伊朗核科学家重返家园

Win some and lose some. And today the CIA has lost one of its once most valuable former spies:an Iranian nuclear scientist who defected to the US but is now on his way home to Tehran after a very messy and public re-defection.

The Iranian defector left Washington late last night on a flight to the Middle East,on route to Iran. After more than a year in US custody, Shahram Amiri now claims he never really defected that he was kidnapped, drugged and tortured by the CIA. A charge the US flatly denies.

"Mr.Amiri has been in the United States of his own free will and he is free to go."

US officials tell ABC News that Amiri defected in the spring of 2009 after working for several years as a spy for the CIA inside the Iranian nuclear program. But officials say after Amiri was relocated to Tuscon, Arizona, he began to have second thoughts. In a battle of videos posted on Youtube by the Iranian's and then the CIA, Amiri changed his story three times. First, he told an Iranian TV via a computer phone he had been kidnapped. Then in a CIA produced video, Amiri said he was happy to be in the US. And then later he again claimed he was trying to elude US agents and wanted to be reunited with his wife and son in Iran.

"This happens all the time. Defectors come across, they think it's a good idea. They get paid a lot of money. And once the boredom sets in loneliness they realized the huge mistake."

Monday Amiri showed up in Washington DC at the Iranian intersection of the Pakistani embassy. Before his flight home, he told Iranian television, he had finally escaped from the hands of US Intelligence. Something US officials say he had to say to avoid being imprisoned or executed upon his return to Tehran.

"If they wanted to keep up the pre-tensity was kidnapped, probably keep him alive, then gave him a couple years as a public hero, after that I can't tell you."

The case of the defector allows the US to ask Iran again to release the three young American hikers in its holding as spies as well as it raises the issue, a former FBI agent Robert Robinson who has been missing in Iran for almost three years now. So there could be something going on between the two countries.

Yeah, we have to keep in mind those hikers and their families,Brain,thanks so much.