A Routine Police Complaint Leads the CIA to the Founding Father of Iran's Nuclear Program

The CIA's discovery of Masud Naraghi - the man who built the foundations of Iran's covert nuclear weapons program - began not with sophisticated intelligence work but with a local police report from a small town in New York's Hudson Valley. The scientist, then about 70 years old, had attracted attention for an embarrassing personal matter that brought FBI agents to his door.

Naraghi's unlikely path into CIA hands has been detailed in a New Yorker investigation about Kevin Chalker, a former agency case officer, "Hvylya" reports.

Naraghi had studied nuclear physics at the University of Michigan in the early 1960s, completed a doctorate at Case Western Reserve University, then returned to Iran to work for the country's atomic energy agency. He later quietly moved back to the United States in the early 1990s, bringing a large amount of cash that he used to start an engineering firm near Newburgh, New York. Previous CIA officers had interviewed him years earlier and concluded he had nothing useful to offer.

Chalker, who accompanied FBI agents to the meeting, thought otherwise. When Chalker mentioned the real name of another Iranian physicist the CIA had been working with, Naraghi's reaction was immediate and visceral. The scientist turned out to have been the founding figure of Iran's covert nuclear program - the man one might call Iran's counterpart to J. Robert Oppenheimer. It took Chalker two years of patient conversations to persuade Naraghi to share what he knew.

Once he agreed, Naraghi provided intelligence about how Iran had overcome weaknesses in the bomb blueprints it purchased from Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan and about the true scale of the country's nuclear ambitions. An internal CIA document praised the resulting intelligence as a new reporting stream on the origins of Iran's drive to become a nuclear power. Naraghi, who died in 2020, left behind a completed memoir that his family is now seeking to publish.

Earlier, "Hvylya" reported on why regime change alone cannot solve the Middle East's deeper structural problems.