Iranian Nukester Headed Home

A new wrinkle has been added to the Case of the 'Kidnapped' Scientist, as Amiri heads back to Iran and everyone wonders how he got to Arizona in the first place. The new theory is that he willingly defected, but the Iranians got to his family and he's headed home. Wanna bet we never hear from or see this guy again?

An Iranian scientist was on his way home to Tehran on Wednesday from the United States, ending what appeared to be a defection gone wrong that could snarl U.S. efforts to gather intelligence on Iran's nuclear program.
Iran's Foreign Ministry said the scientist, Shahram Amiri, was on a flight home, traveling through the Gulf nation of Qatar and was expected to arrive in Tehran on Thursday.
Iran — and at one point, Amiri — claimed the CIA had kidnapped him; the United States said Tuesday that nothing of the sort happened. Amiri disappeared while on a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia in June 2009, surfacing in videos but otherwise remaining out of sight until he turned up at the Pakistani Embassy in Washington on Monday evening, asking to be sent home.
That prompted the Obama administration's first public acknowledgment that Amiri had been in the United States. "Mr. Amiri has been in the United States of his own free will and he is free to go," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said.
While Iran has painted the entire episode as an abduction, Amiri's disappearance last year fueled reports that he had defected to the United States and was providing information on Iran's nuclear program. The United States and its allies accuse Tehran of seeking to build a nuclear weapon, a claim Iran denies, saying its program is for peaceful purposes.
His return and the bizarre string of videos by him that emerged over the past month raised the question of what went wrong. In one that seemed to be made in an Internet cafe and was aired on Iranian TV, he claimed U.S. and Saudi "terror and kidnap teams" snatched him. In another, professionally produced one, he said he was happily studying for a doctorate in the United States. In a third, shaky piece of footage, Amiri claimed to have escaped from U.S. agents and insisted the second video was "a complete lie" that the Americans put out.
"I expect they got to his family," said Clare Lopez, senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy and a former operations officer for the CIA. "Now he'll go back and save them." ABC News reported that Amiri called home this year because he missed his wife and son in Iran and that his son had been threatened with harm.

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By: Brant