An Iranian intelligence operative who cooperated with the US spy agency CIA may have been killed by his own father, according to a report.
An article that appeared in The Atlantic by reporter Shane Harris narrated how Mohammad Hossein Tajik was presumed to have been murdered by his father Hajji Vali, who is a veteran agent of Tehran’s security apparatus, after storming the headquarters of the Shah's secret police during the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Shane Harris made contact with Tajik after an Iranian hacker group, ‘Parastoo’, posted its email address on a message board inviting people to make contact. It was how he got in touch with Tajik, who was disillusioned by the Iranian leadership.
The article added that Tajik earned a good position in Iran’s intelligence ministry at the age of 18, thanks to his family ties and facility with math and computers. He eventually went to head the elite cyber-warfare unit.
Tajik, Harris wrote, wanted to leak information about Iranian intelligence operations to hurt and humiliate Iran’s leaders, who had profoundly upset him. He didn’t mention how he was humiliated, though.
The Iranian also expressed interest in working for the CIA, which he had done earlier too. “He wanted to rekindle his relationship with the agency” and was hoping to connect with his former handler. “If the CIA didn’t welcome Mohammad back in from the cold, he would expose how the CIA operated inside Iran”, Harris wrote.
Tajik then told Harris about how Iran focused its operations on Israel and Saudi Arabia, adding that he had played a role in a 2012 cyberattack on the Saudi state oil company Aramco in which information was wiped from three-quarters of its office computers. Iran had shared Russia's GRU intelligence service and had attacked the electrical grid of NATO member Turkey in 2015, Tajik claimed.
Harris also elaborated Tajik’s connection with the CIA, which he claimed coincided with the assassination of veteran Hezbollah military chief Imad Mughniyeh in Damascus in a joint US-Israeli operation in February 2008 and the discovery of Iran's secret underground uranium enrichment facility Fordow in September 2009.
“Tajik did not take credit for either,” Harris reported. However, the US severed the relationship after it found “the risk of working with him became greater than the value of his information."
"My sources told me he didn’t follow instructions. One day he’d be clearheaded; the next he’d be acting paranoid, imagining conspiracies," Harris wrote.,
"Some officers wondered if he was taking drugs that impaired his judgment. It’s a handler’s job to manage sources," he added. "And Mohammad, one US official told me, had become 'unmanageable.”
He was arrested in September 2013 and transferred to Tehran's Evin Prison, where he was tortured by having boiling water poured on his penis and being forced to lie in a grave-like hole. “Being still a double, turning into a triple and later to a nothing/everything/ticking-bomb," the report quoted Tajik as confiding.
