He Helped Stop Iran from Getting the Bomb A former C.I.A. officer says that he recruited scientists as part of the United States’ effort to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program. By David D. Kirkpatrick March 30, 2026
Not long after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Kevin Chalker set out to become a spy. He was a thirty-year-old graduate student at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, in Washington, D.C., and he and his wife, Young, had a newborn son. She thought that this idea was terrible; having grown up in a left-leaning Jewish family in Chicago, she pictured killings and coups. She also worried that Chalker would turn out like his father—a gruff and taciturn man who had once worked for the Central Intelligence Agency and ended up as a construction worker in Fort Worth, Texas, where he kept trying to interest his daughter-in-law in Jesus, guns, and even knife-fighting.
Chalker reminded her that his father had been an enlisted marine who joined a C.I.A. paramilitary force in Southeast Asia during the early Vietnam War, a time when “the agency was doing wacky stuff all over the world”. Chalker promised her that he would do only “traditional espionage—no big deal”. A few days later, he queued up at the C.I.A. table at his school’s job fair. Chalker had a more martial bearing than most students; he had been a nationally ranked judo fighter and a Golden Gloves boxer, and had spent two years at the United States Air Force Academy before dropping out due to an eye injury. He also had an aptitude for languages, speaking fluent Japanese, basic Mandarin, and a little Farsi. After a proficiency test and several interviews, he entered the first class of C.I.A. trainees who had applied after 9/11. His training culminated at the Farm, the legendary base at Camp Peary, where he was assigned the internal alias Fred E. Snappleton.
I first heard of Chalker in 2018. After a six-year career at the agency, he had set up a security-consulting company, Global Risk Advisors, and one of its few publicly known clients was the emirate of Qatar. That spring, the investor Elliott Broidy—a mega-donor to President Donald Trump—filed a lawsuit claiming Qatar had paid Chalker to orchestrate cyberattacks against him. Leaked emails revealed Broidy had tried to turn the Trump White House against Qatar to win business with the United Arab Emirates, and I covered his legal claim against Chalker for the Times. I had no reason to doubt Chalker had played a role in the hack.
So I was surprised when, in early 2024, Chalker emailed me wanting to talk. We met at his cavernous office in the World Trade Center. Now fifty-four, Chalker is nearly six feet tall and barrel-chested, with short brown hair and a thick, graying red beard. Aside from a receptionist, he appeared to be alone. Chalker told me that before Broidy’s lawsuit, Global Risk Advisors had employed nearly two hundred people and earned about a hundred million dollars a year. He had also founded a second company, Qrypt, which develops cutting-edge quantum encryption. But the lawsuit’s publicity drove away all clients, and Chalker was forced to lay off his entire staff. Since then, he said, he had “not earned a single penny,” lost a lectureship at Yale, and was even denied insurance policies because he was deemed too great a risk.
News reports alleged Chalker had hacked various eminent figures and deployed spy tricks like covert surveillance and honey traps to help Qatar secure the 2022 World Cup. Chalker denied all allegations but said the stress of the lawsuit eventually required him to have esophagus surgery. Recently, however, he and Broidy settled the suit. Chalker told me the terms were confidential but that he wanted to repair his reputation. He insisted he was an American patriot and was willing to talk publicly, for the first time, about his years of clandestine work for the C.I.A.—which, he said, had “prevented Iran from getting a nuke”.
Chalker told me that, as promised to his wife, he had never personally engaged in combat or killing. Yet he acknowledged he had risked his life and indirectly carried responsibility for some killings. He insisted he helped obtain pivotal information that laid the groundwork for over a decade of American efforts to disrupt the Iranian nuclear program, from the Stuxnet cyberattacks around 2010 to the U.S. air strikes on Iranian atomic-energy facilities in the summer of 2025. Chalker spoke in detail, sensing a certain resentment that the C.I.A. had offered him no help as the lawsuit ruined his life.
Chalker began as a clandestine-services trainee on the East Africa desk at Langley. Part of the work involved paying Somali warlords to capture or kill suspected Al Qaeda terrorists—"Fifty thousand dollars alive or twenty-five thousand dead,” he recalled. One assignment involved shipping dry ice to Mogadishu to transport human-tissue samples for DNA testing to confirm identities before paying bounties. When transportation in and out of Mogadishu became a problem due to gunfire, Chalker suggested using inbound charter flights delivering khat—a legal narcotic leaf—which always landed without trouble. The desk chief loved the idea, and the C.I.A.’s inspector general ultimately consented to the reliance on khat-shipment flights.
After completing his assignment, Chalker spent months learning tradecraft at the Farm, including defensive driving, weapons use, and surveillance detection. At graduation, he expected to work in East Asia based on his language skills. Instead, his assignment said “cp/irannuc”—counterproliferation against Iran’s nuclear program. Chalker was shocked; he had a D in physics and had never been to the Middle East. When he complained, the officer handling his assignment—whom he identified as Valerie Plame—told him to “go sit in that fucking cubicle and don’t speak until spoken to”.
Before 9/11, Iran’s nuclear ambitions were a relatively low priority. The C.I.A. knew Iran had bought atomic bomb instructions from Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan, but believed outdated blueprints had handicapped them. Following the invasion of Iraq, President Bush directed the National Security Council to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. While the Pentagon suggested commando operations to kill scientists, the C.I.A. proposed recruiting them to defect. Bush authorized the C.I.A. project, which became known publicly in 2007 as Brain Drain.
When Chalker joined the Iran desk, he found it staffed mostly by analysts, with only a few trained field operators available, some of whom were struggling with alcoholism. Chalker quickly became the most senior case officer available. He learned the agency had few assets inside Iran, though a decade earlier a scientist code-named Bernadine had provided insights. However, Bernadine had become erratic and was viewed as a potential double agent. Soon after, Bernadine called headquarters using a secret code, and Chalker was ordered to meet him outside Iran, treating the situation as potentially hostile.
Chalker met Bernadine on a European street corner. To avoid being kidnapped, Chalker escorted him through a hotel lobby so they would be seen together. Chalker hammered Bernadine with hostile questions, but Bernadine insisted he was working with the agency to protect his children from a nuclear-arms race, not for money. Bernadine provided new details and diagrams that checked out with physicists at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Chalker concluded that Bernadine’s previous handler had fabricated intelligence and embezzled nearly two million dollars from the C.I.A..
Chalker later arranged to sneak Bernadine’s family out of Iran. He then planned to extract Bernadine from a Middle Eastern city. During a "brush-pass" in a souk, the local case officer botched the recognition signals—carrying the wrong newspaper and tying her scarf to the wrong part of her purse. Panicked, Chalker aborted the handoff and hurried to the airport. It was later revealed that the country's intelligence agency had been monitoring the local officer and shared the safe house location with the I.R.G.C.. Working with a different undercover officer in Europe, Chalker eventually successfully extracted Bernadine to America.
To find more defectors, Chalker used Bernadine’s leads. In 2006, based in New York, he followed a tip about an Iranian-born scientist, Masud Naraghi, allegedly soliciting prostitutes. Chalker sat in on an F.B.I. interrogation of Naraghi, who ran an engineering firm called Torr International. Naraghi appeared "too smart to be playing so dumb," and when Chalker mentioned Bernadine’s name, Naraghi "turned sheet white". Naraghi, code-named Shelve, turned out to be the "Oppenheimer of Iran". He eventually shared insights about how Iran had overcome weaknesses in A. Q. Khan’s blueprints. The agency even tried to line up a publisher for Naraghi’s memoir to encourage other defectors, though the project felt too "cloak and dagger" for the editor at Ecco Press.
Chalker specialized in the “cold pitch”—recruiting a stranger in minutes. He would often pose as a junior researcher at conferences to approach scientists. However, he said the ruse rarely worked; most scientists immediately guessed he was a spy and assumed he was there to kill them. Chalker typically had ten minutes to explain that he could secure them a new life in the U.S.—and that, if they rejected the offer, they would regrettably be assassinated. While the U.S. government denied killing civilian scientists, Israel’s ongoing assassination campaign made the threat highly plausible. Former officials said the C.I.A. sometimes shared intelligence with Mossad that enabled these killings, preserving deniability for the U.S..
Chalker didn't know the exact fates of those who refused him, but he was confident they were killed. Israel’s campaign sometimes complicated his work; he once had to send an urgent cable to Mossad to prevent them from killing an asset code-named Hustle. Hustle eventually defected and provided schematics of Iran's missile development node. Other scientists refused his offers to protect their families. One scientist, code-named Ejection, was convinced Chalker was a Mossad operative. Chalker "peeled the onion," showing photos and notes from former colleagues to build trust. Ejection finally agreed after running into a colleague's relative who confirmed the man was alive in the U.S. under the protection of a "burly C.I.A. officer" with a red beard.
Ejection provided intelligence on the Natanz facility, but headquarters then ordered Chalker to persuade him to return to Iran as a mole. Chalker pitched it as a chance for Ejection to prove he was "smarter and better" than those who hadn't promoted him. Ejection agreed after Chalker haggled him down from a three-million-dollar request to ten thousand dollars to avoid being conspicuous at the airport. Chalker called a case officer’s job "to convince someone that something is a really good idea—even though it is actually the worst idea ever".
Chalker’s defectors contributed to a dramatic leap in the U.S. government's understanding of Iran's nuclear program. This intelligence helped carry out the Stuxnet attack and informed the 2015 nuclear deal negotiations. Drawing on this information, the Pentagon even constructed life-size facsimiles of Iranian facilities to plan bombing raids.
Chalker resigned from the C.I.A. in 2010 after his wife gave him an ultimatum. He then built Global Risk Advisors into a lucrative, albeit shadowy, business. While Broidy’s allegations of hacking were plausible given the firm's specialties, evidence surfaced that much of Chalker's revenue actually came from covert work for the U.S. government, and shell companies in Gibraltar were used to move C.I.A. money. Chalker’s lawyers asked the C.I.A. to quash Broidy’s lawsuit on national-security grounds, but the agency refused, leading Chalker to feel abandoned.
The lawsuit ended in a settlement on April 8, 2024, with no money changing hands and no criminal charges against Chalker. Ultimately, while expert Marko Milanovic noted that the killing of scientists in peacetime was "just murder," Chalker viewed the campaign against him as its own kind of success. Referring to the "nation-state denial-and-disruption campaign" that cost him his business and health, he admitted, “they did a bang-up job”.
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