Iran sentences American to death over video game

NY video maker faces execution

February 26, 2012

In the video game “Assault on Iran,” players can test their skills as a Special Forces soldier assigned to put a halt to Iran’s nuclear-weapons program.

“Your team’s mission: Infiltrate the base, secure evidence of illegal uranium enrichment, rescue your man on the inside, and destroy the centrifuges that promise to take Iran into the nuclear age,” reads a description posted on Manhattan-based Kuma Games’ Web site.

But what sounds like just another teenage diversion now has become a real-life spy story, one that could result in the killing of an American.

Amir Mirz Hekmati, a 28-year old former Marine who was born in the United States and raised in Michigan, was arrested in August while visiting family in Iran. After weeks of questioning, Hekmati was put on Iranian state television, where he “confessed” to a stint working at Kuma Games, as well as other supposedly intelligence-linked jobs.

In a translated version of the interview published in the Tehran Times, Hekmati said the company “received money from [the] CIA to design and make special films and computer games to change the public opinion’s mind-set in the Middle East and distribute them among Middle East residents free of charge.”

He was sentenced to death for espionage.

Hekmati’s family and US government officials have denied that he was in any way working for the CIA in Iran.

And the type of video game that Hekmati appears to have worked on has less to do with assault missions or public opinion than with language and cultural training.

Though Kuma Games did not respond to a request for comment, Hekmati’s name is listed as the official point of contact for a 2009 contract worth less than $100,000 from the Defense Department, to develop a video game for language training.

Peter Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, estimates the Pentagon spends about $6 billion per year on “militainment.”

He says such games have proved useful for the military in some contexts as a training tool, “particularly to a generation that is more amenable to gaming than staid lectures, or even [television] and films.”

But the idea that Hekmati’s video-game work was somehow tied to a secret espionage mission seems doubtful: A company that openly advertises games depicting invasions of Iran is hardly a good cover for a spy.

As for the accusation that Hekmati worked on games that were meant to foment anti-Iranian opinion, that, too, seems doubtful. “If it was the idea, it was a pretty silly one,” Singer says.

For now, Hekmati’s best hope is that on appeal, the Iranian courts will be able to separate virtual worlds from the real one.

SOURCE: Sharon Weinberger - New York Post