THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER21, 2020 37
others who may have helped commit it,
in exchange for more lenient terms.
Asgari had accepted none of the charges
against him, and the information sought
in the proffer was unrelated to his case:
the agents wanted him to share general
intelligence about Iran. “This was a coun-
terintelligence case masquerading as a
trade-secrets case,” Bryan told me.
The F.B.I. agents touched on the in-
dictment, but asked mainly about proj-
ects that could be connected to Iran’s
military and nuclear capabilities—re-
search in which Asgari had played no
part—and about colleagues at Sharif
whose names the Bureau had culled from
his e-mails. Asgari refused to answer
these questions. Instead, he responded
with a Persian parable. A man made
friends with a bear because he believed
that he needed a strong protector. One
night, while the man slept, a fly landed
on his face. The bear was indeed very
protective—he crushed the fly with a
boulder, killing the man. The moral?
“Don’t make friends with stupid people,
even if they’re very strong,” Asgari said.
After another proffer meeting ended
in a stalemate, the government offered
Asgari release on bond, on the condition
that he submit to further questioning.
Asgari took the offer, thinking that he
had made his limits clear and would go
on answering only questions strictly per-
tinent to the charges against him.
Upon his release, he reported to the
Cleveland federal building, to be fitted
with an ankle bracelet. But there he was
arrested again—this time by Immigration
and Customs Enforcement. The indict-
ment, Asgari was astonished to learn,
wasn’t his only legal problem: his visa
hadn’t been stamped at J.F.K., most likely
because it wasn’t a real visa. “Unwitting
silent parole” allows the F.B.I. to issue
foreign nationals a document that looks
to them like a visa but in fact grants
them permission to enter the country
only for the Bureau’s purposes. Once
those purposes are served, the F.B.I. is
required to hand the foreign national
over to ice for removal.
The government petitioned ice to
defer Asgari’s deportation until after he
stood trial. While papers changed hands,
Asgari remained in ice’s custody, at a fa-
cility in Geauga County. He shared an
open dormitory with inmates from around
the world, most of them seeking asylum
or awaiting deportation. They fought less
than the inmates at Lake County, and
showed less interest in physics.
After eight days, an ice officer told
Asgari that he would be released if he
signed a form that committed him to
coöperating with an expedited deporta-
tion to Iran after the resolution of his
case. His only other option was remain-
ing in jail. Asgari signed the form, and
was released on bond, with an ankle
bracelet and a curfew.A
sgari moved into a run-down high-
rise in Cleveland, where he studied
cosmology, taught himself to cook, and
fed a rooftop colony of sparrows. Fate-
meh lived there with him until October,
when she returned to Iran. He worked
frenetically through the winter to build
his legal case and almost managed to
conceal from himself that he felt lonely
and found his ankle bracelet and “Offen-
der I.D.” humiliating.
The prosecutors and the F.B.I. came
to him for more proffer meetings. Each
time, he refused to enter a guilty plea
or to become an informant. The F.B.I.
grew increasingly frustrated and angry
with him—and he began to understand
that rebuffing the Bureau’s overtures
would cost him. The government was
prepared to prosecute him, even with a
threadbare indictment. Edward Bryan,
Asgari’s defender, discussed the case
with his boss, a slender ex-marine named
Stephen Newman, and Newman stepped
in as lead attorney.
Asgari felt that the indictment was a
house of cards if you knew the science,
but the amassed technical details did make
for a sinister-looking tangle of acronyms
and numbers. To win, Asgari’s attorneys
needed to understand the context and
the meaning of the data in his e-mails,
and they also needed to grasp the basis
of Asgari’s interest in this information.
He offered them an illustration that later
made its way into the courtroom. For
thousands of years, humans have known
that, when you boil an egg, it solidifies.
But they have known for less than a hun-
dred years why it does that, and why it
does not revert to a liquid state when re-
turned to room temperature. The first—
the how—is the primary concern of en-
gineers. The second—the why—is the
province of science. Asgari stressed that,
at Case, his interest was in the science.The case was on the docket of the
federal judge James Gwin. Appointed to
Ohio’s Northern District by President
Bill Clinton, in 1997, Gwin had a record
of mixing it up with the conservative ap-
pellate judges on the Sixth Circuit. Gwin
enjoined voter harassment and intimi-
dation at Ohio polling stations during
the 2016 election; the Sixth Circuit re-
versed him. In 2018, Gwin threatened
ice with contempt if it deported a de-
fendant who was awaiting sentencing;
the Sixth Circuit reversed him again.
Before the proceedings began, Asgari
and his attorneys obtained copies of the
2013 and 2015 search warrants, and they
felt at once stunned and vindicated. As
they saw it, the F.B.I. had secured the
wiretap warrants based on little more
than Asgari’s nationality. Boggs’s 2013
affidavit tantalizingly referred to a Bu-
reau operation called Operation Clean
Pitch—the pursuit of Asgari was some-
how a component of it—but further de-
tail was redacted. Asgari entered a mo-
tion to suppress all evidence from the
wiretaps, on the ground that the war-
rants had lacked probable cause. His at-
torneys told him not to expect much:
U.S. federal courts were not known for
granting constitutional rulings in favor
of foreign nationals.
Judge Gwin held a hearing on the
motion on February 20, 2018, zeroing in
on the 2013 affidavit’s insinuations about
the Iranian Navy and the graduate-
student paper from Kish. In his decision,
Gwin called the citation of the paper
“wildly misleading,” given the absence
of any connection between Asgari and
its author. “At its essence, the 2013 affi-
davit only says that Asgari worked as a
metallurgy professor at an Iranian sup-
ported prominent engineering school,”
Gwin wrote. “That is not enough to show
probable cause of an Iran sanctions vio-
lation.” Concluding that Boggs had de-
liberately created a false impression of
probable cause, Gwin granted the mo-
tion to suppress the wiretap evidence.
Asgari was riding high: the wiretaps
were the whole case. But the U.S. Attor-
ney’s office appealed Gwin’s ruling, and
the Sixth Circuit reversed it, saying that,
because “investigators operating in good
faith reasonably could have thought the
warrant was valid,” the evidence could
not be suppressed. Moreover, the Sixth
Circuit judges felt that Boggs had not