http://www.consortiumnews.com/c030499a.html
March 4, 1999
Spy in the Cold
By Robert Parry
The two decades of U.S. isolation from Iran have permitted the British to
rebuild their historically strong intelligence ties to Iran's ruling elites,
according to Jamshid Hashemi, an Iranian who worked for both U.S. and
British intelligence.
In an interview in the United States, Hashemi said he helped British
intelligence regain that edge through his work for the Secret Intelligence
Service (SIS), the parent organization of MI-6, the British foreign
intelligence agency.
Hashemi asserted that he helped the British recruit 17 Iranians in sensitive
positions. The total number of Iranians working as British agents, he added,
was certainly much higher.
"I'm only one man," he observed.
Now, bitter over his prosecution in Great Britain on fraud charges, Hashemi
said he intends to divulge the identities of those Iranians. "The SIS agents
should get out of Iran within two months," he warned in the interview on
Feb. 16.
When asked if he was disclosing the names because the British had "betrayed"
him, Hashemi answered, "Exactly."
Court records in London reveal that Hashemi was recruited by British
intelligence in 1985 and that he supplied Great Britain with accurate
information about Iran's military needs when that data was unavailable from
other sources.
Hashemi's work for British intelligence involved setting up arms deals for
Iran that gave his SIS superiors insights into Iranian strategies as well as
access to communist-bloc technology. One Hashemi deal bought �silkworm�
missiles from China.
British intelligence discontinued its use of Hashemi in spring 1993 because
information about Iranian military needs was deemed less vital, the papers
said.
Four years later, Great Britain's Serious Fraud Office charged Hashemi in a
fraud scheme that used allegedly non-existent commodity deals with Iran to
deceive suppliers of American satellite phones, German gas masks and
Vietnamese rice.
Hashemi was incarcerated in August 1997 after he tried to flee England on a
false Italian passport. Hashemi, 63, who suffers from a serious heart
ailment and walks slowly with a cane, was held part of the time at Belmarsh
prison, Great Britain's highest security facility.
Eventually, four charges were dropped because British intelligence feared
disclosure of state secrets. In December 1998, at a pre-trial hearing at the
Old Bailey, Hashemi agreed to plead guilty to four other charges, with the
understanding that he would be freed within a few months.
Judge Andrew Collins said he granted Hashemi leniency because of the
"valuable information" he had given British intelligence. [The Guardian,
Feb. 6, 1999]
Hashemi was released in early February and returned to the United States
where he holds citizenship.
Although Hashemi's relations with the U.S. government have been stormy, too,
he expressed thanks to the interest section of the U.S. embassy in London,
which "helped as much as they could."
Even before Jamshid Hashemi spied for the British, he assisted the CIA and
U.S. Customs. His younger brother, Cyrus Hashemi, an international
financier, sent for Jamshid in late 1979 after Iranian Islamic radicals had
overthrown the U.S.-backed shah of Iran and seized 52 American hostages.
The Hashemis had close ties to the new Islamic government and were seen as
useful intermediaries. Cyrus also had business ties to CIA-connected
Americans, including businessman John Shaheen and Shaheen's lawyer, William
J. Casey.
Jamshid Hashemi arrived in the United States on New Years Day 1980 and
promptly met with U.S. officials, including a CIA officer. According to U.S.
government records, the Hashemi brothers became conduits for negotiations
with Iran about the American hostages.
Jamshid Hashemi has testified that Shaheen and Casey, who became Ronald
Reagan's campaign director in February 1980, used the same channels to send
Republican messages to Iranian radicals urging them to delay the hostage
release only after Reagan was elected, the so-called "October Surprise"
conspiracy.
Other October Surprise witnesses, including senior Iranian officials and
Middle East intelligence operatives, confirmed key elements of Hashemi's
story when it surfaced in 1990-91. But Republicans angrily denied the
charges.
A House task force was assigned to examine the October Surprise case. But
its leaders -- Reps. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., and Henry Hyde, R-Ill. -- moved
quickly to reject the troubling allegations.
The task force concluded that Hashemi had lied about arranging a
face-to-face meeting in Madrid between Casey and a senior Iranian cleric in
late July 1980. But the task force�s alibis for Casey�s whereabouts
collapsed under scrutiny, and Hashemi still insists his account was true.
[For details on the bogus alibis, see Robert Parry's Trick or Treason or The
October Surprise X-Files.]
Though Hashemi's credibility was assailed, the task force report revealed
that the Hashemi brothers were arranging secret military shipments to Iran
even before Reagan's inauguration in 1981.
In 1984, federal prosecutors in New York brought arms-trafficking
indictments against them. But in Washington, Reagan administration officials
tipped them off. They avoided arrest and shifted their base to London.
There, the Hashemis continued to assist U.S. Customs in arranging sting
operations against arms dealers violating the Iranian arms embargo. Cyrus
also helped the Reagan administration make the initial overtures to Israel
and Iran that opened the door to the Iran-contra affair.
In July 1986, as the Iran-contra clouds were building, Cyrus died suddenly
in London from what was diagnosed as acute myeloblastic leukemia. Jamshid,
however, suspected that his brother had been murdered.
In 1989, in the wake of the Iran-contra scandal, the U.S. indictment against
Jamshid Hashemi was dropped. A year later, citing his belief that his
brother had been assassinated, Jamshid began to discuss the October Surprise
case.
Meanwhile, with Jamshid Hashemi's help, the British rebuilt their
historically strong influence within Iran. Those developments brought full
circle the U.S.-British relationship to that strategic country.
In the 1950s, CIA officers saw their principal rivals as British
intelligence, which had long dominated the oil-rich Middle East.
By orchestrating the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953
and restoring the shah to power, the CIA supplanted the British. That
advantage was lost in 1979.
Now, according to Hashemi, the British have exploited Washington's long
hostility toward Iran to regain their intelligence edge, an advantage that
an angry Jamshid Hashemi is threatening to disrupt.
