Dramatis Personae & Cryptonym Guide

Cryptonym guide

The cables hide both people and things behind two-letter-digraph code names: the first two letters mark the CIA desk or station that owns the name. Iran is SD — the other families below were worked out from where each source’s cables originate, cross-checked against the Mary Ferrell cryptonym database. Names in the tables come from the documents’ own decode key plus scholarship (Gasiorowski, Bird, Bill, Emery) and journalism (Sciolino, NYT 1986); the rest the record leaves blank. The “unidentified” sources were cross-checked against the Persian edition (usdoc.ir) and Gasiorowski / Kai Bird — all but UNTROUT stay coded there too.

• SDIran — the desk this whole collection belongs to (SDLURE, SDPLOD, SDJANUS…).
• UNFrance — the Paris station: its assets here are Iranian exiles, leftists and Kurds abroad (UNTROUT, UNPOLO, UNCAMEL, UNFUSIL). Digraph = France per the Mary Ferrell database, and every UN source in the corpus is Paris-run.
• MJLebanon — the Beirut station: sources on Khomeini’s circle, cables cited to Beirut and routed onward to Tripoli (MJBARGE, MJARTY, MJBRIDGE, MJMARTYR — met in Beirut car-meetings). Read off the routing; the lexicon lists the digraph but attaches no country. Note: MJ- in a drafter’s slot, e.g. MJMetrinko, is just an officer’s initials.
• ACuncertain — a single secret-writing mail asset (ACWIZARD/1) that shares an access agent with the Iranian SDURN/1 and was tied to a Libya communications test; too little to fix the digraph’s country.
• CAWest Germany — the Bonn operation (CATOMIC; see sourcing).
• LPCIA proprietaries — cover companies & financial fronts run by the Cover Staff (see sourcing).
• EZtechnical services — a documents lab (EZNOVA, which forges & updates travel papers) and an officer role (EZWIZARD).
• JBtradecraft — JBMINIMUM, an assessment test run on a defector before the SGSWIRL polygraph.
• NVUS Government agencies — NVBLAZON = the US Government, NVCANOPY = the FBI (RG‑263 lexicon). A source is “willing to travel to the U.S. and meet with … NVBLAZON officials.”
• ZRthird-country handling — ZRWAHOO, a marker for reporting that carries “third-country content.”
• LWinternal channel — LWSURF, the informal chief-of-station ↔ DCI letter (≤2 pages, twice a year).
• INa Swiss source — INSET/1, the Swiss diplomat Fred Jenny, run as a CIA source in the “Larry Giel” case. These functional digraphs aren’t countries: NV & JB are in the RG‑263 lexicon; EZ, ZR & LW are read from the corpus and the 1991 Washington Post piece.

Iranian sources — people

Not people — the Agency, its methods & handling caveats

Sourcing. Most definitions are verbatim from the CIA lexicon published by NARA (RG‑263, Research Aid: Cryptonyms and Terms in Declassified CIA Files, 2nd release) and the Mary Ferrell Foundation. The Agency & its parts: RTACTION and BKHERALD = the CIA; REDTOP = its Soviet Division; WOLOCK and AQUATIC = its Technical Services Division; AJAJA = its Near East Division. Government: NVBLAZON and LNBUZZ = the US Government, NVCANOPY = the FBI, WODUAL = the USA as a place (“but not US Government”). Methods: SGSWIRL = the polygraph, JBMINIMUM = a psychological test, RYBAT = the sensitivity indicator, CART = the counter‑espionage‑reports indicator. CATOMIC is a reused 1970‑74 anti‑Soviet project word (CA digraph = West Germany). The dissemination caveats (WNINTEL, NOFORN, NOCONTRACT, PROPIN, ORCON, NODIS/EXDIS/LIMDIS) are the DCID 1/7 set. Absent from the lexicon: LWSURF and ZRWAHOO (traced via David Ignatius’s 1991 Washington Post essay “Bungles, Bobbles and Spies” and confirmed in the cables), and LPGAMIN — whose LP digraph the Church Committee’s proprietaries report (NARA rec. 157‑10014‑10144) documents as the Agency’s cover companies, making it the likely cover/funding channel for the SDLURE operation. Many source identities — and the reading of SDFORGIVE/1 as Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Qomi, UNPOLO/1 as Kenize Mourad, SDPEPPER/1 as Mokhateb-Rafi'i — come from Mark Gasiorowski’s “US Covert Operations Toward Iran” (Middle Eastern Studies, 2015). Counts show how often each stamp appears.