US blames Iran over ex-FBI man’s ‘death’
THE Trump administration for the first time formally blamed Iran for the presumed death of retired FBI agent Robert Levinson, publicly identifying two Iranian intelligence officers believed responsible for his abduction.
Mr Levinson disappeared in Iran under mysterious circumstances more than a decade ago, and though US diplomats and investigators have long said they thought he was taken by Iranian government agents, yesterday’s announcement in the final weeks of the Trump administration was the most definitive assignment of blame to date.
Besides blaming two high-ranking intelligence officers by name, US officials said the Iranian regime sanctioned the plot that led to Mr Levinson’s abduction and lied for years about its involvement in his disappearance through disinformation campaigns aimed at covering
up the government’s role.
The announcement comes nine months after US officials revealed that they had concluded that Mr Levinson “may have passed some time ago” though they did not disclose at the time the information that led them to that assessment.
Officials yesterday would not describe any additional information that led them to believe Mr Levinson had died in captivity, except to say that all evidence they had pointed in that direction, or how they came to identify the role of the two individual intelligence officers.
Officials said they were acting now, one month before president Donald Trump leaves office, not for any political reasons but simply because they had finally accumulated enough information to formally hold Iran accountable.
They also said that no agreement with Iran should be reached without a deal to free the remaining handful of US citizens imprisoned in that country.
Mr Levinson vanished on
March 9, 2007, when he was scheduled to meet a source on the Iranian island of Kish.
For years, US officials would say only that Mr Levinson was working independently on a private investigation.
But a 2013 Associated Press investigation revealed that Mr Levinson had been sent on a mission by CIA analysts who had no authority to run such an operation.
The family received a video in late 2010 as well as proof-of-life photographs in 2011 in which he appeared dishevelled with a long beard and wearing an orange prison jumpsuit like those given to detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison.
Even then, his whereabouts and fate were not known, and the Iran government has persistently denied having any information about Mr Levinson.