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Iranian scientist Shahram Amiri is back in Iran today, where he received a hero’s welcome, complete with wreathes of flowers and a tearful reunion with his 7 year old son. Amiri says he was abducted by the C.I.A. and Saudi intelligence officers on a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia last year. But American officials say he defected to the US, and then had second thoughts. The twists and turns of Amiri’s tale often sound like a spy thriller. Indeed the story has haunting parallels to a recent novel by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius.

• David Ignatius’ book, The Increment
• David Ignatius’ Washington Post blog

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MARCO WERMAN: Shahram Amiri received a hero’s welcome today on his return to his native Iran. The nuclear scientist says he was abducted by the CIA and Saudi intelligence officers on a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia last year. But American officials say he defected to the US, and then had second thoughts. The twists and turns of Amiri’s tale sound like a spy thriller. And as it turns out, the story has some parallels with a recent novel by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius. Ignatius says the real Iranian scientist caught the CIA’s attention in the same way as the fictional Iranian scientist he describes in his spy novel The Increment.

DAVID IGNATIUS:  The similarity is that the initial contact may have come in what the CIA describes as a virtual walk-in. That’s where someone from another country contacts the CIA through its website. This has become an increasingly common way for people who want to offer information, they eventually want to defect, to initiate the process. A little shorthand for the virtual walk-in is a VW, so you’ll say in the CIA quarters, do we have any new VW’s today? And I’ve had somebody with a wink and a nod say we may just have had an interesting Iranian VW of late. So I was going on the most fragmentary information and in this case it’s possible that is was closer to reality even than the author expected.

WERMAN:  Apparently CIA.gov, the agency’s website, has a link for virtual defectors?

IGNATIUS: If you go to CIA.gov and you click the right boxes, the live links, you will find an invitation to commit treason. It’s one of the most interesting things on the web. And it tells you if you’re somebody in a foreign land who has information that might be of interest to the United States government, here’s what you do. Here’s how you send us a message. But I am fairly confident, whether it was Amiri or somebody else, that we have had these virtual walk-ins from Iran and indeed from the Iranian nuclear program in the past. It’s one of the ways we’ve been getting a handle on what the Iranians are doing in their secret labs.

WERMAN: Now, you’ve said the problem with defectors, and I assume you mean both the real ones and the fictional ones you write about, is that they’re all too human. What do you mean by that?

IGNATIUS: Defectors almost be definition are people who are troubled by what’s going on in their lives. They’re in their native country, in the case of Amiri, he’s in Iran. They often are feeling unloved, unappreciated, they’re feeling that what they’re doing is wrong. Sometimes they feel it’s morally wrong, sometimes they feel it’s wrong in a more limited sense that they’re not being properly compensated for it. Their problems over the years, and this is such a recurring phenomena for the CIA, come when the defector arrives in the United States, and all of a sudden he’s in a place where people don’t speak his language, the food is different, the information that was so hot when he first came out is kind of dated and people are saying don’t you know more and get a little frustrated with him and suddenly he’s gone from being Mr. Superstar, who everybody crowded around, people are pressing money on him, arranging his defection, that’s yesterday’s news. I wonder if that’s not part of what happened in the case of Amiri. I’m just guessing here, but doing so on the basis of having studied many cases of defectors.

WERMAN: You were saying you were just guessing on the conflicting loyalties that Shahram Amiri has. What do you think was going on the most recent weeks before he left for Iran?

IGNATIUS: It does seem clear that pressure, direct or indirect, was being put on him. He left his wife and child back in Iran. I’m told by a US official that that was his decision. I had asked isn’t it typical for you to try to bring the family out so that the defector will have some support. And the answer was yes it is, but in this case Amiri decided he wanted to come out, he made the decision that he wanted to come out alone, and he left those people behind. But once he was in the US, I think feelings of guilt, perhaps nurtured by Iranians who were in contact with him, set him to thinking that he’d done the wrong thing.

WERMAN: What crucial intelligence about the inner workings of the CIA and the American government might Amiri take back to Iran?

IGNATIUS: Amiri now will be interrogated in detail in what I would describe as a kind of reverse engineering. The Iranians will want to exactly what questions the Americans asked. They’ll want to know what areas the Americans seemed uncertain about the answers, where the Americans seemed to be getting new information from Amiri indicating that there’d been gaps in their knowledge. It’s possible that the Iranians had fed Amiri with information that was false. You never can be sure about that. Either with Amiri witting or more likely unwitting.

WERMAN:  David Ignatius is a columnist for The Washington Post. His spy thriller about Iran’s nuclear program is called The Increment. David, nice to have you on the show. Thank you.

IGNATIUS: Thank you, Marco.

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