Reported by Colin Moynihan

In the summer of 2020, Niloufar Bahadorifar, an expatriate Iranian in California, received a message from someone in her home country asking her to send money to the PayPal account of a person in Manhattan. Ms. Bahadorifar passed along $670 and forwarded proof of the transaction to Iran.

The payment may have seemed unremarkable, but federal prosecutors have said it was part of an audacious plot to kidnap an Iranian-born journalist who fled the authoritarian government in Tehran in 2009 and had been living in New York City.

Iranian operatives employed private investigators in the United States who were unaware of the plan but spied on the journalist, Masih Alinejad, even setting up a live, high-definition video feed of her home, the prosecutors said.

Ms. Bahadorifar’s payment went to one of those investigators. She was not accused of taking part in the kidnapping conspiracy, but pleaded guilty last year to a charge of conspiracy to violate U.S. economic sanctions on Iran by helping channel money to the investigator.

On Friday, a federal judge in Manhattan sentenced Ms. Bahadorifar to four years in prison.

Ms. Alinejad, appearing in court, said that being targeted by the Iranian government would not deter her activism but acknowledged that it had taken a toll. She had experienced nightmares, she said, and had been living in safe houses after being forced to move out of her home of 10 years.

Her punishment may be the only one to result from an indictment that was unsealed in 2021 and detailed the plot. The other defendants — an Iranian intelligence official, Alireza Shavaroghi Farahani, and three operatives, Mahmoud Khazein, Kiya Sadeghi and Omid Noori — all live in Iran.

Even if those four men never stand trial, federal officials have said that indicting them helps deter similar plots and protects American citizens like Ms. Alinejad.

The indictment provides a glimpse into a byzantine plan that included the use of a real estate listing service to research Ms. Alinejad’s neighborhood in Brooklyn, the potential use of speedboats to spirit her away from New York City and an ocean voyage to Latin America.

Ms. Bahadorifar’s lawyers emphasized in a letter to the court that she had no knowledge of the kidnapping plot and suggested that she had helped the Iranian operatives because she was intimidated. Ms. Bahadorifar, they added, had been arrested in Iran when she was 10 years old, and her sister and niece, who still live there, had been threatened by the regime. They said a longtime family friend had bamboozled Ms. Bahadorifar into making the PayPal transaction.

Sanctions imposed by the United States in response to Iran’s support of international terrorism and its efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction forbid the supply of American banking and financial services to Iran without a special Treasury Department license.

Around 2014, prosecutors wrote, Ms. Bahadorifar started receiving regular payments from Iran provided by Mr. Khazein, a businessman and member of a volunteer auxiliary division of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. She maintained bank accounts and made payments at his request, helping him import commodities to Iran and adding him as an account holder on credit cards, they said.

Over about nine months in July 2020, according to prosecutors, Ms. Bahadorifar made more than 100 bank deposits of cash totaling $476,100, almost all structured to avoid being reported to the U.S. government.

Read full report: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/07/nyregion/iran-kidnapping-plot-sentencing.html