Family: US believes ex-FBI agent Robert Levinson died while in the custody of Iran

The U.S. government has concluded that retired FBI agent Robert Levinson, who vanished more than a decade ago, has died while in the custody of Iran, his family said Wednesday.

Shortly after the family’s announcement, President Donald Trump told reporters that “I won’t accept that he’s dead,” even though his own acting national intelligence director appeared to confirm the news with a statement conveying sympathies for the Levinsons.

The family said in a statement posted on Twitter that it had no information about how or when Levinson had died, but that it occurred before the recent coronavirus outbreak. The family said information that U.S. officials had received led them to conclude that he is dead.

U.S. officials communicated the news to Levinson’s family in a meeting in Washington in recent weeks, according to a person familiar with the situation who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the private encounter. The person said the information about Levinson had come from Iran’s foreign minister.

“It is impossible to describe our pain,” the family’s statement said. “Our family will spend the rest of our lives without the most amazing man, a new reality that is inconceivable to us. His grandchildren will never meet him. They will know him only through the stories we tell them.′

Levinson disappeared on March 9, 2007, when he was scheduled to meet a source on the Iranian island of Kish. For years, U.S. officials would say only that Levinson was working independently on a private investigation.

But a 2013 Associated Press investigation revealed that Levinson had been sent on a mission by CIA analysts who had no authority to run such an operation.

The Trump administration has made it a priority to seek the release of American hostages and prisoners detained overseas. Last week, administration officials touted the release from Lebanon of a New Hampshire restaurant owner jailed on decades-old allegations and the medical furlough of a Navy veteran from an Iranian prison.

The Levinson family thanked multiple U.S. officials for their help, including FBI Director Chris Wray, CIA Director Gina Haspel and Robert O’Brien, the Trump administration’s national security adviser.

But it also said: “Those who are responsible for what happened to Bob Levinson, including those in the U.S. government who for many years repeatedly left him behind, will ultimately receive justice for what they have done. We will spend the rest of our lives making sure of this, and the Iranian regime must know we will not be going away.”

The family said it does not know when or if Levinson’s body will be returned for burial.

At a White House briefing on the coronavirus, Trump appeared to equivocate on the accuracy of the family’s statement, saying that Iranian officials had not told the U.S. that Levinson was dead and that “I won’t accept that he’s dead.”

But he also acknowledged that “it’s not looking promising” and said Levinson, who had diabetes and high blood pressure at the time of his disappearance, had had “some rough problems.”

“He was a great gentleman,” he said.

The family received a video in late 2010 and proof-of-life photographs in 2011 in which he appeared disheveled with a long beard and wearing an orange prison jumpsuit like those given to detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison. But even then, his whereabouts and fate were not known.

Iran repeatedly has said it has no information about Levinson, though U.S. diplomats and investigators have long said they thought he was taken by Iranian government agents.

In November, the Iranian government unexpectedly responded to a United Nations query by saying that Levinson was the subject of an “open case” in Iranian Revolutionary Court. Although the development gave the family a burst of hope, Iran clarified that the “open case” was simply an investigation into his disappearance.

The announcement of his death comes just weeks after a federal judge in Washington held Iran liable for his disappearance, saying the country was “in no uncertain terms” responsible for Levinson’s “hostage taking and torture.” The family had sued for $1.5 billion in damages.

The judge’s decision followed a weekslong trial of emotional testimony from Levinson’s family, including each of his seven children.

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Associated Press writer Darlene Superville in Washington contributed to this report.