Outed During MeToo, Ex-CIA Agent Was Exonerated by Jury. He Still Lost His Career

Ashkan Bayatpour's career as an undercover CIA case officer effectively ended on August 24, 2023. That was the day the Associated Press outed him by name in an article and published a courtroom sketch of him —  even after a judge ordered no sketches of him.

A day earlier, that district court judge in Fairfax, Va., in a bench trial, found him guilty of a misdemeanor assault and battery charge, which his legal team immediately appealed to a jury, as permitted by Virginia law.

Bayatpour became the face of the MeToo movement sweeping through the spy agency; an alleged victimizer whose accuser claimed that he'd snuck up behind her in a CIA stairwell, wrapped a scarf around her neck, strangled her with it, and then attempted to kiss her.

Bayatpour acknowledged draping a scarf around the female colleague he considered a friend and making a joke about it, but he adamantly denied choking or assaulting her. The CIA agreed; multiple internal investigations cleared Bayatpour of the allegations. He drained his life's savings defending himself.

Last fall, in a unanimous verdict, a jury found Bayatpour not guilty of the attack. His lawyers successfully made the case that the accusations were out of character for a patriot who'd signed up for the U.S. Navy at 17 in the wake of the September 11 attacks, and who'd spent much of his adult life in service to his country and his fellow veterans.

His accuser, on the other hand, was evasive on the stand and was accused of manipulating evidence to the point that even the prosecutor told the jury that she "is a liar."

The case against Bayatpour was a rare case of the CIA's secretive bubble being pierced, and it received significant media attention in the years since the AP broke the story.

The not-guilty verdict came too late to save Bayatpour's undercover career — unable to do the CIA job he signed up for, he resigned in December 2023.

But now, six months after his full acquittal, Bayatpour is facing new career repercussions; the Navy is planning a board of inquiry hearing in the coming weeks that could lead to him losing his position as a Navy Reserve officer and his Navy pension. Bayatpour and his lawyers say the Navy's case against him appears to be based almost entirely on what they believe was sloppy, one-sided reporting by the AP and other outlets who followed them.

In an interview with National Review, Bayatpour maintained his innocence, while acknowledging that sexual harassment is a "legitimate problem" at the CIA. He called the accusations against him, made by a woman he considered a friend, "the deepest betrayal I've ever felt."

"I have no idea why the Navy is doing this," Bayatpour said. "It makes no sense to me. A jury of my peers heard all the facts of this case and fully exonerated me. It feels like the Navy is responding to media coverage of this case, not the actual facts of it."

The Navy declined to comment on its case against Bayatpour, while the Department of Defense referred questions to the Navy. The Associated Press declined an interview request from National Review, but "stands by its reporting," a spokeswoman said.

Multiple attempts to reach Bayatpour's accuser, Rachel Cuda, and her current attorneys on the phone and via email were unsuccessful. Her former lawyer said in an email that he's proud to have represented her in civil, congressional, and criminal proceedings.

Last fall, ahead of the jury trial, Cuda participated in interviews with CBS News and ELLE magazine, revealing her identity and making herself the public face of the victims of sexual misconduct within the CIA. She told ELLE that, feeling harassed and humiliated by the CIA, she had once planned to commit suicide at work. "I wanted to make a statement by hanging myself in that same stairwell where I was attacked," she said.

Bayatpour's supporters, on the other hand, paint him as another victim of the MeToo frenzy and the media ecosystem that supported it, which in some cases was too quick to believe anonymous accusers, and to highlight one-sided versions of events, leading to innocent people having their reputations and careers ruined. Researchers believe that somewhere between 2 percent and 8 percent of all reported rape and sexual assault claims are false.

"Ashkan had to burn through his entire savings to defend himself before we were ever retained," said his lawyer, Jennifer Steeve, adding that her team worked on his case pro bono and racked up fees and costs approaching a million dollars.

"Could you imagine being someone who is in his position where he's hamstrung by national security reasons, he has to be limited in his defense, limited in what documents he can obtain, limited in the witnesses he can call for national security reasons. And getting to the point where you don't even have the money to defend yourself," she said. "That to me speaks volumes about our system."

A Life of Service

Bayatpour was born and raised in Mobile, Ala., the son of Persian parents who became refugees in the U.S. after Islamist revolutionaries took over Iran in 1979.

He enlisted in the Navy at 17. He'd planned to join after college, "but after 9/11, that plan got kicked into high gear," Bayatpour recalled to the Tuscaloosa News in 2011.

He served for four years, including a tour of Fallujah, Iraq, supporting a Marine division. He then enrolled at the University of Alabama, where he attended undergrad and grad school, earning an MBA. He also helped to launch two veterans organizations, including a group aimed at helping student veterans adjust to life at Southeastern Conference schools.

He was recruited back to the Navy, and returned as a commissioned officer in 2012, working in intelligence. And while Bayatpour eventually eyed a finance career, he continued working in a variety of national security roles, including deploying to Guantanamo Bay, where he was tasked with overseeing some of the nation's most notorious villains, he said.

"I actually came face to face with the people who orchestrated 9/11. They were my detainees," he said.

He said he was working overseas when he was recruited to join the CIA. The process took a couple of years. He started in January 2022.

A True Friendship

While he was excited about the prospect of making a positive difference in the world, Bayatpour acknowledges he had reservations about joining the CIA. For one, he said, he took a significant pay cut from the tech company he'd started working at.

He also worried about the impact the taxing undercover work would have on his personal life, given that he was a single man in his mid-thirties with eyes on one day starting family.

During an orientation session, Bayatpour began asking questions about how quickly he could advance through international roles and return to a more stable life stateside.

Cuda, another new hire about Bayatpour's age, was in the room. She seemed to take note of the questions he was asking, he said. They chatted in the cafeteria. She told him her husband was a Navy Seal. "I thought it was cool we had something in common," he said.

They sat across from one another in class and chatted on the CIA's internal Skype messaging system. They became friends and leaned on one another for support, he said.

"I think more she was leaning on me," he said. "But it was nice to have someone that I think sort of understood the challenge of being in your late 30s and starting over from scratch."

Bayatpour said he and Cuda developed what he believed was a "true friendship" that he insists "was always platonic." He said she was one of many friends he made at the agency.

"I was giving her a lot of emotional support," he said. "The more that we got to know each other, the more she trusted me and the more she shared with me."

He testified in court that Cuda talked openly with him about problems with her marriage and career struggles.

Bayatpour said that in those few months in 2022 that he and Cuda were friends, he viewed himself as her "cheerleader and supporter," a "sounding board" and a "shoulder to cry on." They talked about problems at work, he said, and she asked him for "boy advice" — despite being married, Cuda acknowledged in court that she had several suitors coming onto her at work.

Escalating Accusations

On July 15, 2022, Bayatpour was contacted by the CIA's security office, he said. He'd recently received a speeding ticket, which he'd reported to the agency. He figured the security officials were reaching out about that.

They weren't.

His meeting with security was part of an administrative investigation. It turned into a two-hour-plus interrogation, he said. Cuda had reported to the CIA's threat-management unit that two days earlier he'd assaulted her in a stairwell by wrapping a scarf around her without her consent and telling her something that she couldn't quite catch.

"Who touches someone?" she said to an investigator during the interview.

Bayatpour claimed that on the day of the alleged assault, Cuda had asked him to go on a walk. They talked about her work troubles and complicated love life, he said. He acknowledged draping the scarf around her and making an inside joke. He laughed, he said, and she rolled her eyes. That's all there was to it, he maintained.

"They had to pry the information out of me about her personal life," Bayatpour said. "I actually remember stupidly saying to them these are private things that she shared with me and I don't feel comfortable telling you about it. One of the interrogators looked at me and said, 'Do you understand that she's the one accusing you of something?'"

CIA investigators deemed that Bayatpour wasn't a threat. In late July, they informed Cuda. She then added a new detail to her accusation — Bayatpour, she said, had been aggressive with her and had choked her with the scarf, according to court transcripts.

Cuda continued to add new details to her account in subsequent interviews, affidavits, and court testimony, records indicate.

She would later say that Bayatpour had snuck up behind her and strangled her. After allegedly going through therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder, she claimed to have recalled what she previously said she didn't catch: With the scarf tight on her neck, Bayatpour said, "there are many uses for this," and, "this is what I want to do to you," according to court transcripts. She added at one point that she would "never forget" the look on his face that indicated he wanted to hurt her.

She later claimed that at the top of the stairs, Bayatpour grabbed her by the arm, spun her around, and attempted to kiss her.

"She added in details that matched the strangulation statute of Virginia," Steeve said.

Steve said the CIA conducted four internal investigations and Bayatpour was cleared of the accusations against him in each of them. The CIA did not respond to requests for comment from National Review.

Striking out within the CIA, in late 2022, Cuda took her claims to local police in Virginia. Bayatpour was eventually charged with simple assault and battery, a misdemeanor.

In early 2023, Cuda was the first in a line of two dozen female CIA employees who testified behind closed doors before Congress about a culture of sexual harassment within the agency. That fall Cuda sued the CIA, accusing the agency of mishandling her case and trying to intimidate her. She was terminated in early 2024. Her lawyer called it brazen retaliation, an accusation the CIA called "factually inaccurate," according to news reports.

In her ELLE magazine interview, Cuda compared herself to a Navy Seal clearing a house: "The first guy through the door is the most likely to . . . take the bullet." 

'No Un-Ringing that Bell'

In August 23, 2023, Bayatpour appeared in a Fairfax court for his bench trial — in Virginia, before defendants in misdemeanor cases can request a jury trial, they first must go through a bench trial where a judge alone rules on guilt or innocence.

There were reporters and a sketch artist present. Bayatpour's attorney at the time, Stuart Sears, was surprised. He told the judge that it "raises national security concerns," and that "there's no un-ringing that bell" once Bayatpour, working at the time as an undercover case officer, is outed in the press, according to a trial transcript.

Sears considered requesting that the courtroom be closed to the press. He ended up making a narrower request: no drawings or sketches of Bayatpour. The judge agreed.

"No sketches of defendant in the courtroom," the judge ordered, according to a transcript.

The next day, after the judge found Bayatpour guilty — and after he'd appealed, vacating the ruling — the AP made him the lead anecdote in a story about the flood of sexual misconduct complaints within the CIA. And they published a sketch of Bayatpour in court.

Steeve said an AP editor told her that they interpreted the judge's order to mean only that they couldn't publish sketches of Bayatpour made after the order was made. The one they published had been completed earlier, she said the editor told her.

The AP spokeswoman didn't address this concern in her email to National Review.

"The court understood the national security concerns at play," Steeve said. "Releasing sketch art done earlier in the morning doesn't solve the problem."

Steeve said identifying Bayatpour both by name and in a courtroom sketch not only had serious national-security consequences, but also "profound implications" for Bayatpour's career and his life. Bayatpour said it also put his Iran-born family members in jeopardy.

Bayatpour said his concerns about the AP's handling of his case began before his name was included in that first article. While working on the story, the AP's reporters had reached out to friends and acquaintances of his online and outed his agency affiliation to them.

He said he did a 45-minute interview with one of the AP reporters. He said the CIA also warned the AP about the possible repercussions of outing an undercover officer.

"All the consequences for them proceeding in the reckless manner that they had were laid out for them," Bayatpour said. "They told me they would consider it, but it was pretty clear to me that they had already made the determination that they were going to fully out me."

He said follow-up reporting by other news outlets, including CNN and the Washington Post, was based on the assumption that the AP's reporting was fair and accurate.

"It wasn't accurate. It wasn't fair," he said. "They did not in any way cover this from an unbiased perspective in my opinion."

Conflicting Accounts

Bayatpour and his lawyers had long calculated that the jury trial would be their best shot at an acquittal, and they saved their most convincing evidence for it. It started in October.

Bayatpour said no one from the AP was present at the trial.

By the time of the trial, Bayatpour had already resigned from the CIA. He said he could have stayed in a role that didn't require him to work undercover, but "that's not what I came there for," he said. "I didn't come there to be an analyst. I didn't come there to do a support role."

In the trial, Bayatpour's lawyers played recorded interviews that Cuda had made with CIA investigators, highlighting how they say she continuously added new details along the way to make the stairwell encounter more violent and harrowing.

And they presented messages from the CIA's internal messaging system to support Bayatpour's version of events. He testified that Cuda had been open to him that her marriage to her Navy Seal husband was on the rocks, and that several CIA members were pursuing her for sex, most prominently a military veteran she referred to as "Tall Guy."

Bayatpour testified hat Cuda talked to him openly about details of her relationship with Tall Guy, including that she enjoyed rough sex with him, including being choked.

Bayatpour and his lawyers contend that messages he exchanged with his accuser at work — loaded with suggestive banter, sexual innuendo, and double entendres — back this up.

In one exchange, talking about her "extracurricular" activities, Cuda said that is one thing "I actually like about this place." In another, when Bayatpour asked if Cuda had "more irons in the fire" besides Tall Guy, she replied "Always." At one point when Bayatpour made a comment about her being with her "next husband," she said, "Next but not last."

Testifying in his own defense, Bayatpour said a Signal message he received from Cuda one night in May 2022 after she'd been with Tall Guy was clearly about rough sex: "Let's just say it's confirmed I that I don't have a gag reflex. LOL," she wrote, and "I'm just proud I could take it all. May not be able to talk tomorrow. LOL."

Cuda denied sending the graphic message.

Bayatpour flattered Cuda in Skype messages. He said she was a "catch" and called himself her "permanent hype man." She said that she and Bayatpour were "worky-work soul mates" and that during "Ashkan time" she would tell him things "I don't tell anybody else."

On the witness stand, Cuda claimed Bayatpour's lawyers twisted her messages by "eroticizing and oversexualizing everything."

She denied having any affairs. Tall Guy wasn't one person, she said, but a reference to several tall people at the CIA. Her messages about being sore and her throat hurting were about exercise and swimming in a chlorinated pool.

But Steeve said that after being presented with the evidnce in the case, "the jury had the opportunity to fully understand the nature of her relationship with Tall Guy." And understanding that was a key to understanding Bayatpour's version of what happened in the stairwell between Cuda and him.

'Ms. Cuda Is a Liar'

The morning of July 13, 2022, Cuda messaged Bayatpour and asked him to go on a walk.

"Whatever you want," he messaged back, according to court transcripts. "Dangerous words," she replied.

Bayatpour said he hadn't really talked to Cuda in weeks since he'd hit it off with a woman on a dating app whom he'd just met in person — that woman, who is now Bayatpour's wife, had just visited Washington, D.C., in early July and they'd spent a week together.

Bayatpour said he assumed that Cuda needed to vent. And she did, he said, for at least 45 minutes, complaining about Tall Guy and being unhappy at work.

Cuda told ELLE that she asked Bayatpour to go for a walk with her because she'd seen him that morning and "he looked really upset."

According to Bayatpour, near the end of their walk, Cuda asked him how he was doing. He said he gushed about the woman he'd just met and expressed being "blissfully happy."

"It seemed to catch her off guard, and her mood shifted immediately," he said.

He said he felt like expressing his happiness was insensitive after Cuda had spent so much time recounting her troubles. He said he aimed to cheer her up and "recenter the mood."

At the beginning of their walk, Bayatpour gave Cuda a scarf he'd received at an air show, he said. It was blue and yellow, the colors of Ukraine's flag, and he thought Cuda, who often wore scarfs and shawls, would appreciate it. In the stairwell he asked for it back.

"So, I remember trying to unravel it," Bayatpour testified in court, "and I was like, 'Hey, you know, this has many uses.' And I draped it over her shoulder."

It was all in jest, he said. He denied choking her. He told National Review that his joke was a "call back" to the sex references and humor they'd regularly engaged in together.

In his closing argument, Bayatpour's lawyer, Ronald Safer, said there was no reason to believe Bayatpour would attack Cuda of the blue — he'd never made advances before and he'd just met the woman he would eventually marry. The best explanation, he said, was that Bayatpour simply made a joke to lift his friend's mood as their Skype exchanges indicated he'd done "many, many times" before.

In the bench trial, his previous attorney said Bayatpour made a joke that "didn't land the way it was intended to land," according to news reports.

Safer accused Cuda of lying about her friendship with Bayatpour, lying about loving her job, lying to investigators, lying about the purpose of her interviews with investigators, and lying to the jury about the sexual innuendo in her Skype messages with Bayatpour and Tall Guy.

In her closing argument, the prosecutor appeared to acknowledge the inconsistencies in Cuda's testimony:  "Ms. Cuda is a liar. Check," said the prosecutor, who earlier told the judge that she believed Cuda was distracting the jury with "alligator tears." But she argued that Bayatpour had engaged in an "unwanted touching" that was "rude" and "insulting," and for that they could still find him guilty.

They did not.

A Navy Hearing

If it is true that Bayatpour's accuser made up the accusations, why did she do it? Safer suggested in court that the most charitable explanation was that she misinterpreted the intent of Bayatpour's joke. But maybe it was because she believed he would no longer be her work cheerleader, he said. Or maybe it was about money.

Speaking with National Review, Bayatpour declined to speculate about Cuda's motive.

"It's unfortunate that it happened," he said, "and it's more unfortunate that the actual survivors [of sexual misconduct at the CIA] who had some momentum have since had to take a step back and regroup."

Over the last two years, the CIA reports that it has taken steps to improve its handling of sexual assault and harassment allegations, including streamlining the reporting process, establishing an internal task force, and bringing on a special victims officer to help the agency facilitate investigations.

After the not-guilty verdict last year, Cuda's former attorney, Kevin Carroll, was critical of the defense's tactics. "This effort to tarnish her reputation is reprehensible, and it is surprising that it was allowed in 2024," he said, according to the AP.

Bayatpour's case has since been expunged from the courts. But the Navy still appears to be moving forward with its own case against him.

On March 10, Bayatpour received a letter from the Navy informing him that he was facing charges of assault, sexual harassment, and conduct unbecoming of an officer. If he's found guilty in a board of inquiry hearing, he could lose his Navy position, the letter stated.

The letter stated that the hearing should be completed within 60 days, a goal the Navy said would be "vigorously pursued." Bayatpour was recently assigned a lawyer from the Judge Advocate General's Corp. to aid him in his defense.

"Despite everything Ashkan has been through, he is still the same patriot who signed up for the Navy in high school in the days following 9/11," Steeve told National Review. "He still wants to serve, even though his cover was blown in the press and his CIA career ended, all because of accusations that a jury quickly determined to be unfounded.

"The Navy now has the opportunity to do the right thing and let this innocent man keep serving his country."