Two years ago graduate student Daniel Levinson’s father vanished in Iran plunging the younger Levinson and his family into two years of dead ends, sleepless nights, uncertainty and grief. His family set up the website www.helpboblevinson.com (visit that link, Barack…).
Now, in a post on RealClearWorld, Levinson is a hoping the government of Iran — if it is holding Robert “Bob” Levinson as some believe — will release his father as a solid, humanitarian gesture. Here’s how it begins:
It has now been over two years since my father, Robert “Bob” Levinson, went missing in Iran. He disappeared on Kish Island, a free-trade zone on March 9, 2007, while investigating cigarette smuggling for his security consulting firm. No one has seen or heard from him since. These past two years have brought my family – my mother, four sisters, two brothers and I – nothing but grief and sadness as we hear less and less from the Iranian government about his disappearance.
Earlier this year, during Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s confirmation hearings, both she and Florida Senator Bill Nelson agreed that if the Iranian government is, as Senator Nelson believes, holding my father, then they have a great opportunity to send a gesture of human compassion and goodwill by releasing him and reuniting him with his family.
While we must stress that our family has never accused the Iranian government of any involvement in my father’s disappearance, we do, however, ask them for clarification concerning an April 2007 report by PressTV, the Iranian government-sanctioned media outlet, stating that my dad had been “in the hands of Iranian Security forces since the early hours of March 9th” and that we should “see him freed in a matter of days.” The last man known to have seen my father made a similar claim.
And it’s clear one of Iran’s top officials knows about this case:
During an interview with NBC Nightly News last August, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was very knowledgeable about my father’s case, and even offered to assist the FBI in its efforts to find him. He also discussed the trip my mother and I took to Iran in December 2007 to search for my father.
Unfortunately, we never received the report on the investigation we were assured would come after that trip, only being told since that the case was “closed.” We have still not met with the Iranian Ambassador to the UN, nor could President Ahmadinejad find time to meet with my mother during his two visits to New York since my father disappeared.
The State Department continues to work on our behalf, and has sent a number of diplomatic notes to Iran via the Swiss, as recently as this month, but Iran has stopped responding.
That’s only part of his post. There’s a lot more so read it in its entirety.
And visit the family’s website.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.