32 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER21, 2020
AREPORTERAT LARGE
THE MAN WHO WOULDN’T SPY
The F.B.I. tried to recruit an Iranian scientist as an informant. When he refused, the payback was brutal.BY LAURASECOR
I
n the spring of 2017, an Iranian ma-
terials scientist named Sirous Asgari
received a call from the United
States consulate in Dubai. Two years
earlier, he and his wife, Fatemeh, had
applied for visas to visit America, where
their children lived. The consulate in-
formed him that their requests had
finally been approved. The timing was
strange: President Donald Trump had
just issued an executive order banning
Iranians from entering the U.S. on the
very kind of visa that Asgari and his
wife were granted. Maybe applications
filed before the visa ban had been grand-
fathered through, or some career State
Department official wanted to give fam-
ilies like his a last chance to reunite.
Asgari, who was then fifty-six years
old, considered the U.S. a second home.
In the nineties, he had attended grad-
uate school at Drexel University, in Phil-
adelphia, and he came to like America’s
commonsense efficiency. His daughter
Sara was born in the U.S., making her
an American citizen. His two older chil-
dren, Mohammad and Zahra, had at-
tended American universities and stayed
on. Asgari was now a professor at Sharif
University of Technology, in Tehran,
and former graduate students of his
worked in top American laboratories;
his scientific research, on metallurgy,
sometimes took him to Cleveland, where
he had close colleagues at Case West-
ern Reserve University.
Asgari and Fatemeh boarded a flight
to New York on June 21, 2017. They
planned to see Mohammad, who lived
in the city, and then proceed to Cali-
fornia, where they would visit Zahra
and meet the man she had married.
But when the Asgaris stepped off
the jet bridge at J.F.K. two officials ac-
costed them.
The officials whisked the Asgaris
into a room, where a phalanx of F.B.I.
agents awaited them. Asgari was under
arrest, the agents told him, accused of
serious charges in a sealed indictment
whose contents they couldn’t reveal at
the airport. He could go with them to
a hotel and look over the indictment,
or he could go to a local detention cen-
ter, and then be transferred to Cleve-
land, for an arraignment. In the turmoil
of the moment, he barely registered that
nobody had stamped his visa or returned
his passport.
Asgari was fluent in English, but the
word “indictment” was new to him. He’d
never had a problem with the law. He
was a high-spirited man accustomed to
middle-class comforts, a professor’s lec-
tern, and an easy repartee with people
in authority. Surely, he figured, he was
the subject of some misunderstanding,
and so he would go to the hotel and
quickly clear it up.
At the hotel, the agents handed
Asgari a twelve-page indictment. It
charged him with theft of trade secrets,
visa fraud, and eleven counts of wire
fraud. To Asgari, the indictment read
like a spy thriller. It centered on a four-
month visit that he had made to Case
Western four years earlier, which the
document presented as part of a scheme
to defraud an American valve manu-
facturer of its intellectual property in
order to benefit the Iranian government.
The punishment, the agents made clear,
could be many years in prison. Their
evidence had been gathered from five
years of wiretaps, which had swept up
his e-mails before, during, and after the
visit in question.
The charges were nonsense, Asgari
said. The processes he’d studied at Case
Western were well known to materials
scientists—they were hardly trade se-
crets. If the government really meant to
prosecute him, it would inevitably lose
in court.
“We haven’t lost a case,” one agent
told Asgari.
“This will be your first,” he replied.
Asgari didn’t realize it, but a vise wasclosing around him. He had never seen
his visits to America through the prism
of its tensions with Iran. “Science is wild
and has no homeland,” an Iranian phi-
losopher had once said, and Asgari be-
lieved this to be so. His scientific com-
munity spanned the globe, its instruments
and findings universally accessible. That
national boundaries and political in-
trigue should interfere with intellectual
exchange seemed to him unnatural. He
had confidence in the capacity of cool
rationality to set matters right.
If he could just make the F.B.I.
agents understand the science, Asgari
told himself, they would see their mis-
take. He described the relationships
and the laboratory equipment that had
attracted him to Case Western, and ex-
plained how the properties of a mate-
rial emanated from the arrangement of
its atoms, and could be altered by en-
gineers who understood that structure.
But even as he talked he began to have
a sinking feeling that an indictment
was not something he could dissipate
with words.
That night, Fatemeh went home
with Mohammad, and two guards stayed
in Asgari’s hotel room as he slept. In
the morning, the agents drove Asgari
to Cleveland, his wife and son follow-
ing behind.
He was arraigned at the federal court-
house and delivered to the Lake County
Adult Detention Facility, a maximum-
security jail in Painesville, Ohio. For the
first of the seventy-two days he would
spend in that facility, Asgari occupied
an isolated cell. Lying on his bed, he
could hear other inmates screaming.T
he F.B.I. had reason to be inter-
ested in a man like Asgari. Sharif
University was Iran’s premier technical
institution, and the instruments and in-
sights of materials science could be used
to build missiles and centrifuges as eas-
ily as to improve the iPhone or to better