A Cautionary Tale That No One Will Heed

New in PJ Media:

What would make someone switch sides and join America’s enemies? It’s easy to envision an America-hating leftist doing such a thing, but it’s much harder to understand when the defector in question was, to all outward appearances anyway, a patriot who was devoted to the service of her country. What made Monica Witt, a former Air Force intelligence specialist, give her allegiance to a nation that chants “Death to America”? Her story is a cautionary tale with lessons that are almost certain to be ignored.

Monica Witt joined the United States Air Force in 1997, when she was just 18 years old. According to a Sunday Fox News report, she was initially “assigned to an RC-135 reconnaissance airplane crew,” but a more significant incident for her life’s trajectory came the following year, when Witt was “assigned to the U.S. Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. For it was there that she learned to speak and write Farsi, the language of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

After that, the Air Force sent Witt to “several overseas locations in order to conduct classified missions collecting signals intelligence.” In 2002, she landed in Saudi Arabia. She was “assigned as an Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) special agent criminal investigator and counterintelligence officer”; this work led her to be “deployed elsewhere in the Middle East, including Iraq in 2005 and Qatar in 2006.”

Witt was clearly a highly trusted individual. Her participation in a “Special Access Program” (SAP) “gave her access to classified information, including ‘details of ongoing counterintelligence operations, true names of sources, and the identities of U.S. agents involved in the recruitment of those sources.’” This was someone who could do a great deal of damage to U.S. intelligence operations if what she knew fell into the wrong hands, and that’s exactly what ultimately happened.

First, however, Witt left the Air Force in 2008, although she continued working for AFOSI as a government contractor. She also enrolled in the University of Maryland, got a bachelor’s degree, and went on to do graduate work in Middle East studies at George Washington University. She already had several years of experience in the Middle East, and clearly those years had a major effect on her; classmates at GWU recall that she was “withdrawn” and “alienated,” as well as preoccupied with “drone strikes, extrajudicial killings and atrocities against children.”

Those are claims that Islamic jihadis and their sympathizers make against the U.S. in its actions in the Middle East. And this was no coincidence: by February 2012, Witt had “set her plans to betray the United States and defect to Iran in motion.” She went to Tehran at that time in order to attend the Islamic Republic’s International Conference on Hollywoodism, “an anti-western event held during the Fajr International Film Festival each year ‘aimed at condemning American moral standards and promoting anti-U.S. propaganda.’”

There is more. Read the rest here.