“I Refused to Secretly Spy” — An Iranian-American Turned Down the FBI and Wound up With a Prison Sentence

by Jonny Dwyer, The Intercept:

TO ALL APPEARANCES, Ahmad Sheikhzadeh led the life of a typical New York academic. A 62-year-old Columbia University Ph.D., he lived alone in a small West Village rental, practiced yoga, attended lectures with friends, and conducted research at New York University’s labyrinthine Bobst Library. On Fridays, he’d travel uptown to a building at the corner of 40th Street and Third Avenue to work at Iran’s Mission to the United Nations, stepping directly into one of the most dangerous flashpoints in global politics.

As Sheikhzadeh left his weekly briefing one day in March 2016, an FBI agent approached him. The agent did not immediately detain Sheikhzadeh, according to court filings; instead the investigator brought him to a hotel for questioning. Over the course of the night, the agent revealed that Sheikhzadeh was the subject of a sealed indictment in the Eastern District of New York.

Eventually, the agent made his pitch. The FBI asked Sheikhzadeh “to cooperate with the government and to spy on his employer even though the charges against him did not include anyone else employed at the Mission,” according to court documents.

When Sheikhzadeh refused, he was charged with falsifying his tax returns, followed by other, more serious accusations, including money laundering and conspiracy to violate U.S. sanctions against Iran.

The case raised the question of whether Ahmad Sheikhzadeh’s real crime was not picking a side.

Sheikhzadeh’s prosecution — and the accusations traded between the government and his defense counsel — open a window on intelligence efforts unfolding in the wake of the Iran nuclear agreement and the role of federal law enforcement in the political rivalry between Washington and Tehran. At a moment when the White House and congressional Republicans are criticizing the FBI for politicizing the investigative process, Sheikhzadeh’s case puts a human face on the inherently political nature of prosecutions involving foreign powers.

On Friday, a federal judge in Brooklyn sentenced Sheikhzadeh to three months for tax fraud and sanctions violations. The sentence was an unusually public rebuke of an unsuccessful covert operation.

The case culminated with a rare scene in federal court: a defendant being called as a witness at his own sentencing. The 3 1/2-hour hearing provided a strange footnote to the nearly 40-year conflict between the U.S. and Iran, which has included the bombing of a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut; the downing of an Iranian civilian airliner by the U.S. Navy; Iran’s use of proxy militias in Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria; the detention and disappearance of U.S. citizens in Iran; nuclear sabotage; cyber warfare; and, increasingly, the use of federal criminal prosecutions. Most notably, it raised the question of whether Sheikhzadeh’s real crime was not picking a side.

Heavily armed U.S. Marshals stand guard outside federal court Thursday, April 2, 2015, in the Brooklyn borough of New York.

Heavily armed U.S. Marshals stand guard outside federal court Thursday, April 2, 2015, in the Brooklyn borough of New York.

AHMAD SHEIKZADEH FIRST came to the United States alone as a teenager in 1973 and remained, studying electrical engineering and political science and, ultimately, receiving his doctorate. Since the late 1990s, he had been employed as a “consultant” to the Iranian Mission to the United Nations, acting as an outside political analyst who crafted weekly reports collating news stories and provided in-person briefings for Iranian officials at the Mission. During his career, the relationship between the U.S. government and Tehran has deteriorated. The regime’s support for the Lebanese militia Hezbollah was eclipsed by an even more pressing national security issue: Iran’s progress toward a nuclear weapon.

On the night of his impromptu interrogation in March 2016, the FBI agent who questioned Sheikhzadeh produced a photograph of missing former FBI Agent Robert Levinson, who had disappeared under mysterious circumstances while traveling to Kish Island off Iran in 2007. The agent then proceeded to question Sheikhzadeh about his finances.

That evening, Steve Zissou, a criminal defense attorney from Bayside, Queens, received a message from a prosecutor in the Eastern District of New York saying they had a person in custody who “wanted to cooperate.” Zissou was uniquely qualified to take the case. A seasoned former Queens County prosecutor, he had defended Ahmed Ghailani, a conspirator in the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania; Jamaican drug don Christopher “Dudus” Coke; and Bryant Neal Vinas, an American Al Qaeda trainee flipped by the Eastern District. Zissou also had the necessary clearances to take a case that involved classified information, as this one did.

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