This is how dissidents are spied on in exile

For years, Masih Alinejad had to suppress her curls.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
19 November 2022 Saturday 17:30
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This is how dissidents are spied on in exile

For years, Masih Alinejad had to suppress her curls.

Her hair, released today, similar to a crown or a divine halo, is the image of a global political pronouncement and a cry of struggle.

Since 22-year-old Masih Amini, arrested in September for wearing the veil badly when visiting Tehran and died in the custody of the morality police, protests have not stopped in Iran. Alinejad, from exile, is the international face and voice of the women of her country who protest in the streets and who are beaten and imprisoned, if not worse, for daring to remove the mandatory scarves in their wardrobe and show their hair, a true revolutionary weapon.

Along with three other Iranian activists in exile, she was received last week by French President Emmanuel Macron. “In my bilateral meeting with the French president, I have told him that what is happening in Iran is a revolution and France may be the first country to recognize it,” she tweeted after the reception.

Masih Alinejad, a 46-year-old journalist and writer, was forced to flee her homeland in 2009 after her press pass was revoked.

He took refuge in New York. It was not the finish line, nor the end of the danger. She settled in Brooklyn and there began her outreach against hijab laws with the launch in 2014 of her Facebook page titled My stealthy freedom, in which she shows images of Iranian women enjoying those moments when you can bare your hair.

From this initiative, his work has contributed to the campaign of disobedience that did not go unnoticed by the authorities of the Islamic republic. In Iran, her 70-year-old mother has received “warnings”, her brother was arrested and her sister had to appear on television denouncing her activities abroad.

And in the Big Apple, a little more than a year ago a court indicted four Iranians for plotting his kidnapping. The four have so far evaded the action of justice for being in their country. Among these is Alireza Shavaroghi Farahani, one of the heads of the regime's intelligence service.

A fifth defendant was arrested in California. Although he was considered to have supported the kidnapping, it is believed that he was not part of the operation.

The FBI disrupted the criminal plot before its objective was fulfilled. As they say, without eating or drinking it, Michael McKeever, a 71-year-old New York private detective with a long career in his profession, collaborated in the police operation.

"I feel like a bit of a hero, I only had good intentions," he jokes in an interview carried out inside his car (Toyota), in an environment under his control, lest he be the victim of a hoax again.

McKeever, whose last name would give a lot of play in a television series, was not surprised to receive an email in July 2020 (the email is on his website), in which a certain Kiya Sadeghi proposed an assignment.

"Contact with you on behalf of some clients in Dubai by a person who has fled to avoid paying a debt," he said in his text. A case like so many in search of a defaulter. Something common, in line with the current trend of "online romances". He says that a couple of days ago she received a request from Spain from someone who wanted to know if a person she had met online was who she claimed to be.

What was requested from Dubai was not an extravagance or a rarity either. It consisted of something as common in his trade as standing guard in front of a house in Brooklyn, which turned out to be Alinejad's house. Take photos and videos, including license plates, of those entering or leaving.

They insisted that the person did not reside at that address, but that he frequented it because they were his friends. Although she sent photos and videos, they demanded more, that they see their faces, "we want more of this." So she suggested that they provide other information, such as the name, since in this way she could know if that person lived in the neighborhood and everything would be easier.

"He did not want. And it's not unusual either. Around 20% of customers have this behavior. There are very reserved people." Not knowing what the story was about, the detective sent photographs showing Alinejad, her husband, her son,...

"Please be discreet because they are lurking," Sadeghi told him in an email.

He didn't know it, but he wasn't alone in this espionage. Two months later, an FBI agent approached McKeever. “He assured me that my client was not who I thought, that there were bad people behind, with bad intentions. I believed him, ”he confesses.

Behind it was Iran's secret service on the hunt for a boisterous dissident. Sadeghi was later identified in the indictment as an Iranian intelligence agent.

As certified by Th, what has happened to McKeever is not something isolated.

Throughout the geography of the US, private detectives are increasingly used by a new type of client, the authorities of countries like Iran or China in their attempt to monitor, harass, threaten and even repatriate detractors to pass accounts on them. and silence them.

In the last two years, federal accusations and denunciations of matters in which private investigators were involved in this type of conspiracy in New York, California and Indiana have accumulated. The FBI maintains that there are others. Most were used unknowingly and later cooperated with security forces. There are a few who have been charged.

“Customers can lie to you for their own self-interest, even for the most mundane of reasons,” McKeever insists. In his inquiry there was an element that gave him confidence: the form of payment.

“They sent me the money and what convinced me is that they specified that this has put so much, this other so much, all those poor scammed people made it more convincing,” he reiterates.

Once the FBI opened his eyes, he did as he was told. He continued with the assignment for a couple more months, a period in which the Dubai officials even suggested that he do a streaming broadcast if he managed to get close to the house.

Some time after the kidnapping attempt was revealed, McKeever received a letter from FBI Director Christopher Wray thanking him.

Something very different from what happened to his colleague Michael McMahon, 55, who became a private detective after retiring from the New York police force. In 2020, he was arrested for illegally acting as a Chinese government agent on charges of harassment and conspiracy.

Prosecutors alleged that he was part of an attempt to coerce a Chinese national, identified only in the indictment as John Doe 1, to return to his country.

Chinese tentacles are very long. Wray warned this week that TikTok poses security concerns. Byte Dance, owner of the application, is linked to the executive of the Asian giant. “The Chinese government has a lot of influence over TikTok,” remarks Aynne Kokas, a professor at the University of Virginia who has published the book Trafficking data: how China is winning the battle for digital sovereignty.

“China is making an effort to extend its digital sovereignty and increase its influence,” he says by phone. “There are three elements at play, disinformation without much control, the possibility of modeling communities and the surveillance of individuals”, adds Kokas.

That surveillance makes it easier to give locations like the one McMahon received. A woman commissioned him from China, through her website, to spy on a person who had stolen money from a construction company. Prosecutors reported that the detective was involved in an aggressive campaign by Beijing called "operation fox hunting." He denies it.

A man was arrested last July near Alinejad's house. He was carrying an AK-47 assault rifle. The international voice of Iranian dissent in New York has had to change residence at least half a dozen times.

McKeever has never spoken to her. He acknowledges that she would like him. “There are colleagues – she maintains – who have criticized me for cooperating with the FBI. To one who told me that he would never have done it, I replied: Do you side with the Iranians to try to suppress this woman from speaking out? She's in the United States!"