Iran’s elite military force, the Revolutionary Guards, is denying a report generated by WikiLeaks documents that suggested it was holding, or had held, former FBI agent Robert Levinson, Agence France-Presse reported .
“We deny the arrest of the FBI agent and if the Guards had arrested an enemy, it would announce itself,” the head of the Guards, commander Mohammad Ali Jafari, told reporters, according to ILNA news agency.
A WikiLeaks cable suggested that missing ex-FBI agent Robert Levinson, who went missing in 2007 while working as a private investigator in the Persian Gulf, was being held — at least at one point — in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard’s prison, according to a report in the The Telegraph in London.
The cable contained information from a political prisoner who managed to escape the country, the Telegraph reported.
“The informant, who was detained in August 2009 amid the civil unrest sparked by the country’s disputed presidential elections, claims that he saw the words “B. LEVINSON” written on the frame of his cell, beneath three lines of English which he assumed to be a ‘plea for help’”, the paper reported.
The American diplomat who spoke to the person wrote in the cable: “He said that at the time he did not know who Levinson was and only after his release did he use the search engine Google to find that Levinson was a missing American citizen.”
