Iranian Spy Indicted

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An FAA contractor and PhD in Electrical Engineering was indicted Friday for illegally acting as an agent of the Iranian government to obtain information on the FAA's electrical power systems.

Abouzar Rahmati (42)  exploited his employment with a US company, which supported the FAA on a contract related to the power and electrical architecture of the FAA’s National Airspace System (NAS)..

Rahmadi downloaded sensitive non-public documents related to the FAA, storing them on removable media, and taking them to Iran, where he provided the documents to the Government of Iran .

These included documents related to the NAS that would give a person unfamiliar with NAS facility engineering a reasonable understanding of how the NAS power and electrical architecture is configured.

“This defendant is charged with infiltrating a U.S. agency with the intent of providing Iran with sensitive information vital to our national security,” said U.S. Attorney Matthew M. Graves for the District of Columbia. “Thanks to the great work of the FBI and the FAA’s investigators, this defendant was stopped in his tracks and a known adversary’s plot was exposed.”

According to the indictment, from June 2009 to May 2010, Rahmati served as a First Lieutenant in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) — an Iranian military and counterintelligence organization under the authority of the Supreme Leader of Iran.

After being discharged from the IRGC, Rahmati lied to the United States government regarding his military service with the IRGC in order to, among other things, gain employment as a U.S. government contractor.

According to information published by the IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Abouzar Rahmati (S'07–M'09–SM'13) received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from The University of Alabama in Huntsville, Huntsville, AL, USA, in 2014.,

He previously worked as a Senior Scientist Consultant with IS International Services LLC, Atlanta, GA, USA. and Leidos,

He was a Research and Scientist Engineer with Electrical Engineering Consultants and Research Centers, Tehran, Iran, from 2004 to 2008. He was a faculty member of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and the Director of the Power Engineering Group, University of Ilam, Ilam, Iran, from 2008 to 2011. He was also a Visiting Lecturer with the Islamic Azad University, Tehran, from 2007 to 2010.

His main research interests are RTDS, smart grids, and simulation methods to power system monitoring, control, and protection.

View the indictment here

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