December 20-2013
. . . last visitor
The story of Robert Levinson—the retired FBI agent who went missing in Iran seven years ago—was turned topsy-turvy this past week when it turned out he had been employed by the CIA.
Meanwhile, the Islamic Republic insisted it knew nothing about his whereabouts and never had any contact with him—although the man who last saw him before he went missing says Levinson was in the custody of Iranian police officers at that time.
The CIA link was strange. The CIA is divided into several branches. The most famous, of course, is the collection branch that sends out spies and is tasked to collect information other people do not want the United States to have. Levinson was not employed by that branch. Instead, he had a contract as a consultant with the analytical branch, the side of the CIA that takes the secret data gathered by spies and combines it with public information and academic analysis to try to make sense of it all. That branch is authorized to hire people to help with its analysis, but not to dispatch spies on clandestine operations.
Levinson had a contract with that branch. But that contract—an unclassified contract worth $85,000, according to The Washington Post—had expired before Levinson flew to Kish Island in the Persian Gulf and disappeared in 2007. The woman at the CIA who had hired Levinson, Anne Jablonski, told him she hoped to get more funds and to be able to sign him to a new contract, but there was no money available at that time.
Jablonski also insists that she never authorized Levinson to go into Iran and says she would never have done so. She says when she learned that Levinson had disappeared on Kish, she went to the restroom and threw up.
Jablonski, her boss, Tim Johnson, who headed the Illicit Finance Group, and a third CIA employee in the analysis branch were all given the choice of resigning or being fired for their handling of Levinson. Two resigned. Jablonski refused to resign and was fired.
Meanwhile, the man who last saw Levinson on Kish says Iranian officials are lying when they claim to know nothing about his whereabouts.
That man is Daoud Salahuddin, who was born in New York as David Belfield, murdered a former Iranian diplomat who had worked for the monarchial regime, and been given asylum in Tehran. Over the years, Salahuddin became disgusted with the Islamic Republic and hasn’t been slow to express his disgust.
Levinson had flown to Kish for one day, March 9, 2007, to meet with Salahuddin. Levinson said he was investigating cigarette smuggling and was hoping Salahuddin could put him in contact with some officials in Tehran who might be able to help him. As they were chatting in a room at the Maryam Hotel on Kish, six plainclothes police officers came in to question them, apparently drawn by concern that two Americans were meeting on the island, Salahuddin told the Christian Science Monitor in an interview this week.
Salahuddin said he was taken away by the police and held overnight until they established that he was who he said he was. As he was taken away, he left Levinson in police hands in the hotel. After being freed, Salahuddin returned to the hotel and found Levinson was gone.
Salahuddin told the Monitor he spoke to the hotel manager, an Indian national, who said Levinson was gone. “He told me that, and without saying a word, let me know that the guy did not leave of his own accord, that he was in custody. But he didn’t have to say it out loud for me to know that.”
Salahuddin said, “The notion that somebody got this guy out of Iranian police custody and kidnaped him or whatever, I realize that simply was not true. I understood when I left the lobby of the hotel, he’s going to be in Iranian police custody for some days, because that’s how they do things.”
But Foreign Minister Mohammad-Javad Zarif told CBS News Iran has found “no trace” of Levinson and doesn’t know if he is still in Iran, but he is not in government custody.
Salahuddin said that after returning to Tehran he contacted a friend in Iranian intelligence who then telephoned Mostafa Pur-Mohammadi, who was then interior minister and is today the minister of justice.
Salahuddin, still believing the cigarette smuggling story, said he was urging the government to free Levinson to avoid any problems down the road. He said he just heard one side of the telephone conversation with Pur-Mohammadi, but “it was clear they had him in custody.”
Salahuddin said he is angry that Levinson came to him “under false pretenses,” saying he was a private investigator looking into cigarette smuggling on behalf of British American Tobacco PLC.
But, according to The New York Times, that was not entirely a ruse. The Levinson family lawyer has found on Levinson’s hard drive an email to Jablonski saying that he was going to Dubai on several private cases, including one involving cigarette smuggling, and hoped to meet someone there “or on an island nearby” who knew something about money laundering by Iranian officials. Thus, it appears from that email that the CIA did not dispatch Levinson to Kish and that Levinson did not tell the CIA he was going to Kish despite the expiry of his contract with the CIA.
Jablonski was part of a CIA office pursuing money laundering and other financial trails. According to Levinson’s notes shown to The New York Times, Jablonski was pursuing information about several countries, especially Venezuela and Iran. With regard to Iran, she wanted to know how Iran might respond to trade sanctions and also sought embarrassing financial information about Iranian officials. In the nine months before he disappeared, the Times said Levinson wrote more than 100 memos for Jablonski. The Times did not identify any of them as dealing with Iran, but said they related to Central American, South America and Central Europe, mostly countries he was visiting for the contracts he held as a private investigator.
When Levinson had worked earlier in his career for the FBI, he came to know Ira Silverman, an NBC News investigative producer, and provided leads to Silverman. Silverman in turn had interviewed Salahuddin in Tehran for a story. When Levinson said he was looking for information about financial shenanigans by Iranian officials, Silverman put him in contact with Salahuddin, who had told Silverman that former President Rafsanjani had stolen millions in oil revenues and invested the funds in Canada.
Silverman told the Times that a few days after Levinson disappeared Salahuddin messaged him that Levinson had been taken to Tehran by the police for questioning. Silverman recalled Salahuddin saying, “Everyone has got to be quiet. It can get resolved early.”
The authorities in Tehran have insisted otherwise. They say Levinson checked out of the hotel the morning after his visit with Salahuddin and left for the airport. They have shown the hotel register to reporters and to Levinson’s wife and insisted they know nothing further.
The connection with the CIA might have remained hidden if it weren’t for David McGee, a lawyer hired by the Levinson family, and his computer geek of an assistant, Sonya Dobbs. Dobbs probed the hard drive on Levinson’s computer and found many exchanges of emails with Jablonski. The news coverage has portrayed the relationship between Jablonski and Levinson as improper, with Jablonski giving Levinson assignments to do clandestine work, which someone in the analytical branch of the CIA is not empowered to do.
The material published so far, however, does not show Jablonski tasking Levinson with any illicit clandestine work. But the CIA clearly felt she had gone beyond her remit when it fired her. She continues to insist she did nothing wrong. But there were unusual aspects to the relationship. For example, The Washington Post reported that Levinson mailed his reports to Jablonski’s home address, not to her office at the CIA, as would be normal and proper.
CIA investigators concluded she was running an agent to collect intelligence, a job only people in the clandestine service, not in the analytical branch, are permitted to do.
However, one email makes clear she knew she was acting close to the edge. She emailed Levinson in mid-2006: “You’d have SO enjoyed being a fly on the wall today in our meeting about you. Everyone was so happy about the info but just freaking out about how to NOT piss off our ops [operations, the CIA clandestine branch] colleagues for doing a better job than they do. Seriously—we have to tread carefully here.”
The news on Levinson’s CIA ties first broke Friday, when the Associated Press ran a story. It said it had first learned of the ties years ago but had sat on the story at US government request out of concern that publication might endanger Levinson’s life. In releasing the story now, it said it had become convinced that Iran had long ago figured out that Levinson was a spy.
However, Mohammad-Hossain Aghassi, the lawyer in Tehran hired by the Levinson family, told the Voice of America that in all his dealings with the Iranian government over Levinson no one has ever suggested Levinson might be a spy.
Salahuddin, now 63 years old, was a convert to Islam and a volunteer guard at the Iranian embassy in Washington after the revolution. He has said he was recruited by the embassy to murder Ali-Akbar Tabatabai, an Iranian diplomat before the revolution who frequently appeared in the American media after the revolution attacking the revolutionaries.
Salahuddin shot Tabatabai point blank at his Bethesda, Maryland, home July 22, 1980. A few weeks earlier he had entered the premises of the Iran Times, poured gasoline around several rooms and set it ablaze. After the shooting, Salahuddin was driven to Montreal where he caught a plane for Europe and then onward to Tehran.
He told Time magazine last week he has mostly worked as a journalist in Iran for English-language outlets. But he says he also fought the Soviet Army in Afghanistan. He said he turned down Iranian efforts to recruit him to hijack a Kuwaiti airliner and to assassinate Saddam Hussein.
He says he worked for PressTV, the English language arm of state broadcasting, but was fired in 2009 after he walked out rather than report that President Ahmadi-nejad had been legitimately re-elected.
He told Time, “Over the years, I have lost a lot of respect for the Iranian system. It relies on blunt force. Iranians are afraid of their government. The basis of their rule is not love and respect for their rulers; it’s fear. It has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with power, corruption and enrichment.”
Salahuddin first went public in 2007 disputing the Iranian claim that it knew nothing about Levinson’s whereabouts. Since then, he said, the government has not provided him with a new Iranian passport or any travel documents that would allow him to leave the country. He said he considers himself the “last American hostage in Iran.” He didn’t mentioned Levinson.
Levinson himself had doubts about that trip to Kish. A few days before making the flight, he emailed a friend: “I guess as I approach my fifty-ninth birthday on the 10th of March, and after having done quite a few crazy things in my life, I am questioning just why, at this point, with seven kids and a great wife, why should I put myself in such jeopardy.”