Help Bob Levinson خواهش ميكنيم به "باب لوينسون" كمك كنيد

Two years after a former agent for the F.B.I. disappeared while on a trip to Iran, American diplomats and investigators are intensifying their efforts to resolve his case.

Two weeks ago, an Obama administration envoy, Richard C. Holbrooke, gave a letter to Iranian officials requesting information about the missing former agent, Robert Levinson, and two Americans imprisoned in Iran. Over the past year, a small team of F.B.I. agents, aided by consultants and businessmen with contacts in Iran, has also been seeking information about him.

The efforts come at a delicate time in American-Iranian relations. The Obama administration is seeking greater engagement with Iran, even as the government there has announced that it will try one of the imprisoned Americans, Roxana Saberi, a freelance journalist, on espionage charges.

Mr. Levinson disappeared in March 2007 on Kish Island, a Persian Gulf resort that is also a smuggling hub. His family has said that the former agent, who has worked in recent years as a private investigator, went there in connection with a cigarette smuggling case.

On Kish, he met with another American, Dawud Salahuddin, who fled to Tehran in 1980 after killing an associate of the former shah of Iran in Maryland. Mr. Levinson was last seen checking out of a hotel on Kish and getting into a taxi to the airport.

Since that day, even the basic question of whether Mr. Levinson is alive remains unresolved.

One businessman who is assisting the F.B.I. in its inquiry said in a brief telephone interview that it was his understanding that Mr. Levinson was alive, a view that F.B.I. agents involved in the case share, said several people who had spoken with them. That businessman, like several other people interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because he did not want to disrupt efforts to resolve the case.

In a recent interview, a top F.B.I. official said the agency had received several unconfirmed reports of sightings of Mr. Levinson in Iran. But the official, Joseph Persichini Jr., said the inquiry had yet to produce evidence to prove that Mr. Levinson was alive. “Some of those reports were detailed and sound credible, and we need to resolve that,” said Mr. Persichini, the assistant director in charge of the F.B.I.’s Washington field office, which is conducting the investigation.

Some American lawmakers have said they believe that Mr. Levinson is being held in an Iranian prison. An expatriate Iranian businessman said his contacts in Iran had told him that Mr. Levinson was held for a time at a site near Tehran run by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

Government officials there have repeatedly said that they know nothing about Mr. Levinson. An official in the Iranian president’s office and a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry both refused to comment about the case on Saturday.

Because no group has said it is holding Mr. Levinson, some people familiar with his case have speculated that he may have died in captivity. But others believe that the silence surrounding his status could suggest that because of his F.B.I. background, his captors view him as a high-value chip in a possible prisoner swap.

“I am confident he is alive,” said David L. McGee, a lawyer in Pensacola, Fla., who represents the Levinson family.

Mr. Levinson, who turned 59 a day after his disappearance, lived in Coral Springs, Fla., 20 miles north of Fort Lauderdale. For his wife, Christine Levinson, and their seven children, ages 15 to 31, the past two years have been an excruciating ordeal. Their hopes have soared and then plummeted amid conflicting reports about progress in his case. Last year, Mrs. Levinson traveled to Kish to retrace her husband’s footsteps. She receives regular briefings from the F.B.I.

“They just keep telling me they keep hearing that he is doing well,” Mrs. Levinson said in a recent telephone interview. “I have always believed that he is alive and well and somewhere in Iran, and that has not changed.”

Mr. Levinson spent more than 20 years with the F.B.I. Before his retirement in 1998, he specialized in Russian organized crime cases. Most of his work as a private investigator involved product counterfeiting, though he also worked for human rights organizations.

It was an assignment for one such organization, Global Witness, a London-based group that investigates corruption in natural resource industries, that took Mr. Levinson to Dubai in March 2007. After spending several days there, he next flew to Kish for his meeting with Mr. Salahuddin.

Mr. Salahuddin’s involvement has added another mystery to the case. While he has been quoted in news reports as saying that the killing he carried out in 1980 was necessary to eliminate enemies of Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution, he has also criticized some of Iran’s recent leaders and once flirted with the possibility of surrendering and returning to the United States. Mr. Salahuddin did not respond to recent e-mail messages seeking comment.

Jeffrey Katz, the head of a London-based investigative firm for which Mr. Levinson did some work, said that he and other friends of the former agent believed that the F.B.I. was initially slow to devote sufficient resources to the case. An agency spokesman, John Jay Miller, disputed such suggestions.

The Levinson case has received more attention since President Obama’s election. Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida and a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has been urging the F.B.I. and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to make resolving Mr. Levinson’s case a priority.

January 22, 2009

The Honorable Hillary Clinton
Secretary of State
Department of State
2201 C Street, NW
Washington, DC  20520

Dear Secretary Clinton:

I want to offer my congratulations to you on your nomination as Secretary of State.  As a senior member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, I look forward to working with you and the Obama Administration addressing the pressing foreign policy issue facing our nation.  That end, I want to bring to your attention the deeply troubling case of Robert Levinson, my constituent from Coral Springs, Florida, who disappeared from Kish Island, Iran on March 9, 2007.  It is my understanding that Senator Bill Nelson inquired about Mr. Levinson’s case during your confirmation hearings on January 12, 2009 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

As you may be aware, despite attempts to track down Mr. Levinson, scant evidence has surfaced regarding his whereabouts, and there are deepening concerns regarding his health and safety.  To this end, I respectfully request your assistance and that of the Obama Administration in ensuring that all available diplomatic avenues are employed to ensure his safe return to the United States.

Mr. Levinson, a former FBI agent, was last heard from on March 8, 2007 by his wife Christine, while he was working in Dubai as a private investigator.  According to his family, he checked into a hotel on Kish Island and checked out the following morning to fly back to the United States. Unfortunately, Mr. Levinson never arrived at the airport for his flight, and there is no accounting for what happened to him once he left the hotel.

Mr. Levinson’s wife, Christine and other Levinson family members traveled to Iran in December 2007, and with assistance from Swiss officials in Tehran, were able to visit the hotel where he was last seen and pass out flyers in Farsi with photos of Robert.  They also met with local Iranian authorities to seek their assistance in gaining information about Mr. Levinson’s disappearance.  The Levinson family was not assisted by the Iranian authorities, who claimed to have zero knowledge regarding Mr. Levinson’s whereabouts and have stonewalled any effort to gain pertinent information.

It is my understanding that the Swiss Ambassador in Tehran has discussed the Levinson case

during meetings with Iranian officials, but no further information about Mr. Levinson’s whereabouts has been gleaned from such discussions.  While US engagement with Iran is and has been extremely limited, it is critical that the Obama Administration employ every diplomatic tool at its disposal to locate Mr. Levinson and return him to his family in the United States.  More specifically, we ask that you to enlist our allies who have official diplomatic relations with Iran and urge them to discuss this case with Iranian authorities, as well as include this issue in any dialogue that may result as part of efforts to bridge the diplomatic gap between Washington and Tehran.  

Secretary Clinton, I had an opportunity to meet with Christine Levinson in 2008 upon the first anniversary of her husband’s disappearance and heard her appeals for assistance on his behalf.  Her heartfelt desire to bring Mr. Levinson home is matched by that of her family and many Floridians who came together for a rally of solidarity held on the one-year anniversary of Robert’s disappearance. 

As we approach the two year anniversary of Mr. Levinson’s disappearance, we hope that the Obama Administration will take steps to ensure his case is raised at the highest levels and that an intensive effort is made to locate and bring him home.  I greatly appreciate your willingness as indicated in your recent confirmation hearing to address this troubling case and look forward to working with you to bring home Mr. Levinson.

I look forward to your response to my request for assistance.

Sincerely,

Robert Wexler