The discussion about U.S. border security focuses on mass migration and foreigners who circumvent our legal immigration system, but those aren’t the only valid concerns. What are the espionage risks to U.S. national security posed by legal immigration?
First, it must be understood that the vetting scheme employed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement is broadly inadequate from a counterintelligence viewpoint. ICE looks more for criminals and immigration fraudsters than foreign spies.
The espionage threat from legal immigrants can be broken into two categories. First, there are spies coming to America on a secret espionage mission, which they don’t declare to ICE. Second are immigrants who, after their arrival in the United States, decide to commit espionage, usually on behalf of their homeland. Both groups are difficult for our counterintelligence to detect — the latter is especially so.
Let’s examine how the top espionage threats to this country employ legal immigrants against us.
Russia has used what it terms Illegals abroad for more than a century — the equivalent U.S. intelligence term is nonofficial cover. These are immigrants who come and live under assumed identities, often as third-country nationals. They have little, if any, contact with Russian diplomats assigned to the U.S. Such Illegals are very difficult for U.S. counterspies to detect.
The classic case was the FBI’s 2010 roll-up of a whole network of Illegals belonging to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR. Termed Operation GHOST STORIES, this was one of the biggest counterspy successes in FBI history, the outcome of years of meticulous intelligence analysis by several U.S. agencies. The 10 SVR Illegals arrested here, many of whom were masquerading as non-Russians, including as Canadians, Peruvians, even Americans, were soon sent back to Russia in an old-fashioned spy-swap. Their suburban American neighbors had no idea who they really were.
Russian immigrants to the U.S. sometimes help their “motherland” by betraying their new homeland. In a strange case, in 2022, the FBI arrested a U.S. Army doctor, Jamie Lee Henry, who, in 2015, became the Army’s first transgender officer, for trying to spy for Russia. Charges were dropped two years later, following a mistrial, but the main driver of Henry’s attempt to betray the U.S. was her wife, Anna Gabrelian, also a medical doctor, who was originally from Russia. A fierce Russian patriot, Gabrelian enthusiastically tried to betray American secrets to Moscow.
In a similar fashion, Beijing relies on the blood-based patriotism of Overseas Chinese to do the regime’s espionage bidding. Few are the spy cases involving communist China that don’t rely on ethnic Chinese in some fashion. Some of these are Chinese operatives dispatched abroad as Illegals to spy on foreign lands. In some cases, they manage to get very friendly with rising American politicians.
Many more are casual or part-time spies who integrate into the U.S., among many countries, using their employment as businesspeople or researchers and academics to obtain American secrets to share illegally with Beijing. There’s political thuggery, too, for instance, Shujun Wang, the elderly immigrant Chinese scholar who was convicted last year of secretly working for the Ministry of State Security, monitoring anticommunist dissidents in New York.
Cuba employs broadly similar espionage modus operandi. The large Cuban immigrant community in this country, centered on Miami, has always possessed its fair share of Havana agents. Some are Illegals, dispatched here to spy. The biggest case was the so-called Wasp Network, rolled up by the FBI in 1998. The core of the network consisted of five Cuban Illegal spies, supplemented by two dozen locally recruited helpers, mostly Cuban immigrants. Together, the Wasp Network successfully penetrated multiple U.S. government targets, including the Miami headquarters of the Defense Department’s Southern Command, while intimidating and harassing anti-regime activists in the U.S. The killing of four Cuban Americans in 1996 resulted from this espionage.
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Similarly, Iran employs immigrants to spy on us and bother, or even attempt to murder, anti-regime activists living in the U.S. This month, Abouzar Rahmati, an Iranian immigrant, pleaded guilty to spying for his homeland while working as a contractor with the Federal Aviation Administration. From 2017 to 2024, Rahmati passed to Tehran various FAA secrets relating to aviation matters, including aviation safety, that would be of high interest to Iran as a state sponsor of terrorism. Rahmati doesn’t appear to have immigrated here as a spy, but his past work for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps before coming to the U.S. ought to have sounded ICE alarm bells.
Vetting of legal immigrants leaves a great deal to be desired from any counterintelligence point of view. ICE simply isn’t asking the right questions, or enough of them, to foreigners coming to this country to work and live. It’s impractical to turn ICE into a full-time counterspy agency — that’s hardly necessary, but providing greater security scrutiny to immigrants from the top espionage threats we face is needed, without delay.
John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.