A retired FBI agent who vanished six years ago in Iran, reportedly during a botched, off-the-books CIA operation, was definitely detained by Iranian authorities despite Tehran’s denials, the last known person to see him alive has insisted.
Robert Levinson is almost certainly still in Iranian custody if he is still alive, Dawud Salahuddin, an Iran-based American fugitive, told the Christian Science Monitor in a an interview on Monday.
Mr Salahuddin, an African-American convert to Islam wanted for a 1980 murder in the US, said Mr Levinson had tried to recruit him as an informant when the two met on the Iranian resort island of Kish in March 2007.
Mr Levinson had flown in from Dubai, presenting himself as a private investigator looking into cigarette smuggling.
As they parted after a six-hour meeting in a plush hotel, plainclothes police arrested Levinson in the lobby, the fugitive said.
The US government has insisted that Mr Levinson, a devoted father of seven who would be 65 if still alive, was merely a private businessman on a trip overseas when he disappeared.
However, citing emails and documents, the Associated Press revealed last week that he was in fact part of a rogue CIA operation to gather intelligence on Iran’s nuclear programme and financial dealings.
Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, on Sunday repeated his country’s official position that Tehran had no knowledge of Mr Levinson’s whereabouts, insisting his fate was a “mystery”.
But Mr Salahuddin said the revelations that Mr Levinson was working for the CIA could now enable Iran to release him. As long as the US was insisting that Mr Levinson was not a spy, it was hard for the Islamic Republic to admit it had detained him, he said.
“It allows the Iranians to justify all their lies for all these years because they had an actual intelligence operative, which is quite valid,” Mr Salahuddin told the Monitor.
He denied suggestions he had orchestrated Mr Levinson’s arrest. “I’ve seen all these things, that I set up the guy and all that. Listen, I don’t do things like that – that’s not part of my make-up,” he said.
Mr Salahuddin, 63, an American born into a Baptist family on Long Island, was known as David Belfield until he converted to Islam at the age of 18. He fled to Tehran 33 years ago after assassinating a pro-Shah critic of Iran’s nascent Islamic revolutionary regime in a Washington suburb.
Mr Levinson was last heard of early in 2011 when a video was released by his unidentified captors showing him gaunt, bushy-bearded and dressed in a Guantanamo-style orange jumpsuit.
mtheodoulou@thenational.ae
