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Notes -
I would argue that given from the context, this is likely a very non-central use of the word 'hostage'. If Iranian operatives had captured him in the middle of the night in his home in (say) Langley, that would be a central example of the word hostage.
Instead, what likely happened was that he voluntarily entered Iran and did spy for the US government.
Spying for a foreign government is illegal pretty much anywhere. If he had been spying in the US for the Iranian government and got caught, he would be in US prison instead. This would not make him a hostage of the US government in any meaningful sense.
Being caught and spending the rest of your life in a shitty cell (or being executed) is part of the risk profile of being a CIA asset in a hostile country. Sometimes you will get traded, sometimes you won't. Sometimes you get the bear and sometimes the bear gets you. (Also, I am sure that before going for hare-brained con jobs, they actually tried to sell their rescue plan to the CIA, and the CIA went 'nope'. I assume it was not 'we would really like to help, but all our black funds are booked out four years in advance, so we must decline.')
Hostage has a certain moral connotation. If someone pulled a con job to rescue the hostages in the 1979 crisis or the Hamas hostages of today, we could say 'their end goal was noble' (which would put them on a level with SBF, at least). The neutral word for what Levinson is is prisoner. Without knowing the details of his spook work, I have no opinion if the world would be better if he was back in the US or if he kept rotting in some Iranian jail.
You're right, it's a bit dishonest to say he was a "hostage." He was captured in Iran almost certainly by the Iranian government likely spying for the CIA (and probably others). He was originally called a "hostage" because the US denied he was a CIA contractor, but then his likely CIA contract relationship was leaked to the press in 2013.
In my defense, I was trying to balance between giving up all the goods in the first minute of reading and revealing details like the above later down in the narrative.
It’s kind of weird though. White American guys are very bad spies in Iran. It’s not like in China where they could conceivably be Western businessmen and don’t stand out too much. Every middle aged white American man in Iran with no Iranian ancestry is either in the service of a Western government or a particularly adventurous tourist. Neither is going to be infiltrating anything or gaining classified intelligence without being extremely suspicious. The CIA certainly has spies in Iran, but they are either Iranians or - at most - Americans of Iranian descent who might plausibly have returned to their ancestral homeland for non-suspicious reasons. Kish Island, where Levinson disappeared, is a weird kind of free trade zone / resort that caters to mainly international Shia tourists and rich Iranians, plus some non-Shia gulf visitors. Americans still very much stand out.
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