Witness: Iranian Police Arrested Levinson

American refugee Dawud Salahuddin said today in an interview with the Christian Science Monitor in Tehran that Iranian police had detained Robert Levinson during a meeting between the two men on March 9, 2007 at the Maryam Hotel on Kish Island.

Salahuddin added that Levinson had been trying to recruit him as an informant before his arrest. Levinson, a former FBI agent, was working as a CIA contractor at the time.

Salahudin, who has lived in Iran since carrying out a 1980 assassination of an Iranian opposition member in the U.S., is the last civilian to see Levinson alive. He told the Monitor that he last saw Levinston surrounded by four Iranian police.

Iran's Foreign Minister Javad Zarif denied all knowledge of Levinson's whereabouts on Sunday, insisting his fate was “a mystery.”



But Salahuddin said that the revelation of Levinson’s CIA ties would now allow “the Iranians to justify all their lies for all these years because they had an actual intelligence operative, which is quite valid.”  [The Christian Science Monitor, 16 December]

Salahuddin meanwhile denied suggestions he had orchestrated Levinson's arrest.

“I’ve seen all those things, that I set the guy up and all that. Listen, I don't do things like that -- that's not a part of my makeup,” Salahuddin said.


File photo: This undated photograph obtained January 8, 2013 courtesy of the Levinson family shows Robert Levinson, who vanished in Iran nearly six years ago. (AFP/Levinson Family) 

CIA Contractor Traveled to Kish to Meet An American Refugee - Report

Robert Levinson, the CIA contractor who disappeared during a trip to Iran’s Kish Island in 2007, had reportedly traveled there to meet with Dawud Salahuddin, an American who fled to Iran in 1980 (a.k.a. David Theodore Belfield and Hassan Abdulrahman), The New York Times reported.

Salahuddin, who was at the time working as a security guard at the Iranian interest section in Washington, killed Ali Akbar Tabatabai, an Iranian opposition activist living in exile in Bethesda, and soon fled to Tehran by way of Canada and Switzerland. He later described his action as an “act of war” on the opposition and not murder. He has since worked in Iran as an English teacher, a war correspondent and a web editor for an English-language TV. He even acted in a feature movie in 2000 by the famed Iranian director Makhbalbaf called Kandahar.

Robert Levinson, who had worked on money laundering cases by Iranian officials, had made arrangements to meet with Salahuddin at Kish Island (an Iranian free economic zone requiring no visas to enter). Salahuddin, who had been outspoken about his opposition to government corruption in Iran, was apparently ready and able to provide valuable information to Levinson. They were going to meet at Maryam Hotel in Kish.

For a detailed account on Levinson by Barry Meier of The New York Times, please click here.

To read The New York Times report on Salahuddin by Robert MacKey, please click here.

File photo: Dawud Salahuddin in a still image from a 2006 documentary. (The New York Times)