Donald Trump’s administration on Monday accused Iran for the first time of the ‘probable death’ of ex-FBI agent Robert Levinson and urged future President Joe Biden to make the release of US prisoners a condition of any negotiations with Tehran. The US Treasury immediately announced sanctions against two senior Iranian intelligence officials, Mohammad Baseri and Ahmad Khazai, for their alleged involvement. The American national had disappeared in 2007 under mysterious circumstances, and Washington had since called for help from Tehran despite the lack of diplomatic relations between the two enemy countries.
“The Iranian government made a commitment to assist in repatriating Bob Levinson, but it never did. The truth is that Iranian intelligence agents, with the green light from senior Iranian officials, were involved in the kidnapping and detention of Bob, ”US Federal Police Director Christopher Wray said in a statement.
A CIA agent?
“The US government has come to the conclusion that all the evidence we have suggests that Bob died in captivity,” another senior US official said in an exchange with the press. “It is very clear that this case was well known at very high levels of the Iranian government”, he insisted. As early as March, after 13 years of uncertainty, President Trump hinted that his death was likely. The family of the ex-FBI agent then claimed to have been informed by American officials that he had “died while in detention by Iranian authorities”.
Washington has always maintained that Bob Levinson was not working for the US government at the time of his disappearance in March 2007, on Kish Island in the Gulf. He had already been retired from the FBI for ten years. But according to the Washington Post, he was working for the CIA and was supposed to meet an informant about Iran’s nuclear program.
The circumstances of the ex-agent’s captivity, and his “probable death”, have not been specified by US officials. “We call on the Iranian regime to provide a full account of what happened to Bob Levinson,” US Foreign Minister Mike Pompeo said in a statement. Trump administration officials assured that the timing of this announcement was not political, only being the result of a “complex process.”
“Horrible violation of human rights”
But this formal accusation puts even more pressure on the future Biden administration to be uncompromising with Tehran. Especially since it comes just after the execution by Iran of the opponent Rouhollah Zam, denounced as “barbarian” by Mike Pompeo and that the future national security adviser to Joe Biden at the White House, Jake Sullivan, also called it a “horrible violation of human rights”.
Iran is an issue on which the Democratic President-elect, who is due to take office in January, is poles apart from his Republican predecessor. Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, arguing that it was insufficient to prevent Tehran from building the atomic bomb and to stem its “nefarious” behavior in the Middle East. He reinstated and then tightened the American sanctions lifted as part of this international agreement.
Joe Biden wants to come back to him in this agreement and lift the sanctions, on condition that the Iranian authorities come back on their side in the nails of the nuclear restrictions that they have started to transgress in retaliation for the decision of the Republican billionaire. A senior official in the outgoing administration on Monday urged the next government to “include the return home of all Americans unjustly detained” in Iran in a possible negotiation with the Islamic Republic.
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