Robert Levinson on video: 'Help me'

The mystery surrounding the disappearance nearly five years ago of a former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent in Iran was rekindled Friday with the release of a hostage videotape showing him alive as of a year ago.

In the video, the former agent, Robert A. Levinson, is shown sitting in a makeshift cell looking gaunt and wearing a threadbare shirt. Mr. Levinson, who worked as a private investigator after retiring from the F.B.I., disappeared in March 2007 while on Kish Island, a resort in the Persian Gulf.

In the tape, which was received by Mr. Levinson’s family last November, he states that he has been held in captivity for three and a half years but does not identify his captors. The tape was the first sign he was still alive.

The footage of the former agent was included with a larger videotape that was released Friday on the family’s Web site in which Mr. Levinson’s wife, Christine, and one of the couple’s seven children, appeal for his release. The decision by federal officials to publicize the tape a year after it was sent to the family by e-mail indicates that investigators have made little progress in their search for the former agent, said people briefed on the inquiry.

In their videotape, Mrs. Levinson and her son David make no mention of the Iranian government. Instead, they direct their requests to Mr. Levinson’s captors and urge them to contact his family again.

Asked about the timing of the tape’s release, an F.B.I. spokeswoman, Jacqueline Maguire, said in a statement: “The video was not previously released due to ongoing investigative initiatives. The investigation to locate Mr. Levinson continues, as the U.S. government continues to work to find him and bring him home safely.”

Earlier this year, Mr. Levinson’s family received another e-mail containing photographs of him wearing what looks like orange prison garb and with a full beard. The F.B.I. was able to trace the various e-mails back to Internet cafes in either Pakistan or Afghanistan but not back to the person or group that created them, said the people briefed on the inquiry.

Mr. Levinson was 59 when he went missing on Kish Island where he had gone to meet with an American fugitive known as Dawud Salahuddin. Mr. Salahuddin has lived in Iran since 1980 when he fled there after assassinating a former aide to the Shah of Iran outside his home near Washington. Mr. Levinson’s family and American officials have said that Mr. Levinson went to Iran to investigate cigarette smuggling for a private client.

Iranian officials have consistently denied knowing anything about the circumstances of Mr. Levinson’s disappearance or what happened to him afterward. During a 2010 trip to the United States, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran said his government was willing to help American officials investigate Mr. Levinson’s case.

Since then, at least two meetings have taken place between American and Iranian officials about Mr. Levinson, but they have not yielded any progress, according to people briefed about them.

While not discussing the tape, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton indirectly referred to it earlier this year when she announced that American officials had evidence that Mr. Levinson was alive.

Last year, The New York Times reviewed the hostage tape showing Mr. Levinson, but at his family’s request withheld its publication.