WASHINGTON (AP) — After a student leader from the historic Tiananmen Square protests entered a 2022 congressional race in New York, a Chinese intelligence agent wasted little time recruit a private investigator to look for lovers or tax problems that could harm a candidate’s candidacy, prosecutors say.
“In the end,” the agent said ominously to his contact, “violence would also be acceptable.”
As an Iranian journalist and activist living in exile in the United States criticized human rights violations in Iran, Tehran also listened. Members of an Eastern European organized crime gang exploited her Brooklyn home and plotted to kill her in a murder-for-hire scheme run by Iran, according to the Justice Department. which foiled the plan and brought criminal charges.
The episodes reflect the extreme measures taken by countries such as China and Iran to intimidate, harass and sometimes plan attacks against political opponents and activists living in the US. Within their own borders, they increasingly maintain a threatening vigilance over those demonstrating thousands of kilometers away.
“We don’t live in fear, we don’t live in paranoia, but the reality is very clear: the Islamic Republic wants us dead and we have to look over our shoulder every day,” said the Iranian journalist. Masih Alinejadsaid in an interview.
The issue caught the attention of the Department of Justice, which over the past five years has charged dozens of suspects with acts of transnational repression. Senior FBI officials told the Associated Press that tactics have become more sophisticated, including hiring proxies such as private investigators and organized crime leaders, and countries are more willing to cross “serious red lines” from harassment to violence as they seek to project power. abroad and suppress dissent.
Foreign adversaries are increasingly making well-funded intimidation campaigns a priority for their intelligence services, and more countries – including some not seen as traditionally antagonistic to the US – are targeting critics in America and elsewhere in the West, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss their investigation.
The Department of Justice, for example, announced a foiled plot last November to kill a Sikh activist in New York that authorities said was directed by an Indian government official. Rwanda kidnapped Paul Rusesabagina of Texas’ “Hotel Rwanda” fame and returned it to the country before freeing himand Saudi Arabia has harassed critics online and in person, the FBI said.
“This is a huge priority for us,” said Deputy Attorney General Matthew Olsen, the Justice Department’s top national security official, describing an “alarming increase” in government-directed harassment.
He said the lawsuits aim to not only hold harassers accountable, but also send a message that the actions are “unacceptable from the standpoint of the sovereignty of the United States and the defense of American values – values around freedom of expression.” expression and free association”.
Other nations have also seen a rise in the number of cases.
An April report by Reporters Without Borders called London a “hotspot” for Iranian attacks on Persian-language broadcasters, with British counter-terrorism police investigating an attack a month earlier. about an Iranian television presenter outside his home in London. In Britain and elsewhere in Europe, harassment and attacks against Russians, including one journalist who fell ill due to suspected poisoning in Germanylong time attributed to Russian intelligence agents despite Moscow’s denials.
Within the US, the trend is even more worrying due to a increasingly deteriorating relationship with Iran It is tensions with China on everything from trade and intellectual property theft to election interference. And emerging technologies like generative AI will likely be exploited for future harassment, U.S. intelligence officials said in a statement. recent threat assessment.
“Transnational repression is a manifestation of the broader conflict between authoritarian regimes and democratic countries,” Olsen said. “It’s been a consistent theme of how the world is changing geopolitically over the last decade.”
‘I’M NOT FEELING SAFE’
Two of the main culprits, officials and advocates say, are China and Iran.
Emails sent to the Iranian mission at the United Nations were not returned. A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington disputed that the country engages in this practice, saying in a statement that the government “strictly complies with international law and fully respects the law enforcement sovereignty of other countries.”
“We resolutely oppose ‘long-arm jurisdiction,’” the statement read.
However, US officials say China has created a program to do just that, launching “Operation Fox Hunt” to track down Chinese expatriates wanted by Beijing, with the aim of intimidating them into returning to face charges.
A former Chinese municipal government employee living in New Jersey found a note in Chinese characters taped to the door of his home that said: “If you are willing to return to the mainland and spend 10 years in prison, your wife will and children will be fine. . That is the end of this matter! according to a 2020 Justice Department case charging a group of Chinese agents and an American private investigator.
Although most defendants accused of transnational repression conspiracies are based in their home country, making arrests and prosecutions infrequent, this specific case led to convictions last year of private investigator and two Chinese citizens living in the U.S.
Bob Fu, a Chinese-American Christian pastor whose organization, ChinaAid, advocates for religious freedom in China, said he has faced far-reaching harassment campaigns for years. Large crowds of protesters have gathered for days outside his West Texas home, arriving in well-coordinated actions that he believes could be linked to the Chinese government.
Fake hotel reservations were made in his name, along with false bomb threats to police claiming he planned to detonate explosives. Flyers portraying him as the devil were distributed to neighbors. He said he had learned to take precautions when traveling, including asking his staff not to disclose his itinerary in advance, and had moved out of his home on orders, he said, from authorities.
“I’m not feeling safe,” Fu told the AP. When it comes to returning to China, where he was raised and left more than 25 years ago as a religious refugee, he said: “I might be able to travel back, but it’s a one-way ticket. I’m sure I’m on their wanted list.”
Wu Jianmin, a former student leader of China’s 1989 pro-democracy movement, was targeted in 2020 by a group of protesters outside his home in Irvine, California. The harassment lasted more than two months.
“They shouted slogans outside my house and committed verbal abuse,” he said. “They paraded through the neighborhood, handed out all kinds of photos and flyers and put them in neighbors’ mailboxes.”
The perpetrators of harassment plots, Wu believes, include retired Communist Party members living in the US, their children, members of Chinese associations with close links to the Chinese government, and even fugitives seeking deals with Beijing.
“The ultimate goal is the same,” Wu said in an interview in Mandarin Chinese. “Their task, as designated by the Communist Party, is to suppress pro-democracy activists abroad.”
Last year, the Justice Department accused about three dozen police officers on China’s national police force using social media to target dissidents within the US, including by creating fake accounts that shared harassing videos and comments, and arrested two men they say helped establish a secret police outpost in the Chinatown neighborhood of Manhattan, on behalf of the Chinese government.
The previous year, federal prosecutors in New York released a series of wide-ranging conspiracies to silence dissentas the scheme to dig up dirt on the little-known and ultimately unsuccessful candidate for Congress.
Other targets have included American figure skater Alysa Liu and his father, Arthur, a political refugee who prosecutors say was surveilled by a man who posed as a member of the Olympic committee and asked them for their passport information.
A sculpture created by a dissident artist in California that depicted the coronavirus with the face of Chinese President Xi Jinping was also dismantled and burned to the ground.
“We should not be under the illusion that somehow these are rogue actors or people unaffiliated with the Chinese government,” Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, an Illinois Democrat and member of a special House committee on China, said of the Chinese agents who were charged.
‘ERASE YOUR HEAD FROM YOUR TORSO’
Sometimes violence was planned in response to world events.
Prosecutors in 2022 charged an Iranian agent with offering $300,000 to “eliminate” Trump administration national security adviser John Bolton as revenge for an airstrike that killed Iran’s most powerful general.
A new threat from Tehran was revealed this year when the The Justice Department has charged an Iranian who authorities identified as a drug trafficker and intelligence agent, as well as two Canadians – one of them a “full” member of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang – in a murder-for-hire plot against two Iranians who had fled the country and were living in Maryland.
“We need to erase the head from the torso,” said one of the Canadians hired. Law enforcement stopped the threat.
Alinejad, the Iranian journalist, was targeted even before the murder-for-hire plot was announced by the Justice Department last year. Prosecutors in 2021 accused a group of Iranians who allegedly worked at the behest of the country’s intelligence services of planning his kidnapping.
Alinejad remains a prominent journalist and vocal opposition activist and says she is determined to continue speaking out, including at a sentencing hearing last year for a woman who prosecutors say unwittingly financed the kidnapping plot.
But the details of the plot are hauntingly etched in his mind. The criminal cases revealed the severity of the threat she faced and the horrific preparations involved, including research into how to get Alinejad out of New York on a military-style speedboat and take her to Venezuela, and discussing bait to get her out of her home. – like ordering flowers from the garden outside.
One of the defendants in the murder-for-hire plot was arrested in 2022 after being found driving through the Alinejad neighborhood of Brooklyn with a loaded rifle and ammunition. Another suspect was extradited from the Czech Republic in February to face charges. Two others were also arrested.
The FBI stopped the plot, but also encouraged Alinejad to move out, which she did. But it also meant saying goodbye to his beloved garden, which brought him joy as he gave homegrown cucumbers and other vegetables to his neighbors.
“They didn’t kill me physically, but they killed my relationship with my garden, with my neighbors,” said Alinejad.
