Washington: When Shahram Amiri emerged from the shadows into the spotlight six years ago, he was a young Iranian scientist who suddenly appeared on YouTube from a safe house, telling a bizarre story of having been kidnapped by the CIA.
Then, in another video that quickly followed, his story changed: He had come to the United States voluntarily to study, but desperately missed his son back in Tehran.
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Who was detained in 2010 when he returned home from the US after a court convicted him of spying for Washington.
Soon, father and son were reunited in Iran, in a joyous scene broadcast by the Iranian government.
Then Amiri disappeared, amid rumours that he had been imprisoned. Questions, of course, went unanswered: Was he a spy, recruited by the US for his insider knowledge of the Iranian nuclear program? Or a double agent, sent by Tehran to spread disinformation, or to learn what the Americans knew?
![Shahram Amiri (left) returns to Iran in July 2010, and is met by Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister Hassan Qashqavi.](/web/20160811135026im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/q/n/a/2/f/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gqn9g8.png/1470631135726.jpg)
On Sunday the case took what appears to be its final turn.
"Shahram Amiri was hanged for revealing the country's top secrets to the enemy," Gholam Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, a spokesman for Iran's Justice Ministry, told reporters in Tehran, according to international news services and the country's state news agency.
"Amiri had access to confidential military secrets and was connected to our number one enemy, the Great Satan," Mohseni-Ejei said. "He was sentenced to death in primary court and the sentence was confirmed by Supreme Court" after Amiri appealed.
Those stories confirmed initial reports from Saturday that quoted his mother saying she had seen his body.
![Shahram Amiri with his son Amir Hossein after his arrival at Imam Khomeini airport in July 2010.](/web/20160811135026im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/q/n/a/2/c/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gqn9g8.png/1470631135726.jpg)
The American, Israeli and European search to understand the scope of Iran's nuclear program - an intelligence effort that continues - has taken many bizarre turns that have become the stuff of books and film. And the drama of Amiri's apparent double defection came in a summer of espionage efforts against Iran gone wrong.
The Stuxnet computer virus was then replicating itself around the world, which ultimately revealed the sophisticated US-Israeli cyberattack on Iran's nuclear facilities that many today see as a turning point in the use of cyberweaponry.
![US Secretary of State John Kerry, left, with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in September 2015.](/web/20160811135026im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/p/5/6/3/u/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gqn9g8.png/1470631135726.jpg)
But few stories were as confusing, and at moments heart-rending, as Amiri's.
Among the side players was Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, who said as Amiri was returning to Iran: "He's free to go. He was free to come. Those decisions are his alone to make."
![In an undated handout image, a satellite view of a mountain in Iran where the Fordow uranium enrichment plant is located ...](/web/20160811135026im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/1/m/f/c/z/o/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gqn9g8.png/1470631135726.jpg)
Some of her emails, made public last year during the controversy over her private email server, show that her top foreign policy aide warned her that the story was about to break.
An email forwarded to Clinton by senior adviser Jake Sullivan on July 5, 2010, from Richard Morningstar, a former State Department special envoy for Eurasian energy, says, "Our friend has to be given a way out ... We should recognize his concerns and frame it in terms of a misunderstanding with no malevolent intent."
![The Natanz nuclear facility in Iran in 2002.](/web/20160811135026im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/h/t/u/i/h/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gqn9g8.png/1470631135726.jpg)
Another email, sent on July 12, 2010, by Sullivan, appears to refer to Amiri just before the story of his complicity became public.
"The gentleman ... has apparently gone to his country's interests section because he is unhappy with how much time it has taken to facilitate his departure" from the US, Sullivan wrote. "This could lead to problematic news stories in the next 24 hours."
![Shahram Amiri greets his son Amir Hossein after arriving back in Iran in July 2010.](/web/20160811135026im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/q/n/4/v/t/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gqn9g8.png/1470631135726.jpg)
Weeks after Amiri returned to Iran, US intelligence officials described the events on ground rules of anonymity to a small group of reporters.
Their story was that Amiri had been a voluntary recruit, interviewed and then placed in the agency's equivalent of a witness protection program. When he first told his CIA handlers that he planned to return, they warned him, according to the intelligence agency's account, that it would probably end with his head in a noose.
Amiri was 32 years old in 2009 when he left a university post to go on what he declared was a pilgrimage to Mecca. He disappeared when he got to Medina, in Saudi Arabia. He had left his shaving kit in an empty hotel room, and the Iranians guessed he was with the Americans - and they accused the US of kidnapping.
He was an unlikely spy, a bit bumbling and nervous. By all accounts, Amiri was not in the inner circle around Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the scientist who had run the weapons side of the Iranian nuclear program. But Amiri had seen a lot; he worked at the academic centre of research for the Iranian program. It now appears he may have begun work as a US source while he was still in Iran.
As a specialist in measuring nuclear radiation, he had been to a number of sensitive Iranian sites, all of great interest to intelligence officials. According to officials familiar with his debriefing, he was among the sources who told the Americans about the internal Iranian debate over whether the country needed a nuclear weapon or just a "threshold capability" to build one on short notice without violating the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty and inviting a military backlash.
By 2009, the CIA had apparently decided that the chances he would be detected were rising, and offered to get him out of the country. The agency promised him $US5 million and a new identity. Amiri believed his estranged wife would never leave Iran, and he decided to go alone, without his son.
After he was interviewed in Washington, he ended up near Tucson, Arizona, under the agency's national resettlement program, which provides cover and protection for cooperative foreign spies.
But he immediately missed his young son and began calling home. Iranian intelligence agencies pressured his family, and by one account threatened to harm his son.
They told Amiri to make a video claiming he had been kidnapped. He did, using a webcam to declare that he had been kidnapped in Medina "in a joint operation by the terror and abduction units" of the CIA and Saudi Arabia's intelligence service. He said he had been drugged and tortured. Two months later, in 2010, the video showed up on Iranian state television.
The CIA made its own video with Amiri, filmed in the friendly setting of a study. In that one, Amiri contradicted what he had said in the first. "I am free here," he said, "and I assure everyone that I am quite safe."
His estranged wife told Iranian television that the second video must have been faked. "He was reading text," she said. A few weeks later the Iranians broadcast a third video, in which Amiri returned to the story that he had been kidnapped, but had escaped his captors.
Behind the scenes, Amiri was telling his handlers that he had made a mistake by defecting, and only wanted to return to see his son. He was warned of what had happened to Soviet defectors - prison and potentially execution - who had returned.
The CIA's resettlement program has clear rules that if a defector wants to return home, there is no legal basis for the US to force him to stay. So in July 2010, Amiri ended up in a taxi to a side office of the Pakistani embassy in Washington, near the vice-president's residence. (In the absence of diplomatic relations between Iran and the United States, Pakistan represents Iran's interests.)
He landed in Tehran on July 15, 2010, and his young son was there to embrace him. The heartwarming picture was broadcast throughout the country. Amiri told Iranian journalists that he had been offered millions of dollars to stay in the United States and reveal all he knew about the nuclear program but had not done so. He told interviewers that he had never been in the two most sensitive Iranian nuclear sites, at Natanz and Fordow.
Weeks later, he disappeared.
His mother said on the BBC Persian service over the weekend that he had initially been sentenced to 10 years in prison, though Iranian officials had never announced that. Last month, she said, that punishment was changed to a death sentence. She said he had tried to console her, saying he would finally be free and at peace.
New York Times, USA Today