Iranian Agents Are Deep Inside the State Department

If you’ve watched films including James Bond or have been inspired by John Le Carré novels, then you’re familiar with scenes of spies breaking into safes or briefcases to steal sensitive documents or photograph them with Minox cameras before putting them back moments before the antagonists walk into the room. That’s a throwback to the days when secrets were closely held and stealing them involved life or death intrigue.

Some secrets are still in that category, but not as many as you might expect. In the new world of intelligence collections, much of what the spy agencies want to know is publicly available as open-source information (called OSINT by the agencies).

During the Cold War, analytical ability was available, but the information was scarce. Today, there’s an ocean of information, almost too much to process. The scarce resource is analytical talent – the ability to make sense of it all and convert it into actionable intelligence for policymakers.

Computers, including artificial intelligence (AI), can help with the analytic process to some extent. But what if it were even easier than that? What if a foreign terrorist power could put its agents inside the State Department, the Pentagon, and the Intelligence Community with ease and supply the terrorists with classified information and insights into official thinking?

That sounds like a dream to spymasters but it’s happening every day. Ariane Tabatabai works for the Pentagon and oversees special operations and irregular warfare, some of which could be aimed at Iran. Evidence, including leaked emails shows that Tabatabai has close family connections to Iran’s senior leadership and that she participates in a network of researchers privately working with the Iranian foreign ministry.

Tabatabai has sought advice from the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps, a global terrorist organization, about whether it was OK for her to schedule trips to Israel. European leaders have refused to take meetings with the Pentagon if Tabatabai is present. All of this is enough to disqualify her from having a security clearance, let alone working in a top policy position at the Pentagon. This comes on top of the revelations that Robert Malley, a key official under Obama and Biden, had his security clearance suspended because of suspicions that he was secretly working for Iran.

It seems clear that Iran has thoroughly penetrated the U.S. national security community. It seems equally clear that Obama and Biden allowed this to happen and even encouraged it. Who needs spy cameras when real spies can just walk in the front door of the Pentagon and get all the classified information they want?

Corporate leaders and institutional fiduciaries looking to incorporate state of the art predictive analytics to their risk mitigation and strategic analysis should click the link to learn more about Raven Predictive Analytics®.