Family ‘crushed’ by politics – spy’s wife
The Chinese-American wife of Roger Uren, a former Australian intelligence officer arrested in Canberra and charged with breaching secrecy laws, says he is loyal to his country and their family is being ‘‘crushed’’ by politics.
Uren had been planning for his wife, Sheri Yan, and her elderly parents to move to Canberra from Beijing when he was arrested last week.
‘‘All his life – he joined DFAT when he was young – he has been very loyal to his country. He cares about Australia,’’ Yan told The Sydney
and The Age in Beijing, where she has been living in an apartment with her parents, aged 90 and 88, and caring for them.
Uren was charged after classified files were found in his home during an Australian Security Intelligence Organisation raid in 2015. That raid was prompted by Yan’s arrest in New York in relation to a United Nations bribery scandal.
The documents were taken home from his office 20 years ago, Yan said, when there were no regulations forbidding the practice of taking documents home. Uren told Yan he had forgotten about them.
Friends of the couple were stunned that Uren was arrested for documents discovered in his apartment four years ago, when he has been living in Australia and travelling frequently to China to see his wife since then.
Yan said he had been to Beijing at least six times to stay in her parents’ apartment since June 2018, when she moved in with them.
‘‘This year I asked him, ‘Are you happy?’. He said, ‘I am waiting for you to come home’.’’
Uren had made himself busy writing manuscripts for books – a novel and a collection of essays. But to watch international television in Beijing – where media is censored – he had to make a daily trip to the apartment complex’s media room for foreign guests.
Yan met Uren in a bookstore in the United States, where he worked for the Australian embassy. Then a student, Yan told him her father was a poet and Uren replied that he wanted to be an author. ‘‘That was how we linked,’’ she said.
She stayed living in the US when Uren later moved to Canberra where he worked as an intelligence analyst for the Office of National Assessments until 2001.
She moved to Australia to join him when she was eight months pregnant with their daughter and stayed for several years after the birth.
Her parents came from China to help with the baby.
Yan said her father, who wrote a book about Australia while he was living in Canberra, is deeply upset at Uren’s arrest.
He said he didn’t understand how ‘‘one professional mistake’’ can be used against Uren for ‘‘politics’’ to ‘‘crush him, crush our family and crush Australian Chinese who love Australia’’.
Yan’s father did not want her to leave her ageing parents alone in Beijing, so Yan and Uren had proposed moving her parents to Australia.
Sitting in a cafe in Beijing in September, Uren and Yan talked about their plans to return to Australia together that week to attend a friend’s birthday party, after a long saga that had seen her jailed in the United States in 2016 for conspiring to bribe the UN General Assembly president John Ashe.
Uneasy about the publicity surrounding Yan’s conviction, and media allegations of spying that she has refuted, Uren suggested the couple approach Australian law enforcement agencies and offer to answer any questions they might have about her.
His lawyer advised against this, and said to wait and see if the authorities called.
As it turned out, Yan didn’t make the flight. She broke her ankle on the eve of their trip and was advised by a doctor not to fly. Uren returned alone. And when the Australian police came knocking, it was for him, not Yan.
‘‘I am criticising myself,’’ Yan said. ‘‘If Roger had never married a girl from mainland China this would never have happened to him.’’