VIENNA, Virginia, is a largely non-descript suburb of Washington, D.C. — perhaps a little further from the city than the better known Fairfax and Arlington areas. Homes in the area — especially new construction — are pricey with median prices around a million dollars. It is here that Ashley Tellis lived with his family. If the affidavit released by the FBI last week is to be believed, it is also where he was storing top-secret documents illegally procured from top-secret facilities.

It is a spy story full of surveillance and subterfuge. Ashley Tellis, originally from Mumbai but a long-time American citizen, is an expert on India. As a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, he played an important role in brokering the US-India nuclear deal during the George W. Bush administration. In 2001, he became an adviser to the US State Department and the Department of Defence. He signed a non-disclosure agreement saying that he would abide by the rules governing the top-secret information that he would have had access to as an adviser. It is not easy to obtain this sort of clearance, which involves a lengthy FBI investigation of background and circumstances. But Tellis apparently obtained this clearance which was the foundation for his decades-long career as a defence and intelligence analyst.

That all came to a shocking end on Oct 11, 2025, when the FBI knocked on his door with a warrant. There are suggestions that on this day, Tellis and his family were planning to leave the US to fly to Rome. According to the FBI affidavit, that has been released by the US Department of Justice, the raid on his home and particularly his home office revealed that Tellis had been squirrelling away top-secret documents for years. Over 1,000 of them were found in locked cabinets, on his desk and in garbage bags in his storage room.

The affidavit details several specific occasions in which Tellis went to the top-secret facilities of the Department of Defence and Department of State where he was accessing documents and illegally printing them. In one such incident, Tellis accessed a document that was over 1,000 pages and had to do with the US air force’s tactical assessments of enemy capabilities. After accessing the document, Tellis saved it under a file titled EconReform, he then looked through the document and printed several sections. The affidavit alleges that there is surveillance footage of Tellis arranging and aligning pages of top-secret documents in notepads so that they would not be visible. This suggests that Tellis was not a naïve old professor who accidentally took documents out of top-secret facilities but was fully aware of what he was doing and deliberately hiding his actions. In legal terms, his actions established intent.

Is Ashley Tellis’s arrest part of a crackdown on experts that the Trump administration sees as having divided loyalties?

All that alone should have been enough to doom Tellis but there is more. The affidavit alleges that Tellis had regular contacts with Chinese officials, and details specific meetings that took place at restaurants in which Tellis was heard talking about US-Pakistan relations and Iran-China ties. In one such meeting this past September, Tellis was seen arriving with a large brown envelope and leaving with a red gift bag that was given to him by the Chinese.

What to make of all of this? According to Dr Muqtedar Khan, a professor of political science at the University of Delaware and a prominent foreign policy analyst and host of the popular show Khanversations, it is possible that the FBI officials became alerted to Tellis’s actions while carrying out routine surveillance on Chinese embassy officials. This may then have sparked an investigation that revealed that Tellis was accessing information about the American air force’s capabilities.

It is a story of smoke and mirrors. In the backdrop is the fact that another member of a top US think tank was targeted and arrested. In July this year, Sue Mi Terry of the Council of Foreign Relations and the top expert on US-South Korea relations was indicted for allegedly having served as an unregistered foreign agent of the South Korea government for many years. Terry is a former CIA analyst and former member of the White House National Security Council. She was suspected of being a foreign agent, sharing information in exchange for money and designer goods.

Is Ashley Tellis’s arrest part of a crackdown on experts that the Trump administration sees as having divided loyalties? It is important to mention that Tellis, who had been a vociferous India promoter for most of his career, had recently changed his tone. Frustrated by the Modi government’s delusions, he had begun to write about how India’s imaginary belief in a multipolar world with itself as a great power was leading to a foreign policy disaster. Could someone on the Indian side have decided to tip off the FBI so that Tellis could be silenced? Given the curbs on speech that Modi has imposed on critics at home, it could well be that Tellis was set up or outed by people he trusted. India had a lot to gain from silencing him.

Then again, there is the man himself. Undoubtedly, providing information to the Chinese could be quite lucrative — far more than speaking engagements and think tank work. Perhaps Tellis simply began to take his access and his power for granted and decided to wield it in a direction that he wanted.

The truth in our troubled world is elusive if not dead entirely, and so it will be in the case of Tellis, whose motivations and betrayals will likely never see the light of day. One thing, however, is quite certain, and that is that the voice of Ashley Tellis has been silenced. n

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, October 18th, 2025