The Researcher as a National Security Threat: Interrogative Surveillance, Agency, and Entanglement in Iran and the United States

Ahmad Salimi, the protagonist of a documentary film I was directing in Iran, was at a museum, visiting with the director in his office. I was in another room setting up lighting equipment for an event that Ahmad would partake in later in the day. The cinematographer was shooting b-roll around the museum and decided to get some footage of Ahmad casually talking with the director. Minutes later, the cinematographer came to me, worried. He said that while he had been shooting, Ahmad had been telling the museum director that intelligence agents began visiting his home as soon as we had started filming. My body froze. I had intentionally tried to stay as inconspicuous as possible. Our film crew was small—just me and the cinematographer—and all of our equipment fit into a backpack. Yet what I feared the most had happened—intelligence agents were questioning my interlocutor and following my activities.

"We will stop filming right now," I said to Ahmad, determined. "Not at all! I didn't tell you about this because I didn't want to worry you. I just wanted to make sure Mr. Hasani knows about the situation," Ahmad said, referring to the museum director.¹ He continued, "I know who they are. They're men from the local office of the intelligence ministry. They came to me last week for the first time. They asked, 'What's the American woman asking you?' I told them you were doing a film on me as a survivor of chemical bombs. They come by after you leave and want to make sure we're not discussing anything else."

Still nervous, I reiterated that we should end filming altogether. Ahmad responded emphatically, "No! They can't tell me who to talk to and what to say. I fought for this country and I have a right to speak."

"Don't worry about it," Mr. Hasani, the museum director, said to me. "The intelligence guys just want to say, 'We're here and we're paying attention.'"

We're here and we're paying attention. The intelligence officers wanted to send a message to me and Ahmad that we were under surveillance. Yet, they did not do it under cover. In fact, the work of intelligence officers and secret police is often not secret at all.² Instead, in interactions such as these, the state unmasks itself.³ Ahmad was insistent that he would not be censored from telling his story.

In this article, I discuss what it means to be a researcher and to be regarded as a potential national security threat at the same time. I focus on my own experiences and ask, What does data gathering look like in such spaces of heightened surveillance? Specifically, I explore methodological considerations in gaining access to militarized groups for research purposes and examine what building rapport in such settings looks like. Throughout my ten years of research in Iran among members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Basij paramilitary organization, I faced a number of challenges. As in many fieldwork situations, I had to convince my interlocutors to take risks in granting me the long-term access I needed to conduct ethnographic fieldwork. I also faced additional challenges: I could be interrogated, access to my research sites could be blocked, and I could be jailed and used as a political pawn in the larger political conflict between Iran and the United States.

The IRGC is Iran's main military arm, created after the 1979 Revolution to protect the newly established Islamic Republic from a potential coup. The IRGC was initially responsible for protecting the new government from political insurgencies in Kurdistan and the Turkomen regions of the country, as well as protecting the regime against other political groups vying for power in the postrevolutionary environment. With the advent of the Iran-Iraq war in September 1980, the IRGC eventually joined the traditional military, the Artesh, in protecting the country from the foreign invader. Throughout the eight-year war, the IRGC gained...