how to detect and arrest a chinese/american spy in iran
according to nyt.
Her Husband Was a Princeton Graduate Student. Then He Was Taken Prisoner in Iran.
Xiyue Wang could easily never have gone to Iran. He was a graduate student at Princeton, researching similarities across regional governments in 19th-century inner Asia. His work touched on neither the United States’ Iran policy nor any Iranian political reality less than a hundred years old. He initially planned to use the archives in Turkmenistan, but Turkmenistan denied him a visa.
He wasn’t looking for an adventure — he had a 2-year-old son and a wife who had only just arrived in the United States from China. Compared with Turkmenistan, Iran was an open book, and compared with Afghanistan, which he also considered, it was safe. Moreover, Iran’s archives had a wealth of material useful to his research. He would need to learn Persian and at least survey the literature on Iran. But this sort of thing came easily to him: He was a voracious reader with a gift for languages.
He left for Tehran in late January 2016, the same month that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (J.C.P.O.A.), better known as the Iran nuclear deal, took full effect. Wang, a Chinese-born, naturalized American citizen, set out for Iran without a worry. The Dehkhoda language institute in Tehran sponsored his visa, and an Iranian consular authority stamped its approval on Princeton’s letter of introduction, which indicated that the purpose of Wang’s travel was archival research. He would be using two collections: the diplomatic archive housed at the country’s foreign ministry and the National Archives of Iran.
He rented a room in a Chinese couple’s apartment near Vanak Square, in a lively middle-class neighborhood in the north of Tehran. He got up at 6 each morning for a video chat with his wife and son, had cookies and milk for breakfast and then took a taxi to the diplomatic archives, just south of the city’s center, arriving by 8 a.m. and staying until closing time. Because many of the documents he needed were handwritten in an antiquated Persian script, Wang engaged a local scholar to help him decode them. He waxed “exuberant” about his research, his Princeton adviser, the historian Stephen Kotkin, recalls. Four days a week, he studied Persian at the Dehkhoda institute.
The days were long and often frustrating. First there was Nowruz, the Persian new year, which shut down the archives for weeks. Then there was the traffic. In Tehran, taxis are cheap, air is poisonous and you can get exactly nowhere inside of an hour. Before he knew it, in June, came Ramadan, when, in deference to local regulation and custom, he would pass 14-hour days without food or drink, only gulping down porridge and instant noodles in his apartment after 9 at night. To one close friend, Wang sounded peevish. He just needed to access the National Archives before he could come home. But unlike the diplomatic archive, the National Archives were holding him at bay.
The National Archives of Iran are indexed in a database. Scholars sit at terminals to pore through the index, then submit lists of documents they wish to see. Only if you have an archive “membership” can the archivists then burn a selection of these documents to a disk for you, at a fee of six cents a page. This step is crucial: When historians work in archives far from home, they routinely collect thousands of pages of documents for later study. Wang had applied for his membership early on, and every week, he stopped by the sprawling, tiered brick complex to check on the status of his request. He never got an answer.
The local scholar working with Wang proposed that they peruse the index together, and then the scholar, a former employee of the National Archives, would submit the request for the documents under his own name. Wang was eager to get home. Having the scholar take the copies was a workaround, and as Wang understood it, not an uncommon one. The archivists gave the scholar half the documents. But when he went back for the second half, they objected, and the next day, the scholar was interrogated by the police.
Wang wrote to Kotkin and explained what he had gathered and what was still outstanding. Kotkin gave him his blessing to leave Iran and return for the remaining documents another time. Wang told his wife he was coming home.
That was when the calls started coming — strangers with unknown numbers, summoning Wang to a police station for questioning. Interrogators took his passport and his laptop. There was a problem with his visa, they told him. He couldn’t do this kind of research with that visa. Anyway, why had the local scholar requested his documents? He called his adviser. He called the Swiss Embassy, which represents American interests in Iran. Everyone told him not to worry. This sort of thing happened often enough: Iranian authorities harassed or intimidated scholars, particularly those from the United States or Britain, telling them their visas were out of order and eventually sending them on their way. But until they gave back Wang’s passport, he was stuck. Days passed, and his panic mounted.
On Aug. 7, an unknown caller told him to report to a hotel. He phoned his wife, Hua Qu, back in New Jersey: If she didn’t hear from him after this meeting, she should notify Princeton right away. A few hours later, he called back with good news. He was at his apartment, packing and paying his rent. The Iranians were sending him home. A man waiting downstairs would take him to the airport. She should have someone from the Swiss Embassy meet him there with a plane ticket.
For five hours, the Swiss diplomat waited for Wang at the airport. The ticketed flight came and went. The next time Qu heard from her husband, she was at Princeton’s Firestone Library, and August was at an end. She got a call from an unknown number. It was Wang, in Tehran’s Evin Prison, crying so hard he couldn’t speak.