Iran has warned its academics that they risk being charged with spying it they attend conferences with Western scholars, according to The Guardian, a British newspaper. The warning was made in a briefing to journalists by the director of counterespionage at Iran’s powerful Intelligence Ministry, although the official remained unnamed. The move came at a time of rising tension between Iran and the United States, and followed the recent arrest of two Iranian-American scholars, Haleh Esfandiari and Kian Tajbakhsh, on charges of spying for the United States.
The Iranian official said even decent Iranian academics were in danger of being lured into espionage networks at academic meetings. “We are worried about many academic conferences which foreigners attend and establish relations” with Iranian academics, the official said. “Any foreigner who establishes relations is not trustworthy. Through their approaches, they first establish an academic relationship, but this soon changes into an intelligence relationship.”
The Guardian reported that some Iranian scholars see the warning as a pretext for coming purges of faculty members deemed too liberal at the country’s universities. Such fears were raised a year ago, when some of the 40 or so faculty members chosen by the University of Tehran for obligatory retirements were thought to have been removed for ideological reasons.
In a related development, the Middle East Studies Association of North America issued what it called an “unprecedented” warning to American scholars considering travel to Iran. The statement said the group “is gravely concerned by the escalating pattern of harassment and detention of American academic researchers and scholars by the Iranian government, and believes that there are significant risks for researchers who intend to travel to Iran, especially those holding dual Iranian-American citizenship.
