When FBI agents stormed through a luxurious apartment building in Washington, DC, and detained two men who reportedly pretended to be Homeland Security officials for years, even some of the country’s most seasoned counterintelligence experts were perplexed.
Was it a case of two jerks whose alleged cosplay went terribly wrong that led US investigators to an Iranian assassination plot or a story of two jerks whose alleged cosplay went tragically wrong?
Earlier this month, the FBI detained 36-year-old Arian Taherzadeh and 40-year-old Haider Ali for allegedly impersonating investigators from Immigration and Customs
Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations division, which handles national security and customs investigations (HSI). The alleged plot, which lasted more than two years, was complex and would have cost a lot of money to pull out.
According to the FBI’s 17-page arrest affidavit, Taherzadeh and Ali used their fictitious HSI affiliations to gain the trust of real federal agents, including uniformed officers from the US Secret Service and special agents from its presidential protective details, as well as other personnel from agencies such as the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.
Ali and Taherzadeh’s attorneys have described the evidence against their clients as “preposterous” and promoting “outlandish conspiracy ideas.”
Meanwhile, Magistrate Judge Michael Harvey, who is handling the case, denied the Justice Department’s plea to put the two suspects in jail last week and minimised the events, claiming there was no proof that secret material was leaked. “There is no proof of foreign linkages in this instance,” Harvey stated. Counterintelligence specialists say there’s plenty of evidence to believe the two men weren’t acting alone—even though the defendants’ alleged behaviour was so brash and odd that it’s difficult to conceive they were the vanguard of a sophisticated scheme.
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