The Case Of The Missing Agent

Other colleagues said that Levinson's trip to Iran grew out of his relationship with Ira Silverman, a retired NBC News investigative producer (and former associate of Ross) who has had a longstanding interest in Salahuddin's case. Silverman had made contact with Salahuddin after becoming interested in the case through his acquaintance with the late Carl Shoffler, a legendary Washington, D.C., police intelligence detective who had spent years trying to persuade Salahuddin to leave his refuge in Iran and turn himself into American authorities. Shoffler told people at the time that he hoped to use Salahuddin as a source for information on Islamic terrorism.

In 2002, Silverman wrote a lengthy article in The New Yorker magazine about the case; for the story, he interviewed Salahuddin, an African-American convert to Islam, for five days in Tehran. In the interview, Salahuddin confessed to murdering Ali Akbar Tabatabai, a former press attaché at the Iranian Embassy in Washington, in Bethesda, Md., on July 21, 1980.  To execute the murder, Salahuddin copied a scene from the thriller "Six Days of the Condor" by Washington novelist James Grady. Salahuddin disguised himself as a mailman making a special delivery, and then shot Tabatabai on the doorstep of his home when he came to sign for the package.

At the time of the murder, Salahuddin—a native of Bay Shore, N.Y.—had been working as a security guard at the Iranian Interests Section of the Algerian Embassy. Tabatabai, who had served as a press officer during the regime of the deposed Iranian Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, had become an outspoken opponent of Iran's new leader, Ayatollah Khomeini. "I shot him," Salahuddin was quoted as saying in the article by Silverman. In a later e-mail quoted by Silverman, Salahuddin added: "It was an act of war. In Islamic religious terms, taking a life is sometimes sanctioned and even highly praised, and I thought that event was just such a time." (In an earlier 1996 interview with ABC News, Salahuddin also confessed to the Tabatabai murder, declaring: "All governments kill traitors, and all governments, if they can, kill people who are making strong attempts to overthrow them.")

One acquaintance of both Levinson and Silverman told NEWSWEEK he learned earlier this year that the former FBI agent was about to leave for the Middle East on a trip apparently designed to make renewed contact with Salahuddin. Silverman told this acquaintance that Levinson's plan was to meet the fugitive in Iran and try to persuade him to return to the United States, the acquaintance said. Silverman did not initially return phone calls to NEWSWEEK. But after this article was posted, Silverman called to say he had no such conversation with anybody about Levinson's trip to Iran. "I did not talk to anybody about Bob's trip," Silverman said. He also said, "I was not involved with the FBI to try to get him [Salahuddin] out of Iran." But he declined to discuss what he knew about Levinson's trip to Iran, saying he had been asked "by the people conducting the investigation" not to make any public comments that could interfere with the effort to bring Levinson home.

U.S. officials familiar with the matter say that the FBI has since tracked Levinson's travels, confirming that he booked a hotel room in Dubai, met with a number of experts there on organized crime and cigarette smuggling. He then flew to Kish, an Iranian-controlled island in the Persian Gulf (U.S. citizens do not need visas to visit there).

In a recent e-mail exchange with another American journalist, Joseph Trento of the National Security News Service, Salahuddin acknowledged meeting with Levinson at a Kish hotel. Salahuddin hinted that the former FBI agent—working with Silverman—was trying to lure him to leave Iran. They had tried to "bait" him by offering to share "files" containing a "bombshell" about a former high-ranking Iranian official's "foreign holdings," he wrote. Although he wasn't present for the meeting, the e-mail alleges Silverman was in simultaneous communication with Salahuddin to try to get him to cooperate with Levinson. "All the time, Ira [was] pushing a number of buttons to gain my confidence," Salahuddin wrote in one e-mail. But in the e-mail to Trento, Salahuddin also indicates that he became wary because he could not figure out why Levinson and Silverman would "put something in my hand of such a bombshell nature."