A former American spy spoke to The New Yorker about “years of secret work in the CIA — to “prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons".
[Kevin] Chalker reported that the Pentagon had proposed conducting commando operations to kill key Iranian scientists, as Israel later did. But the CIA proposed recruiting these scientists to defect, as American spies once courted Soviet physicists. 
Chalker reported what the agency asked for: “We can brief them and learn a lot more — and, if they say no, then you can kill them.” The White House liked the agency’s idea, and the president (George W. Bush) authorized the CIA to conduct covert operations to prevent Iran from building a bomb.
The program Chalker described became public knowledge in 2007, when the Los Angeles Times reported on the existence of a CIA program. called Brain DrainBut the details of the “invitations” to Iranian scientists were not mentioned…
Chalker usually had about ten minutes to explain, as gently as possible, that he was from the CIA, that he had the power to secure the scientist and his family a comfortable new life in the US – and that, if the offer was rejected, the scientist would, unfortunately, be murdered.
Killing a political scientist would violate international law. The US government has denied doing so, and there is no evidence to suggest the US has committed such killings.
A former senior agency official familiar with the Brain Drain program told The New Yorker that all that mattered was that the Iranian scientists believed they would be killed, regardless of whether the US actually carried out the threat.
And Israel had been conducting a campaign to assassinate Iranian scientists, making the prospect of deadly retaliation very likely. Other former officials said the CIA sometimes shared information with Mossad, which allowed its agents to track down and kill scientists. Such exchanges of information remained vague enough to allow for the possibility of denial.
Chalker is certain that those who rejected the “offer” were killed – one way or another… One of Chalker’s colleagues told The New Yorker that, against the backdrop of so many Israeli assassinations, Chalker’s interactions with Iranian scientists could almost be considered humanitarian as he was “throwing them a lifeline.” Of the scientists he approached, three-quarters eventually agreed to cooperate.
The 10.000-word article suggests that Chalker is unhappy that the CIA did not help him in a subsequent unrelated lawsuit, because as the agency stated, “it is almost unheard of for former spies to reveal their past activities.”
But Chalker also says he was the one who “helped obtain critical intelligence that laid the groundwork for more than a decade of American efforts to disrupt Iran’s nuclear weapons program, from the Stuxnet cyberattacks around 2010 [destroying 1.000 uranium enrichment centrifuges] to the Obama administration’s 2015 nuclear deal and U.S. airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in the summer of 2025.”
Although the press releases will range from very select to rare, I said I'd pass...because sometimes the editors hide.
Even the eavesdropper envied their glory.