When an Italian journalist was arrested in Iran in Dec, her boyfriend back home feared she might linger in prison for years. So, amid talk that Iran and Italy were negotiating a prisoner swap that involved the US, he says, he decided to try to get a message to someone who might be in a position to help.
His name was Elon Musk.
Not only was Musk close to Prez-elect Donald Trump, but a month before the journalist was detained, the billionaire had a secret meeting with the Iranian ambassador to the UN.
Saif Ali Khan Health Update
Last week, the journalist, Cecilia Sala, 29, was released from prison in Iran, and days later an Iranian engineer whom Italy had detained on an American extradition request was also freed. The engineer was accused of providing material for drones used in an Iranian-backed militia attack on a US military base that killed three American service members. Musk helped secure the release of Sala by reaching out to Iran’s ambassador to the UN, Amir Saeid Iravani, according to two Iranian officials, one a senior diplomat at the foreign ministry, who are both familiar with the terms of the prisoner exchange. Neither Musk nor representatives of the Trump transition made comment.
How Musk, an increasingly active if uncredentialed player on the world stage since the Trump victory, came to take up the journalist’s cause remains unclear. He is close with Italy’s PM Giorgia Meloni, who travelled to Mar-a-Lago, the Trump estate in Florida where Musk has been a regular, and met with the president-elect Jan 4.
Meloni said at a news conference last week that Sala’s release was the result of a “complex work of diplomatic triangulation with Iran, and obviously also with the USA.” Her office and the Italian foreign ministry declined to comment for this article. A senior Biden official said the US govt had not been consulted, had not been given advance word about the releases and disapproved of the deal.
At the presser, Meloni said she did not know what part if any Musk had played in Sala’s release. “If he had a role, I am not aware of it,” she said. The ambiguity highlights the unusual role Musk has been playing as he sits at Trump’s side, backing far-right parties in Europe even as he continues to promote his business interests abroad.
Sala said in an interview that she had been held in a cell with no mattress. For weeks, she was denied her glasses, and throughout her detention she did not see a human face. She could hear sounds of other inmates crying and vomiting. What she feared the most, she said, was “that I would go insane.”
