Arkansan still in prison in Qatar convicted as spy
Hopes for release caught in geopolitical web
Qatar’s central prison is just down the road from the Al Udeid Air Base, the biggest U.S. military operation in the Middle East. John Wesley Downs has joked, perhaps with a tinge of resignation, that maybe U.S. soldiers there could break him out.
For more than 13 years, Downs, 62, a geophysicist from Arkansas, has been incarcerated in Qatar, a tiny but affluent Persian Gulf emirate. He was arrested in 2005 and sentenced to life on a spying conviction for plotting to sell information about the country’s vast natural-gas deposits to Iran.
He is the only American in the prison, a two-story building in the desert that houses a motley collection of offenders, Qatari and foreign, separated by gender.
Among them are Colombian drug dealers, a wealthy Arab sheikh and a “couple of nice Palestinian friends who passed bad checks,” Downs said in a recent telephone interview.
His best friend, Downs said, is a Chinese man suspected of financial fraud who became his English student and now doubles as his informal bodyguard.
Downs, his family, legal representatives, U.S. diplomats and U.S. Sen. John Boozman, R-Ark., have called his conviction for spying wrong and his harsh punishment grossly unfair, although they have acknowledged an element of truth to Qatar’s complaint against him.
While working in the country as a staff geologist for Qatar Petroleum, the national energy company, Downs tried in 2005 to secretly trade what he described as useless information on Qatar’s enormous gas reserves to Iran in exchange for $20,000, which he said he needed to help pay his eldest child’s college tuition.
At the time, Downs and his defense lawyers said, he was financially strapped. He had also decided to move to Saudi Arabia for a higher-paying job. That decision so angered Qatar Petroleum executives, his lawyers said, that the company canceled a bonus owed to Downs, which he deeply resented.
The trade with Iran was never consummated, having been foiled by Qatari security agents who, according to Downs’ lawyers, intercepted an incriminating letter he had mailed to the Iranian Embassy in Qatar.
“I did a stupid thing,” Downs said in the telephone interview. “I thought, ‘Well, it might be useful if I could make a deal with the Iranians.’”
Attributing his decision to irrational judgment caused by money problems, Downs said that in hindsight, “I never had the courage or gumption to hand anything over to those guys.”
While his lawyers concede that Downs betrayed his employer, they contend that he should never have been charged with espionage, and that a more appropriate punishment would have been dismissal and expulsion from Qatar.
Whether Downs will serve out the rest of his term in the medium-security Qatar prison, where he runs the library, has become a question entan- gled in the geopolitical web of the United States, Qatar, Iran and Saudi Arabia.
His family says a phone call from President Donald Trump to the emir of Qatar would be sufficient to free Downs.
But the Trump administration’s hostility toward Iran, and mixed views about Qatar despite its military cooperation with the United States, have raised doubts about whether Trump would intervene to free an American convicted of espionage for Iran — even if he was prosecuted and punished unfairly.
Downs’ story has also shone a spotlight on what critics call Qatar’s opaque judicial system, which gave him little opportunity to defend himself during a trial conducted in Arabic, which he does not understand. Neither his family nor U.S. consular officials were permitted to attend most of the proceeding, and his lawyers at the time did little to challenge the prosecution.
His family has since hired another legal team, which contends that Downs was incorrectly accused of espionage — a capital offense in Qatar — based on an unfounded assumption that he had intended to provide Iran with large quantities of proprietary data from his employer.
“They didn’t know what he was up to — they took every piece of information off his desk and said, ‘This was what you were planning to give Iran,’” said Randy Papetti, one of his lawyers.
Qatari prosecutors asserted that the information was worth billions of dollars. “But Downs never took, let alone offered to sell, all that information as part of his $20,000 proposal to Iran,” Papetti said.
He described the prosecution of the case and the conviction, which received intense publicity in Qatar at the time, as a mix of misinformation and fact used to reach an absurd outcome.
“You’ve got a nerdy geologist who very wrongly tried to raise some money for his kid’s tuition, when he thought he had been cheated out of his bonus,” the lawyer said. “This was turned into, ‘We caught someone who was a spy.’”
Last month, Papetti and other lawyers working for Downs submitted a petition to the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, a panel of the Human Rights Council, seeking “urgent action” in their effort to persuade Qatar to release him.
The petition called his punishment “an arbitrary life sentence predicated on a politically motivated, false claim that Downs was a foreign spy.”
It is unclear when the panel will render an opinion. The panel’s opinions on wrongdoing can be important leverage in cases of unjust imprisonment.
The petition is also aimed at changing what Papetti called the erroneous narrative about Downs as a spy, which is still promoted by Qatari officials.
Further muddling the case is what, if anything, Qatar might receive in return for releasing Downs. The Qataris have been seeking sympathy from the Trump administration in their own bitter dispute with Saudi Arabia over a range of issues, and might view Downs as a bargaining chip. Qatari officials have declined to speak about the case.
Downs’ family, including his three children, now grown up, have long advocated for his release and sought more information about the case. But their efforts have intensified in recent months.
His sister, Julie Downs Van Woy, said the family had been assured by Qatari and U.S. officials that life sentences in Qatar usually mean 25 years, and that prisoners with good behavior are released after half that time. By such a calculation, Downs should have walked out of prison early this year.
Boozman wrote to Trump in March urging him to “raise the issue of Downs’ release” when the emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, visited Washington in April. It is unclear if Trump mentioned the matter.
Boozman’s spokesman, Patrick J. Creamer, said his office never received a White House response. The White House referred queries about Downs to the State Department, where an official said nothing about prospects for his release, but the U.S. Embassy in Qatar would “continue to provide all possible consular assistance to Downs and his family.”
Downs, in the meantime, has sought to make the best of his predicament.
In the telephone interview from prison, arranged by the David House Agency, a crisis-management firm for Americans arrested abroad, Downs said he had taught himself Mandarin Chinese and Spanish, and is permitted periodic visits from relatives and a shortwave radio — though no Internet access.
When he first arrived at the prison, Downs said, some Arab inmates assumed he was Israeli. “They were calling me ‘Mossad’ as a joke,” he said. “I’m not Mossad, I’m not Jewish. I’m just a hillbilly.”
As prison librarian, he has amassed a collection of books, partly through care packages from his family. Borrowers from the women’s wing tell Downs what they want through a paper-messaging system, he said.
“I’ve got a Colombian lady, a lifer, who is reading Eat, Pray, Love, he said. “I’ve got one that reads Game of Thrones and 50 Shades of Grey. Lebanese and Turkish ladies.”
While he has not been mistreated, Downs said, the confines of the prison are isolating.
“You feel very alone,” he said. “I’m the only American.”
Asked what he wanted most, Downs said, “The only thing I need is to go home and take care of my grandkids. That’s the only thing I want. There is no other thing.”
Downs’ family, including his three children, now grown up, have long advocated for his release and sought more information about the case. But their efforts have intensified in recent months.