According to an informed source who spoke to Rooz, on his arrival in Iran Shahram Amiri was taken to an intelligence quarantine where he is now. Prior to being transferred to an unknown location, security agents took him to the Iranian state television studios where he appeared in a nationally televised program.
Many aspects of Amiri’s exit from Iran, his disappearance in Saudi Arabia, arrival in the US, production of four videos and his eventual return to Iran are still unknown. The saga has been further complicated by the latest American claim that Amiri was paid five million Dollars to spy for the United States.
Shahram Amiri, who was a “nuclear scientist” according to the Iranian foreign minister, was later referred to as an “ordinary citizen.” Upon his return to Iran, he called himself a junior researcher. But the CIA claims that Amiri was an American spy in Iran for years, while the Islamic Republic is portraying him as a national hero who was able to escape from the claws of imperialism, much like James Bond and Tintin. According to Radio Farda, Iranian foreign minister Manuchehr Mottaki said in his latest statement about Amiri that he would not be hailed as a national hero until his claims were proven.
Amiri was taken to the Iranian national television headquarters escorted by three vehicles and accompanied by several individuals. He appeared on the country’s national channel on Saturday night. In the movie clip, Amiri repeated twice that he had been “kidnapped by Americans in Saudi Arabia and transferred to American soil from there.” He also claimed that he was forced into making his second video after being arrested by FBI agents following his first video.
But Amiri did not answer the most difficult question of all. When asked how he was able to escape the American agents, he said, “Your program’s time limitation doesn’t allow me to answer that question in detail, but the related evidence and documents are available and would be published at the appropriate time.”
He also said, “The Americans told me, confess that you were a spy so we can exchange you with our three spies in Iran.”
People who watched the program noted that Amiri was visibly anxious and nervous during the interview, spoke slowly and was forced to look for the interviewer’s help several times to convey his messages.
The website Khodnevis quoted the New York Times as writing: “When Shahram Amiri, the Iranian scientist, took his C.I.A. handlers by surprise last week by un-defecting back to Tehran, he was gambling with his life. Would he end up like Vitaly Yurchenko, the one-time K.G.B. officer who defected to Washington exactly a quarter-century ago, revealed some of the deepest secrets of a collapsing empire, and then bolted from his C.I.A. handlers at a French restaurant in Georgetown and ended up back in Moscow?
The French restaurant is long gone; in one of those oddities of spy-vs.-spy episodes, it was just seven blocks south of the office block where Mr. Amiri took refuge Monday night in the Iranian interests section of the Pakistani Embassy. But, remarkably, Mr. Yurchenko is still around. And as his interrogation by Iranian intelligence began on Friday, Mr. Amiri could only hope for the same fate.”
The piece continued, “Because there’s an alternate ending to such dramas that Mr. Amiri no doubt doesn’t want to think about. It is the case of Hussein Kamel, a son-in-law of Saddam Hussein. Mr Kamel escaped from Iraq to Jordan in 1995, and gave the West an insider’s view of Mr. Hussein’s then-active research projects on chemical, biological and other weaponry, not unlike the view of Iran’s nuclear program that American officials say they got from Mr. Amiri. Mr. Kamel, too, went back home, promised by his father-in- law’s lieutenants that all was forgiven. He was shot a few days later.
