Spy Schools

by Daniel Golden

  “I work for the CIA,” the newcomer answered. “I’m a spy.”

  The spy had majored in theater and was “wonderfully jovial,” Gee recalls. His purpose was to let Gee know that the CIA would be recruiting on campus, and not only Americans. “I think it was because of the significant foreign population at Ohio State,” Gee says. “It was the first time in thirty years I ever had someone from the CIA visit.”

  Spanier frequently traveled abroad, visiting China, Cuba, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other countries of interest to the CIA. On his return, the agency would debrief him. “I have been in the company of presidents, prime ministers, corporate chief executives, and eminent scientists,” he told me. “That’s a level of life experience and exposure you don’t have as a case officer or even a State Department employee.”

  I asked if U.S. intelligence had ever instructed him to gather specific information; in other words, if he had ever acted as an intelligence agent. He smiled and said, “I can’t talk about it.”

  His lofty contacts enabled Spanier to steer federal research funds to universities in general, and Penn State in particular. When Robert Gates, who as president of Texas A&M University had been Spanier’s “close colleague” on the higher education advisory board, became U.S. secretary of defense in December 2006, they brainstormed about academia’s role in national defense. The result was the Pentagon-funded Minerva Initiative, which supports social science research on regions of strategic importance to U.S. security.

  At meetings with the CIA’s chief scientist, or the head of the FBI’s science and technology branch, Spanier invariably asked, “What’s your greatest need?” He rarely heard the answer without thinking, We can do that at Penn State. Then he would approach the director of the appropriate Penn State laboratory, explain what the CIA or FBI wanted, and say, “Why don’t you go and talk to them?”

  Spanier resigned as Penn State president in November 2011 and as chairman of the National Security Higher Education Advisory Board soon afterward, during a firestorm over alleged child sex abuse by a former assistant football coach. University trustees hired Louis Freeh to investigate. He and Spanier had been friendly for years. Freeh had been FBI director when Spanier welcomed the bureau to Penn State. In 2005, Freeh had inscribed a copy of his memoir, My FBI, to Spanier with “warm wishes and appreciation for your leadership, vision and integrity.”

  Freeh’s July 2012 report portrayed Spanier quite differently. It accused him of concealing the child sex abuse allegations from trustees and authorities and exhibiting “a striking lack of empathy” for victims. Spanier denied the allegations and sued Freeh and Penn State separately, contending that they scapegoated him. The university counter-sued. In March 2017, a jury in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, convicted Spanier of one misdemeanor count of child endangerment for failing to report the abuse. Spanier’s lawyer said he will appeal.

  * * *

  THANKS TO SPANIER, CIA and FBI agents could now stride onto campus through the main gate, with university presidents personally arranging their appointments with faculty and students. But, except possibly at Penn State, they still slipped in through the back door whenever it suited them, ignoring their pact with Spanier that they would inform university leaders of their campus investigations.

  For example, the FBI didn’t notify universities during the 2011 Arab Spring, when it questioned Libyan students nationwide, including Mohamed Farhat, a graduate student at the State University of New York at Binghamton.

  In Binghamton, a gritty industrial city nestled among hills near the Pennsylvania border, Farhat talked to me for two hours in November 2015 about himself and his encounters with the FBI. He spoke animatedly, holding nothing back, using expressive gestures to punctuate his fluent English. “I’m a talkative guy,” he told me. “I am very truthful. I don’t like hiding.” Married with three children—the eldest, a daughter, born in Libya, and two sons born in the United States—he’s battled numerous medical, emotional, and financial difficulties. His left eye was blinded in a teenage accident in a schoolyard, and he’s suffered from diabetes and depression.

  The son of an Islamic scholar and nephew of a Libyan general, Farhat grew up in Zliten, a town one hundred miles east of Tripoli. He studied electrical engineering at a technical college, but it bored him, and he discovered that he had an aptitude for English. Within a few years he was teaching English at every level from middle school to college.

  When Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, son of dictator Muammar Gaddafi, decreed that the Libyan government would provide five thousand scholarships for study abroad, Farhat seized the opportunity. He arrived in the United States in December 2008 and, after a year of English language study in Pittsburgh, enrolled at SUNY Binghamton.

  As democratic uprisings sprouted throughout the Arab world in 2011, Farhat canceled his classes for the semester and joined cyber-groups opposing the Gaddafi regime. There were about 1,100 Libyan students in the United States, and Farhat knew many of them. Soon friends began calling to let him know that the FBI had interviewed them and he should expect a visit, too.

  A worried Farhat contacted Ellen Badger, then the director of SUNY Binghamton’s international students office. She was accustomed to rebuffing FBI inquiries. When a university admits a foreign student or visiting scholar, it issues him or her a document required for a visa. It transmits the same information electronically to the departments of State and Homeland Security, but not the FBI, which, unlike the other two agencies, has no regulatory authority over this population. Unless the FBI had a subpoena, she could only provide it under the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act with “directory information,” which includes basic student data, such as dates of attendance, degrees and awards, and field of study.

  “There was a clear understanding they [the FBI] were going to chat with me in the friendliest way, and would be happy with any information I could give,” Badger says. “I would respond in the friendliest way and give them nothing. That’s how the dance went.”

  She reassured Farhat: the FBI would probably come to her first, and she would take care of it. Instead, the FBI bypassed Badger. Because the CIA was “somewhat blind” regarding on-the-ground intelligence in Libya, the FBI had been assigned to question students about the situation there, one insider told me. Agents were instructed to interview Libyan students off campus, without alerting professors or administrators. To protect informants from exposure, the bureau wanted to be as discreet as possible. The FBI did glean some valuable nuggets; students in the Washington, D.C., area helped identify intelligence officers among Libya’s diplomatic corps in the United States.

  An agent knocked on the door of Farhat’s apartment in a nondescript three-story brick building west of campus, showed identification, and said he wanted to schedule a time to talk to him. It never occurred to Farhat to refuse.

  “I have no idea about rights,” he says. “This is not part of our culture. To me, the FBI are the ultimate power.”

  Two agents showed up on the appointed morning. Removing their shoes as a sign of respect for Islamic culture, they sat at his kitchen table and unfolded a black-and-white map of Libya, asking where he was from.

  It was the first of five visits from the FBI, each lasting more than an hour, over a period of two months. The same local agent came every time, accompanied by either of two agents with experience abroad; one spoke a little Arabic. At the initial interview, they explained that they wanted to make sure that he wasn’t threatening, or threatened by, any pro-Gaddafi Libyans.

  That mission reflected the bureau’s concern that, since most Libyan students came on government scholarships, some might be loyal to Gaddafi—and planning acts of terror against the United States for supporting the revolution against him. That worry turned out to be misplaced. “The students hated Gaddafi,” the insider recalled. “I don’t want to say it was a waste of time, but we satisfied ourselves that there was no threat from the Libyans.”

  The agents proceeded to their ot
her purpose: gathering intelligence. They asked Farhat about Libyan society and customs, and his life from secondary school on. Had he donated to Islamic groups or institutions? No. Transferred money to Libya? Once, to repay a debt. Joined the military? No. Did he learn at technical school how to build an electronic circuit? No, he joked, only how to change a lightbulb.

  “They took lots and lots and lots of information from me,” he says.

  What disturbed Farhat most were the questions about his and his wife’s friends and relatives, from other Libyan students to his uncles in the military. The agents wanted names, email addresses, phone numbers. Because they told him that they knew his email address and Facebook affiliations, he coughed up his most frequent contacts, figuring that the bureau could track them anyway.

  “The idea that frustrated me was that they went into Facebook,” he says. “They knew everything. I can’t escape that. I don’t like that.”

  By the fourth visit, Farhat says, “I was annoyed.” The next time, he decided, would be the last. “I will tell them, ‘No more,’” he promised himself. As it turned out, he never had to muster the courage to defy them, because on the fifth session they wrapped up, then never returned.

  Farhat didn’t tell Badger about the agents until afterward. “My reaction was regret,” she says. “What you want to do in a situation like this is make sure students are informed of their rights. They don’t have to answer any questions. They can decline a visit. They can set terms: ‘I want the director of the international office there.’ ‘I want a faculty member there.’ They have control.

  “I never got to give that little speech.”

  8

  BUMPS AND CUTOUTS

  The CIA agent tapped softly on the hotel room door. After the keynote speeches, panel discussions, and dinner, the conference attendees had retired for the night. Audio and visual surveillance of the room showed that the nuclear scientist’s minders from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were sleeping but he was still awake. Sure enough, he opened the door, alone.

  The agency had been preparing this encounter for months. Through a business front, it had funded and staged the conference at an unsuspecting foreign institution of scientific research, invited speakers and guests, and planted operatives among the kitchen workers and other staff, just so it could entice the nuclear expert out of Iran, separate him for a few minutes from his guards, and pitch him one-on-one. A last-minute snag had almost derailed the plans: the target switched hotels because the conference’s preferred hotel cost seventy-five dollars more than his superiors in Iran were willing to spend.

  To show his sincerity and goodwill, the agent put his hand over his heart. “Salam habibi,” he said. “I’m from the CIA, and I want you to board a plane with me to the United States.”

  The agent could read the Iranian’s reactions on his face: a mix of shock, fear, and curiosity. From prior experience with defectors, he knew the thousand questions flooding the scientist’s mind: What about my family? How will you protect me? Where will I live? How will I support myself? How do I get a visa? Do I have time to pack? What happens if I say no?

  The scientist started to ask one, but the agent interrupted him. “First, get the ice bucket,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “If any of your guards wake up, you can tell them you’re going to get some ice.”

  * * *

  IN PERHAPS ITS most audacious and elaborate incursion into academia, the CIA secretly spent millions of dollars staging scientific conferences around the world. Its purpose was to lure Iranian nuclear scientists out of their homeland and into an accessible setting where its intelligence officers could approach them one-on-one and press them to defect. In other words, the agency sought to delay Iran’s development of nuclear weapons by exploiting academia’s internationalism, and pulling off a mass deception on the institutions that hosted the conferences and the professors who attended and spoke at them. Like the hero of the 1998 film The Truman Show, the conferees had no idea they were acting in a drama that simulated reality but was stage-managed from afar by a higher power. Whether the national security mission justified this manipulation of the professoriate can be debated, but there’s little doubt that most of them would have balked at being dupes in a CIA scheme.

  More than any other academic venue, conferences lend themselves to espionage. Popularized by globalization, these social and intellectual rituals have become ubiquitous. Like stops on the world golf or tennis circuit, they sprout up wherever the climate is favorable, and draw a jet-setting crowd. What they lack in prize money, they make up for in prestige. Although researchers chat electronically all the time, virtual meetings are no substitute for getting together with peers, networking for jobs, checking out the latest gadgets, and delivering papers that will later be published in volumes of conference proceedings. “The attraction of the conference circuit,” English novelist David Lodge wrote in Small World, a 1984 send-up of academic life, is that “it’s a way of converting work into play, combining professionalism with tourism, and all at someone else’s expense. Write a paper and see the world!”

  The importance of a conference may be measured not only by the number of Nobel Prize winners or Oxford dons it attracts, but by the number of spies. U.S. and foreign intelligence officers flock to conferences for the same reason that lawyers chase ambulances and Army recruiters concentrate on low-income neighborhoods: they make the best hunting grounds. As Willie Sutton famously said when asked why he robbed banks, “Because that’s where the money is.” While a university campus may have only one or two professors of interest to an intelligence service, the right conference—on drone technology, perhaps, or ISIS—may have dozens. If a spy has nothing to do, chances are he’ll put some false business cards in his wallet and head to the nearest conference.

  “Every intelligence service in the world works conferences, sponsors conferences, and looks for ways to get people to conferences,” says a former CIA operative. Adds NYU professor Mark Galeotti: “Recruitment is a long process of seduction. The first stage is to arrange to be at the same workshop as a target. Even if you just exchange banalities, the next time you can say, ‘Did I see you in Istanbul?’”

  Conferences also provide valuable unclassified information on technology or government policy before it’s published, with expert panelists available to clarify misconceptions or ambiguities. “Because the feedback in verbal exchanges is rapid, when there is something you don’t understand, you can ask about it and clear it up, and when you find some new intelligence leads, you can pursue them,” according to Sources and Methods of Obtaining National Defense Science and Technology Intelligence (1991), known as “China’s Spy Guide.”

  The FBI warned American academics in 2011 to beware of conferences, citing this scenario: “A researcher receives an unsolicited invitation to submit a paper for an international conference. She submits a paper and it is accepted. At the conference, the hosts ask for a copy of her presentation. The hosts hook a thumb drive to her laptop, and unbeknownst to her, download every file and data source from her computer.”

  The FBI and CIA swarm conferences, too. At gatherings in the United States, says a former FBI agent, “foreign intelligence officers try to collect Americans; we try to collect them.” The CIA is involved with conferences in at least four ways: it sends officers to them, it sponsors them at its headquarters, and through Beltway fronts, so that the intelligence community can tap academic wisdom, and it mounts sham conferences to reach potential recruits and defectors from hostile countries.

  The CIA monitors upcoming conferences worldwide and identifies those of interest, said David Albright, founder and president of the Institute for Science and International Security and an expert on nuclear proliferation. Suppose there is an international conference in Pakistan on centrifuge technology: the CIA would send its own agent undercover, or enlist a professor who might be going anyway to report back. If it learns that an Iranian nuclear scientist attended the confe
rence, it might peg him for possible recruitment at the next year’s meeting.

  Intelligence from academic conferences can shape policy. It helped persuade the George W. Bush administration—mistakenly, as it turned out—that Saddam Hussein was still developing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. “What our spies and informants were noticing, of course, was that Iraqi scientists specializing in chemistry, biology, and, to a lesser extent, nuclear power kept showing up at international symposia,” former CIA counterterrorism officer John Kiriakou wrote in a 2009 memoir. “They presented papers, listened to the presentation of others, took copious notes, and returned to Jordan, where they could transmit overland back to Iraq.”

  Some of those spies may have drawn the wrong conclusions because they lacked advanced degrees in chemistry, biology, or nuclear power. Without expertise, agents may misunderstand the subject matter, or be exposed as frauds. At conferences hosted by the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna on topics such as isotope hydrology and fusion energy, “there’s probably more intelligence officers roaming the hallways than actual scientists,” says Gene Coyle, who worked for the CIA from 1976 to 2006. “There’s one slight problem. If you’re going to send a CIA guy to attend one of these conferences, he has to talk the talk. It’s hard to send a history major. ‘Yes, I have a PhD in plasma physics.’ Also, that’s a very small world. Everybody knows what institutes exist. If you say you’re from the Fermi Institute in Chicago, they say, ‘You must know Bob, Fred, Susie.’”

  Instead, Coyle says, the agency may enlist a suitable professor through its National Resources Division, which has a “working relationship” with a number of scientists. “The National Resources people subscribe to all the computer sites that show what conferences are coming up in the next six months. If they see a conference in Vienna, they might say, ‘Professor Smith, that would seem natural for you to attend.’