releases: https://web.archive.org/web/20140221022948/http://www.billnelson.senate.gov/news/details.cfm?id=349233&
Data license: MIT · Data source: dwillis/congress-press
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| https://web.archive.org/web/20140221022948/http://www.billnelson.senate.gov/news/details.cfm?id=349233& | Nelson: I will go to Iran if it will help bring Bob Levinson home | 2013-12-17 | 2013 | 2013-12 | Democrat | House | FL | Bill Nelson | N000032 | web.archive.org | legacy | Nelson: I will go to Iran if it will help bring Bob Levinson home December 17, 2013 WASHINGTON, D.C. - A U.S. lawmaker is offering to travel to Iran and meet with top Iranian officials over the fate of a missing American. Such a trip would be the first for a member of Congress in at least three decades. U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) made the offer through Tehran’s ambassador to the United Nations in a telephone call with him on Sunday. Nelson told Ambassador Mohammad Khazaee that he would be willing to go to Iran in the case of Bob Levinson, the retired FBI agent and Florida resident, who disappeared on Kish Island off the coast of Iran in March 2007. The senator told the ambassador that he would go if it would help lead to Levinson’s safe return home. In response, the ambassador told Nelson that he would pass his comments along to the Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. “I am willing to go to Iran if in any way that it would secure his release,” Nelson said today in a speech on the Senate floor. “If the Iranian authorities took him, somebody in the government of Iran knows of his whereabouts.” This week, the last man to allegedly see Levinson before he disappeared said he believes it was Iranian security officials who took him. Several major news organizations disclosed late last week that Levinson had ties to the CIA. His family last received proof that he was alive in 2011. Levinson’s wife, Christine, traveled to Kish Island in Dec. 2007 to retrace Bob’s steps and met with officials from Iran who pledged to help. Nelson first got involved in the case when Levinson’s family contacted his office and asked for his help. The senator is well-known for his advocacy in individual cases. For example, Nelson was credited with helping to get Jon Hammar, a 27-year-old former Marine from Florida, released from a prison in Matamoros, Mexico after he had been detained there for months without a hearing on a disputed weapons charge. And recently, he was instrumental in getting criminal charges dropped against two elderly American tourists who were briefly detained in the Turks and Caicos after authorities at the airport there claimed in separate incidents they found a single bullet in their luggage. ### | 1 | 2026-03-30T12:14:52Z | 2026-03-30T12:14:52Z |