A late-February post by Salat, a Telegram channel close to former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, ignited the intense debate surrounding Catherine Perez-Shakdam over the past several days. More than 10,000 people viewed the post, and attention quickly turned to her activities in Iran. Centered on a blog post she wrote for The Times of Israel, the debate has produced explicit and implicit suggestions that she may have been an agent who infiltrated Iran. Although the blog post was written in November 2021, the controversy intensified only after the Telegram post.
A French-born Jewish journalist once highly active in Iranian state media, Shakdam converted to Shiite Islam after marrying a Yemeni man and traveled to Iran over eight years. During that time, she established relationships with numerous senior political and bureaucratic figures. Her work appeared in outlets including Mehr News, Tasnim News, Press TV, the Russian International Affairs Council, Tehran Times, IRIB, Majalla, the Foreign Policy Association, Yemen Post, Yemen Today, The Oslo Times, Your Middle East, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, and The Independent. Her articles also appeared on Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s website between 2015 and 2018. Following the allegations, the institutions that had published her work in Iran hurriedly removed all her articles. She had particularly close ties to conservatives.
During her years as a Muslim, Shakdam consistently spoke in favor of the Revolution and Iran’s professed values, presenting herself as a sincere believer. In a 2018 interview with Defa Press, she said: “Iran is the only flag beneath which we can all gather and sit, feeling safe and secure. It is the only country that remains stable in a chaotic world. I am proud to be sincerely called ‘my sister.’” She added: “Frankly, analysts like me owe Iran a great deal. Without the Iranian people’s resistance in 1979, invisible barriers would not have been broken, and we could not have freed ourselves from the oppressors’ tyranny. My main focus now is introducing Shiite Islam to non-Muslims. (...) Since Islam is a religion God has perfected, we must follow its teachings without diluting its truth in any way. I believe it was Imam Khomeini who, in the 1970s, called on all Muslims to revive and honor the message of Ashura, to rise against oppression without violence, so that truth could be spoken again. But as Imam Ali said, truth must be stated plainly even if speaking it leaves one alone.” The interview shows her close familiarity with, and apparent internalization of, revolutionary rhetoric and the discourse underpinning Iranian policy. It is understandable that the establishment would regard a foreign journalist—particularly one of Jewish origin—who so fully embraced revolutionary values as a propaganda instrument for both Iranian and global audiences and give her a prominent state-media platform. In a sense, the case illustrates how propaganda, one of the establishment’s most valued instruments, can be manipulated and turned against it.
After a period of silence from mid-2021, Shakdam adopted a striking tone and position in her November 25 blog post for The Times of Israel. She said, in essence, that her French passport had helped open doors, that marriage to a Yemeni Muslim gave her access to other Muslim countries and firsthand observation, and that Islam’s definition of a woman through her husband, without an identity of her own, had effectively erased her personal history—her Jewish origins. In a mocking tone, she wrote: “When my people were hated... Oh God, however often my mother-in-law reminded me of that hatred, the outside world still saw me as the wife of a Muslim man, someone who could pose no threat. After all, I had assumed the shape of the mold they wanted me to fit. I do not think I will ever understand this logical contradiction. But anyway.” She thus openly states, mockingly, that she manipulated the society in which she moved. The espionage allegation stems from this tone and frankness, not from any direct information provided by her or anyone else. The entire debate rests on someone with such access to the establishment effectively writing, “I manipulated everyone; none of it was real.”
Why, then, would she engage in such manipulation? Drawing conclusions from the limited information is difficult, though several possibilities merit consideration. Immediately after the controversy arose, she gave interviews first to the BBC and, two days later, to Voice of America. In both, she said she was an analyst, not an agent, had given Israel no information, and had no contact with it. She also stressed that she had never betrayed her Jewish background or ancestors. She said she traveled to Iran because she wanted to know whether hatred toward Israel’s government or Jews existed there. In the VOA interview, she discussed her articles for the Supreme Leader’s website, saying she wrote only a few and stopped because they were altered and manipulated to fit its ideology.
Her two recent interviews clearly suggest an effort to explain that she had not been aligned with Iran while there. Her writings also indicate that she separated from her husband. Her mocking attitude toward her mother-in-law and wholesale offensive may suggest that personal matters drove her transformation. The affair has also brought her greater prominence, attracting attention in many circles, particularly among diaspora Iranians. The possibility that her statements serve personal ambition or a settling of scores should therefore not be overlooked. She may also have decided she had nothing more to gain from Iran or the region and adopted this rhetoric as a route back. Her claims that “I was subjected to revolutionary propaganda” and “I never betrayed my Jewish background or ancestors” also present a narrative of victimhood.
If, however, we momentarily consider the insinuations that she undertook these activities for intelligence purposes, several points stand out. Nearly every source describes her husband simply as a “Yemeni Muslim.” No details about his name or personal background are available. Those familiar with the region know that Yemen has a substantial, long-established Jewish community known as the Temani. It is quite possible that the husband of Shakdam, who repeatedly emphasizes Judaism and insists she never betrayed her Jewish roots, is Jewish as well.
According to one party’s view, her sudden emergence—or promotion—could be a diversionary operation. On this reading, she was not the actual intelligence source. If Iranian intelligence was investigating someone else, or an urgent escape was needed, she may have drawn attention to herself to distract or redirect it. That person could be her husband or someone else. If it were her husband, he too would be a victim in this account: not only the establishment but also her husband would have been deceived. Even otherwise, while appearing as a divorced woman who engineered everything for her analyses, she could be buying time for the actual source or intelligence officer.
Another possibility is that she genuinely established these connections through her initiative as a journalist. Even then, with everything she knows, she is clearly someone various parties might consult now, if not before. Such contact could even have occurred long before the affair, on the premise that Israel operates on the principle that “every Jew is a voluntary Mossad operative.”
Although some are inclined to see “a new Eli Cohen case,” there is insufficient evidence or documentation for definitive judgments, leaving each possibility unresolved. The most tangible assessment available now is that the affair compounds the psychological defeats Iran has experienced from Fakhrizadeh’s assassination to Natanz. This is the atmosphere in which the debate is unfolding.
This article was first published by the Center for Iranian Studies (İRAM) on March 14, 2022.
Link: https://www.iramcenter.org/iranda-yeni-casusluk-tartismasi-catherine-shakdam-olayi-712