The ruse is as old as crime itself. A wrongdoer assumes the guise of a trusted figure. A victim, caught unaware, becomes an easy target. For many, the visit of a uniformed courier or the sight of a delivery truck is a common experience that blends into the fabric of everyday life. But the complacency inspired by that familiarity can make those uniforms and vehicles ideal cover for individuals with nefarious intent.
It happened last week when a homeowner in Houston was beaten and robbed after he opened the door to a criminal posing as a package delivery driver. Terrorists who carried out the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 also had plans to steal a FedEx truck to use as a cover for an assassination attempt at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Thankfully, that plan never materialized.
I have witnessed firsthand the effectiveness of such deception. Early in my career, before I became an agent with the U.S. State Department's Diplomatic Security Service, I was an emergency medical technician in Bethesda, Maryland, a job that would lead directly to my law enforcement career. The Washington, D.C., suburb was a popular residence option among high-ranking government officials and diplomats. While the city was as safe as any other, responding to unusual calls — even an assassination — was part of the rescue squad's job. I vividly recall being dispatched to one such scene in 1980.
Ali Akbar Tabatabai, a staunch critic of post-revolution Iran's government, had been shot in the doorway of his Bethesda home. We did our best to save his life, but to no avail. To the members of the rescue squad, he was a patient like any other. We did not know until later that Tabatabaei had been a victim of a state-sponsored assassination orchestrated by Iran.
The hit man was David Belfield, an American convert to Islam who had changed his name to Dawud Salahuddin. He showed up at Tabatabai's home driving a stolen U.S. Postal Service Jeep and wearing a postman's uniform. Salahuddin lured Tabatabai to the door on the pretense that a package needed his signature, then fired several rounds into the Iranian dissident. The assassin, who would freely admit to the murder in later media interviews, fled to Iran, where he remains safe from U.S. extradition.
During my career, some people — including Salahuddin — have seemed to continually pop up in different contexts. The Tabatabai case crossed my desk during my years as a State Department special agent. I drew the assignment to revisit his murder and examine the options of luring Salahuddin away from Iran so he could be apprehended. My colleagues then couldn’t believe that I had been on the scene of the original killing. Unfortunately, we weren't successful in devising a way to get Salahuddin to leave Iran.
Salahuddin later resurfaced in another case. He was the last person to have acknowledged seeing Robert Levinson, a retired FBI agent and CIA contract employee who has been missing since he was detained in 2007 by security officials in Iran. Perhaps one day, another agent will be more successful than I was in bringing Salahuddin to justice for the Tabatabai murder, and the U.S. intelligence community might learn more about Levinson's fate from him.
