U.S. Reporter Ordered to Leave Iran

Iran said today Wall Street Journal reporter Gerald F. Seib will be expelled Thursday, five days after he was arrested and accused of spying for Israel while visiting the country by government invitation.

Iran’s official Islamic Republic News Agency quoted an Information Ministry official as saying the decision to free and expel the 30-year-old American came after “a judicial probe into his case ended.”

The official, who was not identified, said Seib was “permanently banned from returning to Iran,” the agency reported.

IRNA gave no details of the Seib investigation or findings, but he apparently was cleared of the allegations. The report did not say where the Thursday flight would take the journalist, who is based in Cairo.

No Deal With U.S.

(An Iranian journalist in Tehran who works for a Japanese newspaper reported today that Seib was released from prison about noon Tehran time and handed over to officials of the Swiss Embassy. Fereydon Pezeshkan reported that a Swiss official who requested anonymity said the release involved no deal of any kind with the United States.)

Premier Hussein Mussavi, asked in a Tehran radio interview why a foreign reporter was detained, said he was “engaged in certain investigations and collecting intelligence at the front.”

Seib was among 57 foreign correspondents and photographers invited to Iran for a tour of the border battle zone where Iranian forces have pushed into Iraq toward its southern capital, Basra. The Persian Gulf neighbors have been at war since September, 1980.

In Iran 10 Days

He had been in Iran for 10 days when seized Saturday outside his Tehran hotel. The other journalists were allowed to leave.

After Seib’s detention, IRNA said a “spy of the Zionist regime” was arrested after entering the country with a false passport in the guise of a journalist.

Paul Seib, the journalist’s brother, said at the family home in Hays, Kan., that relatives were “upbeat and elated but also reserved because we don’t take anything for granted until the Wall Street Journal tells us he’s definitely been released.”

The newspaper said it was awaiting confirmation of the release and would have no comment.

State Department spokesman Charles E. Redman said Swiss diplomats interceded, but beyond that “I am not in a position to go into the various channels that have been used.”

Three other Westerners held by Iran on espionage charges remain in prison. American telecommunications engineer Jon Pattis, Canadian engineer Philip Engs and British journalist-businessman John Cooper were arrested last year.