The FBI announced on Thursday that it is offering $200,000 for information that leads to the arrest and prosecution of a former active-duty U.S. Air Force intelligence specialist and special agent for the Air Force Office of Special Investigations who is accused of espionage.
Monica Witt, 47, also known to use the aliases Fatemah Zarah and Narges Witt, was federally indicted in Washington, D.C. in 2018 and charged with espionage. She is accused of defecting to Iran and turning over classified information to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
Here’s what we know about Witt’s alleged descent from American warfighter to suspected Iranian asset.
U.S. military service
Witt was born in El Paso, Texas, and enlisted in the Air Force in 1997, shortly after her 18th birthday. According to the New York Times, she was assigned to an RC-135 reconnaissance airplane crew.
Her 2018 indictment says she was assigned to the U.S. Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, between 1998 and 1999, where she learned Persian Farsi.
From May 1999 to November 2003, Witt was deployed to “several overseas locations in order to conduct classified missions collecting signals intelligence.”
In 2002, she reportedly deployed to Saudi Arabia.
The indictment says Witt was assigned as an Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) special agent, criminal investigator, and counterintelligence officer, where she deployed elsewhere in the Middle East, including Iraq in 2005 and Qatar in 2006.
She was part of a “Special Access Program” (SAP) that gave her access to classified information, including “details of ongoing counterintelligence operations, true names of sources, and the identities of U.S. agents involved in the recruitment of those sources.”
“This SAP was known within the USIC by a code name,” the indictment says. “The code name allowed agents to communicate in the open without disclosing the true nature of their operations.”
Witt’s time as a member of the Air Force came to an end in 2008.
Government contracting and education
From 2008 until 2010, Witt was employed as a government contractor but worked with AFOSI.
The New York Times reported that Witt received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Maryland in 2008, just about the same time she left the Air Force. Thereafter, she enrolled in a graduate program at George Washington University in Middle Eastern studies.
Witt was described as “withdrawn” and “alienated” by classmates, who also mentioned “drone strikes, extrajudicial killings, and atrocities against children.”
It was in February 2012, just before she graduated from George Washington University, that the government says Witt set her plans to betray the United States and defect to Iran in motion.
She traveled to Iran that month to attend the International Conference on Hollywoodism in Tehran, an anti-Western event held during the Fajr International Film Festival each year, “aimed at condemning American moral standards and promoting anti-U.S. propaganda,” according to the indictment.
During that trip, she is accused of providing her “bona fides” to the IRGC in order to establish that she was a credible source of American national defense intelligence and that she disclosed government secrets to them.
She was not invited to the Hollywoodism, but was allowed to speak anyway, according to The New York Times. The indictment says she “was identified as a U.S. veteran and made statements that were critical of the U.S. government, knowing these videos would be broadcast by Iranian media outlets.”
At the same time, her public conversion to Islam was filmed and broadcast on Iranian state television.
In May, at about the same time she received her graduate degree, the FBI reached out to Witt, telling her she was a prime target for recruitment by Iranian intelligence officials.
Defection
By then, it was too late.
Witt had become ensnared by a “spotter” — someone who recruits on behalf of a foreign intelligence service — in this case, Iran.
The indictment refers to the “spotter” as “Individual A,” named by The New York Times as Louisiana-born journalist turned naturalized Iranian citizen and state television broadcaster, Marzieh Hashemi.
Hashemi allegedly traveled to the U.S., and along with Witt, filmed an anti-Western propaganda film that was later distributed in Iran.
Over the course of the next year, according to the indictment, Witt bounced around from country to country while she worked with Hashemi to gain permanent residence in Iran. Some of that time was spent in Dubai and Afghanistan.
Around that time, the FBI put out a missing persons declaration for Witt, saying that as of July 2013, she was believed to be in either Afghanistan or Tajikistan, teaching English.
Text messages between the pair chronicled their efforts, including Iranian suspicion of Witt and alleged plans to “slip into Russia quietly” and expose U.S. secrets via WikiLeaks if she couldn’t gain access to Iran. Witt explicitly said in one message that she would not go to Turkey for fear of the country’s extradition agreement with the United States.
But on Aug. 25, 2013, according to the indictment, Witt sent an email titled “My Bio and Job History” to Hashemi, which contained more “bona fides,” her Certificate of Release or Discharge From Active Duty DD-214 form, and her Islamic “conversion narrative.” The indictment alleges that around the same time, she searched on Facebook for the names of U.S. intelligence services assets.
The same day, that email was forwarded to an email address associated with the Iranian government.
On Aug. 28, 2013, she boarded a flight to Iran.
“I’m signing off and heading out! Coming home,” she texted Hashemi.
Life in Iran
Immediately after defecting, Witt was accused of providing Iranian government officials with the code name for a Department of Defense SAP.
Throughout 2014 and 2015, she is accused of helping create “target packages,” defined as, “a document, or set of documents, assembled to enable an intelligence or military unit to find, fix, track, and neutralize a threat,” for the Iranian government.
Those “target patches” have allegedly included the names of U.S. counterintelligence agents.
Later, she is accused of linking up with Iranian hackers and producing malware “designed to capture a target’s keystrokes, access a computer’s web camera, and monitor other computer activity.”
This technology was turned against U.S. intelligence assets, whom Witt identified, according to the indictment. Witt and her co-defendants concocted schemes to implant malware on the computers of U.S. military intelligence workers known to Witt, mostly by reaching out to them through Facebook.
She was indicted alongside four other co-conspirators accused in the hacking operation.
Witt is officially charged with conspiracy to deliver and delivering national defense information to representatives of the Iranian government, delivering national defense information to representatives of the Iranian government, conspiracy to commit computer intrusion, computer intrusion, aggravated identity theft, and aiding and abetting.
“Monica Witt allegedly betrayed her oath to the Constitution more than a decade ago by defecting to Iran and providing the Iranian regime National Defense Information and likely continues to support their nefarious activities,” Daniel Wierzbicki, special agent in charge of the FBI Washington Field Office’s Counterintelligence and Cyber Division, said in Thursday’s announcement about the $200,000 reward.
“The FBI has not forgotten and believes that during this critical moment in Iran’s history, there is someone who knows something about her whereabouts. The FBI wants to hear from you so you can help us apprehend Witt and bring her to justice.”