President Trump’s reaction didn’t help. “I don’t accept that he’s dead,” Trump said when asked about the case. “It’s not looking great, but I won’t accept that he’s dead.”

Last November, the Levinson family shared with me a report from United Nations investigators that suggested Levinson was alive and facing trial in Iran.

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“According to the statement of Tehran’s Justice Department,” the report noted, “Mr. Robert Alan Levinson has an ongoing case in the Public Prosecution and Revolutionary Court of Tehran.”

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Iranian authorities quickly rejected the notion that they had Levinson in their custody or any knowledge of his whereabouts. It would appear, though, that the U.N. report nudged the U.S. intelligence agencies to address the long-standing mystery with renewed urgency.

Earlier in November, the State Department had offered a $20 million reward for information leading to Levinson’s safe return. Combined with a previous offer of $5 million from the FBI, it ties for the highest publicly offered reward in U.S. history with the bounty for Osama bin Laden. It’s unclear whether the reward led to information about Levinson’s fate.

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Levinson had traveled to Kish Island, a free trade zone in the Persian Gulf. It’s the only Iranian territory that U.S. citizens can enter without a visa. It is the last place Levinson was seen publicly.

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There are conflicting reports about exactly what Levinson was trying to accomplish on Kish, but we know he was on an assignment from CIA agents that was never authorized by the agency’s leadership, a fact that the U.S. spy agency did not fully acknowledge until 2013.

There Levinson met with Dawud Salahuddin, formerly David Belfield, a U.S. citizen who fled to Iran in 1980 after agents of the Islamic republic contracted him to assassinate a former official of Iran’s pre-revolutionary government at his home in Bethesda.

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Salahuddin acknowledges meeting with Levinson on Kish, but has always contended that he has no information about what happened to Levinson after their encounter.

In 2011, the family received a “proof of life” video confirming that Levinson was alive long after his initial detention.

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A report from PressTV, Iran’s state-run English-language media network, published several weeks after Levinson went missing, claims that the American was in Iranian custody but would likely be “freed in a matter of days.”

At the time Salahuddin worked for PressTV. Marzieh Hashemi, another American who has long resided in Iran, currently works for the television station as a presenter. Last year, when Hashemi returned to the United States to visit relatives, she was taken into custody and held for several days as a material witness.

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At the time, I suspected that her detention might have something to do with the ongoing investigations into Levinson’s disappearance. Although government sources I sought comment from at the time declined to discuss Hashemi’s detention or the nature of her questioning, I have no doubt that Levinson was one major area of discussion.

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What makes me so confident?

For over a decade, the FBI has chased down any conceivable lead to finding their missing former colleague.

I first moved to Iran in 2009. For years after that, whenever I returned to the United States for visits, I was routinely contacted by FBI agents seeking information about Levinson. I had none. When I was released from prison in Iran in 2016, two FBI agents were on the U.S. government plane that took me and other freed Americans to a U.S. military hospital in Germany.

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Levinson was the only subject they asked about. Years later I still get occasional queries from agents, some of them friends and former colleagues.

The timing of this announcement of Levinson’s probable death is understandably leading to more questions. Why now?

One possibility is that the U.S. government and intermediaries are engaged in negotiations with Iran over Americans still in Iranian custody. For years, Levinson’s fate was a sticking point for Justice Department officials. They made any further prisoner negotiations with Iran contingent on a full account of his fate. Intelligence that concludes he is no longer alive potentially removes that obstacle.

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The Americans still imprisoned in Iran include Siamak Namazi, British and U.S. dual national Morad Tahbaz, and Michael White, a U.S. Navy veteran who is suffering from cancer and has been admitted to a Tehran hospital with symptoms of the coronavirus.

The pandemic lends new urgency to their fates, because there is considerable doubt that the Iranians are capable of protecting their prisoners from the virus. The Trump administration has made it clear that it will not tolerate any deaths of Americans in Iranian custody.

I desperately hope those Americans are reunited with their families as soon as possible. But of equal importance is getting answers for the Levinsons. They have suffered disproportionately, having been wronged by the regime in Iran and failed by the U.S. government for far too long.