{"id":44499,"date":"2019-03-15T08:39:18","date_gmt":"2019-03-15T13:39:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=44499"},"modified":"2019-03-15T08:42:00","modified_gmt":"2019-03-15T13:42:00","slug":"us-officials-offered-my-friend-cash-to-take-down-tehrans-power-grid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=44499","title":{"rendered":"US officials offered my friend cash to take down Tehran\u2019s power grid"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

US officials offered my friend cash to take down Tehran\u2019s power\u00a0grid<\/a><\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\"\"\/<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

It took a country-wide power outage in Venezuela, whispers of a cyberattack, and smug<\/a> tweets<\/a> from US officials<\/a> to make me suddenly recall the cloak-and-dagger story of a close Iranian-American friend nine years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My friend, an engineer\u200a\u2014\u200awho I will not name for obvious reasons and who I will call \u2018Kourosh\u2019 for the purpose of this article\u200a\u2014\u200arevealed to me in 2010 that he was approached by two \u201cState Department employees\u201d who offered him $250,000 to \u201cdo something very simple\u201d during his upcoming trip to Tehran.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kourosh was freaking out because he didn\u2019t know how these guys knew he was going to Iran in the first place, and how they knew he was \u201ccash-strapped,\u201d in the second.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He wasn\u2019t a particularly political person, though he had participated in some DC protests in the aftermath of the hotly contested 2009 presidential elections. He was just one of thousands of Iranian-American engineers in the Washington-Maryland-Virginia technology belt looking to make a decent living.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kourosh told the US officials that he was not interested, that if Iran needed to make changes, Iranians inside the country were the only ones who should do it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I begged him to let me write this story, but he was very nervous and declined. Over the next year or two, I pushed some more and he gave me further information, but wouldn\u2019t budge on its publication. Here\u2019s what he revealed:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The State Department guys had since approached him a second time. They offered him further details about the job. They wanted him to disable Tehran\u2019s power grid in exchange for the $250k. They needed someone with technical skills, but said the job was a simple one. He would have to go to a specific location in the Tehran area with a laptop or similar communication device and punch in a code.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

US officials offered my friend cash to take down Tehran\u2019s power\u00a0grid It took a country-wide power outage in Venezuela, whispers of a cyberattack, and smug tweets from US officials to make me suddenly recall the cloak-and-dagger story of a close Iranian-American friend nine years ago. My friend, an engineer\u200a\u2014\u200awho I will not name for obvious reasons and who I will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[441,14273,1574,24676,827,2344,851],"class_list":["post-44499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","tag-iran","tag-medium","tag-power-grid","tag-sharmine-narwani","tag-united-states","tag-us-state-department","tag-venezuela"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44499"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44499\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44500,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44499\/revisions\/44500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}