The intelligence gathered from Iranian nuclear scientists who defected to the United States contributed to three of the most consequential American actions against Iran's weapons program: the Stuxnet cyberattack around 2010, the Obama administration's nuclear deal in 2015, and the U.S. air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in the summer of 2025. A New Yorker investigation has traced much of that intelligence back to a single CIA case officer, Kevin Chalker, who ran the agency's defector recruitment campaign.
As "Hvylya" reports, the investigation by David D. Kirkpatrick draws on internal CIA documents, former senior officials, and extensive interviews with Chalker himself to reconstruct the operation's scope.
One key recruit, given the code name Ejection, initially refused to believe Chalker was CIA rather than Mossad. The scientist became convinced only after an accidental encounter inside Iran with a relative of another defector, who confirmed the recruits were alive and protected in America. Once persuaded, Ejection agreed to cooperate - but headquarters then changed the plan, asking Chalker to send him back into Iran rather than bringing him to the United States. Ejection had access to Natanz, where thousands of centrifuges enriched uranium underground, and the agency wanted more.
Gary Samore, a former senior Obama administration official who worked on the 2015 nuclear deal, told The New Yorker that negotiators had felt confident the agreement would cover all of Iran's enrichment activity because the CIA had achieved a thorough picture of the program. Samore said the intelligence included details at the level of facility blueprints, though he could not attribute any specific piece to an individual defector.
The Pentagon used the defectors' knowledge to build life-size underground replicas of Iranian nuclear facilities, duplicating even wall thickness. The Air Force relied on these replicas to plan bombing raids against sites at Natanz, Fordow, and Isfahan over the past two years. U.S. Special Forces have also trained on them. President Trump is reportedly weighing a commando operation against one of the facilities to capture enriched uranium.
Read more: RUSI's warning about a "magazine abyss" as key U.S. interceptors near depletion.