ABOVE: Amir Ardebili
mugshot

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All of the installments in the outstanding series on the Ardebili case under John Shiffman’s byline at The Philadelphia Inquirer have now been published, and each article is a treasure trove of new information about the case. Although I’m going to highlight a few interesting things revealed by the series, don’t let that deter you from reading the whole thing. There is much more to be learned in the articles than I have the time and space to cover here.

When Ardebili was released from jail in Georgia, he was whisked back to the U.S. on a Gulfstream IV that cost the United States $300,000 to rent. While on the way back, one of his interrogators from Immigration and Customs Enforcement lied to him:

You have a right to an attorney. While you can have an attorney paid for by the Iranian government, you should be careful, because that lawyer will probably report everything you say back to Tehran. You tell the Iranian lawyer the wrong thing, and it might endanger your family.

Because, of course, such a lawyer would readily violate attorney-client privilege to endanger his or her client’s family

Once Ardebili was in the United States, the U.S. government not only threw him into solitary confinement, but also they gave him a fictitious name to conceal what had been done. When an Ardebili relative in the United States was approached by Ardebili’s family in Iran, he hired Ross Reghabi, an Iranian-American lawyer in Beverly Hills, who assured the family that he could find Ardebili if he was here:

Reghabi was not a criminal lawyer. He specialized in family and business matters, and taught an advanced accounting class at the University of California, Los Angeles. But he knew enough to assure his friend that the U.S. government did not routinely hold people in secret confinement.

Don’t worry, he said. This is America, not Iran. Laws and procedures must be followed. People don’t just disappear.

Well, perhaps that was true at one time. It certainly wasn’t any longer.

So why was Ardebili in solitary confinement under an assumed name? Because the U.S. government had assumed his identity and was continuing to negotiate with the U.S. companies that had been approached by Ardebili. They found hundreds of contacts on Ardebili’s computer. And they planned on keeping Ardebili in the hole forever, if they had to, until they had run down all their contacts. And, according to the article, around 100 U.S. companies are still under investigation based on leads from Ardebili’s computer.

ABOVE: Amir Ardebili captured on
surveillance video in Tbilisi, Georgia

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An eight-part series has been running this week in the Philadelphia Inquirer on the U.S. sting operation conducted against Iranian national Amir Ardebili, which this blog first reported on here. Needless to say, much of the series so far contains a number of interesting details not previously reported on the sting operation and presumably will contain even more fascinating details on the prosecution and plea bargain in the upcoming installments. So far, the series has glossed over the question of the legality of the U.S. operation under international law and why the U.S. chose to engage in such questionable tactics to spear such a small fish as Ardebili.

One interesting detail in the report relates how some grandstanding by a political appointee in the Justice Department threatened the investigators’ plan to whisk Ardebili back to the United States and throw him into a black hole while they searched his laptop, continued the investigation, and waited for months of solitary confinement to soften Ardebili up to the idea of a guilty plea. The political appointee wanted to announce the apprehension of Ardebili at a press conference as soon as Ardebili was in cuffs, which would, of course, lead to inconvenient questions about where Ardebili was. The investigators headed off this plan by having a judge in the United States put all the information on the operation and planned arrest under seal.

The series also has new video of what took place in the hotel room in Tbilsi where Ardebili was apprehended. I was particularly amused by the preposterous faux-Russian accent put on by a Customs investigator called “Darius.” It sounded like “Darius” had boned up on this over-the-top accent by listening to Boris and Natasha in old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons. In the videos, Ardebili seems at best naive as the investigators ask questions that more sophisticated persons would clearly see as unrelated to the business transaction at hand and simply designed to set him up. Frankly the questioning reminded me of the legendary SNL sketch where a badly wired Linda Tripp with a flower mike tried to extract information from Monica Lewinsky at the Pentagon City Ritz Carlton.

The series continues on Thursday and Friday. Read the whole thing.