Iran Hands American 10-Year Sentence for Espionage

NICOSIA, Cyprus — An Iranian court sentenced American engineer Jon Pattis to 10 years in prison on charges of spying for the CIA, the official Iranian news agency reported Wednesday.

The Islamic Republic News Agency, monitored here, quoted “informed sources” for its report on the sentencing of the 50-year-old Pattis. It did not say when or where the trial took place.

Pattis, an electronics specialist employed by Cosmos Engineers of Bethesda, Md., worked at the Asadabad telecommunications center 200 miles southwest of Tehran. He was arrested last June, shortly after an Iraqi air raid on the center interrupted Iran’s communications with the outside world.

According to the news agency, he faced seven charges related to espionage and using a forged passport to enter the country. It did not specify the charges on which he was found guilty.

Appeared on Iranian TV

In an appearance on Iranian state television in October, Pattis said he passed information through his company to the CIA on Iranian military activities, oil production, inflation and food distribution.

He said he gave information about the Asadabad complex and the warning system it uses to guard against Iraqi air raids. The two Persian Gulf neighbors have been at war since September, 1980.

Neither the CIA nor Cosmos commented on the televised confession.

A State Department spokesman, Bruce Ammerman, said in Washington: “We are aware of the press report (about the sentence), but we have no independent confirmation and I don’t have anything more on it at this point.”

Charles Redman, another State Department spokesman, reiterated that Pattis was not an employee of the U.S. government. He said Iran repeatedly refused requests by Swiss diplomats in Tehran for consular access to Pattis. The Swiss have handled U.S. interests in Iran since relations with that country were severed in 1980 after the seizure of American hostages at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran by Islamic radicals in November, 1979.

Ellen Pattis, the imprisoned engineer’s sister, said: “We’re still hopeful. We’re hopeful that there will be something other than the 10-year sentence.”

“None of us in this family will make it 10 years, including Jon,” she said in a telephone interview from her home in Aiken, S.C.

She said Pattis had health problems that are being treated by the Iranians. She did not elaborate.

Pattis’ arrest was announced in July by Hashemi Rafsanjani, Speaker of Iran’s Parliament.

Pattis said on television in October that he worked in Iran from 1969 until the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s fundamentalist revolution overthrew Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi’s government in February, 1979. Pattis said he returned in 1984, 1985 and 1986, the last time with a forged Italian passport.

Sources in Iran who have links with the government said that Pattis was caught in a power struggle between the Intelligence Ministry and the Telecommunications Ministry, which had invited the American to return and help its engineers.