An Iranian named Amir Ardebili was writing out a long list when he suddenly stopped and turned to his new partners in arms.
“This is a very secret list, please,” he said to Darius, the Eastern European arms broker, and Patrick Lynch, an American involved in the trade.
“ ‘Have it in your pocket. Or customer will kill me.’ He laughed as he said it, but he wasn’t joking.”
Lynch said to him, “You can trust us. No worries.”
Ardebili’s deadly customer was the Iranian government. The list was a detailed account of every player in Iran’s ongoing attempts to secure American military technology for their own use, including “Iranian front companies, [and] American companies they’d done business with.”
Ardebili told his new partners he had “50 customers, all owned or controlled by the Iranian government,” and that “90 percent of what they ordered was manufactured inside the United States.”
Darius and Lynch were thrilled at the revelations. They were undercover agents of the US government and were just minutes away from arresting the man responsible for providing Iran with a treasure trove of military technology, much of which wound up being used against our own military overseas.
“In Iraq and Afghanistan, at least 2,500 US soldiers have died in IED attacks, accounting for nearly half of the total killed by hostile fire,” writes John Shiffman, an investigative reporter for Reuters, in his new book, “Operation Shakespeare.”
Shiffman also points out that “lately, US soldiers in Iraq were discovering more-sophisticated remote timers and triggers inside the IEDs including, incredibly, products manufactured in American factories.”
One might think that curbing the smuggling of weapons to America’s enemies would be a significant priority for the US government. One would be wrong.
The reasons our military technology flows into Iran, China, Pakistan, Russia and others are many, including our intractable government bureaucracies and the immense difficulty of building a case against a foreign defendant.
“Every year, American businesses report more than 19,000 suspicious contacts from foreign buyers, and US agents open approximately 1,800 new counter-proliferation investigations,” Shiffman writes. But arrests total only about 30 to 40 a year, and mostly inside the US.
Moreover, many of these arrests are merely middlemen, smuggling for “the Chinese, the Pakistanis, the Iranians or the Russians. Most arrested know little more than the details of their own schemes.”
The true high-value targets are the “foreign procurement agents” who are “virtually untouchable inside their own countries and employ the Internet, freight-forwarding companies, and express-mail services to keep the illicit purchases at arm’s length.”
Baiting the trap
Cross International was a small company, located in an office park in Yardley, Pennsylvania, dedicated to the procurement of “military and defense-related items and technology.” A Google search would have backed the company’s claims with just enough information to convince someone that it was real.
Enough, in other words, to fool someone like Ardebili.
In truth, Cross was a one-man front operation, and that one man was Lynch, an undercover agent for the Department of Homeland Security whose real name is Patrick Lechleitner.
In building Cross’ website, Lechleitner used terms in the site’s metadata such as “laser, tanks, infrared, night vision,” and many more, as arms-dealing middlemen used Internet searches to find companies that sold their desired products.
In April 2004, Lechleitner got a tip from a US aircraft manufacturer about a suspicious request from a man calling himself Alex Dave. This, it turned out, was the name used by Ardebili.
Lechleitner had the manufacturer refer Alex Dave to Cross, and “within days, the American undercover agent and the Iranian broker were e-mailing directly, and Alex Dave was sending Cross International a flurry of requests. To begin, the Iranian sought prices for American jet parts and radioisotopes.”
Alex Dave asked for so many price “quotes” that one agent referred to him as Shakespeare — and “Operation Shakespeare” was born.
Iran’s shopping list
The next few years saw continued correspondence between Alex Dave/Ardebili and Lechleitner/Lynch — infused with caution, obfuscation and flat-out deception.
Paranoia meant long delays in arms operations. Often, one party will send a deposit for thousands of dollars for a certain item, and the other party will then disappear. It is also normal for parties to suddenly go silent, for a variety of reasons, only to reappear months later as if they had never been gone.
Ardebili was no different, once even blowing off a meeting with Lechleitner in Dubai.
But overall, Ardebili was no flake. In 2005 and 2006, “Ardebili’s company wired at least $1.8 million to European and American companies” for “a dizzying array of requests for the Iranian government” including “bulletproof material, night vision equipment and parts for Bell helicopters, F-14 fighters, C-130 cargo planes and oil derricks.” (Ardebili was busted before he received any arms from the American agents.)
Throughout early 2006, Lechleitner heard about requests Ardebili made of other Homeland Security front companies, including his having wired “a $7,000 deposit to a Massachusetts company to purchase gyroscopes,” and conducting regular correspondence with fronts in San Diego and Chicago.
If he was dealing with four front companies, the agents reasoned, he must be talking with many real companies as well. “The agents,” writes Shiffman, “knew of no one else so prolific.”
Ardebili became a priority target, but there was no clear path to his capture, as they couldn’t exactly fly to Iran and arrest him for crimes against America.
Their only hope would be to lure him to a country that either had an extradition treaty with the US or would agree to extradite in this case.
Setting up the deal
Their first bit of good fortune came from a senior agent in Germany, who was setting up a front company in Eastern Europe for a separate case. This agent was Darius. Additional information on his identity and the location of his company were intentionally omitted from this book.
Ardebili began e-mailing Darius with requests for parts, starting a pattern of communication similar to his with Lynch, with the Iranian disappearing, then popping up again later. This went on into 2007 — the pair would make deals, but money promised by Ardebili would never arrive.
Receiving the money was essential for the eventual case against Ardebili.
“Although the US courts recognized a concept known as extraterritorial jurisdiction — the United States could enforce laws related to American-made technology anywhere in the world — the practice was controversial,” writes Shiffman.
“To the average US juror, it might not seem fair to charge an Iranian citizen for violating a US law, when all he’d done was send an e-mail from Iran to an American undercover agent located in Germany. The case would become much stronger if the Iranian made actual contact inside the United States — if he wired cash to a US bank, for example.”
In July 2007, more than three years after the sting had begun, Lechleitner called his supervisor to report that $3,000 had arrived from Ardebili in Cross’ account, a down payment for 1,000 radar shifters.
The next phase of the sting could now begin.
It was arranged that Darius, Lechleitner (as Lynch) and Ardebili would meet at a hotel in Tbilisi, Georgia, as that country had agreed to arrest and extradite Ardebili. Lynch would deliver an order of radar microchips to Ardebili, as pre-installed hidden cameras recorded it all.
The two agents would then “discuss prospects for future deals with [Ardebili], a feint designed to get him talking as much as possible about the Iranian procurement process — what their military sought and how they ultimately acquired it.”
Golden laptop
During the time between arranging the meeting and the meeting itself, Ardebili continued sending requests, which allowed the Americans to keep adding additional charges. One request was for “a DADC-107, a digital air data cockpit computer for an F-4 fighter,” which “increases the accuracy of a jet’s weapon systems, air speed and angle of attack.”
Darius and Lechleitner had a list of topics they needed Ardebili to discuss or admit to in order to solidify their case for a jury, including that he understood that his actions were illegal in America, that he’d worked with at least one other person (for a conspiracy charge), and that he had sent money to a third-party country in order to evade our Iranian embargo, which would add a charge of money laundering.
For all the agents’ trouble, and the years it took them to get there, the meeting in Tbilisi could not have gone better.
Over two days, Ardebili, believing he was setting a course for significant future business, laid out every single detail of his operation, even showing corroborating evidence on his laptop.
He walked the agents through how the Iranians intended to use all the equipment he obtained for them, and told them the country’s complete set-up for weapons procurement and development, which included reverse-engineering American products.
He also revealed, to the Americans’ surprise, that Iran was not his only customer. He had also been selling American military technology to China.
As he spoke, undercover operatives in the next room watched on a monitor, checking off the list of desired topics as Ardebili spilled his guts on all of them. Darius and Lechleitner knew the list as well, and as soon as Ardebili covered the final topic, Darius gave a silent signal to the agents in the next room via the hidden camera, and Georgian police rushed in and arrested the Iranian.
Ardebili’s laptop provided the Americans with “a treasure trove of intelligence — 40 gigabytes, 101,000 files, 26,000 e-mail messages, almost all of them related to smuggling US military technology. The laptop [also] contained four years worth of correspondence with US manufacturers and Iranian procurement officials. A search of the word ‘missile’ on Ardebili’s computer returned 1,498 files.”
It was a Hollywood ending — and, indeed, “Operation Shakespeare” already has been optioned for a film.
‘Drop in the bucket’
Ardebili was sentenced to five years in prison. He was released and returned to Iran in 2012. His current whereabouts are unknown.
Using the contents of his laptop, US agents continued e-mail correspondence, as Ardebili, with “150 US companies,” and “Homeland Security agents began stings against 20 US companies, firms targeted for agreeing to sell Ardebili military or restricted technology.”
But in the end, much of this work was for naught, as “in most situations, the agents were unable to prove that the US companies understood the law and expressly intended to break it,” leaving these companies facing nothing but “stern warnings.” Charges were eventually brought against just “11 more people or companies.”
While the Ardebili arrest might have seemed like a victory, Shiffman notes that he is but one player, a drop in the bucket compared to the massive and ongoing flow of sensitive American military technology into our enemies’ hands.
“There are hundreds of state-sponsored brokers like Ardebili out there working for the Iranians, Chinese, Russians, and Pakistanis . . . systematically stealing the technological advantages that sustain America’s status as military and economic superpower. Is the United States doing enough to prevent this?”