No charges filed against soldier arrested on suspicion of spying for Russia
Daniel Hoffman, a former CIA senior executive clandestine service officer who now serves on the advisory board of the global consulting firm BGR Group, said the Iranians “still have the capability to inflict harm on the United States” despite their depleted military. U.S. military bases and other critical locations, he told NPR’s Michel Martin, are “in the crosshairs for the Iranians.”
Hoffman spoke with Martin about investigations in Britain into alleged threats linked to Iran and Russia. Martin described charges linked to Iran against alleged operatives said to be carrying out attacks remotely — a FaceTime call placed from Iran and coded messages passed from a New York jail. Separately, a U.S. soldier has been arrested on suspicion of spying for Russia, a case in which, Martin noted, no charges have been filed.
Hoffman said many would like to declare the U.S. war against Iran over, but he argued the Iranians nonetheless want to demonstrate they have the power to target the United States kinetically, and that, in his view, they believe doing so would give them leverage “in whatever negotiations may or may not take place.”
Martin described a detailed narrative released by the DOJ about the accused, including photos of them allegedly planning and directing terrorist attacks. Hoffman said plotters gather much of their information through open sources. “These days, what terrorists like to do is conduct surveillance of targets before they strike,” he said — work that can be done with Google Earth and other tools available on the internet. The same behavior, he added, gives investigators an opportunity, when they are watching, “to determine or to learn where they might be planning their next attack.”
Asked whether the suspects were under surveillance even though some of the attacks took place, Hoffman said “there are probably ongoing attacks.” Arrests like these, he said, put authorities in an incident-response phase: assessing possible attempted attacks, conducting a damage assessment to understand where other threats may be, and then defending accordingly.
Hoffman said that pattern has already been seen at U.S. Army bases in the U.K., and that Iran has targeted U.S. bases in the Middle East as well. Iran’s goal, in his assessment, is “to degrade the U.S. ability to project power both in the Middle East and globally.”
Martin observed that the threats seem so dispersed — small groups, cells, or individuals operating all over the world — that no one can surveil everyone. Hoffman agreed the dispersal is “definitely the challenge.” The groups, he said, are operating “reportedly at the behest of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps,” and the long-standing U.S. goal has been to recruit sources inside adversary institutions, whether the KGB during the Cold War or Iran today. Planning without central control, he said, makes it “extraordinarily difficult” to detect a threat far enough out — in the phrase he used, “left of boom” — to preempt it before harm reaches U.S. installations or the homeland.
On the soldier case, Martin emphasized again that no charges have been filed and that much remains unknown. Hoffman said an arrest on suspicion of espionage — assisting a foreign intelligence service by obtaining or disclosing protected information — is “quite significant.” “That’s a big deal,” he said. What investigators do not yet know, he said, is when the Russians recruited the soldier or what information he passed.
“To connect these stories together,” Hoffman said, Russia and Iran maintain a “very robust intelligence-sharing relationship.” Whatever Russia obtained from the U.S. Army officer, he said, “quite possibly, most likely, they passed it to the Iranians” — “not to mention their other allies. China, for example.”
Martin closed the interview by restating the point she had stressed throughout: “individuals are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.”