and is now quietly living there.
ABC News said Amiri’s disappearance “was part of a long-planned CIA operation to get him to defect.” The CIA reportedly approached Amiri inside Iran through an intermediary who made an offer of resettlement on behalf of the United States, ABC News said. It said he has been helping the United States sort out the details of Iran’s nuclear program ever since.
In the week since ABC News carried its report last Tuesday, no other major American news outlet has reported on Amiri, suggesting that no one has been able to find support for the ABC News report. The United States, however, hinted last year that Amiri had indeed defected.
In Iran, news outlets continued repeating the official line of the past year that the United States kidnapped Amiri while he was in Saudi Arabia and spirited him away against his will and illegally.
Iran first announced Amiri’s disappearance a few months after he went missing. Some new accounts described him as a nuclear scientist heavily involved in Iran’s nuclear program, but Ali-Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization, denied in December that Amiri had ever been employed in or had any links to Iran’s nuclear programs. Others said Amiri was just a teacher at Malek Ashtar University. But if that were true, it would fail to explain why the United States would be interested in kidnaping him, as charged by Iran. The Islamic Republic has still not provided any explanation for why the Americans would want him.
The ABC News story added little information. For example, intelligence specialists wanted to know if Amiri had worked for the United States for years feeding information, or if his first contact with the Americans was just before his defection. They also wanted to know how high up he was in the bureaucracy. Was he a scientist working on one isolated part of the nuclear program? Or did he have an administrative role that would give him an overall perspective on the program. Even his age is unknown; he is believed to be in his thirties, which would suggest that he probably did not hold senior status.
Some speculation in Iran has suggested the Americans might be seeking to disable Iran’s nuclear program by kidnaping scientists. But Mark Fitzpatrick, a proliferation specialist with the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London, told the Christian Science Monitor, “Iran has by now enough trained operators and scientists that it would be impossible to decapitate the program by persuading the leading scientists to defect or otherwise making them disappear.”
Malek Ashtar University was founded after the revolution and is widely reported to be run by the Pasdaran, which oversees the military aspects of Iran’s nuclear program. The rector is a lieutenant general who was one of seven people cited in the first round of UN sanctions for involvement in Iran’s nuclear program. The Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) last week said Malek Ashtar is sited just across a highway from the headquarters of a clandestine nuclear program run by the military in northwestern Tehran.
In Tehran, Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehman-Parast denied the ABC story that Amiri had defected. But at the same time, he argued that the news report proved the U.S. government “knew Amiri’s whereabouts all along” and lied when it claimed last year that it had nothing to do with Amiri’s disappearance.
But the United States never denied any involvement in his disappearance. Questioned last December about Amiri, the United States played cagey, suggesting to some that it knew something about Amiri and raising the possibility that he had defected. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said, “We are aware of the Iranian claims. I have no information on that.” It was noted he said he himself had no information on Amiri; he did not say the United States government had no information.
The next day reporters asked another spokesman, Ian Kelly, about Amiri and Kelly said, “The response today is the same as yesterday.”
Two and a half years before Amiri disappeared, Ali-Reza Asgari, a former deputy defense minister and retired Pasdar officer, disappeared while on a business trip to Turkey. A senior German official later said he had defected to Germany. There has been much speculation as to whether he knew much about Iran’s nuclear program. Much of his Pasdar career, however, was tied up with Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Regarding Amiri’s disappearance, Iranian officials have complained that the Saudis and Americans colluded to abduct him and send him to prison in the United States.
The Saudi government was silent about the allegations until December, when Saudi Foreign Ministry spokesman Osama Nugali told the daily Ash-Sharq Al-Awsat that he was “stunned” by the allegations from Tehran, which he “deplored.”
Saudi officials rarely attach their names to comments critical of other governments, so the fact that these dismissive remarks were made on the record suggests a growing frustration with Tehran and an increasing willingness to accept that relations are now testy.
Nugali denied the Iranian charge that Saudi Arabia had done nothing to locate Amiri. “After having been informed of his disappearance by the Iranian [hajj] delegation, Saudi authorities undertook an intensive search in Medina as well as in all the hospitals and hotels in the region of Mecca,” Nugali said. No signs of the missing man were found.
Nugali added: “Saudi Arabia receives a million Iranian pilgrims every year for the hajj and umrah [which is the minor pilgrimage that takes place outside the days of the formal hajj]. And, as with other countries, they are under the supervision of their own national delegations.” In other words, Nugali was saying Iran is guilty of insufficient supervision if one of its pilgrims just disappeared.
But Nugali also said Saudi Arabia had asked Iran numerous questions about such things as Amiri’s last sighting and his known friends in the country in order to help a search, but that Iran had never responded to any of the questions.
Several days after Nugali’s remarks, Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki directly charged the United States with abducting Amiri and held Saudi Arabia guilty as an accomplice. “Based on the existing pieces of evidence [which he did not describe],… the Americans did abduct him. Therefore, we expect the American government to return him,” Mottaki told a news conference. “He disappeared in Saudi Arabia and naturally we ask the Saudi government to look into this case.… Saudi Arabia must be held accountable in this regard.”
But in a similar case involving the disappearance of an American, Robert Levinson, in Iran, the Islamic Republic said it was not accountable for the movements of individuals.
If Amiri did defect to the United States in Saudi Arabia, a few Saudi officials would know about it. He most likely would have gone to the American consulate in Jeddah. The Americans would then gave gone to the Saudi government to get formal papers allowing him to be flown out on an American government plane. It would, of course, be possible to sneak Amiri out unbeknownst to the Saudi government. But it is not American policy to do things that way with American allies; exposure of such an underhanded action would be too damaging to relations to contemplate.
