Saturday 23 January 2016
Who is Nosratollah Khosravi-Roodsari? The Story of the Fourth American Prisoner
“Yes,
he left Iran.” This was the sentence we have been waiting for for the
last seven days, in order to bring you this story.
Nosratollah Khosravi-Roodsari, also known as Farzad or Fred Khosravi,
has left Iran. He is now somewhere in the sky between Iran, his country
of birth where he was in prison for almost a year, and the United
States, which released seven Iranian prisoners in exchange for Khosravi
and three other Iranian-American prisoners. Khosravi has become known as
the fourth Iranian-American prisoner released from Iran on January 16,
and the mysterious one who didn’t want to leave Iran with the others on
the Swiss airplane.
So who is this mysterious man? Journalists flocked to
social media to see what they could find out. He doesn’t have a Facebook
page or a Twitter account. There was no information available about his
arrest or the charges against him. All the American authorities said
was that he was an American citizen arrested in Iran.
It was only by chance that one of IranWire’s occasional
contributors told us that Khosravi’s former cellmate had expressed his
joy at Khosravi’s release in a Facebook post. The cellmate does not want
to be identified, and has since removed the post. Khosravi’s tale, as
told to us by the cellmate and a family member, is bizarre yet typical
of many Iranian prisoners who have been arrested by a paranoid
government on security charges. We have not been able to speak with
Khosravi, but the following details have been confirmed by three
independent sources.
According to Khosravi’s cellmate, Khosravi served in the
Iranian military during the 1979 Islamic Revolution. He was a member of
the army units that fought anti-regime activists in the northeast of the
country a few months after the revolution began. We don’t know why
Khosravi left Iran. More than a million Iranians migrated to the United
States and other countries in the early 1980s. Khosravi moved to
California, which is home to the largest Iranian community in the
Diaspora. According to his family members, he worked in the carpet
industry as a designer and seller in California and Florida.
Khosravi’s life took a dramatic turn when he unexpectedly
became an advisor to the FBI. According to his cellmate, Khosravi told
him that he once noticed that he had unintentionally bought a car with
stolen parts. He managed to identify the thieves of the stolen parts,
and notified the police about his findings. The FBI, he said, was so
impressed by his investigative talents that they asked him to work with
them on a freelance basis. According to the cellmate, Khosravi insisted
during his interrogations in Iran that he was not an FBI employee or an
agent, “just an occasional advisor.” Khosravi told his cellmate that his
job included visiting car shows and secondhand dealerships to identify
stolen cars and cars with stolen parts. The FBI did not reply to our
email enquiries about Khosravi. A former FBI agent told IranWire that it
is not unusual for the FBI to hire freelance consultants with special
talents.
Khosravi went back to
Iran in late 2013 to visit his elderly mother in the city of Tonekabon,
close to the Caspian Sea. He decided to stay in the country and worked
part-time as English teacher. Khosravi, who the cellmate says is now in
his late 50s, fell in love with one of his students, a woman in her 20s,
and asked her to marry him. The couple was supposed to marry in 2016.
One night, at a gathering with friends, Khosravi saw a
report on BBC Persian television about Robert Levinson, a CIA consultant
and former FBI agent who disappeared in Iran in 2007. Khosravi sent a
text message to an FBI contact indicating that he knew Levinson’s
whereabouts. Later, during interrogations and in conversations with
cellmates, Khosravi said that he sent the message under the influence of
alcohol, which is illegal in Iran. His cellmate and family members say
that Khosravi had no information about Levinson’s fate, and had simply
lied to impress his FBI contact.
The Iranian government has denied any knowledge of Robert
Levinson’s disappearance, a claim that appears to be accepted by the
White House. But journalist Barry Meier, author of “Missing Man,”
a forthcoming book about Levinson’s case, claims that Iranians were
holding Levinson in the country at least until 2011, and were willing to
exchange him for unspecified gestures by the US government.
Iranian officials are not known for transparency with
regard to the fate of prisoners, as recent cases have shown. Authorities
have never admitted to arresting Iranian-American consultant Siamak
Namazi. In the case of Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian, who was
released in a prisoner exchange last week, authorities never officially
declared the reasons for his arrest.
Despite the government’s denial of knowledge of Levinson’s
whereabouts, his case seems to be a thorny issue for the authorities.
The words “Robert” and “Levinson” are reportedly keywords monitored by
Iranian intelligence. All cell phone providers in Iran are either owned
by or affiliated with the Iranian government. According to security
experts, Iranian intelligence, similar to NSA, collects and monitors
millions of text messages everyday. Khosravi’s cellmate and his family
members believe Khosravi was under surveillance from the moment he sent
his FBI contact a message about Levinson.
“In May 2015, Fred Khosravi ordered a cab to take him to
Tehran’s Imam Khomeini Airport to go to the United States. At the
airport he was told that he couldn’t leave the country,” says the
cellmate. “He was taken away without being told where he was going. They
blindfolded him and put him in a Hyundai Santa Fe, the intelligence
agents’ car of choice. It’s the very same make of car that I, and other
people I know, were taken away in.”
Khosravi’s lawyer said plainclothes security agents
charged him with espionage and sending “secret information” to “a
hostile government,” meaning the American government. Khosravi was
roughed up during the arrest and was taken to Ward 209 of Evin Prison,
which is controlled by Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence.
Judge Abolghasem Salavati
was in charge of Khosravi’s case. Salavati, who has been nicknamed “the
judge of death,” is known for his harsh treatment of defendants in
security-related cases. When Khosravi told Salavati that he was drunk
when he sent the text message, and just wanted to show off, the judge
sentenced him to 74 lashes, the punishment for consumption of alcohol in
Iran. The sentence was never carried out.
While in Evin Prison, Khosravi was allowed to speak with
family members for one minute a week. Khosravi told his cellmate that
his interrogator warned him about telling anybody about where he was.
For a long time, Khosravi did not tell his family that he was in
prison.
“Whenever he talked to his family from prison, he would
say ‘I’m with a client at the carpet store in the US. I need to go’. And
then would hang up the phone,” says the cellmate. “The family
eventually became angry with him for ignoring them. They didn’t know
that Khosravi was in prison." It was only after a few months that
Khosravi told a family member that he was in prison. American officials
were also notified of his status months after his arrest.
“His trial was supposed to be in April 2016 at Branch 15
of Tehran’s Revolutionary Court, presided over by Judge Salavati,”
Khosravi’s lawyer said. Khosravi’s lawyer said she had generally not
encountered any obstacles when trying to represent her client, but
admitted that the surprise release meant that she had not had a chance
to review new developments in his case.
“At the request of Judge Salavati, I did not talk about
the case to anyone, but now that the case is closed, I believe there
should be no legal prohibition on that,” she said. She says that she was
as surprised by Khosravi’s sudden release as she was when she heard he
was arrested. “The arrest was the result of a misunderstanding,” she
says. “But I’m glad that he’s out of prison now and can go back to his
life.”
https://en.iranwire.com/features/7035/
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