The FBI announced Thursday a $200,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and prosecution of Monica Witt, a former Air Force intelligence officer and special agent. Witt, who held top-secret security clearances, is accused of defecting to Iran and turning over sensitive classified information to the Revolutionary Guards—including special access programs and the identities of American agents in the Middle East, Fox News reported Sunday.
Witt, 47, is believed to be living in Iran since she defected to the country in August 2013. She’s charged with disclosing national defense information and state secrets to the Revolutionary Guards. FBI officials emphasized that the decision to offer the reward now stems from the understanding that at this critical moment in Iran’s history, there may be sources with precise information about her whereabouts that could help bring her to justice.
Monica Witt enlisted in the Air Force in 1997, shortly after her 18th birthday. Between 1998 and 1999, she was sent to study Farsi at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, and later was assigned to an RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft crew on signals intelligence collection missions around the world, including deployment to Saudi Arabia in 2002. She was then promoted to special agent and criminal investigator with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations and deployed to Iraq and Qatar nearly two decades ago.
In her role, Witt participated in a “Special Access Program,” a highly classified intelligence project with a secret code name that allowed agents to communicate openly without revealing the nature of their activities. The program gave her access to extremely sensitive details about active counterintelligence operations, the real names of sources, and the identities of American agents involved in recruiting those sources.
In 2008, she left military service and continued working as a government contractor for the Air Force while pursuing a master’s degree in Middle Eastern studies at George Washington University. Classmates from that period described her as “alienated” and “frustrated,” and she frequently voiced sharp criticism of U.S. drone strikes and harm to children.
In February 2012, Witt traveled to Tehran to attend an anti-Western conference called the “International Conference on Hollywoodism.” During the visit, she provided the Revolutionary Guards with documents establishing her credibility, publicly criticized the U.S. government, and documented her conversion to Islam on Iranian state television.
Despite an explicit warning from the FBI in May 2012 that she was a prime recruitment target, Witt continued contact with a “recruiter” named Marzieh Hashemi, a U.S.-born journalist and media figure who became an Iranian citizen. In August 2013, Witt sent Hashemi an email with her resume, military discharge forms, and a description of her conversion to Islam, which were passed directly to the Iranian government. On August 28, 2013, she boarded a flight to Tehran and sent Hashemi a message: “I’m signing off and heading out! Coming home.”
Upon arriving in Iran, Witt provided senior regime officials with the secret code name of the Defense Department’s special access program. During 2014 and 2015, she worked closely with Iranian government officials and compiled “target packages” for them designed to locate, track, and neutralize American counterintelligence agents.
She later collaborated with four Iranian hackers, who were charged alongside her in the indictment, and helped them develop malware designed to record keystrokes and activate webcams. These systems were directed specifically against Witt’s former colleagues from the Air Force and U.S. intelligence community, whom the network approached manipulatively using fake profiles on Facebook.