16 March 2010

Robert Levinson: Still Missing in Iran

For Christine Levinson, the issue is getting a father back to his family

Robert Levinson plays with his grandson. He has yet to meet his granddaughter, who was born in December 2008.

By Jeff Baron
Staff Writer

Washington — Christine Levinson says she has one main strategy to keep her sanity while trying to find her husband: “Every day, I wake up and hope that today is the day I hear that he is on his way home,” she said.

It is one of the few things about Robert Levinson’s disappearance from Iran’s Kish Island that seems to make sense.

Levinson vanished three years ago, on the eve of his 59th birthday, at the end of a one-day visit to Kish Island in the middle of a business trip. He checked out of the Maryam Hotel as expected and caught a taxi for the short ride to the Kish airport but never boarded his flight to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where he was due to reclaim luggage he had left at a hotel and take a plane for London.

Levinson, a U.S. citizen, had retired as an FBI agent in 1998, but he was still in the business of catching crooks: “He investigated cigarette smuggling and other criminal activities,” Christine Levinson said. His clients were private companies, and his wife said this particular, expensive trip involved work for several of them, so she was unable to say what sent him to Kish. In any case, she said, he didn’t go anywhere or do anything that should have gotten him in trouble: “My husband was a law-abiding citizen.”

Nor does the Iranian government say Levinson broke the law or is under arrest. His wife said no one has come forward with evidence that he is being held by Iranian authorities or anyone else, or that he was injured or died on that day in March 2007. “In all this time, there is nothing that we have heard that says he is not alive and well somewhere,” Christine Levinson said.

Christine and Robert Levinson have been married 35 years. “I’m just a housewife who wants her husband home,” she says.

As soon as she realized her husband was missing, Levinson started making efforts to find him. After eight months, she retraced his steps and visited Kish Island. “The Iranians promised to investigate and let me know the results of their investigation, and I haven’t heard back from them,” she said.

So life has gone on for the Levinsons, but with an important difference. Among the couple’s seven children, one has graduated from high school, one from college and one from graduate school in the three years Levinson has been gone. A granddaughter, Grace, was born a year ago and has yet to meet her grandfather. The youngest son, Douglas, who was 5 feet 2 inches (157 cm) tall when his father left, is 6 foot 4 (193 cm).

“He was 13 when Bob left, and now he’s 16,” Christine Levinson said. “He’s had a tough time with Bob not being here. Every teenage boy needs his father.”

An older daughter has become engaged to her longtime boyfriend. “He waited for a long time, waiting for Bob to come home, before he asked her to marry him,” Levinson said. The wedding is planned for September; the bride, daughter Sarah Levinson, said in an open letter to the governments of the United States and Iran that she needs her father to walk her down the aisle. “My father needs to be home now to dance with me at my wedding, a once-in-a-lifetime event that no father should ever miss,” she said.

Christine Levinson said the lack of diplomatic relations between the United States and Iran has complicated the effort to find her husband. But she said the U.S. government has been working through diplomats from Switzerland, which represents U.S. interests in Iran, to seek help from Iran.

A statement from the U.S. State Department March 9 on the third anniversary of his disappearance says, “Mr. Levinson will remain a priority for the United States until he is reunited with his family.”

The statement also calls on Iran to resolve the cases of five U.S. citizens detained in Iran: Joshua Fattal, Shane Bauer and Sarah Shourd, three hikers who strayed over the border from Iraq; Kian Tajbakhsh, an Iranian-American scholar and urban planner arrested after the disputed Iranian presidential election of June 2009; and Reza Taghavi, a retired U.S. businessman reportedly held without charges since May 2008.

Christine Levinson appealed for anyone who knows something about her husband’s disappearance or whereabouts to contact U.S. or Swiss officials or the Levinson family through its Web site, www.helpboblevinson.com. She said that if Levinson does return, he’ll have a hard time disappearing again: “My children said that he’s not allowed to go out of the house without an escort,” she said.

(This is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://www.america.gov)