Iranian physicist M. Hadi Hadizadeh was looking forward to returning to his alma mater, Ohio University, as a visiting professor.
He was a specialist in scanning devices used for medical research and luggage screening, and a leading advocate of democracy in his country. He once was freed from an Iranian prison through the appeals of several Nobel laureates.
But a seemingly routine request for a U.S. visa got him a 17-month nightmare, he contends, because of three words: “Iranian nuclear physicist.”
“They thought I was either a double agent, or it wouldn’t be safe for the security of the United States that an Iranian nuclear physicist would come here and do research,” he said.
Hadizadeh was blocked by stringent visa requirements enacted after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to bar scientific visitors who might hand over strategic knowledge and technologies to U.S. enemies.
But the rules have become so broad that thousands of foreign students and scholars have been denied or delayed visas even though they have no connections to sensitive technologies.
The foundation of the new procedures is a government technology watch list that identifies scientific fields with potential military importance. Anyone studying those areas can be screened for months before being allowed to enter the United States, even if they have previously studied or worked in the country for years.
The list includes research areas with clear military significance, such as bioweapons, navigation and laser technology. But it also sweeps up whole fields of science that have peaceful as well as military uses.
It now includes all of microbiology, much of chemistry and physics, and even seemingly mundane areas: urban planning, landscape architecture, housing and civil engineering.
“It seems to be an issue out of control,” said Bruce Alberts, director of the National Academy of Sciences, considered the nation’s pre-eminent scientific society. “It’s a wonderful way of helping our enemies by insulting our friends.”
`Security interests first’
The government concedes the new rules have inconvenienced visa applicants. But State Department spokesman Stuart Patt said: “We have to put national security interests first.”
The need for restrictive visa precautions is made evident, said advocates of immigration reform, by the fact that several of the Sept. 11 hijackers entered the U.S. on student visas.
“We need to be vigilant about who we are letting in here and what sort of information they are picking up,” said Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which seeks to restrict immigration for economic and security reasons. “Science and technology in the wrong hands can present a very real problem.”
Among the scientists snared by lengthy visa delays: a Mexican environmental-engineering student, Russian epidemiologists, an Egyptian AIDS specialist, Israeli and Chinese cancer researchers, and an Iranian earthquake-safety engineer.
Even Russian scientists collaborating with U.S. colleagues on counterterrorism and arms control have been denied.
Although Hadizadeh eventually was allowed to enter the United States in October, after more than a year of interviews with consular officials in Dubai, he lost a year of work, and he still hasn’t been able to bring his family here.
Special visa programs meant to bar enemies and prevent the theft of strategic technology are a product of the Cold War’s scientific battles.
The government realized, given its own success after World War II recruiting German rocket scientists, that key technologies had the power to recalibrate the balance of power.
In recent years, the poster child for the visa restrictions may well be Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash. Dubbed “Mrs. Anthrax” for allegedly running Saddam Hussein’s biological-weapons research in Iraq, she received her doctorate in microbiology from the University of Missouri in 1983.
Ammash is 39th on the Defense Department list of the 55 most-wanted Iraqis from Hussein’s regime.
Screening ramped up
Today, the screening program designed to prevent a repetition of the Ammash scenario is known as “Visas Mantis.”
Relying on the technology alert list, Mantis requires anyone working in a sensitive field to undergo detailed consular interviews and intensive security checks when applying for a visa.
Some scientists and students face double jeopardy, checked under Mantis and “Visas Condor,” which flags a range of possible security risks, including applicants from nations considered sponsors of terrorism.
A November 2003 poll of 40 elite U.S. universities found nearly 800 students and 357 foreign professors, visiting scholars and researchers were delayed or denied through the visa process in the 2003-04 academic year, disrupting research and teaching in the sciences, according to the Association of American Universities.
The FBI has reported an “explosive increase” in security “name checks” of all kinds, including 200,000 visa reviews in the last fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30.
In the past, most foreign students and scholars could routinely return to the United States after visits home or trips to scientific meetings abroad. They could get a new visa at a U.S. Consulate within hours.
Now, if they leave the United States, they may have to return to their home countries to obtain a new visa. And they receive the same intense scrutiny as newcomers.
