Day 71 - Spy Story - Part II

spy vs spy image by tr.robinson, via Flickr

Today's piece is more about coincidences than spying. But some don't believe in coincidences. Do you?

One evening, I went to an art exhibit opening on behalf of the Consul General. The art was all from eastern Europe, and the Consul General knew I had been in Romania, so he gave me his invitation. While there, I met a woman from Yugoslavia who told me her son was going to a party later that week at the home of a British artist who lived in Stuttgart. She asked if I would like to go with her son. She seemed nice, and I decided I could control the situation, so I agreed. Her son called a day later to arrange to pick me up. I decided it would be safer not to tell him where I lived, so we met at the gallery where I had met his mother. When I told him I was from Minnesota, he said he had met some people from Minnesota a couple of years before. They were part of a baseball team that toured in Germany. He said the players were from Moorhead. I chose not to tell him how much of a coincidence that was. I didn't let him know that I was from Moorhead. I never heard from him again.

I spent a lot of time in Germany with a German, Karl Ullrich, while I was in Stuttgart. We met at a German/American friendship organization. I had been attending the meetings for several weeks before Karl Ullrich started attending. In the course of our first conversation, I probably told him where I was from and then he mentioned that he had spent Christmas in the United States, in Fargo. He had spent Christmas in Fargo because his wife was on a teacher exchange there. He and his wife had gotten married so that they could both go to Fargo - U.S. law makes it tough for unmarried couples to spend extended periods of time in the U.S. He and his wife had been living together for several years; they married because of the teacher exchange visa, but then he decided he really didn't want to spend the year in the U.S. because he wouldn't be able to work. His wife was accepted for the exchange, although they had both applied. So instead of going with her, he stayed in Stuttgart. When she got back to Germany, they were divorced.

The reason I was assigned to Stuttgart was that I had lived in Iran. I know that may sound strange, but Germany was the furthest point west that Iran Air flew, so the wealthiest of Iranians who wanted to travel to the U.S. would fly into Frankfurt. The Frankfurt consular section was full of Iranian applicants every day. Stuttgart was a little bit further away, but we still got our share of Iranians. I didn't conduct any interviews in Farsi, but I was able to use my knowledge of Farsi to understand what was going on behind the scenes.

Most of the time, the course of an interview with Iranian applicants was predictable. So when an applicant's story varied from the predictable, it was memorable. One man came to Stuttgart to apply for a visa to travel to the U.S. to visit his children. He was accompanied by an Iranian couple who lived in Stuttgart and served as his translators.  Both the man's son and daughter had left Iran before the revolution. They attended high school in England and then went to the U.S. for college. It had been seven years since this man had seen his children. But it was difficult for for any Iranian to overcome the presumption of being an intending immigrant, so I refused his application. Later that day, I filed his application away together with his previous five applications - all of them refused - and a letter from a rabbi in Los Angeles on this man's behalf. We had received it several weeks before. In it, the rabbi requested we give him positive consideration for a visa so that he could attend his son's wedding. The applicant's son was raised Christian - the man's first wife was Christian - and he was marrying a Jewish woman. The applicant was Muslim.

The next day, the applicant came back by himself. Since I had connected him with the letter, I chose to reinterview him. Because he didn't bring a translator this time, the interview was in English. The first question I asked him was why he hadn't told me he was applying in order to attend his son's wedding. He gave me the most sensible, and atypical, answer ever. He said he had applied for a visa to travel to see his children. If he arrived the day after his son's wedding, that was OK because what he really wanted was to see his children, not to attend a ceremony. I asked why he had come back again a day after I had already refused him. He had a feeling that he would be able to answer my questions better himself than through a translator. I decided to take a chance - actually several chances. First, I gave him a visa. Second, I told him that I had been close to a Jewish family in Iran when I lived there. And I wondered what had happened to that family. I asked if he could help me find out about the family when he returned to Iran.

About three months later, I got a phone call from the applicant. He was back in Germany and wanted to see me. He had had to convince the German consular officer in Los Angeles to give him another visa so he could stop in Germany again on his way back. I guess that consul trusted him, too. I shouldn't have agreed to meet with him, at least not without telling someone else at the consulate. But I trusted him. It's an intuition thing. I met him for lunch on a Saturday. He told me he had found my Iranian family now living in Los Angeles.  He said I should expect a phone call from my friend Abraham soon. He also admitted that he had told me one lie during his interview; he said he had a job in Tehran when he was unemployed. He knew that telling the truth about that would have made it much more difficult for me to grant him a visa. But he wanted me to know about the lie so that I would continue to trust that he would tell the truth in the future.

I did get a phone call, but it wasn't from the Abraham I wanted to hear from. It was his nephew whose name was also Abraham. The nephew was two years older than the uncle. The family had gotten out of Iran several years before and were living in Los Angeles. But my Abraham had been arrested by the Revolutionary Guard and executed. If I hadn't trusted the unusual Iranian applicant, I probably would still not know what happened to Abie.

Another Iranian applicant appeared with her husband who had been living in Germany for the past several years. He had come to Germany to get his Ph.D. and had stayed on. His wife hadn't been in Germany long; her German wasn't strong. Neither was her English, so her husband translated. During the course of the interview, I realized not just that his face was familiar, but why. He had been in my first English class at National Iranian Radio and Television in Tehran. That term I had the most advanced students, so his English had been quite good then. But he wouldn't speak English with me.  Several years in another country, speaking a third language, was enough of an explanation for that, but I asked some probing questions to be absolutely sure I had not mistaken him for a former student. While most Iranians are able to keep a straight face when telling what we call lies, but they define as something else, in his case, a puzzled look appeared and grew deeper as I asked questions about aspects of his history that no American consular officer should have any knowledge of. Eventually he, too, recognized me and the puzzled look turned into a smile.

A few months later, he came to the consulate to invite me to join him and his wife for dinner at a popular restaurant. I agreed, but then later got cold feet. I had gone so far as to contact one of the security guys at the military base to accompany me, but when I realized I wouldn't be able to keep a straight face or maintain any story about the security guy being my boyfriend or any other plausible story, I pulled out the Iranian's wife's visa application to find their telephone number and called them to say I couldn't make it.

Another Iranian gentleman applied for a visa in Stuttgart and got me as his interviewer by chance. The day before his wife had applied in Munich and been refused. His answers were also memorable for being so sensible and therefore atypical. I asked why he had come to Stuttgart to apply instead of applying in Munich. He looked me in the eye and said it made no sense to apply there when his wife had been refused. But it wasn't just his apparent honesty that led me to take a chance on him. He handed me a letter of invitation from his son's landlord. Most of the time we didn't put much stock in invitations. But this one was signed by one of my high school classmates who worked at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. The applicant's son lived in a basement apartment of the couple's Moorhead house. I showed the applicant the signature on the invitation and explained that I knew the couple who had invited him, and I knew they were honest and honorable people who would never do anything illegal. So when they said they would make sure he would return to Iran at the end of his three-month stay, I knew they meant it. I was willing to give him a visa because I also knew there was no way that he could have known in advance that I knew his son's landlord.

The next day I got a phone call from that high school classmate who asked if I would also give their tenant's mother a visa, too. I agreed. I never did think that giving a visa only to one spouse was an effective way to ensure an applicant wasn't intending to stay anyway.

Were all of these just coincidences?

More later. . .