief moment, the U.S. had very nearly united Shia and Sunni forces in a war against a common enemy.

This situation was untenable. By 2005, the U.S. had become fully invested in policies that greatly exacerbated sectarianism in Iraq. It began arming, training, and funding Shia death squads that terrorized Sunni communities in a war that altered the demographic makeup of Baghdad. As the position of the Sunnis became increasingly dire, groups began to emerge that grew more and more extreme, including Al Qaeda in Iraq and its successor, the Islamic State.

As the leaked intelligence reports show, the sectarian bloodletting that started with the U.S. invasion has never really ended. As late as 2014, the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security was documenting the continued violent cleansing of Sunnis from areas around Baghdad by Iraqi militias associated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Iran’s Calculation, Iraq’s Anger

When the Obama administration conducted a made-for-television “withdrawal” from Iraq in 2011, large swaths of the country were still in a state of political and humanitarian collapse. The Iraqi state that had existed before the war had been utterly destroyed. For better and for worse, Iran has sought to fill the gaping void in Iraq that Washington’s policies created. Out of the rubble of the country, Iranian leaders saw an opportunity to create a new order — one that would never again threaten them the way Saddam Hussein’s regime had.

The protests now paralyzing Iraqi cities are a vivid demonstration of how unpopular Iranian policies have been in Iraq. Several hundred demonstrators have been killed by security forces firing live ammunition into crowds. The sovereignty of Iraq was effectively annihilated by the 2003 U.S. invasion, but the idea of an Iraqi nation is still cherished by young people in the streets braving bullets to assert their independence.

Iran’s aggressive approach toward Iraq has to be seen in the context of history. Indeed, it is hard to imagine any rational nation-state actor that would not have pursued a similar path given the same circumstances. The invasion led to fears in Iran that the next stop for the U.S. military would be Tehran. These fears were heightened after the Bush administration rebuffed a proposed “grand bargain” from Iran in 2003 that offered talks aimed at resolving the differences between the two sides. Instead, the United States continued to treat Iran as an enemy and pursued a path of occupation in Iraq that left in its wake a trail of failures and hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis.

That Iran would seize an opportunity to assert its influence in Iraq is no shock. While Iran’s role has been far from positive, the United States has long since lost any claim to be a legitimate broker regarding the future of either country. In 1963, the U.S. helped initiate Iraq’s long nightmare when it aided the overthrow of the popular government of Abdel Karim Kassem, who sought to nationalize Iraqi oil and create social welfare programs. The U.S. supported the ascent of Saddam and continued to back his regime over the years, mainly as a bulwark against Iran, even in the face of high-profile atrocities like the gassing of Kurdish civilians in the city of Halabja and the massacres of Shia Iraqis following the Gulf War.

For more than six decades, the U.S. has played a central role in fomenting disasters that have destroyed the lives of entire generations in Iraq and Iran. Any criticisms of Iran’s role today cannot efface this ugly record. How Iraqis respond to the information about Iran’s secret dealings in their country is their business. Perhaps there are international organizations and countries whose advice and counsel would be welcome. But given its atrocious legacy in Iraq, the United States should not be among them.

The post From the Rubble of the U.S. War in Iraq, Iran Built a New Order appeared first on The Intercept.

In the months after we received the intelligence reports, which are written in a highly bureaucratic and opaque style, we had them translated from Persian into English and then had the translations cross-checked. Once we determined the significance of the documents — the cables detail MOIS operations in Iraq from late 2013 through early 2015 and include reports from Iranian assets at the highest levels of the Iraqi government — we approached the New York Times and proposed a reporting partnership. The article we jointly published with the Times is the product of months of collaboration, in which Intercept and Times reporters verified the authenticity of the documents and conducted further reporting to place them in context.

Because the raw intelligence reports contain large amounts of sensitive personal information, we are publishing only brief excerpts with the articles. As we continue to evaluate the cables for newsworthy material, we will publish new stories along with relevant excerpts.

In addition to providing insight into Iran’s espionage operations and its strategies for managing Iraqi and Kurdish politics, the documents lay out what amounts to a secret history of the war against the Islamic State and reveal the surprising ways in which Iranian and U.S. interests often aligned in that conflict. The tale the documents tell is a crucial chapter of a much bigger story: how the devastation that followed the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq gave Iran a golden opportunity to build a political and social order there that was more favorable to their interests.

Indeed, these intelligence reports show Iran grappling with many of the same challenges that bedeviled the United States as it struggled to maintain control over a restive Iraq during the U.S. military occupation. While the U.S. continued to exert influence after its formal withdrawal of troops in 2011, it was Iran, with its vast network of spies and assets, that expertly manipulated Iraqi politics, shaping the power structures and cultivating the leaders who remain in place to this day. In keeping with this shift, today’s movement of Iraqis seeking to wrest control of their own government and expel outside influence has a new primary focus: Iran.

The post The Story Behind the Iran Cables appeared first on The Intercept.

A more nuanced portrait of Suleimani emerges from a leaked archive of secret Iranian spy cables obtained by The Intercept. The documents were generated by officers from the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security, or MOIS, stationed in Iraq between 2013 and 2015, when the Iranian war against the Islamic State was at its height, and Suleimani was running the show.

The reports reveal how Suleimani was perceived in some corners of the Iranian intelligence establishment, and the picture that emerges does not always align with the carefully crafted public image of the general as an indomitable strategist. While the Iranian-led war against ISIS was raging, Iranian spies privately expressed concern that the brutal tactics favored by Suleimani and his Iraqi proxies were laying the groundwork for major blowback against the Iranian presence in Iraq. Suleimani was also criticized for his own alleged self-promotion amid the fighting. Photos of the Iranian commander on battlefields across Iraq had helped build his image as an iconic military leader. But that outsized image was also turning him into a figure of terror for many ordinary Iraqis.

Some of the cables chronicle Suleimani’s battlefield appearances and meetings with senior Iraqi officials, while others describe the activities of his militia proxies in Iraq. As commander of the elite Quds Force, the external operations arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Suleimani belonged to a more powerful institutional rival of Iran’s intelligence ministry. In some documents, intelligence officers criticize Suleimani for alienating Sunni Arab communities and helping to create the circumstances that justified a renewed American military presence in Iraq.

A 2014 MOIS document lamented that, partly because Suleimani broadcasted his role as commander of many of the Iraqi Shia militias fighting ISIS, Iraqi Sunnis blamed the Iranian government for the persecution that many were suffering at the hands of these same forces. The document discussed a recent assault by Iran-backed forces against ISIS fighters in the Sunni farming community of Jurf al-Sakhar. The attack had included a number of Shia militia groups, including a notorious outfit known as Asaib ahl al-Haq. The militias succeeded in routing the Islamic State, but their victory soon gave way to a generalized slaughter of locals, transforming the sweetness of Iran’s triumph into “bitterness,” in the words of one case officer.

That same document speculated that Suleimani’s public promotion of his role in the war was geared toward building political capital in Iran, possibly for a future presidential bid. But it also contained subtler insights into the Quds Force commander’s character and how he saw himself. The document noted Suleimani’s affection for former Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, once a close ally of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. For a time, Davutoglu was considered the intellectual force behind Turkey’s foreign policy.

“Mr. Suleimani has an old relationship with Ahmet Davutoglu and always compares his role in Iranian foreign policy to that of someone like Davutoglu in Turkish politics,” the secret report said. However, Suleimani’s self-perception had evolved over time, according to the report, and by 2014, with the Iranian proxy war against ISIS in full swing, he had begun to see himself less as a political ideologue and more as a military and intelligence chief comparable to Hakan Fidan, the head of Turkey’s powerful intelligence apparatus.

The intelligence ministry report does not contain further details about Suleimani’s relationships with senior Turkish officials. But the apparent shift in his self-perception ­tracks with developments in the region. Just as Fidan was helping direct a Turkish proxy war in Syria, Iran was ramping up a similar effort in Iraq.

In late 2014, according to the leaked documents, an expansive program was already underway to send Iraqi Shia militia fighters to Iran for training, equipment, and ideological preparation. It was a program in which the Revolutionary Guards played a critical role. These Shia militia fighters went on to fight the Islamic State, but also stood accused at times of waging an indiscriminate sectarian war inside Iraq and undermining the country’s elected government.

Iran’s secret intelligence documents contain insights into how this training campaign was organized, while also shedding light on the idiosyncratic reasons that some Iraqis sought the support of Suleimani and the Revolutionary Guards.

In a September 2014 meeting at the Iranian consulate in Basra, an Iraqi militia commander told an Iranian spy that he wanted his fighters to operate under Iranian control, rather than being directed by the Iraqi army or the Popular Mobilization Units, or PMUs, formed to fight ISIS. His concerns seemed primarily ideological. The commander told his Iranian interlocutor that he already had 600 well-trained fighters and planned to grow his militia in the near future. He was anxious, however, that his troops might lose their ideological discipline without Iranian guidance.

Many volunteers in the PMUs “might not even pray,” he said, and “some commanders and even soldiers” in the Iraqi security forces were said to drink alcohol. The commander asked the Iranian spy to “coordinate for these soldiers to come under the command of Iran,” worrying that his fighters’ morale and discipline would be harmed otherwise. According to the report, the request was enthusiastically granted.

But some Iraqis appear to have romanticized the Revolutionary Guards, and some militia fighters sent to Iran for training found the experience did not meet their lofty expectations. “Unfortunately, those who we send to Iran to receive training are not happy with the cultural situation in Iran,” another commander whose troops had already undergone training in Iran told an intelligence ministry spy, according to a different report from the same month. This commander complained that “brothers in [the Revolutionary Guards] only pray the usual five times a day,” and that the Iranian fighters were not as zealous in their religious practices as the Iraqi trainees had expected.

These Iraqi militias wound up playing a significant, if controversial, role in the war against ISIS. Following Suleimani’s death, some of them are now finding themselves in the U.S. military’s crosshairs. Within 24 hours of the strike that killed the Quds Force leader, another strike took place north of Baghdad, reportedly killing and wounding several members of an Iran-backed militia. There are strong signs that this campaign is just beginning. Late Friday, the State Department announced that it was designating Asaib ahl al-Haq, which had taken part in the 2014 massacre in Jurf al-Sakhar, as a foreign terrorist organization and sanctioning several of its leaders.

In the short term, it is almost certain that violence will escalate in the Middle East. Late Saturday, U.S. President Donald Trump made a provocative threat to bomb 52 selected targets inside Iran if it retaliates for the killing of Suleimani, including Iranian cultural sites. But Iran may not even need to respond with violence to impose a price for the death of the Quds Force commander. In response to widespread outrage over the strike that killed Suleimani, Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi, who is described in the MOIS documents as having a “special relationship” with Iran — and who enjoyed Suleimani’s personal backing when protests demanded his ouster this past fall — pledged on Friday to convene parliament to review the status of American troops in Iraq. By Sunday, the parliament had voted to expel the U.S. military from the country.

If the Iraqi government does make U.S. troops leave in response to Suleimani’s killing, it will be another chapter in what is by now a familiar story: Like the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, this latest act of aggression may be a tactical success for the United States that winds up delivering a strategic victory to Iran.

The post Secret Iranian Spy Cables Show How Qassim Suleimani Wielded His Enormous Power in Iraq appeared first on The Intercept.

Ali Saremi, a supporter of the Mojahedin-e Khalq, or MEK, had been executed four years earlier at another Iranian prison for his allegiance to the militant dissident group, which is considered a terrorist organization in Iran. But in death, at least to supporters of the MEK, Saremi had become a martyr.

The group of MEK prisoners had gathered on Saremi’s death anniversary for a moment of silence in his honor. They read poetry, shared personal memories, and vowed to continue their struggle. But the Iranian regime was most irritated by another aspect of the commemoration: videos and photos of the gathering, recorded on the prisoners’ cellphones, soon began spreading online, reaching far beyond Gohardasht’s walls. Saremi’s execution had turned into a propaganda coup for a group whose sole mission is to undermine the Islamic Republic.

The gathering is described in a secret Iranian intelligence report leaked to The Intercept. The document is part of a trove of cables that provides a glimpse into the Iranian government’s clandestine efforts to spy on and combat the MEK. The war between the Iranian government and the banned opposition group continues. In 2018, the French government said it foiled a bomb attack orchestrated by Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, the MOIS, targeting an MEK convention in Paris.

The documents, written mostly by MOIS officers serving in the field in Iraq, reveal a deep hatred of the exiled group, which functions largely as an anti-Iranian government propaganda organization, as well as a sober assessment of MEK activities around the world. The spy cables, which date from 2013 to 2015, suggest that a once potent paramilitary group with thousands of soldiers has been reduced to little more than an anti-Iran lobbying organization and fount of online vitriol against Iran’s mullahs. While the documents do not offer a full accounting of Tehran’s concerns about the MEK, they show a meticulous focus on the small band of exiled Iranians, most of whom now live on a secluded base in Albania.

The MEK’s ongoing campaign against Iran’s government has been a source of concern for the intelligence ministry. In its secret reports, the ministry bitterly refers to the MEK as monafagheen, an Islamic term meaning “hypocrites.” While the MEK has little popular support among Iranians, the MOIS considers the group — and its ties with foreign powers — a threat to Iran’s national security.

The intelligence ministry has continued to conduct broad surveillance on the MEK around the world, monitoring its attempts to build ties with Western governments, organize its members in exile, spread propaganda, and even recruit supporters inside Iran. A lengthy 2015 MOIS report about the MEK, which bills itself as “giving a clear picture of this group’s evil activities,” said that the militant organization has a “black and shameful record, which includes countless acts of treachery against the country.” The MEK “keeps trying to strike at the system with various means and so it is necessary to follow its latest activities and news about its activities,” the cable notes.

According to the cable, videos of Saremi’s prison memorial were circulating online. A MOIS officer described what had taken place: “After one minute of silence in respect, some of the convicted hypocrites talked about [Saremi] and shared some memories. Then they had a poetry reading in chorus altogether. At the end, they reaffirmed their resistance against the [Islamic Republic of Iran] and promised not to stop any effort until the time of its downfall and dismantlement.”

“The content of this news has been shared and spread on all this terrorist sect’s social networks and media platforms, which have covered and broadcast it,” the cable noted. “It is mandatory to act swiftly and gather all the mobile phones and other contraband that are available or at hand in these prison wards. This way we can block the counterrevolutionary and seditious propaganda from within the country’s prisons.”

The man on the phone identified himself simply as “Muhammedi” and said he was a reporter from Tehran. In January 2015, according to the MOIS cable, he had begun making phone calls, seemingly at random, to numbers in the northwestern Iranian province of Gilan. On the surface, Muhammedi was just hoping to gather information about the rising price of bread, meat, and produce in the region. His inquiries were part of a wave of MEK calls aimed at gathering information about the conditions of laborers and ordinary consumers in Iran, as well as reactions from ordinary people to disasters like a prison fire in December 2014.

Behind these seemingly mundane information-gathering efforts lay something darker: an ongoing propaganda war between the MEK and the Islamic Republic. Muhammedi was not a reporter, according to the cable. The MOIS had instead identified him as an MEK supporter based outside Iran, aiming to gather intelligence that would help portray a “grim situation” in the country.

“In this phone conversation, the member of the sect, in a calm and fully respectful way, talked about the increases in the price of bread and its effects on some other goods,” the MOIS report noted, adding that the MEK caller had successfully extracted the information he was seeking. “However, the recipient of the call inside [Iran] did not fully trust the caller. It is worthwhile to say that the sect member asked for the mobile phone number and occupation of the recipient. The recipient said he is self-employed and refused to give his mobile number.”

According to the cables, the MEK has also tried to win supporters in Iran by reaching out to them directly via the internet. While it is unclear how successful the MEK has been at this, the MOIS appeared to have been aggravated by such efforts, including seemingly trivial MEK attempts to recruit members in Iran and compel them to acts of solidarity. An intelligence ministry officer in the Western city of Khorramabad claimed to have seen online messages from the group trying to recruit supporters in that city and ordering them to “write slogans and graffiti on the walls and make videos of these to share.”

MEK-affiliated social media accounts periodically share videos of graffiti tags appearing to show support for its positions inside Iran. While such videos are a dubious metric for gauging public sentiment in any country, they are frequently used by partisans in the United States to argue over the political views of the Iranian people. The creation of these videos, sometimes by the MEK itself, apparently rattled the MOIS enough that the ministry issued a directive about it, referenced in the 2015 cable on the MEK, warning that the group would try to incite “acts of graffiti and slogans on the walls and make videos to broadcast on their so-called ‘freedom television,’” a likely reference to an MEK-run satellite television channel known as Voice of Freedom.

For years, the MEK held an annual conference near Paris, where many of its senior leaders live, as well as at its new headquarters in Albania. These conferences have been attended by high-profile, right-wing American political figures like President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and former Trump national security adviser John Bolton. The group has also received support from Democratic politicians like former presidential candidate Howard Dean and California Rep. Brad Sherman, as well as from a network of current and retired political figures from the European Union and Canada.

The MOIS has viewed these events as part of a campaign to isolate the Iranian government internationally, according to the cables. A number of MOIS reports note with irritation that the MEK had held conferences in Albania and the Kurdish region of Iraq. The MEK was also planning to soon hold a major event in Germany, where MOIS believed the group enjoyed the support of a former German parliamentarian named Otto Bernhardt. In Berlin, according to the lengthy 2015 cable, the MEK was planning to organize an event about human rights in Iran aimed at defaming the Islamic Republic while offering side trips and entertainment “as an incentive for attending this conference.”

“The hypocrite group, by managing to have different conferences and conventions, tries to network with elites and officials of other countries so they can get on with their inauspicious agenda, like disrupting the political and diplomatic ties of the Islamic Republic with other countries,” the MOIS report states. “It is mandatory to strengthen propaganda activities and enlighten people about this terrorist sect. Especially at the parliamentary and political levels, there should be obstacles to block the hypocrites from reaching their goals.”

But the Iranian government’s attempts to rein in the MEK’s public relations and lobbying activities have fallen short. The group continues to boast strong access to parliaments around the world, whether through advocacy work or simply by paying for access. They appear to enjoy continued support among Trump administration figures as well. In a recent interview following the assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassim Suleimani in January, Giuliani bragged about his close ties to the MEK.

Suleimani was “directly responsible for killing some of my MEK people,” Giuliani said. “We don’t like him very much.”

The post Leaked Intelligence Cables Detail a Secret Propaganda War Between Iranian Spies and Exiled Militant Group appeared first on The Intercept.

By 2015, he had a job in Iraq’s security service, but he still needed money, so he came back to the Iranians to apply for his old job as a double agent.

It had been so long since he had last spied for the Iranians that he was dealing with a new intelligence officer who only knew what he had done by reading old files. Now, the Iraqi was classified merely as a spy “candidate,” like a job applicant.

His new handler had to be convinced that he was worth it. So during a clandestine meeting, the Iranian intelligence officer told the Iraqi to run through everything he knew that might be of interest to Iran.

There was one thing the Iraqi said that made the Iranian officer really take notice. The Iraqi said he had a friend who was also interested in spying for Iran. And the friend was working for the United States at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey. He could thus spy on the Americans for Iran.

This spy story emerges from an archive of Iranian intelligence cables that were obtained by The Intercept in an unprecedented leak. Hundreds of top secret reports from Iranian intelligence reveal in astonishing detail the extent to which Iran influences neighboring Iraq and how its spies have penetrated the country. The Intercept first published stories based on the leaked documents in 2019, including one article jointly published with the New York Times. Since then, The Intercept has continued to research the documents and publish additional stories.

The leaked reports are from Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security, or MOIS, and deal primarily with Iran’s intelligence operations in Iraq. The archive is highlighted by field reports and cables, dating from 2013 to 2015, from the intelligence service’s offices in Iraq and sent to MOIS headquarters in Tehran. The leak marked the first time that a large cache of documents from the highly secretive Iranian government has ever been obtained by a Western news organization.

In addition to documenting Iran’s influence in Iraq, the leaked files show how Iraq serves as a battlefield for American and Iranian spies. Iran’s deep influence over the Iraqi political landscape means that Iran’s two major intelligence organs — the MOIS and the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — have been able to operate freely throughout Iraq for years, developing an enormous network of secret sources throughout the country.

Iran’s thorough penetration of the country made Iraq the place where Iranian intelligence officers went to recruit spies against America, particularly when the American military presence in Iraq was at its height. Now that the U.S. presence has been reduced, the Americans and the Iranians have turned back to the shadows for their secret intelligence battles. But Iraq remains a key battlefield in their spy wars, and Iran continues to benefit from its longstanding influence there.

After the Iraqi mentioned that he had a friend working at Incirlik Air Base in Turkey, the Iranian intelligence officer gave him an assignment. The Iranian officer told the Iraqi to meet his friend on his next trip to Turkey. He could prove himself to the Iranians by recruiting the friend.

At their next meeting, the Iraqi updated his Iranian handler about meeting his friend in Turkey.

“In last month’s visit as promised, I visited him and talked with him about his cooperation with Iran,” the Iraqi told the Iranian officer, according to one of the cables obtained by The Intercept. “He is very likely to cooperate with Iran.”

Security at the Incirlik base would make it difficult for his friend to communicate with the Iranians regularly, the Iraqi reported: “Since the American forces tightly control the elements working inside Incirlik Air Base, leaving the base and traveling around the cities would get one in trouble.”

But that wouldn’t be a problem for long. His friend had just gone to the United States for a two-month training course, and when he returned, he would be working at Al Asad Air Base in Iraq. “At that point, it will be easy to establish contact with him,” the Iraqi told the MOIS officer.

The Iraqi’s handler, an Iranian officer identified in the report by his internal code number #3141153, was impressed by the Iraqi’s efforts.

“Initial stages of the file on his cooperation completed, and he is ready to receive the cooperation code,” the officer wrote of the Iraqi in his report. He was prepared for the next step in his employment as a spy, “based on the guidance of the honorable General Director 364.”

The leaked MOIS cables do not show whether the Iraqi’s friend ever actually spied for Iran from inside U.S. military bases in Iraq or Turkey.

A Pentagon spokesperson declined to comment.

The case of the Iraqi and his friend at Incirlik was hardly the only time that Iranian intelligence officers have tried to use Iraq as a platform from which to spy on the United States, the leaked files show.

A story jointly published by The Intercept and the New York Times in 2019 reported on one leaked Iranian cable that showed the MOIS had recruited — or was attempting to recruit — a spy inside the U.S. State Department. The individual was not identified by name but was described as someone who had worked for the State Department on Iraq issues. The Intercept only obtained an undated portion of the internal Iranian report about the case.

“Considering his responsibilities in the U.S. State Department and record and knowledge, he has good access” to secret information, the MOIS cable stated.

In 2020, the FBI made an arrest in another Iran-related spy case in Iraq. Mariam Thompson, a translator from Minnesota working for the U.S. military in Iraq, was charged with passing information that identified U.S. undercover informants to Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed group. This month, a court filing in her legal case showed that she is planning to plead guilty.

Iranian intelligence’s analog methods may work to defeat American surveillance in part because they rely more on legwork than the latest technology.

But the leaked cables obtained by The Intercept show that Iranian intelligence operations are usually conducted throughout Iraq with little interference from American investigators. The cables show that one reason for their success may be that the Iranian intelligence officers operating in Iraq use gritty, old-fashioned tradecraft to avoid detection while meeting their sources. Their analog methods may work to defeat American surveillance in part because they rely more on legwork than the latest technology.

“I left the base by foot an hour before holding the meeting, and after twenty minutes walking on foot and carrying out the necessary checks, took two taxis through the neighboring streets to the site of the meeting and then once more, while checking on foot for ten minutes, returned to the site and, after the meeting I again took two taxis and returned to the base,” a MOIS officer wrote in one report about a meeting with an Iraqi informant.

“After leaving place of residence and taking a walk, got into the car and drove to the bazaar,” a MOIS officer wrote in a report about another meeting with a source in Erbil, Kurdistan.

“While driving a distance, went back to the desired site Majidi Mall. I got into source’s car near Fawq Market and went for a distance from the place. Meeting held in one of the city’s suburbs, inside the car. We then got out of the car. … Source’s behavior and state were normal. … Aforementioned wanted an increase of his wages, giving as the reason financial difficulties and his parent’s illness.”

The Iranians are also creative in how they take advantage of religious and cultural institutions and events in Iraq for intelligence purposes. Many of their Iraqi agents are, like Iranians, Shia Muslims, and so personal visits to Shia religious sites in Iraq provide the MOIS with good cover for their spy meetings.

Many of their Iraqi agents are, like Iranians, Shia Muslims, and so personal visits to Shia religious sites in Iraq provide the MOIS with good cover for their spy meetings.

“A meeting was held with [a source code-named 118511001] on Saturday, in the Shrine of Aba Abdullah al-Husayn (Peace Be Upon Him). At the beginning of the meeting, he described the situation in the fields of Najaf and Karbala during the past few days, with attention to the pre-determined fronts. Then, after going to Imam Husayn’s shrine, he visited and inspected some centers and gathering places of the Shirazi sect. … Later, after he left the pure shrine, we went together to the area around it and visited the scholarly seminaries. … He then invited me to have lunch and the conversation continued for hours.”

Another MOIS officer arranged a meeting at a political photo exhibition with an exiled Bahraini dissident visiting Karbala from London.

“Now present in Karbala … [the dissident] has been contacted and told that an exhibition about martyrs of Bahrain has been set up. … On Saturday night, in the company of other brothers [MOIS officers] we made a joint visit to the photo exhibition of crimes committed by the government of Bahrain. During a short meeting, it was decided to meet with him the next day. This meeting happened on Sunday with the noon call to prayer and began after noon and afternoon prayers, and continued an hour later.”

In order to avoid the betrayal of their spy operations in Iraq, the Iranians were more willing to trust informants who were Iraqi Shias with some family ties to Iran. One MOIS report about an Iraqi intelligence officer who wanted to spy for Iran noted that his father took refuge in Iran in the 1970s and that the potential agent “spent three years of elementary school in Iran.”

The Iraqi informants that the Iranians often prized the most were those, like the Iraqi with a friend at Incirlik, who proved useful in helping them gain access to American personnel and facilities. “Source went to the aforementioned base in Baghdad airport on the excuse of giving gifts to some of the [Iraqi] commanders,” including one commander who “is a corrupt bribe-taker and a CIA agent in the Iraqi Army,” one MOIS officer wrote in a report about his informant. “While giving gifts to several of the Americans present in that base, he took souvenir photographs. (These pictures will be sent by messenger.)”

While the Iranians operating in Iraq relied heavily on shoe leather and personal and cultural relationships, the leaked cables also show that the Iranians did sometimes depend on electronic technology to conduct their espionage operations in Iraq. But like other spies around the world, the Iranians sometimes found their technology to be frustrating. In one cable, a MOIS officer angrily reported on the failure of their efforts to conduct electronic surveillance on one of their Iraqi informants, to make sure he was giving them accurate information. The MOIS officer reported that the informant had discovered their surveillance equipment, and the suspicious Iraqi had insisted on a change of plans for their meeting.

As the cable noted, “The bugging device we had in source’s work place as well as the telephone bugging device was exposed to him by satanic agents, and so the meeting was held in the open, outside his workplace.”

The post How Iran Tried to Recruit Spies Against the U.S. in Iraq appeared first on The Intercept.

For more than 40 days, Sara Miran had been held hostage by an Iranian-backed militia that operated with almost total impunity in post-Saddam Iraq. Miran, a real estate developer who lived in Virginia, was kidnapped while she was working in Iraq in September 2014. She was imprisoned in a locked, third-floor room of a house in a Baghdad neighborhood that served as one of the militia’s strongholds. The room had wood paneling and a marble floor; this had once been an elegant home, transformed into the militia’s prison.

Miran was certain the militia was going to kill her. Her captors forced her to wear a prison uniform, like the clothes the Islamic State group made its hostages wear just before they were executed. They had whipped her for five straight days with wire cables, trying to make her falsely confess to being a CIA spy. Her guards never showed their faces, and when she asked why, one of them said they would reveal themselves when she was about to be released. “Once I heard him say that, I knew they were going to kill me,” Miran told The Intercept. She knew they would never let her go if she could identify them.

She was desperate to escape. There were at least two guards in the house at all times, and they searched her room each day to make certain that she wasn’t plotting a breakout. They installed a surveillance camera in the room so they could monitor her movements 24 hours a day, watching even while she slept on a mattress on the floor.

Her captors fed her the bare minimum to keep her alive — a half piece of bread, some cheese, tea, a little soup — and she lost 30 pounds. With each meal, they brought her plastic spoons. But on a Sunday in October, her guards altered their routine. Instead of bread and cheese, they brought her a lunch of rice and curry. And along with the new meal came a metal spoon.

Miran hid the spoon in the tank of the toilet in the bathroom adjoining her room. Then she waited for the night.

At 9 p.m., she went into the bathroom and got the spoon. With years of experience as a manager of construction projects, she knew the weak points in building designs, and so she used the spoon to dig into the edges of the wall surrounding the small bathroom window. It took her 15 minutes to remove the frame and the window without breaking the glass. She said a silent prayer of thanks that the guards had not heard the noise she had made.

She went to her room’s closet and put on the clothes she had been wearing when she had been kidnapped, which her captors had incongruously left with her. She then put on her maroon prison uniform, topped with a hijab, so she wouldn’t rip her own clothes while escaping. Back in the bathroom, she leaned a chair against the wall and looked out the window. She was three stories aboveground, on the back side of the house. At 10 p.m., she squeezed through the window, grabbed onto a drain pipe anchored to the side of the house, and began to climb down. There was no turning back.

Left/Top: Sara Miran's side table containing beauty products, a jewelry box, and three handguns belonging to her, her husband, and her security guard. Right/Bottom: A view from Sara Miran's apartment complex in the Green Zone in Baghdad, Iraq, in 2022. Photos: Emily Garthwaite for The Intercept

Sara Miran’s story is the remarkable answer to what seemed for years to be an unsolvable human mystery, one that was buried deep in an archive of secret Iranian documents that were leaked to The Intercept.

When The Intercept published a series of stories in 2019 based on an archive of hundreds of leaked Iranian intelligence cables detailing how Iraq had fallen under the sway of Iran, one document contained what appeared to be a fragmentary clue to an untold story. The document was a report of a 2014 meeting between an Iraqi official and the Iranian consul in the southern Iraqi city of Basra.

“The subject of the meeting was Ms. Sara,” stated the cable, which was written by an Iranian intelligence officer and sent to Iranian intelligence headquarters in Tehran. The Iraqi official told the Iranian counsel that he was relaying a message from officials in Kurdistan, the semi-autonomous region in northern Iraq. The Kurdish officials wanted to get a message to Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the powerful head of Iran’s Quds Force — the secretive intelligence and special operations arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that dominated Iraq — to release “Sara,” a woman who had apparently been kidnapped in Basra.

After the meeting, the Iranian consul gathered the intelligence officers who worked in his consulate. He wanted to know from them what was really going on. Why did the Kurds care so much about this woman named Sara? Why did they want to get a message to Suleimani about her? Above all, he wanted to know the answer to this simple question: What do we know about Sara?

The intelligence cable did not include the answers. It didn’t even include Sara’s last name, or her nationality. And so the mystery of “Sara” lingered, long after The Intercept published other stories based on the Iranian documents.

It took time to unlock the story. Clues in the archive of leaked cables helped, but ultimately it came down to old-fashioned reporting, phone calls during the Covid-19 pandemic to a wide variety of people in Basra, Baghdad, and Kurdistan, which finally led to a name: Sara Miran. Another round of reporting led to Miran herself, and to extensive interviews with her and members of her family, along with business associates, government officials, and others familiar with the case. Key elements of her story were also confirmed by documents subsequently obtained by The Intercept.

Once unearthed, Sara Miran’s story turned out to be a remarkable tale of an ambitious Kurdish American businesswoman whose kidnapping, and her efforts to escape and survive, ultimately led to a nighttime battle through the streets of Baghdad between the heavily armed Iranian-backed militia that kidnapped her and the Iraqi federal police and the Iraqi presidential guard force seeking to rescue her. It was a running gunfight, evocative of an action movie, involving hundreds of combatants from opposite ends of Iraq’s sectarian divide, all battling over a woman who lived in an American suburb.

On a human level, Miran’s story is an anatomy of a kidnapping, an underreported scourge on unstable countries like Iraq. Thousands of Iraqis and foreigners living and working in the country have been kidnapping victims since the U.S. invasion in 2003, many disappearing without a trace even after ransoms have been paid. Most kidnappings in Iraq are conducted by militias and criminal gangs for money, but Miran’s kidnapping was one of the unusual cases that had both political and financial overtones. Miran is also one of the few high-profile kidnapping victims in Iraq to escape, survive, and tell her story.

“My kidnapping is something that has happened to many other people,” she told The Intercept. “Many of them were killed, and others can’t speak about what happened to them because of fear. They have killed many, many other people, and they remove their bodies and threaten their families if they talk about it. I believe that God was on my side.”

Sara Hameed Miran was born in 1977 into a politically connected family in Sulaymaniyah, in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq.

Her family’s wealth and influence couldn’t protect her from the bitter combat that raged almost nonstop during her childhood. Wars blurred together. There was the Iran-Iraq war, the Kurdish insurgency against the regime of Saddam Hussein, the Kurdish civil war between two powerful Kurdish factions, and the American wars against Iraq. “I was born into bombs and guns,” she says. Her experience with war hardened her in ways that she now believes helped her stand up to threats and survive her kidnapping. During an extensive series of interviews for this story, she matter-of-factly described in graphic detail the most intense episodes of her life and of her kidnapping ordeal.

One of her earliest memories is of watching a gunfight on the street that spilled into the driveway of her family’s home; she was only 3 or 4, and she’s not sure who the combatants were. When she was older, she saw how the Peshmerga, the Kurdish militia, would slip into Sulaymaniyah from the surrounding mountains at night to attack Saddam’s army; rocket fire would force Miran and her family to hide under the stairwell in their house. “Every month or two, my father would have to replace the windows on our house, because there were no windows left,” she recalls. By the time she was 14, she was able to handle an AK-47.

After Saddam’s grip on Kurdistan was weakened by his defeat in the 1991 Gulf War with America, the major Kurdish factions agreed to hold elections for a new Kurdish parliament, and Miran’s father was elected. She moved with the rest of her family to Erbil, the Kurdish regional capital, where her father took his seat in parliament. Her family maintained its real estate holdings and other business interests in Sulaymaniyah.

Miran finished high school and fell in love with Gring Marif, a neighbor. Their proposed wedding led to tensions with her parents, because she came from a much more prominent family. But she insisted, and they were married in 1998 and had two sons and a daughter. While it was an unhappy marriage, it would eventually bring Miran and her children to America.

In 2003, Miran graduated from Salahaddin University, where she studied engineering. That year, the United States invaded Iraq, and her husband went to work for the U.S. military as a translator, and later for the U.S.-backed Kurdish intelligence service. Miran briefly taught at Salahaddin University before going to work for a property development firm that had special political connections; one of its co-owners was Nechirvan Barzani, Kurdistan’s prime minister and a member of one of the most powerful families in the Kurdish region. Miran started as an office administrator, but by 2005 became the chief of engineering for the firm. By 2007, she was the firm’s project manager for a huge shopping mall development that had 5,000 construction workers. She was becoming one of the fastest-rising women in business in Iraq.

And that’s what led her to Basra.

In 2010, Barzani and Nizar al-Hana, the other owner of the real estate firm, put Miran in charge of one of their most difficult projects: the renovation of the Basra International Hotel. It was the largest hotel in a city that had been riven by years of insurgency and war after the fall of Baghdad. In the predominantly Shia region of southern Iraq, Basra was dominated by nearby Iran and Iranian-backed militias. Miran’s work there gave her a rough introduction to the kind of political and criminal forces that would be behind her kidnapping four years later.

The sudden appearance of a Kurdish woman running a major construction project in war-torn Basra apparently angered the Iranian-backed power structure there, which opposed having an outsider take control of such a lucrative development. In April 2010, Miran was visited by a representative of one of the Iranian-backed militias in the city. The representative, whom she was told was an assassin, demanded that she abandon the hotel project and leave Basra.

Miran refused and instead turned to a powerful relative, Maj. Gen. Hussein Ali Kamal, a Kurd who was then Iraq’s deputy interior minister in charge of intelligence. Miran says her relative agreed to provide security for her, arranging for three Iraqi Humvees to be placed in front of the hotel construction site to try to ward off attacks.

It wasn’t enough.

In June, an explosion ripped through the apartment where Miran was living on her own (her children and husband had stayed behind in Kurdistan). She wasn’t in the apartment at the time, but it was a clear message to leave Basra. “They put a bomb in her room,” recalled Nizar al-Hana, the co-owner of the property company, in an interview with The Intercept. “Really, it is not easy to do things in Iraq.”

Despite the bombing, Miran refused to leave town. Instead, she moved out of her damaged apartment and into the hotel full time, while her secretary bought her new clothes to replace what she had lost in the bombing. She scrambled to finish the hotel project in eight months. “That was the hardest job I ever had,” she recalled.

In 2012, Miran moved with her husband and children to the United States, because her husband qualified for family visas as a result of his work with the American military in Iraq. They eventually settled in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington. Even though she had a green card, her marriage was in trouble, and she returned to Iraq to again work on real estate development projects, now as a business partner with her former boss, Nizar al-Hana. Her family stayed behind in Virginia.

In 2013, she made a fateful return to Basra.

This time, Miran and her partner took on the construction of a massive residential development with more than 2,500 units of apartments and single-family homes. She obtained a large loan from a major Iraqi bank to finance the project. Word that Miran had obtained financing for her project — and was presumably flush with cash — quickly spread. In April 2014, she says, she came under pressure to siphon off $2 million from her bank loan for campaign funds for the party of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Parliamentary elections were scheduled to be held later that month, and Maliki and his party were scrambling to hold on to power.

After Miran refused, she says she received a series of threatening phone calls. In the first, she was told that if she continued to refuse to pay, she would get in “big trouble.” She said no. In the second, she was told that other business executives had paid, and she should too. She again said no. In yet another call, she was told that if she didn’t pay, she would be hurt. She said simply, “I will work on that problem when it comes to my doorstep.” She redoubled security at her construction site.

Hana, her business partner, told her to immediately leave Basra and return to Kurdistan. He believed that her courage in the face of such threats sometimes bordered on recklessness. “She’s crazy,” he joked.

Miran reluctantly took his advice, returning to Kurdistan in May before flying to the United States to see her family. But she returned to Basra to resume her work in September; she even brought her young daughter and a babysitter. It didn’t take long for trouble to find her.

She took up residence in the Basra hotel she had renovated a few years earlier, but the hotel’s chief of security soon warned her that an Iranian-backed militia was probably going to try to kidnap her. Miran says that the security chief offered to act as an intermediary with the militia and told her she could settle with the militia by paying $2 million. She refused but became more cautious about her movements around Basra. She rarely left the hotel. Even inside the hotel, she tried to hide from surveillance cameras, so that it would be harder for anyone to track her. “I knew where every camera was, I had them installed when I renovated the hotel,” she recalls.

It was too late. A powerful Iranian-backed militia, known as Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq — now designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. — was already watching her. On the morning of September 8, Miran drove to Basra’s provincial council building, the main office of the regional government, and met with two officials to discuss her construction project. When the meeting finished at about 11:50 a.m., she walked out of the building with her driver and another employee of her company.

Miran sensed something odd: The local police officers who normally stood guard outside the building’s main entrance were gone. She shook off her feeling of unease, walked about 20 yards down the street to where her white Lexus SUV was parked, got in the back seat, and began playing with her phone and shut out the world.

Her driver went about 30 yards before braking abruptly. Marin looked up and saw four vehicles blocking the road, while masked men in what looked like SWAT-type uniforms and carrying weapons walked toward her SUV. One of them pointed a handgun at her driver, and then a man with no mask, dressed in jeans and a white shirt, opened the back door next to her.

“Are you engineer Sara Hameed?” he asked, before dragging her out of the car while hurling insults at her and claiming, falsely, that he had an arrest warrant from Iraqi intelligence.

“He said, ‘You have a case against you from intelligence,’” Miran recalled. “I said I don’t have any problems with intelligence.”

He pointed a gun at her head and began dragging her down the street. She hit him in the stomach with her elbow, and he then hit her on the side of her face with the back of his handgun, leaving a deep bruise. She fell to the street, and then four men picked her up, threw her in the back of one of their vehicles, and then one of them tased her. “I pissed myself uncontrollably,” she recalls.

The men threw her face down on the floor in the back of the vehicle, covered her with a blanket, and climbed inside with her. The man in jeans and a white shirt stripped her of her expensive jewelry as they sped off.

Word of her kidnapping spread quickly to her family.

“On September 8, I got a phone call from an employee of the Basra project, and he said we heard your sister has been kidnapped, right in front of the provincial council’s building,” recalled Miran Beg, Sara’s brother.

The kidnappers drove her to a house about 90 miles from Basra on the road to Baghdad, where she spent her first night in captivity. The next morning, she was bound and gagged and stuffed into a hidden compartment in an SUV. On the drive, Miran could hear her kidnappers being waved through government checkpoints.

They took her to a house near Baghdad’s al-Sinek Bridge, the first of several houses where she was held in Iraq’s capital. She was kept there for just a few hours and was blindfolded, but she could hear that two men were also imprisoned there. Kidnapping was a big business for the militia.

Over the next few weeks, she was moved to different houses and interrogated, sometimes for hours in the middle of the night. Miran quickly realized how much her kidnappers already knew about her and her business operations. They knew, for instance, that she moved her firm’s money from Basra back to Kurdistan by having a trusted employee carry funds on a commercial flight from Basra to Erbil. They also knew she had tried to evade the surveillance cameras inside the hotel. And they told her that her daughter and babysitter had returned to Kurdistan. “They knew everything I was working on. It seemed like they had documents, they were flipping through notes and pages,” she told The Intercept.

Her kidnappers suspected she was an American spy; they couldn’t seem to imagine any other reason why a Kurdish woman with family in the United States would be working on a project in Basra. So they turned to torture. In a house in the Al Bayaa neighborhood of Baghdad, Miran was systematically beaten with wire cables, as her captors demanded that she confess that she worked for the CIA. Each day for five days, her captors restrained her with handcuffs on her arms and legs, lay her on the floor, and then a man wearing black clothes and a mask would whip her 10 times with the wire, slashing across her shoulders, back, hands, and legs. The beatings left her in such excruciating pain that even pouring water on her skin felt like torture.

She refused to give her kidnappers what they wanted. “I wasn’t going to confess to being a CIA agent when I’m not,” she said. “They had no common sense, they were idiots.”

She became despondent, convinced that she was about to be killed. She secretly wrote a note about herself on a small piece of paper, including her name and the date, stating that she had been kidnapped and that her captors claimed they had ties to Iraqi intelligence. (She did not yet know that her kidnappers were from Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq.) She hid the note in the wall of a bathroom in a house in Baghdad’s Sadr City, where she was held for about two weeks. If she didn’t survive, at least some record of her kidnapping might someday be discovered.

While Miran struggled to survive in captivity, her family’s wealth and political status in Kurdistan started to bring attention to her kidnapping. Her photograph was shown on Iraqi television news, and her kidnapping became a political issue in Kurdistan, where officials saw it as an affront to Kurdish sovereignty by Iranian-backed Shia forces. Her family used their network of political contacts to try to put pressure on government officials to help free Sara.

“We tried to contact all the people who we thought would have some power with the kidnappers — we tried to get help from a lot of people,” recalled Miran Beg, her brother. “When you have a family member kidnapped, you talk to a lot of people you never want to talk to.”

“When you have a family member kidnapped, you talk to a lot of people you never want to talk to.”

Hero Talibani — the wife of Jalal Talibani, a powerful Kurdish leader who had just stepped down as president of Iraq — took the opportunity at a reception in Baghdad to buttonhole Qassim Suleimani about the kidnapping. Hero Talibani later told Sara Miran that she had scolded Suleimani by saying “your militia has kidnapped her, give her back.” Suleimani insisted that “we don’t have Sara.” (Suleimani was killed in a U.S. air raid in Baghdad in 2020.).

Meanwhile, Masoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan autonomous region, wrote a letter to the provincial governor of Basra, demanding that he work to gain Miran’s release. The pressure from both the Talibani and Barzani families — the two most powerful families in Kurdistan — must have prompted the decision by the Basra governor to meet with the Iranian counsel in Basra. That is the meeting described in the Iranian intelligence cable leaked to The Intercept.

While Kurdish officials were applying pressure, Miran’s family received a ransom demand that immediately sounded like a scam. A member of the militia, apparently acting alone, phoned Miran’s brother, Miran Beg, and told him that he could free her in exchange for cash. “About a week after Sara’s kidnapping, I got a phone call from somebody, and he told me that he had information about Sara, and he wants me to give him $600,000,” recalled Miran Beg. “He told me I should come to Baghdad, and put $600,000 in an oil barrel used as a trash can. After that, Sara will be released. I said, let me talk to Sara and we can make a deal, and he said it’s not possible. Just come to Baghdad, put money in the barrel.”

Miran Beg contacted a senior Iraqi military commander who he knew and arranged for the cellphone number of the caller to be traced. The militia member was arrested at his Baghdad home. He was moved to Basra for questioning, but under enormous pressure from the militia’s political allies, the militia member was released.

After the freelance attempt to bilk Miran’s family, official ransom negotiations began between the kidnappers, Miran’s family, business associates, and Kurdish leaders. “I was negotiating with the kidnappers, they wanted me to pay them directly, and I refused, I said I’d pay a middle man,” recalls Nizar al-Hana, Miran’s business partner.

Kurdish President Masoud Barzani arranged for Zuhair al Garbawi, the chief of Iraqi intelligence, to act as an intermediary. Hana handed over $1 million to Garbawi to pay to the militia, but the kidnappers said it wasn’t enough; they demanded $2 million. Haggling led to a standoff. No ransom was paid, but negotiations continued.

Meanwhile, the kidnappers began to ask Miran detailed questions about her life. She realized that they had to provide answers to questions that only she would know, to prove to her family and others that she was still alive. But she also knew that if she answered the questions and a ransom was paid, the militia would kill her rather than release her. The only way to guarantee that she could stay alive was to make sure that no ransom money changed hands. She had to buy time until she could figure out how to escape, so she provided incorrect answers to all of the questions.

The ransom negotiations were still underway when her guards brought her the metal spoon.

When Miran climbed out the window and grabbed onto the drain pipe on the outside of the house where she was held captive, she found that she had to move slowly to maintain her balance and avoid falling. But after climbing down one story, she peered into the darkness and was able to see just how close she was to the roof of the neighboring two-story house. She jumped.

She made it onto the roof of the neighboring house, and then saw that she could make it onto the roof of the next house. She jumped again. She kept going, jumping from one roof to the next. Once she came to the sixth house, she stopped and looked down from the second story. She clambered down one story and jumped to the ground. Quickly looking around, she realized that she was in the walled-in backyard of a private home.

The noise from her fall alerted the people inside, and they immediately feared that thieves were trying to break in. Miran went to the back door, saw two women and a man inside, and asked them to open the door so she could leave their compound. They refused, and she then asked them to call the police. Instead, they went to get weapons, returning with a handgun and knives, and demanded to know why she had suddenly appeared in their back yard, loudly calling her a terrorist.

Miran tried to explain that she had been kidnapped, but the panicked homeowners refused to believe her and said they would contact the militia to check out her story. With a sinking feeling, Miran realized that the homeowners might turn her back over to her kidnappers. In desperation, she began scanning the yard to see if there was somewhere to hide. She crawled under a black tarp that covered an outdoor stove, while continuing to scream at the homeowners to call the police.

Finally recognizing that she was not an immediate threat, the homeowners called the federal police. When the police arrived, they searched Miran for weapons and bombs, and then brought her inside and asked her identity. She told a police captain who she was, and he was shocked; she had lost so much weight that he didn’t recognize her from the photos that had been shown on Iraqi television. “You don’t look like Sara at all,” the captain told her.

The captain called Miran’s husband, and he confirmed her identity. Realizing that he had discovered a famous kidnapping victim, the police captain brought Miran to his armored car, and while he reported to his superiors, he allowed her to sit in the vehicle and make calls to notify her relatives that she was free.

Even with the Iraqi federal police now on the scene, Sara Miran was still in danger. The raw power of the militia that had kidnapped her was about to reassert itself, leading to the surreal climax of the night.

Now seemingly safe inside the police’s armored car, Miran called her brother in Kurdistan.

“I took a call from an unknown number,” recalled Miran Beg. “I answered, and it was Sara. The time was 10:55 p.m. I said, ‘Where are you?’ She told me this is the number of the Iraqi federal police. She said, ‘I’m in the car of the police commander.’”

Miran Beg quickly spread the news to officials in both Baghdad and Kurdistan. Using another phone, he kept the line open with Sara while calling his contacts. One Kurdish official agreed to call Muhammad Fuad Masum, a Kurdish political leader who had just succeeded Jalal Talibani as president of Iraq.

Miran Beg also reached Lahur Talabany, the top counterterrorism and intelligence official in Kurdistan, who quickly arranged for the Iraqi presidential guard to be dispatched to the neighborhood where Sara had been found. Under the post-Saddam Iraqi political structure, Iraq’s president is always a Kurd, and so the presidential guard was the largest and most effective Kurdish-controlled security force in Baghdad. A total of 40 soldiers and four officers from the presidential guard were dispatched to the Karrada district where Miran was located, according to an official memo that was provided to The Intercept.

As the presidential guard sped across town, Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq finally realized that one of its prized prisoners had escaped. Dozens of militia members soon gathered just down the street from where the federal police were sheltering Miran in the armored vehicle. The militia members began yelling at the police. “They were screaming, ‘Kill us!’” recalls Miran. “They were telling the police to kill us or give us Sara. They were saying she is CIA.”

Suddenly, automatic weapons fire ripped through the air. It’s not clear who fired first, but the showdown between Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq and the federal police quickly descended into a gun battle. During a lull, the militia called out to the police captain, who was just outside the armored vehicle, yelling that “we will do anything if you give her back,” according to Miran. The captain refused. The vehicle’s bulletproof armor was holding up under intense fire, but reinforcements were needed.

Miran’s brother had called Zuhair al Garbawi, the chief of Iraqi intelligence who had earlier agreed to be an intermediary in ransom negotiations in Miran’s case. Garbawi sent a group of armed intelligence officers to support the federal police. Yet they were still outnumbered, as more and more militia members poured onto the street.

Finally, the presidential troops arrived, with at least one heavy military vehicle, swinging the tide of the battle. As his forces deployed, the presidential guard commander saw that “the businesswoman Sarah Hameed Miran was inside a bulletproof/armored Landcruiser affiliated with the federal police,” according to the memo provided to The Intercept. Soon, the memo continued, “the armed militias (came) towards us, and they claimed that the kidnapped is a Jewish businesswoman affiliated with Israeli Mossad, and was plotting to destroy Iraq.” The militia members, armed with M4 assault rifles and M2 machine guns, “were speaking in Lebanese-accented Arabic,” the memo added. Iranian-backed militias in Iraq have close ties to Hezbollah, the Lebanese-based organization which is also backed by Iran.

The presidential guard joined the federal police in an intense firefight with the militia, leaving four federal police wounded and two militia members killed, according to the memo. The presidential force deployed a Russian-made BTR armored personnel carrier, enabling it to overpower the militia. They used the BTR to tow the armored car holding Miran away from the field of fire. Miran was transferred into the BTR and taken to federal police headquarters.

The showdown still wasn’t over.

Miran Beg said he contacted the chief of the federal police to warn him that the militia might attack the police building to get Sara back. At first the police official dismissed the threat, but a few minutes later, he called Miran Beg back. The militia had just threatened him. “What you said is true, take Sara away from my headquarters,” the police chief told Miran Beg. “They told me they will attack me with RPGs and heavy weapons.”

Under the protection of the presidential guard, Sara Miran was moved to the headquarters of Iraqi intelligence, where she was finally safe. Intelligence officials were eager to speak with her.

“The first question they asked me was, ‘What is the date today?’” recalled Miran. “And they asked me what time it was. By then it was 2 a.m. in the morning. I told them what day it was, and they said it was good that you are still functioning so well. I said I had been counting the days with my fingers and toes.”

She was then driven to the presidential palace, where she met with Masum, the new Iraqi president. She stayed at the palace for three days to recuperate. When the Iraqi Air Force offered a plane to fly her back to Kurdistan, Miran Beg asked that the chief of the Air Force fly with her. “That way they wouldn’t shoot the plane down,” he told The Intercept.

Miran received a VIP reception when she landed in Sulaymaniyah, where she was reunited with her family. A week later, they all flew back to the United States. The FBI met them at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, and took Miran and her family to their northern Virginia home. She agreed to a series of lengthy debriefings by the FBI, which wanted to better understand how militias like Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq conducted their kidnapping operations. U.S. officials confirmed that Miran was interviewed by the FBI about her kidnapping.

Since her kidnapping, Miran and her husband divorced, and she has remarried. She and her family still live in northern Virginia, and she and her children are now U.S. citizens.

In 2016, Miran says that a local official in Basra texted her a photo of a diamond ring on his finger, the same diamond ring that she had been wearing when she was kidnapped, and which her kidnappers had taken from her. She says that the official relayed a message from Asa’ib Ahl al-Haq, telling her that she could have the ring back, along with a promise of safety in Basra, if she paid the militia $1 million. She refused.

Undaunted, Miran has repeatedly traveled back to Basra since the kidnapping to complete her work on her residential development. “I had a lot of responsibility,” Miran said. “I didn’t have any assurances about going back, but I had to go back.” She added, “I have a gun on me to defend me.”

It may be useful. Earlier this month, while working on her project in Basra, she was warned by Kurdish intelligence of a new threat against her life from an Iranian-backed militia. Sara Miran is once again in danger.

The post How a Virginia Businesswoman Escaped Her Kidnappers in Iraq — and Later Returned to Finish Her Work appeared first on The Intercept.