Who Is Holding Robert Levinson? The strange case of the former F.B.I. agent who went missing in Iran
Robert Levinson disappeared in March 2007 while visiting the island of Kish, off the southern coast of Iran. What brought Levinson, a retired F.B.I. agent, to Kish is not entirely clear. The Times reports that he had gone to meet Dawud Salahuddin, an African-American Muslim convert living in Iran since 1980. That year, Salahuddin assassinated a vocal critic of the Revolution on the front step of his home in Bethesda, Maryland, while disguised as a mailman; he promptly fled and has never returned to the United States. (Salahuddin was profiled in this magazine by Ira Silverman in 2002.) Others, including Levinson’s family, say he was investigating cigarette smuggling in Kish’s free-trade zone. Kish, unlike other parts of Iran, does not require a visa to enter.
Early on, many speculated that the Iranian government had arrested or kidnapped Levinson. But, unlike in other cases featuring Americans arrested in Iran on questionable pretenses, there were neither accusations of espionage nor the promise of a show trial. Then yesterday, for the first time in almost five years, Levinson reappeared.
In a short video released by his family, Levinson, wearing a white collared shirt with the sleeve of the right arm ripped, looks into the camera and asks the United States government “to answer the requests of the group that has held me.” (The Levinsons reportedly received the proof-of-life video roughly a year earlier but kept it private while the American government worked for Levinson’s release.) “Please help me get home. Thirty-three years of service to the United States deserves something,” he says, his voice sounding weak and his face looking weathered and frail. The rough concrete backdrop to the frame and the Middle Eastern music playing in the background would suggest that Levinson is not spending his days inside a safe house in Tehran, waiting for Washington to guarantee his release through negotiations with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Rather, the crude surroundings point to the possibility that he is somewhere remote and in the hands of a militant Islamic “group.”
Last fall I met several retired and serving F.B.I. agents who had worked with Levinson. I was reporting on a notorious Ukrainian-born businessman named Semion Mogilevich, who had earned the dubious distinction of making the F.B.I.’s Top Ten Most Wanted List. Mogilevich is, according to one Russian organized crime expert, the “high-end underworld financier of choice.” Before he retired, Levinson had become perhaps the most fearless, crusading agent against Mogilevich. “He’s dangerous because he’ll get anybody who gets in his way,” Levinson once said of Mogilevich, speaking to the BBC. “It’s become just a little personal hasn’t it?” the interviewer replied. “I’d like to finish the job,” Levinson said, smirking.
