WASHINGTON -- The CIA and the FBI have concluded that an Iranian defector in Turkey who claims to be a former Iranian intelligence official and terrorist mastermind is an impostor who lacks basic knowledge of Iran's intelligence apparatus and "has been lying about lots of stuff," a senior U.S. official said Saturday.
In an unrecorded, off-camera interview with the CBS News program "60 Minutes" a week ago, the defector identified himself as Ahmad Behbahani and claimed to have been in charge of foreign assassinations and terrorist operations for the Iranian government for more than a decade.According to the news show, the defector said he had documentary evidence that Iran was behind the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am jet over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed 270 people and the 1996 attack on the Khobar Towers housing complex in Saudi Arabia that took the lives of 19 U.S. military personnel.
But after a series of debriefing sessions with the defector at an undisclosed location in Turkey, counterterrorist experts from the CIA and the FBI have concluded that he is not Ahmad Behbahani and that, at 32 years old, he could not possibly have masterminded terrorist operations dating to the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, when he would have been just 20, the official said.
The defector's true identity, the official added, remains a mystery.
"He knows a few things, but nothing very much -- stuff that could have possibly come from somebody else," the official said. "But when it comes to serious stuff that he should know, he comes up empty. He still has not provided anything that has led CIA and FBI folks to believe his story."
Turkish authorities, who are holding the defector, also have expressed skepticism about his claims. The Turkish news agency Anatolia quoted Turkey's director general for security, Turan Genc, as saying last week that "he is not a person of great significance. There was nothing tangible in the statements he made."
Iran also has vehemently denied the defector's claims, calling him a plant by Iran's exiled opposition, the Mujahideen el-Khalq.
On Thursday, Iran's intelligence ministry claimed that the defector was an opposition member who had been schooled in espionage techniques in Iraq. The ministry said the defector was born in 1968, and it identified him as Shahram Beladi Behbahani.
U.S. officials said that even if the defector is a fraud, some of his claims still could be true. U.S. investigators have long suspected that Iran "handed off" the Pan Am bombing to Libyans after German police broke up a Palestinian terrorist cell that originally had been contracted for the job. Iran had vowed to get revenge after an American warship, the USS Vincennes, fired a missile that destroyed an Iranian civilian airliner earlier in 1988.