Why doesn't the US want to find Bob Levinson?

On December 10, 2018, a former Air Force intelligence officer named Bob Kent was planning to board a plane in New York for the Middle East on a most improbable secret mission: freeing Robert Levinson from Iran.

Levinson, an ex–FBI agent well into a second career as a private detective, had disappeared over a decade earlier from a hotel on Iran’s Kish Island. He had been seen only twice since then, first in a hostage video his family received from unknown intermediaries in 2010, then in photos three years later, showing the then-63-year-old increasingly haggard and begging for help.

At first, the U.S. government claimed it had no knowledge of why Levinson, an expert on Russian organized crime, had gone to Iran. [...] But in 2013, the Associated Press and other news outlets revealed that the ex-agent had gone to Kish on an off-the-books CIA mission to probe high-level Iranian money laundering.

[...]

He was an embarrassment to both the FBI and CIA. The possibility also existed that rival factions in Iran had not been able to agree on his release after years of denying it had him.

  Newsweek

Being fairly ignorant of some undercover escapades, I wonder why looking for Iranian money laundering would have to be off-the-books.

March 9 will mark the 12th anniversary of [Levinson's] disappearance.

[...]

Kent would be just the latest in a chain of unlikely players in the hunt for the missing man, including a onetime Iranian assassin, a retired detective with CIA connections, an ex–FBI agent, a former federal prosecutor, a Philadelphia truck driver and Russian mobsters.

And why are Russian mobsters looking for him?

One such was Oleg Deripaska, the Russian aluminum tycoon who would be sanctioned by the Treasury Department in 2018 for “a range of malign activity around the globe.” A decade earlier, hoping he might earn points toward solving his visa problems with the U.S., “Deripaska announced he was willing to fund a search [for Levinson] and pay any ransom needed to free Bob,” according to Meier’s authoritative account. “Bureau officials were elated.” In the end, nothing came of it.

Deripaska is also a name involved in the Trump-Russia collusion case.

The same offer came from an even more odious Russian figure with U.S. legal problems. Notorious mobster Semion Mogilevich, who occupies a spot on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list in connection with an alleged massive stock swindle, telegraphed U.S. officials through intermediaries that he would finance a Levinson rescue effort. The involvement of Mogilevich, often dubbed “the most dangerous criminal in the world,” was hugely ironic: As an FBI agent and private investigator, Levinson had been tracking Mogilevich for years. “I don’t know his motivation,” Kent says of Mogilevich, but “he backed out.“

Downright weird.

Kent’s mission, like all the other private efforts to locate and win Levinson’s release, came to nil. Not for lack of resources—money men “with CIA connections,” as three sources involved in the case described them, had offered to pay Kent’s Iranian helpers $100,000 for a proof-of-life package, including fingerprints, a blood sample and what they claimed was a recent, 41-second video clip of Levinson, who would be 71 on March 10. “Another $150,000” would be needed “for the rescue,” Kent says. But just as Kent readied to leave for the airport three months ago, the federal government got in the way, he says, refusing to issue the Americans a waiver from the Trump administration’s sanctions on Iran to permit the payments.

Now that's downright puzzling. The US government, apparently, does not want this man to be found. Why?

“I received a phone call informing me that the funding was withdrawn because the State Department and/or FBI threatened my sponsors” with prosecution, Kent tells Newsweek.

To Levinson family attorney David McGee, a former federal prosecutor who had several meetings with government officials on the case over the years, the last-minute abort of Kent’s mission fit a long pattern of official neglect and sometimes outright interference in efforts to free the former FBI agent.

[...]

“He was taken by enemies of this country while in its service. There is no moral justification for their failure to do what is necessary to bring him home.”

There must be a political one.

“While we cannot discuss how we handle particular investigations, over the past 12 years, the FBI has worked diligently to follow every credible lead to determine the whereabouts of Bob Levinson and will continue to do so,” the bureau says in a statement to Newsweek. “Bob spent 22 years serving as an FBI special agent, and as we mark the anniversary of his disappearance, our resolve to find him only increases.”

Meanwhile, the bureau has posted a $5 million reward for "information that could lead to Bob Levinson’s safe return."

So either the FBI is lying, or it's the Estate Department who threatened prosecution. The FBI announced it was raising the reward from $1M to $5M three years ago.

Hoping to land a government intelligence contract, [Kent] reached out to FBI counterterrorism agents. But they were skeptical about his sources, he says; as a kind of test, they “sarcastically” told him to "find Bob Levinson." Two months later, he came back with assurances he could obtain proof-of-life evidence and perhaps even more.

Kent’s main FBI contact (a counterterrorism agent whose name Newsweek is withholding at the bureau’s request) “thanked me for sharing my information, promised to investigate the background information I shared and told me repeatedly that arranging the proof-of-life meeting in Iraq would be ‘incredibly complex,’” Kent says. The agent said he would get back with an update within 10 days. He also “recommended I not contact McGee,” Kent says—the FBI privately dismisses the lawyer as “a meddler”—but Kent rejected the suggestion. Since July, he’s been “working for McGee pro bono,” he says.

Months went by without further word from the FBI.

[...]

[I]n an early February [2019] meeting, Kent and McGee had with several officials at the State Department, Robert O’Brien, the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, told them that if OFAC cleared the deal and the Defense Department authorized it, the Joint Special Operations Command might be able to assist with the Levinson mission.

McGee soon got a personal meeting scheduled with a sanctions official at Treasury to pursue the waiver issue. At the last minute, however, the department canceled the February 8 appointment. [...] (A Treasury spokesman asked that Newsweek not identify the official by name and refused to discuss the case further.) Kent’s appeals to various congressional offices were also fruitless.

[...]

A former senior intelligence official responsible for Iran tells Newsweek the government believes, privately, that Levinson is dead. Officially, it maintains he’s alive, with the FBI calling the 12th anniversary of his disappearance “an opportunity for the leadership of the government of Iran to demonstrate its commitment to basic freedoms and civil rights and return Mr. Levinson home to his family.”

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.