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It’s a smoke and mirrors saga fit for Hollywood, complete with a major movie star, murky reports of a kidnapping and an American fugitive sneaking across the border of a nation unfriendly to the U.S.

Little is being revealed about Jacob Ostreicher’s flight from house arrest in Bolivia and into the care of actor-activist Sean Penn.

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The New York businessman arrived in the U.S. on Monday after an ordeal that began more than two years ago when he was jailed as part of a money laundering probe into a rice-growing venture. His Orthodox Jewish family, associates in Bolivia and the U.S. State Department are all expressing a mixture of relief and surprise, and not much else.

No one is saying how the 54-year-old fled, or who helped him.

“You’ll never find out,” Peter Hakim, president emeritus of the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington, said Tuesday. If the U.S. was involved, “it was done through layers and layers of cover,” he said.