The 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. 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 . 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.
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 .
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 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 , 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.
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 East 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Witt was described as “withdrawn” and “alienated” by classmates, who also mentioned “drone strikes, extrajudicial killings and atrocities against children.”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 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 .
By then, it was too late.
Witt had become ensnared by a “spotter” â someone wh
