Ian Black, the London Guardian’s Middle East editor, says there are ‘many unanswered questions’ in relation to the bizarre bordering on farcical case of Shahram Amiri, self-styled harmless Iranian nuclear researcher who turned up in Pakistan’s Washington Embassy today.

Well Ian, I’d say that was the understatement of the decade. But journalism is supposed to be about answering those questions. And in fact, Ian shows disturbing signs of having an open and well-briefed mind in middle Eastern questions, so I’d imagine his days at The Guardian are numbered.

His view (and it concurs with – to be honest here – a few low-level contacts I’ve been able to contact on this case) is that Amiri’s explanations of what happened after he disappeared during the June 2009 pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia are even more potty than those of the US security services, but not as yet quite so sanctimoniously insane as those of the Iranian Government itself.

The bare facts appear to be straightforward: Shahram went missing, and was reported in April this year to have defected to the United States, where he was happily working for the CIA. This account (from ABC News) was described as ‘a CIA intelligence coup’, and claimed that Amiri had fessed up to being a top nuclear boffin engaged on making naughty atomic bombs for not entirely peaceful purposes. This was off-message Tehran-wise.

At various points thereafter he turned up on YouTube saying he’d defected, then again there to say he’d been abducted, and then (29th June) made a further video saying he’d escaped from a CIA establishment in Virginia. Somehow, (a) he had the equipment and crew available to make it and (b) it wound up being shown on Iranian telly.

Today, he toed the Iranian abduction line and demanded to be sent back to Iran. (It is interesting to note that he chose sanctuary in the Pakistani Embassy). From there he says:

“The video which was published on YouTube by the US government, where I have said that I am free and want to continue my education here, is not true and is a complete fabrication.”

However, there have been outputs from his variously explained dis- and reappearances. Perhaps the most telling is that, three months after Amiri’s 2009 vanishing act, Iran admitted to the UN’s nuclear watchdog that it was building a small uranium enrichment plant near Qom, south of Tehran – a day before Barack Obama announced its existence to the world.

That’s a bit of a giveway: Amiri worked at the secret Qom establishment. One is thus left to conclude that he was debriefed by the CIA. But how did the Tehran regime get wind of this and beat Obama’s revelation of its existence by 24 hours?

At the same time, the US Administration’s equally major volte-face suggests that something went badly wrong: in April he was a Clinton-guaranteed turned agent, but today he is a harmless Iranian citizen – perhaps a fantasist – who is free to return to Iran any time he likes. Hillary said this with a customary level of “What is your problem with that?” on her face, a trick she perfected under the tutorship of husband Slick Willy.

On the whole, you’d have thought Amiri wouldn’t like to go back to Iran at any time at all….on the grounds that shortly after the guy’s debriefing there, his head would be forcibly separated from the rest of him.

Like most espionage matters, it is a labyrinthine confusion of false leads and dead ends. But the Slog suspects that the bottom line is this:

1. Shahram Amiri was a fairly obvious Iranian security service plant – a man who would defect after a religious festival, plead all kinds of life-in-danger asylum bollocks, and then sing like a seemingly grateful canary to the entirely gullible CIA.

2. A rather less than gullible CIA spotted Shahram for what he was, probably threatened him with having all kinds of important bits removed – and thus discovered the location of the Qom plant.

3. This next bit gets a bit multi-possibility, but my hunch is that his CIA controllers then offered Amiri a new identity with all the usual added extras – at which he pretended to enthusiastically jump….

4. ….and then rapidly used his freedom to tell Tehran that he’d escaped, was still on their side, and to show good faith made videos denouncing all previous confessions as false.

There are of course flaws in this explanation too. The main underlying assumption of it is that Amiri is seriously dumb, and thus thinks Ahmadinnejhad (himself a former Iranian security agent) is remotely likely to believe his cock and bull story. But then, an alarmingly high percentage of Islamist agents and bombers are mind-bogglingly dumb.

It’ll be fun watching what happens next, and whether Shahram Amiri is still a fully-functioning live human being a month from today. I just wouldn’t want to be him when the desk lamp is turned on his face, accompanied by the words, “So then Shahram, explain to us how the Satan found out about Qom”.