said that he was thirty-five, adding,
“When I was eighteen, the girls thought
I was twelve.” He asked Asgari why he
had come to Cleveland, and Asgari ex-
plained the sabbatical, the job offer, the
lack of parts for his tem in Iran. He
speculated to Olson that the F.B.I. had
been behind the scuttling of his visa
application. Four months’ work, and
some twenty thousand dollars that he
would never be paid: the U.S. govern-
ment was responsible.
Olson seemed to take Asgari’s com-
plaint to heart. He offered him five thou-
sand dollars—if he would sign a paper,
which he could get from another man
in the café. Asgari realized that he’d
walked into a trap. Olson was not there
to arrest him. He was trying to recruit
him as an informant.
Asgari looked at the man with the
paper to sign and felt sick. He wouldn’t
sign anything, he said, or take a penny
from the F.B.I. Honorable people didn’t
entertain such offers. Asgari soon finished
up at Case and flew home to Iran, feel-
ing that he had dispatched with the
whole affair.
T
he man with the paper was Spe-
cial Agent Timothy Boggs, a coun-
terintelligence officer at the Cleveland
field office of the F.B.I. His focus was
Iran, a U.S. adversary whose nationals
are of special interest to the Bureau,
whether as suspected agents or as po-
tential assets.
Iranians visiting or residing in the
U.S. routinely hear from the Bureau. Half
a dozen Iranian nationals and Iranian-
Americans have described such ap-
proaches to me, and they have typically
done so with trepidation, because the
Iranian government sees any returning
national who has had dealings with a
U.S. intelligence agency as a potential
spy. Some Iranians told me of polite con-
versations with federal agents, cards ex-
changed, refusals accepted. Others de-
scribed repeated demands, veiled threats,
and legal trouble lasting years. The Bu-
reau recruits counterintelligence assets
in much the same way it turns witnesses
in domestic racketeering cases: agents
look for vulnerabilities to use as leverage
in pressuring people to become infor-
mants. They find discrepancies in immi-
gration paperwork or identify petty sanc-
tions violations, sometimes threatening
an indictment to bolster their demands.
Late in 2012, Boggs got a tip from
an informant at Case that an Iranian
on a tourist visa was working at a lab
there. Boggs must have sensed an op-
portunity: a professor from Sharif Uni-
versity undoubtedly would be acquainted
with scientists working on military
or nuclear engineering in Iran—and
Asgari’s tourist visa was a vulnerability,
as it didn’t authorize him to work for
an American employer. Tellingly, Olson
later testified in a court proceeding that
when he met Asgari he did so to see if
the scientist could be “potentially help-
ful for other areas.”
Boggs had been sizing up Asgari since
December, and by questioning Arthur
Heuer, the Case scientist, he learned that
Asgari’s lab work was neither classified
nor strictly proprietary. Still, Boggs ex-
amined the metadata for some of Asgari’s
e-mails. He noted that Asgari had been
in contact with Case staff well before
his arrival, and that during his time in
Cleveland he had kept in touch with
multiple people at Sharif.
In February, Boggs asked an Ohio
magistrate to grant him a search warrantfor a wiretap, claiming probable cause
to believe that Asgari was violating
U.S. sanctions. In an affidavit, Boggs
mentioned Asgari’s e-mails to Iran, and
pointed out that Sharif University was
partly funded by its home government.
(Of course, all public schools are.) Part
of the rationale for the search warrant
was more insinuated than argued ex-
plicitly: the Swagelok Center, Boggs
stressed, had received funding from the
U.S. Navy for its work on low-tempera-
ture carburization, and researchers at
Sharif University sometimes worked
with the Iranian Navy. Boggs cited a
paper written by a student at a branch
of Sharif on the Persian Gulf island of
Kish. The student, who hadn’t worked
with Asgari, or even in the same de-
partment, had written about autono-
mous underwater vehicles—a topic com-
pletely outside Asgari’s area of expertise.
The magistrate granted the wiretap,
which gave Boggs access to e-mails in
Asgari’s Gmail account from as far back
as 2011. In 2015, when the wiretap ex-
pired, the Bureau secured a new one.
The application for the second warrant
suggested that F.B.I. agents had found