Free Republic

His name is Touraj Esmaeeli, and you haven’t heard it before. And yet, he’s a big story. He worked as a top advisor to the Iranian intelligence service, as an expert on that country’s cyberwar against the United States and other Western countries. Several of his colleagues have been arrested since last spring, accused of spying, but the spybust hasn’t been widely covered. Esmaeeli scooted off to Istanbul, where he first checked in to a hotel and then barely escaped a combination of Iranian and Turkish agents who had come to arrest him. He has taken refuge in a Western...

State-sponsored hackers penetrate the systems of other nations. It happens regularly. The United States does it. China does it. Russia does it. Iran does it. Sometimes, hacking reveals that someone in the hacking nation is working with the enemy. When that happens, someone dies. Sometimes, a secretary of state receives e-mails — on her unsecured, private e-mail server — about an Iranian scientist who is providing information to the United States and then that scientist is later executed for espionage.Throughout the scandal surrounding her use of an unsecured, private e-mail server, Hillary Clinton claimed that she “never sent or received...

An Iranian journalist writing about the nuclear negotiations between the United States and Iran has defected. In an interview Amir Hossein Motaghi, has some harsh words for his native Iran. He also has a damning indictment of America's role in the nuclear negotiations. “The U.S. negotiating team are mainly there to speak on Iran’s behalf with other members of the 5+1 countries and convince them of a deal," Motaghi told a TV station after just defecting from the Iranian delegation while abroad for the nuclear talks. The P 5 + 1 is made up of United States, United Kingdom, Russia,...