The trailer for “American Fugitive: The Truth About Hassan,” a documentary about Dawud Salahuddin, an American living in Iran. The complete film can now be viewed online.
When the Justice Department announced last week that an undercover agent in Mexico had disrupted an Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington, using members of Mexican drug cartel recruited by a used car salesman, officials in Tehran dismissed the charges as fiction, and several prominent American experts on Iran also expressed their doubts.
Scott Peterson, a Christian Science Monitor correspondent in Turkey, consulted someone who should know about such plots: an American who fled the United States for Iran in 1980 after carrying out a political assassination in the Washington suburbs on behalf of the Iranian government.
The former assassin, who was born David Theodore Belfield, changed his name to Dawud Salahuddin when he converted to Islam in 1969.
He was a security guard at an Iranian diplomatic office in Washington in 1980, when he accepted an assignment from the revolutionary government of Iran to assassinate a former member of the Shah’s regime living in exile in Bethesda, Md.
Speaking to The Monitor by telephone from his home outside Tehran last week, Mr. Salahuddin said that he doubted that Iran’s government was really behind the alleged plot described by the Justice Department.
Like at least one respected American expert on Iran, Mr. Salahuddin’s skepticism was prompted by his assessment that Iranian officials would be aware that carrying out such an assassination in Washington — and bombing embassies in the U.S. capital as well — could lead to all-out war between Iran and the United States.
Mr. Salahuddin said: “For all the noise that comes out of this country, the Iranians know full well they are no military match for the Americans; they know that better than they know their names.” So, he added, the notion that Iranian officials “are going to bring that down on them, that just makes no sense at all.”
As The Lede reported in 2009, Mr. Salahuddin has led an interesting life since he fled the United States for Iran. In 2001, he attracted attention when he appeared as an actor in the Iranian film “Kandahar.” The following year, Mr. Salahuddin told The New Yorker that he had spent part of the 1980s with the mujahedeen in Afghanistan, fighting the Soviets.
In 2007, when a former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent who worked as a private investigator disappeared in Iran, it emerged that he went missing shortly after a meeting with Mr. Salahuddin.
In the wake of Iran’s disputed presidential election in 2009, the American fugitive revealed that he had been working for the Web site of Iran’s English-language satellite channel, Press TV, but admitted to The Times of London that “state journalism is not journalism.”