For several weeks now, I have been trying to get in touch with an expert on Iran to discuss the historic developments that we are seeing nearly every day since Operation Epic Fury began. And while there are many Iran experts I could turn to, my mind keeps going back to her.
I should say that sometimes random pieces of information float around in my head. Maybe that is common for journalists. But the pieces aren’t always neatly tied to whoever shared the information. In fact, I don’t even realize that my brain has collected these tidbits until I stumble on the through-line like a piece of tripwire.
And this turns out to be the case with Rachel. Because I don’t know who first mentioned her or how many people invoked her name before I wrote this. I called up several people to ask them about her and they were rather perplexed, giving me the verbal equivalent of a look like I had three heads.
I think that in the beginning, some years ago, she was brought up to me as a question. A possibility. Something innocent and vague. Something like, “Are you related to Rachel?”
“Rachel who?” I would have asked.
“Rachel Ingber,” would have been the answer.
“I’m not sure,” I would have said. “Who’s that?”
At some point when her name was mentioned, I noticed how the air tightened. Because although my last name is not common, it is not rare. And the air would never tighten at other name-droppings — the dentists and lawyers and fellow journalists. It was different with Rachel.
Time went by with these moments slipping away and other small details accumulating. Once, when I was speaking to someone about Iran, the person said that someone with my last name had been a spy specializing in Iran. She just seemed to vanish, the person said.
Was that Rachel? Had she actually gone into Iran at some point too?
I tried to imagine what it would have been like to be in Iran, especially as an American woman. Personally, I had only seen Iran from above, as if it had been an aerial tour of the Grand Canyon. From my passenger plane, I looked down at the country’s mountains, displayed in Georgia O’Keefe shades of pink, cream, red, and orange. That flight, from D.C. to Erbil in Iraq, did not take its usual flight path. It was 2016 and ISIS still held pieces of its so-called caliphate. Terrorists were burning oil from the ground to obstruct coalition air strikes and I saw a pencil-thin black line in the clouds.
Another time, a wealthy friend who went to Iran brought me back a dragon (or damsel) fly glued inside in an elaborate Persian shadow box. The insect was perfectly preserved, with a city skyline hand-painted on its wings. Maybe it was Isfahan. I don’t actually know and we don’t talk anymore. But it was a piece of a country that I knew only through the eyes of its diaspora, books, articles, experts on TV, and movies like The Color of Paradise, about a blind boy and his father.
Then one day this year, someone I spoke with tied it all together. Not only did the source mention Rachel. Did I know she had been a spy focused on Iran?
And there it was, very directly, on an Iranian news and analysis website. “The new U.S. National Intelligence Officer for Iran is Rachel Ingber,” it stated, back in August of 2012. I was able to confirm other information, such as Jillian Burns serving as Consul in Herat, when Rachel was said to have replaced her.
Clearly, Rachel had long been steeped in Iran. In 1997, I found, she had prepared a report about the country’s presidential election for the Washington Institute, a DC-based think tank. It described Mohammad Khatami, who ran on a platform of easing restrictive social policies, including women’s clothing. Khatami was the underdog, but he won the election that year.
The article states, “It will be difficult for any [incoming Iranian] president to change Iran’s foreign policy, especially its anti-U.S. orientation, in light of the apathy of the majority and the militant commitment of a dwindling, but still important segment of radicals for a confrontational policy with the United States… Regardless of who wins the presidency, the Iranian elite feels that there is no longer a need to make concessions to the West.”
So much of it felt like it could be true today.
In 2002, Rachel appeared to have been quoted in Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs winter edition. “It was an amazing opportunity to be in Lebanon 15 years after the war ended,” she said, describing Lebanon’s post-war reconstruction. “I went to the border and toured the prison where the South Lebanese Army (SLA) used to keep political prisoners.”
She also wrote for Columbia’s Journal for International Affairs. And, three years before she became the top intelligence officer for Iran, she wrote a book review about the “human side of Iran.”
I wanted to know what Rachel thought about today’s war and our nebulous negotiations with Iran — how the Strait of Hormuz was open before U.S. and Israeli strikes rained down, then controlled and closed by Iran as the war carried on, then doubly closed by President Donald Trump’s blockade, then partially opened by Iran but still with a U.S. blockade, and then announced closed again by Iran. I wanted to hear her take a crack at the “where is this all going” question based on her years of expertise.
The reason I am using her name now is because she was already clearly known to the Iranians and her work appeared to take place several years ago. I also did everything I could to reach out to her. I emailed her Columbia university email address, but the email bounced back. I sent messages to two Rachel Ingbers on LinkedIn whose profiles lacked images and information, but were connected to diplomacy-types.
I contacted an alumni association that she may have been associated with. I went back and forth with a woman named Lorraine who said she had reached out to Rachel on my behalf. But Rachel never got in touch with me, and Lorrie never told me if Rachel declined.
That was about a month ago. And in the meantime, I’ve been thinking about Rachel’s unknowableness. How little we really know about spies, let alone anyone at all. The different layers that make up a human, in public and private, to themselves and to others. The things we wish we’d asked and wish we said. No matter how many calls, texts, emails, in-person meetings, no matter how much time. There is an unknowableness to all of us.
In the unsuccessful pursuit of Rachel, I was also brought back to the unknowableness of Setara, a woman I had heard about while interviewing Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. In 2017, the Rohingyas were fleeing a brutal crackdown in Myanmar’s Rakhine State, where their rights had been steadily stripped away.
I had co-founded a nonprofit organization that was documenting the displacement of musicians, and one girl had mentioned Setara. I started asking others about her in the refugee camps, where the dusty dirt looked like it was speckled in drops of blood — really just the juice of betel nuts that people were eating.
I learned that Setara had been a popular musician in Myanmar, singing about education and family planning. Someone said she had gotten married and was in one of the camps. Our fixer found the camp and some friendly refugees walked us to her very tent. Then a man stepped out and insisted she wasn’t inside. He was angry and defensive, and I wondered if he was her husband. If she had stopped making music because she was no longer allowed. If she was there, she would have heard the entire back and forth, but he didn’t let her out and she never stepped out.
Our conversation, through our interpreter, had attracted quite a crowd. And some of the young men staring at us did not hold the kindness and curiosity of the majority. I got a bad feeling. So I left without ever speaking to Setara.
Today, sitting at my kitchen table where I’m writing this, I imagine Rachel with short brown hair, walking bruskly down hallways and streets in practical flats. Someone who smiles discreetly, but is warm and friendly with people who passed the threshold for her trust. Someone dedicated to the impossible quest of trying to understand Iran, a complicated country with a long and rich history. She is out there somewhere, still unknowable, watching as these days unfold.
