34 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER21, 2020
understand the properties of a gem.
Asgari’s concerns fell squarely on the
civilian side of the line. “I never inten-
tionally worked for destructive pur-
poses,” he told me, during a series of
conversations that began in 2018. “If
you have a pen, you can write a love let-
ter, or you can write instructions for
making a bomb. That’s not a problem
with the pen.”
Asgari’s career was a love letter to
the atom. He was dazzled the first time
he discerned one with the aid of a trans-
mission electron microscope, or tem:
within the seemingly inert surfaces of
objects was a kaleidoscope of churning
activity. Atoms cannot be seen with an
ordinary optical microscope. A tem—
which is about twice the size of an in-
dustrial refrigerator—is expensive, and
so sensitive that it must be shielded from
light, heat, cold, dust, the imperceptible
shifting of buildings in wind, and the
noise of distant galaxies.
Asgari was in charge of a tem that
Sharif acquired in 1994. He ran an élite
research team of Ph.D. students and
adored teaching. Compact and clean-
cut, with a heart-shaped face and wire-
rimmed glasses, he spoke at volume,
often insistently, with a charisma that
occasionally verged on overbearing.
Professors at Sharif supplemented
their salaries and financed their depart-
ments with industrial and government
contracts. Asgari had one with Iran’s
energy ministry, assessing and extend-
ing the longevity of gas-turbine parts;
he was also conducting a feasibility
study for a state-owned mining com-
pany, which was looking into produc-
ing high-performance, heat-resistant
metals known as superalloys. The two
contracts brought the university some
four hundred thousand dollars, which
helped support the work of Asgari and
his students.
International sanctions had long been
a fact of life in Iran. In the twenty-tens,
in the run-up to nuclear negotiations
between Iran and six world powers,
the restrictions tightened: nothing that
could be classified as “dual use,” or ap-
plicable to both military and civilian
realms, could be imported to Iran. Ma-
terials science straddled that line almost
by definition.
Asgari could not order parts or main-
tenance for Sharif ’s tem, which was
made in the U.S. and had cost about a
million dollars, and so he and his stu-
dents learned to patch the instrument
with improvised fixes and secondhand
components. In 2011, for want of a fila-
ment, the machine spent months off-
line. That year, Asgari visited Pirouz
Pirouz, a friend and colleague at Case
Western. The materials-science lab there
had a state-of-the-art tem, and a col-lection of instruments not often found
in one facility. Asgari was eligible for a
sabbatical the next year, and he hoped
to return to Case.
He was eager for both the labora-
tory access and the opportunity to make
some dollars: Iran’s currency was in free
fall, and he had two children paying tu-
ition at U.S. universities. But his search
for a position came up empty, and so he
went to America on a visitor’s visa, in
November, 2012, with a plan to spend
time with his children while continu-
ing to look for work. A few days after
he landed in New York, he learned that
a job had unexpectedly opened up at
the materials-science lab at Case.
Arthur Heuer, the scientist then in
charge of the lab, offered Asgari the po-
sition. The university would need to ini-
tiate paperwork to convert his visa to an
H1B, which allowed employment in the
U.S. In the meantime, he could work at
Case as a volunteer. Asgari told me that
he did so, with an informal promise of
back pay once his status was straight-
ened out. (Heuer said that he does not
recall making such an arrangement.)
The work consisted mainly of pre-
paring samples for the tem. But a few
weeks into the job Heuer asked Asgari
to analyze the atomic structure of stain-
less-steel samples from the university’s
industrial partner, the Swagelok Com-
pany—a valve-and-tube-fittings manu-
facturer based in Ohio. In the mid-two-
thousands, the company had generously
funded the department’s lab, and it was
now called the Swagelok Center for Sur-face Analysis of Materials. Case schol-
ars worked independently on research
projects and also with Swagelok scien-
tists on technologies that could benefit
the firm.
In 2000, Swagelok secured its first
patent for low-temperature carburiza-
tion, a process for introducing carbon
atoms into stainless steel, to produce a
surface that was both extraordinarily
hard and resistant to corrosion. The
samples that Asgari was preparing and
analyzing had been subjected to this
process, and although the company was
seeking to improve its product, for Asgari
the technique was primarily of intellec-
tual interest. He wanted to know not
how it worked but why. The carbon
atoms diffused into the crystalline lat-
tice of solid metal like a drop of ink per-
meating a glassful of water. The laws of
thermodynamics would not have pre-
dicted that the resulting metal would
be stable, but it was.
Asgari had been at Case Western for
three months when he learned that the
university was rescinding its formal job
offer. In March, 2013, Heuer told him
that his visa application had no chance
of being approved. According to Asgari,
he noted, “The U.S. government is con-
cerned about your activities in the United
States.” Asgari continued working while
Case looked for a replacement, and
Heuer paid him an honorarium from
discretionary funds.
One day in April, Asgari noticed a
business card stuck in the jamb of his
apartment door. The card belonged to
Special Agent Matthew Olson, of the
F.B.I.; on the back, Olson had scrawled
a note asking Asgari to call him. Where
Asgari came from, a summons from an
intelligence agency was trouble. He called
Pirouz and another friend for advice, but
their lines were busy, and Asgari, his
mind spinning, became afraid that the
Bureau had seized control of his phone
and meant to arrest him. Finally, he called
Olson, and the agent proposed meeting
just a few minutes later, at a café across
the street. As Asgari walked there, he
imagined that people were watching him.
Olson was boyish and pleasant, and
seemed mostly to want to make small
talk. Like Asgari, he had three kids.
Wasn’t it amazing how different each
child was? Olson looked too young to
have three kids, Asgari remarked. Olson