The New Yorker Radio Hour - An Iranian Plot Grew in Brooklyn, and the Revelations about Pegasus

Episode Date: July 27, 2021

The indictment reads like a not-so-great spy novel: the operatives would kidnap the dissident from her home in Brooklyn, deliver her to the waterfront to meet a speedboat, bring her by sea to Venezuela, and then move her on to Tehran—where she would, presumably, face a show trial, and perhaps execution. But this was no potboiler. The Iranian nationals charged in the indictment were allegedly researching an audacious plot to capture a naturalized American citizen, on U.S. soil. The target of the scheme was Masih Alinejad, a journalist and activist who has been critical of the Iranian theocracy and particularly vocal in speaking out against the compulsory wearing of hijab; she has a large following on social media and a show on Voice of America. Her brother has been jailed in Iran, and her sister was forced to renounce her on television. The F.B.I. took the threat to Alinejad seriously enough to sequester her and her husband, Kambiz Foroohar,  in a series of safe houses, where they stayed for months. Alinejad and Foroohar spoke about their ordeal with David Remnick, and explained why the regime regards her as such a threat. “For Iran, hijab is like the Berlin Wall was to the Soviet system,” Foroohar points out. “The narrative of the Islamic Republic was that women are choosing to wear hijab, and Masih is challenging that narrative.” Plus, the revelations about Pegasus. Marketed as a tool against terrorism, the spyware was also deployed by governments against journalists and activists. Isaac Chotiner interviews one of the targets, the Indian journalist and scholar Siddharth Varadarajan. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Lately, the stories were reading about international espionage or kind of like something from Cold War spy novels. Nerve agents deployed against a Russian dissident, a so-called Havana syndrome, which we've reported in the New Yorker, apparently some kind of microwave weapon that's used on American diplomats who, after the attacks, have showed signs of brain damage. Now there's this. U.S. officials have indicted four Iranian nationals

of planning an extraordinary plot on U.S. soil. It targeted an American-born in Iran named Masi Alinajad, a journalist and an activist. She's quite critical of the Iranian regime, particularly of the requirement that women wear the hijab. According to a recently unsealed indictment, the plotters researched kidnapping Alinajad in Brooklyn, evacuating her by speedboat, taking a sea route to Venezuela, and from there, flying her to Iran,

presumably to be put on trial or much worse. When the FBI caught wind of the scheme, they put her and her husband in a series of safe houses where they stayed for months. Masi Alinajad and her husband, Cambiz Faruhar, join me now. Masi, the last few months must have been very stressful and incredibly strange. Now that this indictment has been unsealed. Do you feel that you're on the other side of this experience, or do you feel safe from being kidnapped or being harmed in any way? To be honest, the word safe is too luxury for us Iranians. Because, yeah, I am under FBI's protection, but, you know, every single word that I say here to you, I don't know what's

going to happen to my brother in prison. I don't know what's going to happen to my family inside Iran. It is stressful. It is scary. But to be honest, right now, they send someone here in America to kidnap me. So it shows you that they scare of me as well. Kambis, take me through the experience of the FBI's reaching out to you, I believe, in September to warn you. Well, the initial call came as a surprise for us. There were repeated phone calls, and they sent a car, a non-marked car to pick us up, take us to headquarters at New York. And they said someone in America is following you, taking videos of you, taking photographs of everything you're doing,

and sending it to Ministry of Intelligence in Iran. And our reaction was that, why don't you do something about it? And it was like, that's what we're trying to do. Now, when you were given the details, of the plot, the whole business of spiriting you onto a speedboat and taking you to Venezuela and then flying you from Venezuela somehow to Iran. It sounds like the worst spy novel we've ever read. How did you react to it initially? Look, this is exactly what happened to Roholah Zam. Roholah was a journalist like me. They trick him from France to Iraq and they kidnapped him from Iraq. Then they executed him.

And I was like, oh my God, that was going to happen to me. So you see, for us, the scary movie is the reality. Why is the Islamic Republic so interested in what you've said in your writing? You've written very strongly against the laws requiring women to wear the hijab. I think it's very difficult for Westerners to understand what Massey has touched on with her campaign against compulsory hijab. because they said this is a fashion item, the compulsory hijab. You know, people in America wear hijab.

What's the big deal? For Iran, hijab is like the Berlin Wall was to the Soviet system. It's a symbol of the Islamic Republic. And what Massey is doing, challenging, saying that this is not a choice for us. It's absolute. And if any women are coming at and saying,

yes, I hate this hijab. And so the narrative of the Islamic Republic was that if any women are choosing to wear hijab, and mass is challenging that narrative. So if the hijab is falls down, the Islamic Republic itself is undermined. And this is the red line for the Islamic Republic. For them, it's a life or death situation. Masi, maybe we should be clear on how you're reaching an Iranian audience.

Look, my weapon is my social media. The Iranian government, they have all the official media. They have newspapers. They have money, power, prison. I have my Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. and altogether 7 million followers, so that scares them. So I just ask people inside Iran, talk to me, be your own storytellers. You don't need anyone to come and save you.

Be your own savior. That's all I do. And I receive videos of mothers whose children got killed in Iran protest. They don't have any media inside Iran. They send a video to me while going to the same street that their children got shot in the head. And that scares the government because they don't want people to be fearless and to speak up. The head of the Revolutionary Court came out on TV said that if anyone sent videos to Massey, Arinajad, will be charged up to 10 years prison.

Isn't that stupid in 21st century? Now, Massey, I know that you spoke with Secretary of State Blinken last week. How do you feel the Biden administration has responded to your situation? To be honest, part of the Biden's administration did a great job, the Justice Department, by stopping the plot. That was amazing. But I have to be honest. I'm disappointed because this is a threat to Americans on their own soil.

Imagine it was not me. It was President Biden's son. Will he go after them and say, okay, let's talk about nuclear deal? No. The first thing he would ask was release my son. Now they arrested my brother, American citizen is in prison, British citizen is in prison. You know, so many European citizens are in prison. They're being used like bargaining chip for nuclear deal.

I want Biden's administration to stop negotiation. First ask for the release of all those innocent political prisoners. When you say stop negotiations, you're referring to the negotiations to revive the 2015 nuclear courts? Yeah, that's it. Because, look, when you negotiate with the regime without considering the human rights violation, basically you're empowering such a dictatorship to put more pressure on people. But this is a very old dilemma watching administrations of all kinds, balancing human rights questions with nuclear arms questions.

When the United States was negotiating with the Soviet Union back in the day, the Soviet Union had political prisoners in camps all over the Soviet Union, and at the same time the Nixon administration, the Carter administration, the Ford administration, all negotiated with the Soviet Union on questions of nuclear arms, even while discussing human rights questions. Is there some way in your mind that these can be balanced in terms of international diplomacy, or do you think that's a farce? I think after the Obama administration, and now with Biden administration,

they have isolated Iran into different boxes. And I think we want to discuss with box of nuclear, and that's all we're going to talk about. And once you deal with nuclear, we can get to other areas. The issue is that the human rights issue, the terrorism issue of Iran, it gets buried under the fact that they want to reach a deal on nuclear. Whereas I think it's a much larger issue.

The fact that you're negotiating with Iran at the same time that Iran's are plotting a campaign inside the U.S., well, how much of a good relationship is that? How can you trust that good faith negotiation? Masi, I just want to make clear to listeners that your sister was forced to go on Iranian television to denounce you. Am I correct? And your brother was sent to prison. This must add to the pressure immeasurably.

I don't want to cry because I don't want to see me broken. But it's not easy. Imagine you're sitting here in America and you see your sister's 17 minutes. an Iranian state TV denouncing you, disowning you. My brother risk his life. He's in prison right now. Because when the regime had a plan to kidnap me from Turkey, he was the one he called me and he said,

Massey, if mom and dad called you and said, come to Turkey, we want to visit you, we want to hug you, don't. Because the intelligence service is behind them. So we loved each other, you know. My mom was intrigated for two hours, and now she's stopped sharing her love with me. Why? I'm not a criminal. I'm just a journalist and activist.

I'm just giving voice to voiceless people. I'm not doing anything wrong. And sometimes I cannot even breathe when I think about them. But I have to choose my path because of my own family keep silent. I have a bigger family. The women inside Iran who's sending me videos, although they know that they're going to face 10 years prison, the mothers of those people who got killed in Iran protests

keep sending me videos, I have to make a decision. And if I keep silent, I'm going to betray my own people. If I keep silent, I'm going to send a signal to the regime, okay, threatening activists and journalists work. So go after another one. And every day I tell myself, But they did everything to stop me. They did everything to make me feel miserable.

But I'm going to make them feel miserable. I'm going to make my oppressors feel miserable. I'm not going to give up. Kambis, what did the FBI tell you in terms of moving forward and your own safety? Well, they said if it was them, they would move our house. We would change their location, maybe even change the city. and they feel we were safe, but, you know, as long as the Islamic Republic is in power,

there's a bullseye on Massey's back. Essentially, we are targets. You know, when this is what's happening, I got the book by Salmon Rashdie, by his experiences as to live going to being under threat of a fatwa. We didn't get a fatwa, but... Oh, I got. I got a fat bar. Massey has fatwas of her own.

Yeah, no, I got a fat one. Even the cleric made a video and said that even in New York, we're going to throw acid on your face. There's so many threats I didn't take them serious. This time, because the FBI came to us, we took it serious. Massey and Cambys, what is your plan going forward now? How do you plan to live your life after being made aware that there was such a terrifying plot? aimed against you. Keep going. We're going to double our efforts in our fight against Islamic Republic.

I became more determined. I became more powerful, you know. Of course it is scary, but I feel more powerful that I am not going to give up and I'm going to be stronger, louder, condemning this terrorist regime. And this is not about me. This is about all Americans. They should feel safe in their homeland. but just because of the Islamic Republic

they want me to look over my shoulder. I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to live in fear. That's it. Masi and Kambis, I can't be more grateful to you. I really appreciate your time. I wish you the best. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much. Masi Alina Jad is a journalist for Voice of America and her 2018 book is called The Wind in My Hair. Kambis for her heart was a journalist for Bloomberg and he's a strategist for a financial services firm in London. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Pegasus is everything the digital privacy advocates have been warning us about for years.

Pegasus is spyware, and it allows the user to access all the contents of a target's phone. That software is the creation of an Israeli firm called NSO, which claims that its creation was only licensed for use by governments, for law enforcement, and for the battle against terrorism. But an investigative effort led by a nonprofit called Forbidden Stories, and including more than a dozen news organizations, asserts something far more sinister. According to this week's reports, Pegasus has been used to target journalists, human rights activists, political opponents, and many others whom governments consider perhaps inconvenient. In India, the journalist and scholar Siddharth Varadirajan was one such target of Pegasus. He's a frequent critic of India's ruling party. Varadarajan spoke last week with staff writer Isaac Chotner.

You have a very unique perspective on this story because you are both sort of the micro and macro involved. Your news organization, The Wire, is one of the 17 organizations working on this Pegasus project. And you yourself may have had your phone tapped. So can you tell us a little bit about how you got involved in the story, both as an editor and as a subject? So sometime in the middle of March, forbidden stories, which is the French organization, which is coordinating this collaborative project, got in touch with me and with my colleague and co-founding editor at the wire, MK Venu, to inform us that they had reasons to believe that both of our phones had been infected with spyware.

And they wanted to see if we would be willing to have our phones. phones forensically examined for the presence of Pegasus. We asked what this involves and how complicated is the process because neither of us are particularly tech savvy. And then we decided, okay, we'll go ahead. And forbidden stories got back with the bad news, fully compromised, fully infected with Pegasus. That's when they explain a little bit about the project. and asked whether the wire would be willing to be part of an international consortium that was going to investigate and report on the full extent to which phones around the world

might have been targeted with this horrible spyware. And we decided to jump in. So Forbidden Stories presents everyone in the consortium with a list of 50,000 numbers. What is that list exactly and how did you connect it later on to specific names, and people in India. So the list of 50,000 numbers was accessed by forbidden stories. And essentially, Forbidden Stories has established that this is a list of numbers selected as potential targets for surveillance by clients of the NSO Group.

This is NSO Group, the Israeli technology firm, that appears to be selling the technology to these different governments. Now, the NSA group strenuously denies having anything to do with this list. But they also conceded in their letter that they have a strong belief that this list of numbers is being used by clients of NSO. In other words, the fact that this list emerges from clients of NSO to my mind is not in dispute. What's in dispute is what exactly do the clients of NSO have in mind when they put a number on the list, right? What we had to work with was simply a list of numbers.

And to then try to identify whom these numbers belong to was not quite a needle in a haystack kind of job, but it was difficult. We were able to populate some names based on people that we. knew who were on our phone book, and it was a bit alarming to discover that people that we knew were also on this list of potential spyware victims. We were able to verify the identity of 300 of those numbers among the Indian numbers, which is a pretty decent number. It's quite a good, quite a decent proportion. And among those 300 numbers, I understand the consortium was able to actually do forensic analysis on a much smaller number of those Indian phones, and 10 of them showed signs of being infected

by Pegasus. So that raises the question. Maybe you can tell us more about how exactly Pegasus works. Pegasus essentially allows the operator of the spyware to take remote control over your phone. So nothing that you do on your smartphone, once it's infected, is secure. all your conversations through signal or WhatsApp are compromised. Pegasus also allows the remote operator to take control of your microphone, your camera, see any files that you've stored in your phone. So it's essentially a mirror to the contents of your phone.

And if you have Pegasus, then you can forget about having any privacy when you use your phone. Can you talk a little bit about the climate for journalism in India? Prime Minister Modi was elected in 2014. He was re-elected in 2019. And there's been concern about declining press freedom in the country since that time, especially over the last few years. How do you understand the climate about press freedom? And can you talk about what's changed in your reporting over the past several years?

The media freedom, climate in India is abysmal right now. And I'm choosing my words very carefully. You know, there's enormous pressure on, journalists, on editors, on media organizations to not be critical, to not cover certain kinds of stories, to not offer certain kinds of perspectives. So there is a kind of, a lot of self-sensorship that goes on. We have a disturbing trend. We always had a problem in India of government officials or corporates using slap suits or defamation cases to intimidate and to turn a media organization away from covering a certain story. That was the first form of pressure put on the wire.

You know, multiple defamation suits filed against us. I mean, these are all frivolous cases, but they consume time and money. What's been happening over the last two or three years is a growing tendency for the police in different parts of India to actually file criminal cases now in response to a report that they don't like. And this is a new trend and it's very, very harmful, and it's had a chilling effect on media coverage, for sure. We've been talking a lot about journalists, but there were also dissidents. There were NGO workers. Other people who were opponents of the government in some way or seen as opponents of the

government were part of this list. There was also Rahul Gandhi, who's one of the leaders of the Congress Party, which is still, even though much diminished the main opposition party to Modi's BJP in India, was that surprising to you to see Rahul Gandhi on this list? and can you talk a little bit about the political meaning of what we've seen? You know, there's been a longstanding tradition in India of the government using its intelligence agencies to gather political intelligence. One assumes that they have always kept an eye on what the opposition is doing,

what critics are doing, but what the use of Pegasus does or involves is hacking into somebody's smartphone. which is actually a criminal offense under the Indian Information Technology Act. And there's no exception for law enforcement. So it was a bit surprising for us to come face to face with the brazen use of an illegal means of surveillance. In such a kind of instrumental fashion, right? So you have somebody like Prashad Kishore. Kishore is India's premier political strategist, and he's been advising opposition parties in state.

elections and he played a key role recently in the West Bengal state elections, a very, very important state election that was held in March and April this year. And Kishore, as it emerged when we did a forensic examination of his phone, Prashant Kishore's phone turned out to be compromised, fully infected with Pegasus and Pegasus activity on his phone was happening right in the midst of the West Bengal election. the key political advisor to Narendra Modi's opponent in that state had been hit with Pegasus. You know, this is pretty damning because we now have, you know, conclusive proof that Pegasus is being used in an election.

And to my mind, that's as close to a kind of Watergate moment in India as you're ever going to get. Can you just explain sort of briefly how we, you're sure or how you can be sure that it's the Indian government that is deploying Pegasus. Because they are the only ones who can use Pegasus. We have NSO, the company which sells Pegasus, saying repeatedly that we only sell to governments. So if NSO sells Pegasus only to governments, and Pegasus has been found in the phone of political opponents of Narendra Modi during an election, it's a reasonable surmise that the government is the one that's doing it. You referred to this earlier as a potential Watergate moment.

Most people know that Watergate ended with the resignation of President Richard Nixon. Do you have any hope, or even if you're not hoping one way or the other, do you have any sense that Prime Minister Modi could face some, or his government could face some sort of legal reckoning around Pegasus issues? So it's really not clear to me today what the outcome of our expose is going to be. I mean, the opposition is up in arms, and I think the scale of surveillance that our project has exposed, I think, will be alarming to ordinary people. I mean, there's no question of an equivalent of Nixon resigning. You know, Mr. Modi will serve out his full term for sure.

I mean, I don't know if you've seen some of the reactions and statements that have come from the highest levels of government over the last two days. I mean, they are termed. The Home Minister of India, who's the second most powerful guy. has declared that this project, which involves 17 media organizations around the world, and is talking about surveillance not just in India, but in Mexico. Today we've broken the story of Macron being put on the list. But the government of India believes that this entire project is a conspiracy against India and against the Modi government.

But they are likely to double down on their authoritarian practices and divisive politics. So there is this danger that in dealing with the crisis that they perceive has emerged, they will actually start doing things that are going to make the situation in the country much worse. Siddharth, to you and anyone else at the government who may be listening, thank you for joining us today. Thank you. Isaac Chautner is a staff writer, a principal contributor to Q&A at New Yorker.com, and he spoke with Siddharth Faradirajan in India. The Indian government maintains that any service,

surveillance it conducts is according to its laws and due process. And NSO, the maker of Pegasus, insists that the 50,000 phone numbers associated with the spyware is not at all a target list. So far, there is no evidence that agencies in the United States have used Pegasus. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed. by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon Corby,

Calaliyah, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, Annabelle Bacon, and Stephen Valentino. And we had additional help from Harrison Keithline. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.