The tooth spy

This seems to be a good week for strange spy arrests in the Middle East. Here’s the latest: Iranian authorities have arrested a 55-year-old American woman on suspicion of spying, state-controlled media said on Thursday. The reports said she had espionage equipment concealed in her teeth.[…] People briefed on the affair, who requested anonymity because ...

By , a former associate editor at Foreign Policy.

This seems to be a good week for strange spy arrests in the Middle East. Here's the latest:

This seems to be a good week for strange spy arrests in the Middle East. Here’s the latest:

Iranian authorities have arrested a 55-year-old American woman on suspicion of spying, state-controlled media said on Thursday. The reports said she had espionage equipment concealed in her teeth.[…]

People briefed on the affair, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters, said the arrest seemed confusing since the woman, identified by the newspaper as Hall Talayan, had presented herself as an asylum-seeker when she entered Iran from Armenia.

By this account, the woman had told Iranian officials at the border town of Nordouz, 370 miles northwest of Tehran, that she would be killed if she returned to Armenia. She had personally vouchsafed that she had espionage equipment concealed in her teeth, these people said.

There’s a lot missing here — like which country is supposed to have installed the hardware in this woman’s teeth and why an American would travel to Iran, of all countries, after she ran into trouble in Armenia. Plus, are the teeth really an effective place to hide spying equipment? Wouldn’t you have to spend a suspicious amount of time grinnning at sensitive locations?

Joshua Keating was an associate editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @joshuakeating

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