Iran accuses America of kidnap and torture

JUST as America’s spy-catchers were basking in glory for having nabbed 12 Russian agents, another scandal was breaking with a different spin. An Iranian nuclear scientist, Shahram Amiri, has returned home claiming that American agents kidnapped him.

American officials say that Mr Amiri was a willing defector who has returned home at his own wish, having, according to the Washington Post, received $5m for information. For his own and his family’s safety, Mr Amiri may well wish to stress that his disappearance from Iran, perhaps with secrets about its suspected nuclear-weapons programme, was involuntary. Another possibility, with cold-war echoes, is that Mr Amiri was a fake: loyal to his government all along, and on a mission to find out America’s unanswered questions about Iran.

Whichever version (if any) is true, the story will give comfort to those who see American talk of human rights as self-serving prattle. Mr Amiri vanished during a visit to Saudi Arabia in June 2009. In June Iranian television broadcast a shaky video purportedly made by Mr Amiri at an internet café in Tucson, Arizona, in which he claimed to have been abducted and drugged by American and Saudi agents. In another, smoother video shortly afterwards, he said he was studying happily for a doctorate at an unnamed American university. Then in a third video he denounced the second one and said he was on the run.

On July 12th Mr Amiri appeared at Pakistan’s embassy in Washington, DC, which represents Iranian interests in America, demanding help with his return home. He now says that American agents offered him $10m to denounce Iran’s nuclear-weapons programme on television and $50m to remain in the United States. When he refused to co-operate, he says, he was resettled in Tucson, free to move but under constant surveillance. When he made his first video, he had fled his furious minders.

America, Israel and others are working to uncover and hamper Iran’s nuclear programme; in January, an Iranian physicist said to be closely linked to it was mysteriously blown up in Tehran. Mr Amiri’s strange odyssey, Iranian jubilation and American embarrassment are all, somehow, part of this secret war.