38 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER21, 2020
REMEDY
In deciding what I am, I’ve ruled out cat, vulture, shoe,
a sadist who tortures people to death in a Syrian hospital,
a president who separates families at the border,
a handful of purple irises at the beginning of the path
to heaven. Is there memory in the shade of a tree
of a lynching fifty years ago, when I was nine? And do I love
that tree? Love the sinner, not the sin. Forgive the electricity,
not the singeing of genitals. The more I know about human nature
the more I plan to be tall grass in a field. Until then
I’ll tell my wife I love her in Toronto and Blacksburg and bed,
in pajamas and bluejeans and song, in theory and fact and dream.
I will not gouge a man’s eye out, I promise, yet the eye is out,
the man is dead, and the geese I’m listening to have no idea
that we’re as wild as the coyotes that would tear them apart.
If given a choice I’d not choose to be human. If given a choice
how to be human, I’d say like a glass of water. While I have
no answers to the questions I don’t know to ask, I can love my wife
in Detroit, in general, in detail, in vain, in spite, in depth,
in the shallow light of the moon, in contrast to hating myself,
in sympathy and in stealth, in time as a ghost and right now
as a poet wondering if surgeons, during a transplant,
tell the shivering and recycled heart it is loved. I assume so,
but I’ve never asked a heart on its second time around,
Were you christened, were you blessed, are you worth
all this trouble?—Bob Hicokintentionally misled the magistrate, and
found the affidavit at least minimally
persuasive: at the Swagelok Center, As
gari was working in a lab partly funded
by U.S. military grants, at a time when
Iran was under broad sanctions.
During the eighteen months that
followed Gwin’s wiretap ruling, there
were more hearings, motions, appeals,
and reversals. Because Asgari only rarely
needed to appear in court in Cleveland,
he obtained permission to stay with
Mohammad in New York, where he
read books on the crystallography of
precious stones, and then with Zahra
in California, where he went on hikes
and audited lectures at Stanford.
Until the conclusion of his trial, he
couldn’t leave America: he had an ankle
bracelet, supervision, and bond. If he was
convicted, he’d go to jail; if he was ac
quitted, he’d be deported. He didn’t know
what would await him in Iran. The re
gime would surely look askance at his
contacts with the U.S. justice system, no
matter how antagonistic they had been,
and might not believe that he hadn’t let
the F.B.I. recruit him. In the past, the
Iranian government had negotiated pris
oner swaps with the U.S., but Asgari told
his wife to inform the Iranian foreign
ministry that he did not want to be in
cluded in any such negotiations. He felt
that he had a chance of a fair hearing
before Judge Gwin, and didn’t want his
case to be politicized.
T
he trial began on November 12, 2019.
Asgari, wearing a charcoal suit with
out a tie, in the Iranian fashion, sat
through the proceedings alert and bird
like. The case before the jurors was diz
zyingly technical, but the big picture was
strangely vacuous. He had allegedly sto
len trade secrets, but from a company
that had suffered no apparent injury,
and to nobody’s profit. The supposed
trade secrets had all been published in
patents and scientific journals.
To support the tradesecrets charge,
Daniel Riedl and the other prosecutors
presented emails that Asgari had sent
or received, some of which contained
Swagelok data. But the data in the emails
were either erroneous, banal, or in the
public domain. The prosecution’s cen
terpiece was an email that Asgari re
ceived from Sunniva Collins, a materi
als scientist at Swagelok who held several
patents in lowtemperature carburiza
tion. Prosecutors characterized the mes
sage, which detailed times and tempera
tures for a carburization process used on
one of the samples Asgari was asked to
analyze, as the “recipe” email.
By the time Asgari showed up at Case
in 2013, lowtemperature carburization
had been around for decades. Dozens of
papers had been published on the sub
ject. To steal a trade secret, a person has
to knowingly expropriate intellectual
property for the profit of someone other
than the owner. And, for information to
qualify as a trade secret, it has to be both
economically valuable and confidential.
The “recipe” email met none of these
criteria. The particular sample that Col
lins described had been treated in a trial
run for a patent that Swagelok had al
ready published. Asgari did not forward
the times and temperatures to his Gmail
account or to anybody else. In any case,
the values were consistent with the pub
lished patent. Collins testified that the
recipe was not a trade secret.The prosecution further offered an
email that Asgari had forwarded from
his Case account to his Gmail account.
It contained data that he’d obtained
from Swagelok about the chemical com
position of the steel before it was treated
with carbon. Asgari’s lawyers said that
he had forwarded these data to himself
out of puzzlement: the values for phos
phorus and chromium did not match
industry standards for the grades of steel
Swagelok had ordered. Asgari had con
cluded that either the samples were de
fective or—more likely—Swagelok’s in
struments were out of calibration.
Finally, the prosecution presented the
proposal that Asgari’s student had made
to a research institute connected to Iran’s
petrochemical industry, suggesting a
project on lowtemperature carburiza
tion. The student had hyped his profes
sor’s experience, boasting that, in Amer
ica, Asgari had acquired knowledge of
the process that nobody in Iran possessed.
On the witness stand, the student made
clear that he had sent Asgari the pro