Do you need an attorney?

BY SAM FIELDS

The lead story in Friday’s Miami Herald is that Robert Levinson, the Coral Springs man who disappeared in Iran in 2007, was not a private citizen looking into cigarette smuggling.

He was a full-blown CIA spy.

The Levinson family never stopped trumpeting the story that he was an innocent victim even though they knew it was a lie.  They knew it was a lie and were paid $2.5 million from the CIA to keep their mouths shut.  This does not include the $120,000 the CIA paid the family to fulfill Levinson’s contract.

The only person I know who publicly questioned Levinson’s cover story was….me.

Four years ago I wrote on the pages of BROWARDBEAT that the explanation of Levinson’s trip seemed “questionable or shows an incredible miscalculation in judgment by Levinson”.

We now know that the Associated Press was aware of the truth for years.  But the AP continued to print lies of omission and commission because the government asked them to say nothing, as this was a “national security” issue.  The “national security” cover story was the second lie.

On December 1, 2013 The Miami Herald published a column by Levinson’s son Dan Levinson that, once again, repeated the cover story about his father.

I wrote a letter to the Herald suggesting that the story was bogus and that it was high time that the media looked into this.

That letter was not printed.  Was the Herald in on the lie or just dumb? What did they know and when did they know it? Readers have a right to know.

We still have not come close to getting the whole truth.

The government continues to compound the original lies with new cover-ups about the original cover-up:  The story they would have us believe is that they needed to keep the truth from the Iranians. What a joke.

If the Iranians weren’t a 100% sure he was a spy when they arrested him, you can be damn sure they knew his whole story within days.

Only the American people did not know the truth.  It reminds me of Nixon’s 1969 “secret bombing of Cambodia”.  I’m pretty sure it was not a secret to the Cambodians or the North Vietnamese troops in Cambodia. It was a political secret from the American people.  By 1969 the war was highly unpopular and Nixon did not want to further inflame the anti-war movement.

The Levinson cover story about cigarette smuggling was an attempt to keep the American people in the dark about a CIA screw-up.  Whatever you do, don’t embarrass the CIA spy mavens who didn’t think a guy named “Levinson” would stick out in Iran. What next, send Snoop Lion as an undercover spy on the KKK?

Still have doubts about the intelligence community’s Cover Your Ass mentality? Consider this. Earlier this month, the CIA was in the Federal Court of Appeals arguing that they still needed to keep secret its written account of the 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle!

L’Affaire Levinson is no different. Once Levinson disappeared no one’s reactions had anything to do with national security or the truth.  That means: no one, no how, no way.

Start with his family and their crocodile tears. They sold out the truth and Dad for $2.5 mil.

The CIA’s only interest is still avoiding embarrassment. The government continues to compound the original lies with new cover-ups about the original cover-up.

The “Company’s” latest cover story is that Levinson’s mission was a rogue operation. The problem with this explanation is that Robert Ludlum’s estate may sue them for stealing this storyline from “The Bourne Identity.” Next, they will be telling us that the rogue operation was called “Operation Treadstone” and, to recover the $2.5 mil, they have sold the movie rights to Matt Damon.

The media, like the AP, supported the cover-up for years. That’s a whole lotta egg on AP’s face.  Others, like the Miami Herald, were either in on it or blind to the truth.  The folks in Miami need to come clean.

Finally, there is the untold collateral damage to America.

Now you have to wonder whether we are getting the full story on Alan Gross. He’s doing 15 years in a Cuban prison as an American spy. The Levinson fable gives us one less reason to believe that yenta, Miami Republican Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, who insists that Gross is an innocent victim of the Castro regime.

On a larger scale, actions by the likes of whistleblowers Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning look more justifiable when our government gets caught lying about national security.  It’s unfortunate that it takes the theft of government documents to learn the truth. It’s too bad someone didn’t steal the Levinson file years ago.

Closed.