Dissident Hunters

• July 10, 2025

On a balmy night in October 2019, the defector rode his bike home. He’d just finished a long shift helping waiters serve yogurt-smothered kabobs at a restaurant in Yalova, a seaside town an hour from Istanbul, Turkey. By this time of night, many of the shops had closed. Most of Yalova was home watching TV; traffic was sparse on the dimly lit streets. Before he defected, Mohammad Rezaie had served 17 years in Iran’s naval services. The military had taught him vigilance, but lately he had more reasons to stay alert. Even though he was now 1,500 miles away from Iran, the regime had not forgotten his betrayal.

Rezaie had trained as a gunner on ships, eventually going on to train other Navy sailors in radar navigation simulators. He fled in 2017 after being informed that he would be deployed to fight in Syria, where a bloody, multifactional civil war had been raging for years. The regime in Tehran was supplying weapons and troops to Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, and Rezaie would be one of many Iranian men sent to aid Assad in keeping his grip on the country. Rezaie didn’t want to kill children, and he certainly did not want to fight another nation’s war. But defecting is not without its own costs: since fleeing Iran, the former naval officer has been just scraping by, both financially and emotionally. He was lonely, short on cash, and on antidepressants.

That night in Yalova, as Rezaie cycled home through secluded alleys, a Mercedes whizzed past him. He noticed several men inside the car staring at him. At six feet tall and 200 pounds, Rezaie often does not have much to fear, even on a dark street. But something about the situation sent tension shooting through his body. I’m being paranoid, he told himself. Still, he pedaled faster.

Another vehicle, a BMW, pulled up alongside him. The passenger window rolled down, and Rezaie could make out a man in a suit and tie, with a pointy beard and the outline of a pot belly. “Do you know me?” he asked Rezaie.

Rezaie did recognize him. The former naval officer had seen him once, weeks ago, outside the kabob restaurant. At that time, the stranger, dressed casually in a cap and T-shirt, had introduced himself as Angel. The two men had shared a smoke, and Angel had even offered to get Rezaie to the West — he had a foreign girlfriend, Angel had said, and she could help. It was a generous, but suspect, offer. Rezaie knew better than to trust a stranger promising to take him abroad. Rezaie had made his excuses and left Angel on the street, the cigarette still lit.

As Rezaie peered into the BMW, he realized that he also recognized the man in the driver’s seat. His name was Ismail, and he’d been hanging around the kabob restaurant, too.

Days earlier, Ismail introduced Rezaie to a pretty, platinum blonde American woman named Katherine. She’d visited the restaurant in ripped jeans and a white button-down shirt. With short hair and a full face of makeup, she looked like a model. Katherine had told him, in English, that she would hire him to captain her ship for $10,000 a month. He could sail to Greece and then Europe. Was this Angel’s girlfriend? Maybe the stranger’s offer wasn’t too good to be true. Rezaie had been impressed by Katherine and had even begun to hope that this was where his life would turn around.

The instructions: come to Tuzla, another Turkish municipality, where Katherine’s vessel was docked. Rezaie had asked to see the details of the cargo ship. But after looking up the ship’s International Maritime Organization number — akin to a license plate for a sea vessel — he had seen it was at another location 60 miles from Tuzla. Something had felt off. His suspicions raised, he had refused to go to Tuzla.

In the days after, Rezaie’s doubts were overtaken by his loneliness. Life in exile was miserable, an existence in limbo. So little had filled his days except the anxiety of waiting for something, anything, to happen. That night, as he stared at the men in the BMW, deep down he wanted very badly to believe that they were his friends — that they were kind people who simply cared about the plight of an Iranian refugee.

Ultimately, the voice of caution won out. Rezaie began to walk his bike away from the BMW. But suddenly, the car cut him off. Then Ismail and another man — a slight figure with silver hair that Rezaie had not met before but would later learn was Ismail’s cousin, Erdal — exited the car. They had reached a street corner near a crowded cafe. The men dashed toward Rezaie, who let go of his bike, letting it clatter as it fell to the ground.

“Get in the car,” one of the men demanded. “We want to talk to you.”

His heart pounding, Rezaie stood his ground, silently telling himself to stay calm.

Ismail said that they were there to save Rezaie from a group of assassins working for the Iranian regime that wanted him dead.

The story was fantastical, but for an Iranian defector, it was not implausible. It wasn’t even the first time that he’d heard this story in the last month. Rezaie had previously received threats from the regime, which is known to kidnap and execute military defectors — a stern warning for all its troops. Just a couple weeks earlier, a Yalova police officer had gone to Rezaie’s home, saying a team was out to kidnap him.

The officer said that he would protect Rezaie if he gave him $10,000. Rezaie had blown him off — grifts were common among Turkish police. But the reappearance of Angel and Ismail, together, sparked fresh alarm. Perhaps they were, in fact, trying to help him — and perhaps that Mercedes that Rezaie had spotted earlier was out to get him. Still, it was just as plausible that Angel and Ismail were the kidnappers that the bribe-seeking officer had warned him about. All Rezaie knew at this point was that someone was out to get him. So who was friend and who was foe?

Angel grew impatient. “Get in the car now!”

“I’m not coming with you guys,” Rezaie said, laughing nervously. It was three against one, but as he sized up his opponents, he took comfort in seeing that they were older and less fit. (Rezaie went to the gym every day; working out was one way to stave off the uncertainty and loneliness of his new life.) The other men may have come to similar conclusions about how they would fare in a physical confrontation. Ismail intervened, trying to de-escalate the situation. “Rezaie is my friend. I can convince him,” he told the others.

Ismail then turned to Rezaie, reminding him about Katherine, the pretty blonde whose suspicious ship Rezaie had declined to captain. She was actually a CIA agent, Ismail explained, who had hired them to bring Rezaie to the US consulate in Istanbul. She wanted to take him to the US to save him from the Iranian regime.

The whole story — that Katherine was in the CIA, that the CIA would care about a single sailor, that they would tell him this on a street corner in the middle of the night — sounded ridiculous to Rezaie. But dismissing the entire thing raised even more questions: why would Katherine, an American woman with no connections to Iran, conspire to harm him? Nothing added up in either direction.

Angel got out of the car. They were now going to take a photo together, he said, to send to Katherine. The men posed together — Rezaie in the middle, flanked by Erdal on his left and Angel on his right, with their arms linked tight — staring unsmilingly at Ismail as he snapped the photo.

“Get in the car. We want to take another picture with you,” Angel said.

Perhaps it was resignation, perhaps it was hope — or maybe the escalating strangeness of it all had simply worn him down. This time, Rezaie complied.

Since its founding in 1979, the Islamic Republic has been known for kidnapping and killing its critics at home. But the regime has also become notorious for chasing down its dissidents abroad, from the US to France to the Netherlands. Iran is keenly aware at all times that a single person can spark a revolution — after all, the charismatic Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was once an exile in France, before leading the modern state of Iran as we now know it.

In 2020, Jamshid Sharmahd, a 65-year-old Iranian German dissident residing in southern California, was on a layover in Dubai, UAE, when he was kidnapped by Iranian forces. Sharmahd was taken to Iran and put on trial. Iran accused Sharmahd of planning an attack on a mosque that killed Iranians, sharing classified military information, and being part of a terror organization. Sharmahd’s family denied the charges.

Sharmahd was convicted and handed the death penalty in October 2024. Germany closed its embassy in Tehran in response. Iran’s judiciary made a statement after his execution: “Without a doubt, the divine promise regarding the supporters of terrorism will be fulfilled, and this is a definite promise.”

Sharmahd was accused of leading a pro-monarchy organization that is classified was a terrorist group by the Iranian regime. In comparison, military defectors like Rezaie are small fries.

For Rezaie, like many Iranian dissidents fleeing their country, the first step was crossing the border into Turkey. But staying in Turkey is dangerous — the Iranian regime has reach and connections in that country that it does not elsewhere. Nevertheless, Turkey still functions as an opposition haven, hosting the largest number of migrants — about 3.2 million, including thousands of asylum-seekers waiting for resettlement to a third country.

There’s a good reason for this: Turkey is one of the few countries Iranians can travel to without a visa. As for Iranian dissidents who have been banned from leaving their home country, they can hire smugglers to take them across the 332-mile border with Turkey. In 2018, more than 4,000 Iranians crossed to Turkey illegally, and that number nearly doubled by 2023. Since Israel started bombing Iran on June 13th and Iran’s airports closed, hundreds of Iranians are crossing by land into Turkey daily. The regime accelerated its executions of suspected spies in Iran.

Safety eludes them even after they escape. Iranian dissidents have been gunned down on the streets of Istanbul or kidnapped and taken back to Iran to be tried and later executed. An Iranian diplomat now sanctioned by the US was convicted in a Turkish court of murdering Iranian cybersecurity expert Masoud Molavi Vardanjani — the judgment came after the diplomat had fled to Iran.

Tehran also recruits attractive women to lure lonely, exiled men to the Turkish-Iran border, where Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) can seize them. The women who operate these honeytraps are also known as “regime swallows” — named for the sweet-voiced migratory bird. In 2020, a woman working with the regime convinced Habib Chaab, an Iranian dissident residing in Sweden, to fly to Istanbul. He went to meet her at a gas station per her instructions; there, men snatched him into a white van and drove him across the border to Iran, where Chaab was tried and convicted for his supposed involvement in a 2018 attack on a military parade in southern Iran. Three years after being lured to Istanbul, Chaab was executed.

“Iran has been a persistent perpetrator of transnational repression for decades. It changes depending on the political situation,” says Marcus Michaelson, an Iran expert at the Toronto-based Citizen Lab. “The scale and scope has widened… so it has intensified.” Iran’s government has become more hard-line and aggressive in the last decade. The violent treatment of the opposition in exile has escalated, as well. To capture dissidents abroad, the regime outsources espionage and hitmen to corrupt local authorities and organized crime.

“It’s easier for them to deny the operation and have other people doing the dirty work for them,” Michaelson says.

Timur Soykan, a Turkish investigative journalist who authored a book about a drug lord conspiring with Iran to kidnap and kill targets on Turkish soil, says the Islamic Republic recruits local criminals with connections inside the Turkish government. “If you have a connection within the government … you can get into the guarded security systems. From there, you can find out where the person’s phone signal is coming from and use the plate number recognition system — what [freeway] exits they used, where they came from, where they’re going, if they’ve left the country.”

There’s also a facial recognition system that finds people, Soykan says. With a photo of an escaped dissident, the regime’s hired help can retrieve an address and go directly to the dissident’s home. The Iranian regime can appropriate all of the Turkish police’s technological resources to capture its opponents.

The surveillance dragnet deployed by Iran and the viciousness of its tactics are well documented through a long history of kidnappings, renditions, and assassinations. Yet there is no precedent to explain how Katherine, a middle-aged American from Texas, got wrapped up in an operation hatched by one of the United States’ major adversaries.

Sometimes, it’s not clear who’s a victim or perpetrator

It took our team two years to unravel the mystifying plot. Sources continue to reach out, even from prison, to offer information as I write this. We reached out several times to Iranian officials in both Iran and Turkey, but they did not respond to our questions.

The enigma of Katherine, whose last name The Verge is withholding because she wasn’t indicted, unfolds inside a tale of espionage and kidnapping that led to a trial in Turkey that I attended for more than a year. Hundreds of court documents unveiled a secret operation to kidnap two military defectors and a businessman, and how women like Katherine were accomplices — willingly or unwillingly — to an international crime.

In Iran’s web of hunting down dissidents across borders, women are both culprits and victims in stories that play out like spy novels, complete with illicit love affairs, betrayal, and treason. Sometimes, it’s not clear who’s a victim or perpetrator. Could Katherine have been both?

Inside the BMW, surrounded by the three men claiming to be his concerned friends, Rezaie contemplated his next move. Angel took a group selfie. A few taps on his phone, and he looked up again. “Sent,” he said, confirming — or so it seemed — that he had messaged the photo to Katherine.

Rezaie was feeling skittish. He had just gotten into the car, but he was already trying to find a way to gracefully exit. He needed to change his clothes, he said. He wasn’t ready to go. He needed his documents. He needed money.

Angel opened his bank app on his phone and showed Rezaie his account, flush with more than 120,000 of some currency — whether it was euros or US dollars, Rezaie couldn’t tell. “I can just wire you the money now,” Angel said. “Send me your account.”

“We could give $10,000 to someone to throw you in a potato sack in the trunk.”

When Rezaie wavered, Angel switched tactics, locking the doors of the car. “Now that the door is closed, are you going to run?”

Rezaie threatened to bang on the windows and make a scene; in response, Erdal pulled out a taser. He played with the non-lethal weapon, letting it spark, its menacing cackle now pointed straight at Rezaie. “We don’t want to force you.”

“This is Turkey,” Angel said. “We could give $10,000 to someone to throw you in a potato sack in the trunk. We could work with the mafia.” He flipped between menacing and conciliatory. “We don’t want to kidnap you. Otherwise, we would not have come ourselves. Besides, Katherine’s on her way to meet us. Let’s go.”

Then Erdal surprised Rezaie by shifting from Turkish to Farsi, Iran’s national language. “Boro az Yalova,” he said. Get out of Yalova. “Don’t stay here. Whether you come with us or not, you should flee Turkey.”

The language switch surprised Rezaie. Was Erdal being forced to work with Angel and Ismail? Before Rezaie could ask Erdal, Angel demanded to know what Erdal was saying, clearly not fluent in Farsi.

This felt promising. Rezaie ignored Angel and raised his voice. “I’ll return tomorrow if you let me go now. If you’re going to return me to Iran, just be honest, so you don’t have to go to so much trouble.” Rezaie had already made plans to die by suicide rather than end up in an Iranian prison. At this point in his life, he had nothing to lose.

And just like that, the men let him get out of the car.

If Rezaie was confused by the men’s intentions earlier, he was even more bewildered now. Why had they released him?

The explanation that eluded him then would become apparent years later, when the men would be tried for espionage and kidnapping; the members of this crime ring simply weren’t all that smart.

They may have just given up because they had failed at persuading Rezaie to go with them quietly — if Rezaie, bigger and more fit than the other three men, had fought back and made a scene, it may have jeopardized their mission.

The men weren’t good at planning or execution, but they had told Rezaie the truth in one regard. There were men in Yalova out to get him — a second, rival group of criminals that included a corrupt Turkish prosecutor named Davut Yilmaz and his crony police officers. This other ring was more hardened and had better resources; it’s possible that the men in the BMW were afraid to linger on the street lest it lead to a clash with their rivals.

Rezaie didn’t know any of this at the time, of course. All he could do was pick up his bike and start cycling home as fast as he could. The BMW followed him for a bit, before eventually disappearing under the midnight moon. Rezaie never saw the second team.

Around 1AM that same morning, a couple hours after the would-be kidnappers let him out of the BMW, Rezaie went to the police with a friend who spoke fluent Turkish. The police took a routine statement without much interest until Rezaie mentioned Katherine and the CIA. That pushed buttons for Turkish intelligence, which doesn’t want other NATO countries poking around in its backyard. If there was even the slightest truth to Katherine being connected to the CIA, Turkish intelligence was going to get involved.

Millî İstihbarat Teşkilatı (MIT), the main Turkish intelligence agency, arrived with other branches of police. Rezaie was questioned until dawn. He didn’t know the last names of the men in the BMW, but the police did. They were brothers and cousins, all from the same family and sharing the same last name: Saglam. Angel’s real name was Ihsan, and he owned By Saglam, a defense contractor selling weapons to clients from Europe to Africa.

“These guys seem to have a history of crime,” one of the local police officers said. He urged Rezaie not to press charges and simply let things go. The intelligence officers had their own ideas of what Rezaie should or shouldn’t do — they wanted Rezaie to meet the Saglams as planned later that day. Turkish intelligence would monitor the meeting and catch the abductors: it was a sting operation.

The following evening, Rezaie walked to the rendezvous point, a nearby shopping mall overlooking a highway overpass. Two undercover cops shadowed him from a few feet behind. Rezaie got a text from Ismail: “Where’s your suitcase? Come to the bridge. We’ll pick you up there.”

Rezaie couldn’t see Ismail, but Ismail could see him.

“Who are the two men following you?” Ismail texted, immediately suspicious of the cops tailing him. “Why did you call the police?”

Rezaie changed directions and lost the cops, but Ismail wasn’t convinced.

“If you think I went to the police, why are you even here?” Rezaie texted back.

“Katherine is very upset that you told the police,” Ismail wrote. “The US Embassy doesn’t want to get involved with the Turkish police, nor does the CIA.”

Rezaie didn’t go to the bridge, and Ismail didn’t text back. The sting appeared to have failed.

When Rezaie met with the Saglams again, it would be in court. He would discover then that the plot against him was part of a much bigger operation with unseen co-conspirators. But that night, he had little notion of the complexity of the forces arrayed against him and even less of how he had, by reporting the Saglams to the police, already set in motion the eventual capture of his would-be kidnappers.

Turkish authorities arrested 16 people — 14 Turks and two Iranians — in February 2022, nearly 2.5 years after they committed their alleged crimes. During their investigation, MIT and police detectives gathered CCTV footage, photographs, phone records, WhatsApp messages, traffic records, and witness statements to prove their case. According to the indictment, the apparent masterminds of the operation — three Iranians working directly with IRGC intelligence — had escaped. Rezaie found out about the arrests when he saw pictures of the Saglams published in the Turkish press.

As the trial commenced in July 2022, the nation was fixated on the sensational details written in the Turkish media. Even in a country inured to tales of deep-state tactics, the story was lurid and alarming. Yilmaz, the corrupt Turkish prosecutor in charge of the terror division, and the Saglams, a family of retired military officers, were among those charged with spying for Iran. It was clear that the Islamic Republic had infiltrated Turkey’s police and judiciary. Beyond that, these highly publicized arrests and prosecutions represented an unprecedented turn in Turkish-Iranian relations — Iran had finally crossed the line, and Turkey would not tolerate unabated attacks on its home soil.

The relationship between the two countries has long been fraught. As a NATO member, Turkey has to abide by Western sanctions against Iran. As its neighbor, Turkey buys energy from Iran; the two have trade agreements and cooperate on cross-border crime fighting. But Iran was overstepping its boundaries, Soykan says, and there have been more Turkish intelligence operations to stop Iranian plots in the last several years.

Turkey and Iran also have an extradition agreement for those considered criminals by both countries, like drug dealers. But foreign military personnel with official asylum claims are protected by Turkish law — Iran cannot simply ask Turkey to hand over defectors like Rezaie. The Iranian regime chose, instead, a bizarre plan for rendition with a confidence game.

In October 2022, a few sessions into the trial, I squeezed into the back of the stuffy, crowded courtroom as police walked in with wrists cuffed to the defendants. The gendarmerie uncuffed the accused and sat them in front of three black-robed judges.

Murtaza Sultan Sanjari, the only Iranian defendant still in custody, joined from prison via video conference. Other defendants, including two women who had already served 18 months in jail, sat with the public in the back. The accused and their lawyers gave hourlong emotional speeches as the judges listened patiently. Every single person pleaded innocent.

“Throw enough mud so some will stick,” said Yilmaz, the accused prosecutor, when he took the stand. The 46-year-old man angrily called the media coverage fake news and claimed he was being framed. One of the Saglam men denounced the others and said he didn’t consider them his family anymore. One of the lawyers cried while talking about how prison had made his client depressed and sick.

“It’s like you fall into a deep hole, and you cannot get out.”

There were moments of levity, as well. Erdal Saglam — the man who had spoken Farsi with Rezaie in the BMW — claimed he went to Yalova not to kidnap anyone but for the hot springs, a local attraction for tourists.

Among those mentioned in the indictment but missing in the courtroom was Katherine. Little of what was said in court shed light on what the men really wanted from Rezaie or who Katherine really was. In the indictment and the appeal, a coherent story began to form. According to a police confession by one of the defendants, the kidnapping ring had already successfully kidnapped one Iranian army pilot and returned him to Iran. Rezaie was one of their next targets.

At 46, Sanjari is bookish with glasses and chubby cheeks. He has become both the canary and scapegoat in this case. “It’s like you fall into a deep hole, and you cannot get out,” he said.

Sanjari’s confession established many of the operation’s key details to the police. We sent a lawyer to speak with him face-to-face in the Turkish prison in which he is incarcerated. Over a two-hour interview, he reiterated and fleshed out the testimony he gave in the case but maintained that he was innocent.

A self-proclaimed businessman and translator, Sanjari had dabbled in many different sectors. He used to manufacture shower valves in both Tehran and Istanbul. Over the years, he often worked with Ihsan Saglam; Sanjari’s LinkedIn profile lists him as a business specialist for By Saglam. According to Sanjari, they traded abroad in US dollars, gold, and weapons, making trips to sub-Saharan African countries like the Ivory Coast and Gambia.

Ihsan Saglam, who Rezaie had known as Angel, was respected in Istanbul’s business community, an older man with a family that included several grown children. But there was another side to him — he had a penchant for black suits and blonde girlfriends, and Katherine was just one of his lovers.

Ihsan was keen to do business in Iran. Sanjari, who had an Iranian girlfriend and was fluent in both Turkish and Farsi, had high-profile connections in Iran, including an agent of the regime, Seyed Mehdi Hossaini. Hossaini was looking for a team in Turkey to carry out renditions of Iranian dissidents. Sanjari saw an opportunity and introduced the two to each other.

Ihsan had the other Saglams; he also brought the prosecutor, Yilmaz, who had his own connections, into the ring.

The first kidnapping was haphazard but a success. The ring abducted Mashali Firouze, a defected Iranian army pilot, along with his wife and son, in southwest Turkey in February 2019. According to Sanjari, the kidnappers were paid $28,000 for the operation.

Rezaie would have recognized their MO. The Saglams, along with Yilmaz and his team, promised Firouze they would rescue him from the regime that was after him, arranging to take him to Israel through Iraq. Instead, Firouze and his family were flown to the city of Van on the Iranian border.

It’s not clear why Firouze so easily agreed to get on the plane. Based on Rezaie’s own recounting, the Saglams were not exactly the most convincing actors. Firouze had to be keenly aware that he was still well within the regime’s reach — Tehran was near, and Israel was far. When we pressed Sanjari in jail, he said Firouze had realized he was being handed to the regime and had accepted his fate. Sources in Iran say that Firouze is currently languishing in a secret military prison in Tehran, where the regime holds those accused of spying for adversary nations, like Israel.

Israel has a history of recruiting Iranian military defectors in Turkey as spies. In 2019, Turkey deported one such defector; he was later executed in Iran. Firouze’s willingness to flee to Israel may have been seen as adequate evidence of treason on its own.

After their successful operation, Sanjari took Ihsan Saglam to Iran on an invitation from Hossaini. Sanjari says that highly ranked Iranian intelligence officials met them at an airport entrance reserved for VIP guests. The welcome did not last long; they were then hauled off to a Tehran suburb, where Ihsan was questioned by various intelligence agents on how Firouze’s kidnapping had gone. Sanjari served as interpreter during the interrogation. He says that Hossaini and others were frustrated and dissatisfied with how Ihsan had performed during the operation.

Iranian intelligence was displeased and suspicious

Throughout the abduction, distrust and conflict had brewed between Ihsan and Yilmaz, who, despite working together on the kidnapping, saw each other as competitors for future jobs and potentially lucrative payouts from Iran. Meanwhile, Ihsan had been shifty and difficult to reach during Firouze’s kidnapping, avoiding Hossaini’s texts and phone calls when the Iranian agent wanted evidence of Firouze’s capture. Iranian intelligence was displeased and suspicious.

Ihsan was receptive, even placating. He reminded the agents that he had, after all, successfully delivered Firouze. He would keep on delivering, he said. He would abduct more dissidents for them; he could even launder regime money to Africa, evading Western sanctions, and he could help identify Israeli cells in Iran. He could become a crucial asset for Tehran.

Despite their suspicions, the intelligence officials relented and gave him the second job: kidnapping Rezaie.

Seven months later, Ihsan got Rezaie’s address through Yilmaz, who had access to government databases of refugees.

Ihsan sent his cousins and brothers to do reconnaissance in the coastal town. While the Saglams groomed Rezaie, Hossaini met with Yilmaz. Sanjari, in his role as interpreter for the regime, was now privy to all sides of what was becoming a tangled, multi-actor operation. Yilmaz and Ihsan had believed that they were competing for Iran’s money; they were, in fact, correct. Hossaini had doubts about whether the Saglams could do the job, and as a result, went behind Ihsan’s back to offer Yilmaz and his police underlings $50,000 to operate as a fallback kidnapping team.

But when Yilmaz’s cronies ran into the Saglams in Yalova, Ihsan put two and two together. Furious, Ihsan took Sanjari into the woods and threatened to torture him. “How many people are you giving the job to?” he demanded to know.

Surprisingly, the Saglams didn’t call off the job, and neither did Yilmaz. That night in October 2019, the two competing abduction teams, each in their own vehicle, were simultaneously dispatched by Hossaini to nab Rezaie. As luck would have it, they ended up at the exact same gas station. A minor public meltdown ensued, with the men screaming threats at each other over the gas pumps. After the shouting match, the car with the Saglams, the BMW, headed toward Rezaie. When they caught up with him, things played out more or less as Hossaini had predicted. Ihsan had gotten lucky with the first kidnapping; faced with the slightest bit of recalcitrance from Rezaie, he immediately crashed out.

But what about the blonde American, who the Saglams had claimed was a CIA agent? What was her role in all this?

Hossaini’s doubts about the Saglams had borne out, but his backup plan didn’t pan out either. Neither team, it turned out, had what it took. (It wasn’t the first time that Iran’s dependence on local amateur crooks and mafia connections had doomed its transnational plots. In one case, Iran hired a heroin addict to kill an Israeli tourist in Turkey, only to have the addict turn himself in to Turkish authorities.)

Despite the fiasco, the regime hired the Saglams for a third time, ordering them to abduct Iranian businessman Shahnam Golshani, another asylum-seeker residing in a Turkish town on the shores of the Black Sea.

That plan failed, as well, and Golshani eventually received asylum in Australia, moving thousands of miles out of Tehran’s reach.

With his would-be kidnappers in custody, there was still one loose end that Rezaie couldn’t stop thinking about: Katherine. He could wrap his head around the story of the incompetent Turkish cousins getting mixed up with the Iranian regime. But what about the blonde American, who the Saglams had claimed was a CIA agent? What was her role in all this?

On July 19, 2021, Rezaie wrote to the US Embassy’s general email in Ankara about Katherine, hoping someone would follow up. “Almost two years ago, there was a conspiracy to kidnap me and bring me back to Iran, in which an American citizen was also involved … I considered it my duty to inform you of this. I will send you some case documents that show the role of this lady in this operation,” the email read.

After no response, Rezaie reported Katherine to an FBI agent by calling their hotline in the US. No one called back.

Then he decided on a more direct route. In May 2022, Rezaie wrote to Katherine on Facebook Messenger. “I’m sure you remember me,” he said. “Did you know that if your friends could kidnap me and extradite me to Iran, I would eventually be executed three months later? How did you convince yourself to work with the kidnappers?”

Unsurprisingly, he didn’t get a response.

Katherine’s public Facebook features happy, smiling photos with family and friends on outings and charity events. One Facebook post reads: “All too often.. we women, find it easier to criticize each other instead of building each other up.” Attached to the post are several photos of herself.

The details of her life as sketched out through her social media accounts are far from sparse. She’s married to a plastic surgeon and appears to work at his office. She’s pro-Trump and anti-immigration. She has no arrests; a background check came up clean aside from a speeding ticket in 2011. She is, in other words, shockingly average.

A few months after Rezaie’s abortive kidnapping, Katherine gave a statement to the police — only one page long — that ended up in court records. She was in Turkey for business, she said, and since Ihsan had business in Yalova, she went with him for sightseeing. She referred to Rezaie as “this person named Mohammad” and described their meeting as coincidental.

“I absolutely do not accept the allegations of the person named Mohammad. I did not have any conversation with him about giving him a job, I did not threaten him, I did not detain or kidnap him. When I learned that there were such allegations against me, I wanted to come and give my statement myself.”

Turkish authorities initially banned Katherine from travel, but after her statement, they let her leave the country.

One day, I called Katherine’s Texas number from Turkey. She answered.

She was nervous, vague, and reluctant to open up. She was confused, she told me multiple times. But she stayed on the phone for an hour while she prepared her lunch.

“I didn’t really try to get more information because I really didn’t care … It’s none of my business. Ever. I don’t get into people’s business.”

She often visits Turkey just to go shopping, Katherine said. For that purpose, she kept an apartment in Bebek, a ritzy neighborhood in Istanbul. She had previously met the Saglams in Africa, but she’s unclear about where in Africa — she rattled off countries like Nigeria, Rwanda, Uganda, Congo. Katherine saw Ihsan and his cousin Ismail at a United Nations office where she worked. Which branch of the UN did she work for? She didn’t remember. She said the Saglams were purchasing something from a government in one of the African countries but had no idea what they were buying.

The entire conversation was like this: incoherent and inconsistent.

“I didn’t really try to get more information because I really didn’t care … It’s none of my business. Ever. I don’t get into people’s business,” she said.

But she was literally in people’s business. According to Katherine herself, she was going to work with Ihsan, but their business fell through because he didn’t have enough money to invest. What kind of work? What kind of business? She didn’t specify. She wouldn’t clarify their personal relationship either — were they friends? Mere acquaintances? Romantic partners?

Katherine’s recounting on the phone didn’t match up with Rezaie’s story or with her own statement to Turkish authorities in 2019. In the statement, she said that her meeting with Rezaie was coincidental; she also said that at no point had they discussed “taking him to America or any other country.”

But on the phone, she told me that the meeting had been planned and that Ihsan had asked her to talk to Rezaie at the restaurant to convince him to return to Iran.

“They told me the Turkish government wanted him to go back. Because he was there illegally,” Katherine said, the pace of her Southern accent accelerating. “Could I talk to the guy and just get him to talk to me, and they would get him to go back?”

She spoke to Rezaie in English, since she doesn’t know Turkish or Farsi. She was on her phone most of the time while in the restaurant, she said, tuning out the conversations happening elsewhere.

“I only spoke to the guy, literally, [for] like two minutes. But I only know what I was told … So I was told that the guy was in the military, and he ran away from the military and left his family and children in Iran. And the government was wanting him so they could deport him back,” she said.

Katherine said she thought the Turkish government had hired the Saglams like bounty hunters to persuade Rezaie to return to his military service in Iran and back to his wife and kids. I explained the Turkish government doesn’t convince migrants to leave. Local police scour shops, streets, and homes in search of undocumented immigrants to throw them in removal centers and then deport them. But Rezaie was in Turkey legally with UN protection.

Katherine became so anxious while talking to me that she burned the lunch she’d been making.

“I’m freaked out a bit … Even when I was talking to the guy, the guy didn’t seem remorseful about his family or sad. It seemed like the few minutes I spoke to him, like he was lying about something … I don’t know his story. All I know is that, you know, I just felt sad for his wife and children, not for him, because he deserted them.”

Rezaie’s first wife divorced him, and he remarried another Iranian woman in Yalova; he hasn’t seen his son since he left Iran. During the call, Katherine repeated 17 times that she told Rezaie he should go back to Iran because he has kids.

Katherine painted herself as a caring person with family values who had suffered deeply and wouldn’t harm anyone. She said that she lost her 25-year-old son when he was hit by a drunk driver; then she’d had a stroke and several heart attacks. (Public records show a 25-year-old relative of Katherine’s with the same last name died in 2016.)

She said that she was also working with Saving Jane, a nonprofit, to stop human trafficking in Africa. (Saving Jane told us Katherine approached the organization with a project in 2018, but they didn’t approve it.)

Moreover, Katherine denied having ever tried to hire Rezaie as a captain for her ship. She did have a boat at one point, she said, but it had never been in Turkey.

Throughout the interview, Katherine seemed to be in disbelief that the Saglams would kidnap anyone, apparently unaware that they had been convicted in a notorious trial.

“You know, that sounds like it’s not the truth, what you’re saying … And if they did, it was in Turkish,” she said. “Like I said, I didn’t understand them.”

The trial ended in 2023, nearly three years after Rezaie’s attempted abduction. The court returned guilty verdicts for most of the Saglams — for espionage, the kidnapping of Firouze, and the attempted kidnapping of Rezaie. Sanjari was also convicted and sentenced to 16 years and eight months in prison; he remains in jail. Ihsan was sentenced to 15 years and 10 months in prison. Yilmaz received 11 years and eight months, and he was disbarred. The other defendants — including Erdal, Ihsan’s Turkish girlfriend, and Sanjari’s Iranian girlfriend — were acquitted.

“Iran got away with it again and will continue to do the same with other dissidents.”

Yilmaz and the Saglams found guilty were released on probation. They have to sign in every two weeks with the police and cannot leave the country until their conviction is finalized. In Turkey’s legal system, it normally takes years to exhaust all appeals, a course of action that defendants do normally pursue. It’s likely they will remain free.

Rezaie, now in the US, fears for other Iranians in the opposition. “Iran got away with it again and will continue to do the same with other dissidents,” he said.

Iran’s fall guy, Sanjari, said he wants to become an informant for the US if they get him out of prison, and his biggest fear is being returned to Iran.

When I explained the trial and the verdict to Katherine, she told me that the Saglams were her friends and would continue to be so.

“They are really — I thought — genuinely kind and nice. I never felt unsafe and never felt in danger,” she said. “I feel bad that they got wrapped up and sucked into bad things for money.”

When my producer reached out to Katherine again, she forwarded our messages to Ihsan, who threatened to take us to the Turkish prosecutor and demanded to know why we were trying to ruin his reputation. (Turkey is ranked 159th out of 180 in the Reporters Without Borders press freedom index; simple accusations of libels can lead to house arrest or other restrictions). We asked Ihsan for an interview several times.

“I’m seriously warning you,” Ihsan texted when he was reached for comment.

After repeated reach-outs, Katherine began texting us back, after we asked if she wanted to respond to specific claims made by Rezaie and the Saglams. “He said, she said lies,” Katherine texted.

It was a confusing message. But then again, Katherine had always been confusing.

Additional reporting by Chris Harland-Dunaway

Source

On a balmy night in October 2019, the defector rode his bike home. He’d just finished a long shift helping waiters serve yogurt-smothered kabobs at a restaurant in Yalova, a seaside town an hour from Istanbul, Turkey. By this time of night, many of the shops had closed. Most of…