Shahram Amiri, the maybe-nuclear scientist who was maybe kidnapped by the CIA, has landed in Teheran. Now come the denials about what he actually did and who he actually was.
Apparently dressed in the same white shirt and tweed sportsjacket from his calm academic YouTube video, Amiri held a press conference at Imam Khomeini Airport after de-planing to say he rejected what he described as a $50 million bribe not to come home. Or, as Iran's PressTV puts it, Amiri held firm against "concerted efforts to bribe him to advance their political agenda against the Iranian government from the very first days of his kidnapping."
Who kidnapped him? According to PressTV, "a joint operation by terror and kidnap teams from the US Central Intelligence Agency and Saudi Arabia's Istikhbarat."
Notice something else about that PressTV account: It calls Amiri merely a "scholar" and not -- as Iran has previously contended -- a scientist affiliated with Iran's nuclear program. That appears to have fallen down the official memory hole. "Shahram Amiri is not a nuclear scientist and we reject it," Deputy Foreign Minister Hassan Qashqavi, at Amiri's side, told a bank of cameras. Why the Great Satan would abduct a mere "researcher in one of the universities in Iran" went unexplained.
Well, except for generic American perfidy. "The U.S. administration has connected my abduction to Iran's nuclear case to pursue certain goals and exert pressure on the Iranian government," Amiri said. In order to whitewash his kidnapping, Amiri continued, U.S. agents urged him to apply for asylum -- to appear to defect, in other words -- and "announce that I carried a laptop containing important information." He claimed to be under "psychological pressure" during his 14-month captivity, during which time he was threatened with rendition to "prisons of the Zionist regime" and Israeli agents participated in his interrogations.
We'll have to wait until later today for the inevitable American denials. For now, anonymous U.S. officials are happy to continue the intelligence operation through the newspapers. Some told the *Washington Post * that the CIA paid him $5 million for his information, part of an effort called the "Brain Drain" to entice Iranian scientists to leave the country, thereby jeopardizing Iran's uranium-enrichment efforts.
That's money Amiri left on the table by returning to Iran. "He's gone, but his money's not," an anonymous official told the Post. "We have his information, and the Iranians have him." Hmm. Subliminal Message No. 1: Amiri is still on our payroll, so don't take whatever he says in Iran too seriously. Subliminal Message No. 2: Hey, Shahram: anytime you want to come back to the States, you'll be set for life. We'll keep the webcams ready.
And, there might be a Subliminal Message No. 3, if Joe Klein's latest column in Time has it right. Klein reports that some in the military and the intelligence community are giving a second look at a military attack on Iran, out of frustration with the Obama administration's unrequited diplomatic outreach and the dicey prospects for new international sanctions to retard Iran's nuclear program.
According to Klein, it's not that a strike looks any wiser to anyone in the administration -- nor that a third U.S. war in the Middle East looks any smarter -- and it might just be saber-rattling. It's more that every other American option for preventing an Iranian bomb make kidnapping a nuclear scientist look downright effective.
Credit: PressTV
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