Project IBEX Iranian SIGINT Monitoring Program
Project IBEX was not just a rumor about a few antennas in northern Iran. The public record shows a large, controversial, U.S.-assisted surveillance project created for the Shah's Iran in the mid-1970s, built around electronic and photographic monitoring of Iran's borders, Rockwell International contracting, CIA advisory involvement, and the strategic value of listening posts close to the Soviet Union. Its strongest documentary trail comes from Washington Post reporting, FRUS notes, diplomatic oral history, and post-revolution reporting on abandoned American monitoring sites at Behshahr and Kabkan. What the record supports is a real technical-intelligence architecture. What it does not prove is every later claim that IBEX was an omniscient internal-control machine or a fully exposed CIA/NSA master system.