What would make someone switch sides and join America’s enemies? It’s easy to envision an America-hating leftist doing such a thing, but it’s much harder to understand when the defector in question was, to all outward appearances anyway, a patriot who was devoted to the service of her country. What made Monica Witt, a former Air Force intelligence specialist, give her allegiance to a nation that chants “Death to America”? Her story is a cautionary tale with lessons that are almost certain to be ignored.
Monica Witt joined the United States Air Force in 1997, when she was just 18 years old. According to a Sunday Fox News report, she was initially “assigned to an RC-135 reconnaissance airplane crew,” but a more significant incident for her life’s trajectory came the following year, when Witt was “assigned to the U.S. Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. For it was there that she learned to speak and write Farsi, the language of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
After that, the Air Force sent Witt to "several overseas locations in order to conduct classified missions collecting signals intelligence." In 2002, she landed in Saudi Arabia. She was “assigned as an Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) special agent criminal investigator and counterintelligence officer”; this work led her to be “deployed elsewhere in the Middle East, including Iraq in 2005 and Qatar in 2006.”
Witt was clearly a highly trusted individual. Her participation in a "Special Access Program" (SAP) “gave her access to classified information, including ‘details of ongoing counterintelligence operations, true names of sources, and the identities of U.S. agents involved in the recruitment of those sources.’” This was someone who could do a great deal of damage to U.S. intelligence operations if what she knew fell into the wrong hands, and that’s exactly what ultimately happened.
First, however, Witt left the Air Force in 2008, although she continued working for AFOSI as a government contractor. She also enrolled in the University of Maryland, got a bachelor’s degree, and went on to do graduate work in Middle East studies at George Washington University. She already had several years of experience in the Middle East, and clearly those years had a major effect on her; classmates at GWU recall that she was "withdrawn" and "alienated," as well as preoccupied with "drone strikes, extrajudicial killings and atrocities against children."
Those are claims that Islamic jihadis and their sympathizers make against the U.S. in its actions in the Middle East. And this was no coincidence: by February 2012, Witt had “set her plans to betray the United States and defect to Iran in motion.” She went to Tehran at that time in order to attend the Islamic Republic’s International Conference on Hollywoodism, “an anti-western event held during the Fajr International Film Festival each year ‘aimed at condemning American moral standards and promoting anti-U.S. propaganda.’”
Although not a scheduled speaker, she ended up speaking at this conference anyway. She "was identified as a U.S. veteran and made statements that were critical of the U.S. government, knowing these videos would be broadcast by Iranian media outlets." Those same media outlets, all state-controlled, also broadcast her very public conversion to Islam.
Witt is also accused of also taking the opportunity of that trip to Iran to establish her trustworthiness to Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officials as “a credible source of American national defense intelligence.” She has been charged with giving U.S. government secrets to the IRGC.
Three months after Witt’s eventful Tehran junket, the FBI started to get a shadow of a clue of what was happening, and warned her that Iranian officials might try to recruit her for espionage. A bit slow on the uptake, there, eh, feds? For by that time, Witt was working with Marzieh Hashemi, an American-born journalist of Iranian descent who had become a naturalized citizen of the Islamic Republic, on an anti-American propaganda film that was shown all over Iran.
Related: What Do You Think Happened After This English Teen Converted to Islam?
She fled to the Islamic Republic shortly after making the film. On Thursday, the U.S. government announced a $200,000 for any information that leads to her arrest, but a payout is unlikely: Witt is almost certainly in the Islamic Republic of Iran and far out of the reach of American officials.
Nevertheless, her case includes numerous lessons. It illustrates yet again what nearly everyone in the West prefers to deny: that Islam is political. She didn’t just change her private religious beliefs. Monica Witt’s conversion to Islam meant that she became a citizen of the umma, the global Islamic community, and she apparently considered that to mean that she was an enemy of the United States. And so she has ended up being accused of espionage on behalf of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
If Monica Witt had never converted to Islam, she might still be a loyal American citizen. Should converts to Islam in the U.S. military receive greater scrutiny than, say, converts to Christianity? That would likely be considered “Islamophobic.” It also might prove to be a necessary measure for the preservation of the republic.
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