Hashemi Sting

The Hashemi Sting was a joint U.S. Customs Service and FBI undercover operation conducted in 1985-1986 targeting illegal arms trafficking to Iran, an operation that became entangled with the parallel Iran-Contra Affair and the October Surprise network through its principal informant, Iranian-American arms dealer Cyrus Hashemi. The operation resulted in indictments prosecuted by then-U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Rudolph Giuliani, and its aftermath raised serious questions about the relationship between legitimate law enforcement, intelligence operations, and the covert arms pipeline to Iran authorized at the highest levels of the Reagan administration.¹

Cyrus Hashemi

Cyrus Hashemi was an Iranian-born businessman and arms dealer based between London and New York who became a central figure in the intersection of the October Surprise, Iran-Contra, and Hashemi Sting investigations. His brother Jamshid Hashemi was one of the sources for Gary Sick's October Surprise research, claiming knowledge of meetings in Madrid and Paris in 1980 in which William Casey and Iranian representatives agreed to delay the release of the American hostages.

Cyrus Hashemi had extensive dealings with Iranian government officials and arms procurement networks, and he simultaneously worked as an informant for U.S. government agencies including the CIA and the FBI. His dual role - as an active arms dealer and as a government informant - placed him at the center of a web in which it was difficult to determine whether his arms-brokering activities were authorized by the U.S. government as part of intelligence operations, unauthorized criminal conduct, or both simultaneously. This ambiguity was characteristic of the Iran-Contra period generally, when official covert operations and freelance arms dealing coexisted and overlapped.²

The Sting Operation

U.S. Customs Service undercover agents posed as weapons brokers willing to supply arms to Iran, making contact with a network of dealers and intermediaries. The sting targeted illegal exports of military equipment to Iran in violation of the Arms Export Control Act - the same statute that the official Iran-Contra arms shipments were circumventing through Israeli transshipment and presidential finding authorities.

Among those implicated in the sting was Avraham Bar-Am, a retired Israeli general and arms dealer who was identified as a participant in the arms trafficking network. The indictments produced by Giuliani's office charged multiple defendants with conspiracy to violate U.S. arms export laws.

The operation created a significant institutional problem for the Reagan administration: the illegal arms sales being targeted by U.S. Customs overlapped with the official covert arms pipeline to Iran that Oliver North, Manucher Ghorbanifar, and the "Enterprise" were simultaneously managing under presidential authorization. Investigators and journalists subsequently noted that the sting appeared to be targeting, in some instances, the same network of dealers and intermediaries that the official covert operation was using.¹

Cyrus Hashemi's Death

Cyrus Hashemi died in London on July 21, 1986 - approximately six weeks after the sting he had helped facilitate resulted in the arrests of its targets. The official cause of death was given as acute myeloblastic leukemia, diagnosed and fatal within a matter of weeks. His sudden death, shortly after his role as the sting's principal informant became known to those he had helped entrap, was noted by investigators working on the October Surprise and Iran-Contra as suspicious in its timing, though no investigation concluded foul play. The rapidity of the illness was unusual; acute myeloblastic leukemia typically has a longer symptomatic progression, leading some investigators to raise the possibility of deliberate poisoning - a method available to intelligence services and consistent with the vulnerability a double agent who had betrayed multiple parties would face.²

Relationship to Iran-Contra and October Surprise

The Hashemi Sting's intersection with the Iran-Contra Affair was explicitly identified by the Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh investigation, which documented that the arms trafficking networks being prosecuted by Giuliani overlapped with networks involved in the official covert arms program. The broader question - whether the sting was used to neutralize figures who knew too much about the October Surprise arrangements - was raised by investigators including Gary Sick and journalist Robert Parry but was not resolved by official investigations.¹