Investigating State Attacks on Exiles: Lessons from The Washington Post’s ‘Repression’s Long Arm’ Series

Editor’s Note: This article is published in conjunction with US Democracy Day, a collaborative effort centered on Sept. 15, the International Day of Democracy, in which news organizations cover how democracy works and the threats it faces. To learn more, visit usdemocracyday.org.

When we think of exiled dissidents and defectors being persecuted in their new country by their home government, we tend to think of attacks by Russia and its sinister intelligence agencies.

However, the audacious assassination of an Indian-born Sikh activist in Canada last year — allegedly by agents of India’s democratic government — was a shocking reminder that Russia is not alone in its brazen disrespect for sovereign borders.

And a recent report from Freedom House — which traced cross-border attacks and harassment of exiles to 44 governments in the past decade — suggests that this is an urgent and undercovered topic for investigative journalists, in exile host countries ranging from Turkey to Thailand, South Africa to the United States.

The report stated: “Transnational repression is no longer an exceptional tool, but a normal and institutionalized practice for dozens of countries that seek to control their citizens abroad.”

In-depth investigations into these incidents — which range from physical assaults to spyware attacks and false passport notices — are challenging for several reasons, including the fear of targeted diaspora communities, and the reluctance of host countries to officially link crimes on their soil to foreign governments for fear of diplomatic fallout. Public accountability, therefore, is often left to investigative journalists and civil society.

One year ago, the international investigations team at The Washington Post decided to tackle the issue, in an ongoing series called Repression’s Long Arm.

Published in April, its first installment revealed evidence of a plot by India’s spy agency, known by the acronym RAW, to employ a hitman to murder an Indian dissident at his new home in New York.

Its recently-published second investigation — How China Extended Its Repression Into an American City — revealed how US-based pro-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) groups and Chinese diplomats coordinated violent counter-protests to silence critical voices during Premier Xi Jinping’s visit to San Francisco in November. It also highlighted a pattern of cross-border repression against Chinese human rights activists in other countries. However, the findings — as well as its embedded video clips of organized assaults on protesters on US streets — sparked deep shock among domestic audiences who prize their First Amendment right to free assembly.

The second installment in The Washington Post’s series on Repression’s Long Arm looked into a plot by the Chinese government to counter protests of Premier Xi Jingping’s visit to San Francisco. Image: Screenshot, The Washington Post

Long-Arm Spotlight Turns to Iran

In an interview with GIJN, Peter Finn, senior editor for international investigations, revealed that the series will be long-running — and noted that its latest investigation, published just last week, exposed how Iran has “cultivated ties with criminal networks in the West to carry out a recent wave of violent plots.”

Notably, neither of the series’ first two investigations involved whistleblower tips or smoking-gun documents, and used dissimilar formats. Instead, both involved painstaking enterprise evidence-gathering. The India story was source-driven, and featured national security and law enforcement sources on three continents. Finn said the trigger moment for this project happened when the team wondered why an indictment by the US Department of Justice on the attempted assassination referred to a major conspirator only as “CC-1,” and then discovered that this unnamed person was an intelligence officer serving the Indian government. By contrast, the China story was technology driven, centered on leads from WeChat channels and forensic analysis of 21 hours of video footage from four days of violent protests surrounding Xi’s recent US visit.

Peter Finn, senior editor for international investigations at The Washington Post. Photo: Bill O’Leary, The Washington Post

“For the series, we wanted to make each story distinct, so, rather than simply saying ‘Country X does this bad stuff in country Y,’ and then just replicate that to other governments, we wanted stories to have that original feel,” Finn explains. “I have a team of six very experienced reporters, but I’m trying to leverage cooperation from different teams as well. Greg Miller covers the intelligence community; Gerry Shih in New Delhi is deeply sourced in that world; and Ellen Nakashima is here in Washington, and is very tied in to the national security agencies. With the China story, it was a combination of the international team — Shibani Mahtani and Cate Brown; two national security reporters; Meg Kelly on the visual forensics team; and Chris Dehghanpoor, who specializes in open source reporting.”

Tracking State-Controlled Diaspora Groups

Findings from the China story included these: “The most extreme violence was instigated by pro-CCP activists and carried out by coordinated groups of young men embedded among them, verified videos show. Anti-Xi protesters were attacked with extended flagpoles and chemical spray, punched, kicked, and had fistfuls of sand thrown in their faces. The Chinese Consulate in Los Angeles paid for supporters’ hotels and meals as an incentive to participate.”

Singapore-based reporter Shibani Mahtani helped to identify 35 pro-CCP diaspora groups represented at the counter-protests; many with links to the United Front Work Department, a branch of the CCP that mobilizes civilian groups abroad to further Chinese government goals.

Mahtani tells GIJN that unmasking the make-up and operation of United Front organizations within the US represented the greatest investigative challenge.

“They are notoriously opaque … and go to great lengths to hide themselves, for instance, with different names that can be translated in various ways,” she says. “What we saw last year in San Francisco was a whole lot of visuals, and especially videos, that we could use to start digging.”

How Old Sources and New Ideas Led to Forensic Evidence

The reporting methods Mahtani and her teammates used offer useful lessons for others investigating transnational repression.

Enlisting government-hired private security as sources. Because foreign governments typically lack the security resources to organize large events abroad, consulates often need to hire local security personnel, which can open new sourcing pathways for reporters. Despite the 15-hour time difference between Singapore and California, Mahtani reached by phone some of the 60 private security guards hired by Chinese diplomats to “protect” pro-CCP counter-protesters. These turned out to be key witnesses — revealing episodes of anti-protester violence, and directives that sometimes sought to use them more as “muscle” than protection.

Shibani Mahtani, The Washington Post’s Singapore-based international investigations correspondent. Photo: Bill O’Leary, The Washington Post

“To us, that was a major breakthrough. You can look at all the videos, but to have someone who was there, and tasked with security, to tell you there was something really off about this — and how their instructions kept shifting — was so revealing,” she recalls. “Given that these people were overwhelmingly Americans, and guns-for-hire, my feeling was that they didn’t really know … the politics they were wading into when they took on these jobs.”

Maintaining contacts with exiled sources. While much of the coordination evidence was on the WeChat messaging platform, Mahtani still needed human sources to access that evidence as most of the conversations were private. The key to the team’s access to this, and to a trove of video evidence, involved the pro-democracy activists Mahtani cultivated as sources during several years of reporting in Hong Kong — and the fact that she stayed in touch with these activists after they fled China’s crackdowns on Hong Kong’s 2019 protests. Years later, many of these people reappeared to protest Xi’s visit to San Francisco.

“In following their experiences over those days in San Francisco, a lot of crazy videos came out,” she explains. “Unfortunately, a lot of the WeChat channels were closed to us, so we needed sources in those groups to take screenshots and send them to us.”

She added: “The main thing we relied on were the videos, to identify key violent players who kept on appearing at key moments during those four days. Additionally, we were able to identify Chinese diplomats, which was a real breakthrough for us.”

Digging into diaspora group tax filings. “First, we used FARA (the US Foreign Agents Registration Act) to make sure none of these were registered as foreign agents,” she recalls. “But, in terms of databases, the only thing we really could rely on — because we were looking at groups within the US — were tax filings. Because all of these Chinese diaspora organizations were listed as 501(c)3’s; they were charities, technically. These filings gave us the best estimation for how big these organizations are; how much money was coming in; and the size of these players. They also gave us leads on who to contact.”

Using — and carefully verifying — approved facial recognition tools. Finn reveals that the powerful and controversial reverse image tool PimEyes — which searches the internet for images that match faces — has been formally approved for use by Post reporters, but only in conjunction with a multi-step verification process and extremely strict ethical caveats. This tool, he adds, was important for identity leads in the China investigation.

“PimEyes has gone through a standards review, and is approved for use in our stories, but is not something we rely on exclusively,” he notes. “Instead, PimEyes provides leads that we have to then go out and confirm. The algorithm on any technology like this may say: ‘We believe this is Mr. X,’ but that is not confirmation for us; it’s merely a starting point. We have to go to Mr. X himself and go to his friends, or get overwhelming visual and open source confirmation that this is Mr. X.”

Enlisting specialist skills outside the team. The team enlisted the help of Post national security reporter Cate Cadell, whose language fluency in Mandarin was key to mapping narratives between Chinese state media and pro-CCP groups. Mahtani says the sheer volume of video clips required a digital scraping tool to track individuals to multiple incidents, which a tech wizard colleague, Chris Dehghanpoor, developed especially for this project. And Finn reveals that the video analysis in the story by a member of the Post’s visual forensics team used many of the same techniques as its Pulitzer Prize-winning project on the US Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, and for its Gaza investigations.

The latest in the Post’s Repression’s Long Arm series exposed how the Iranian government is partnering with criminal groups in the West to conduct operations. Image: Screenshot, The Washington Post, Rob Dobi

The Secrecy Blind Spot for Allies of Cross-Border Repression

Another principle Mahtani finds helpful in these investigations is to “never underestimate how much people will put online, and how much they will say without thinking someone is going to look.” The over-sharing of information online helped to confirm the team’s finding that a Chinese consulate had funded the accommodation of many counter-protesters who were later shown to commit violence.

“In this case, the confirmation came from WeChat — and, weirdly, from people boasting about being funded themselves on their organizations’ websites. They were brazen.”

She adds: “Groups like these have to show they’re navigating the rules of the countries they’re in… but  they also need to show the Chinese government that they’re doing something; to prove their worth and their access by showing off what they’ve delivered on the ground.”

Asked about impact, Finn says: “Some of this impact is very hard to measure. Would the Indian government attempt this again in North America? I think probably ‘no.’ And not only because it drew scrutiny from us and other places, but also they didn’t have the tradecraft to pull it off. And they achieved none of their goals. If anything, it backfired.”

Finn’s thoughts suggest a fascinating implication for this emerging field of investigative journalism: that — just as it often reveals crimes that governments won’t fully reveal — its accountability impact can also take on a traditional government function: deterrence.

“The accountability of public scrutiny leads to deterrence,” Finn says. “Why are people living in the United States being mobilized on behalf of China, in some instances to suppress the voices of fellow immigrants who have a different point of view? From the beginning, our premise was: ‘OK, we’ve heard about China doing this and that in its immediate neighborhood’ — but the fact that they would try to silence dissenting voices in a major American city struck us — to quote [former Post editor] Ben Bradlee — as the ‘holy shit’ factor.”

Rowan Philp is GIJN’s senior reporter. He was formerly chief reporter for South Africa’s Sunday Times. As a foreign correspondent, he has reported on news, politics, corruption, and conflict from more than two dozen countries around the world.