Missing Man Page 11

  Gurlie

  Good luck with your speech today. I’ll be thinking of you and know you’ll do just fine.

  I truly enjoyed your “Fellow Turtlonian” e-mail. It was very creative and shows a mind with empathy for our fellow tortoises.

  As I said on the phone, please, please do-not-sweat-the-small-stuff—Just do your best and let everything else fall into place.

  And also know that your parents love you (despite the green shell and all!)

  Love

  Father of the silliest turtle in the United States

  As he left his hotel, he sent a message to Ira: “Off today for that place. All is set. Best wishes and thanks for all your help in getting this arranged.”

  Ira responded: “Bob, so good to have your words. Please get back to me when you can.”

  Once at the airport, Bob called Chris. “I’m getting on a plane,” he told her. The flight from Dubai to Kish took about thirty minutes. Upon landing, his plane taxied toward a small terminal building with a large red sign that said KISH INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT. It stopped short of the terminal and Bob, after descending a stairway, boarded a bus for a brief ride. He walked up a short flight of black granite stairs into the building. A large round clock hung in the center of it. The waiting area consisted of about a dozen gray metal chairs. In twenty-four hours or less, he planned to be seated on one. He held his passport and the forged BAT letter ready for inspection by Iranian customs officers. Cleared, he walked out of the terminal and got into a taxi. It headed down a two-lane road divided by a wide median planted with palm trees and passed large, modern hotels resembling the types of places where he usually stayed.

  Chris tried to reach him that day, but he had apparently shut off his phone, so she sent him an email with some updates from home. A client had paid a bill and St. John’s law school in New York had made a provisional offer of financial aid to Dan if he kept his grades up.

  Surprise!

  You shut off your phone or it doesn’t work.

  So here is the fill in.

  The check came in the regular mail.

  The packet for St. John’s also came for Dan. They are offering him $20,000 in tuition renewable each year if he is in the top half of his class. I tried to email him, I told him to call me for details.

  Last, but not least, the bar in our shower broke in half and fell down. I hope it can be repaired.

  Everything happens when you are gone!

  Love, Chris.

  The taxi pulled into the driveway of the Maryam hotel. It was a large white baroque-looking building with shuttered floor-to-ceiling windows that had seen better days. A doorman opened the door and Bob walked into an ornate, aging lobby decorated with plants and Persian rugs. A desk clerk greeted him and asked him to sign the reception book.

  The following day, Friday, March 9, Ira waited at home, expecting a call or an email from Bob. He wanted to know about his meeting with Dawud and how it had gone. By evening, he’d heard nothing and he started to get anxious. It was early Saturday morning in Dubai, which was eight hours ahead of Washington. Bob should have been back there. Ira wanted to call Chris to see if she had heard anything, but his wife, Betsy, convinced him to wait until morning. Just after 11:00 p.m., Ira sent his friend an email: “Bob, how are you doing?”

  Then he went to bed. When he awoke Saturday morning, he went downstairs to check his computer. There wasn’t anything there. He sent another email: “Bob, how are you doing?”

  It was March 10, 2007, Bob Levinson’s fifty-ninth birthday.

  9

  The Missing Man

  On Saturday, March 10, in Coral Springs, Chris awoke to the sound of the telephone ringing on her bedside table. She was sure it was Bob. It was his birthday and he always liked the kids to celebrate with him. A big family party to mark the event was planned for the following Saturday at Disney World in Orlando, but Samantha and Douglas would still want to scream “Happy birthday!” into the phone. When Chris picked up the receiver, she heard Ira Silverman’s voice. He wanted to know if Bob had called her. When she said no, Ira told Chris that Bob had gone to Iran and that he hadn’t heard from him since. Chris sank back in shock. All of Bob’s comments—about the side trip, the presents, the back-and forth with the CIA over money—suddenly made sense. He had also been more nervous than she had ever seen him before a trip. Ira told Chris he would call Dave McGee and ask him to alert the FBI.

  When Ira reached Dave, the lawyer was speeding west along Interstate 10, heading back to Gulf Breeze after spending Friday night in Tallahassee. Ira laid out the story about Bob, the CIA, and Kish, adding he thought their friend had been kidnapped. It was because of Bob that Dave and Ira knew each other. They had met in the early 1980s, when Bob was with the FBI and Dave was trying to build a drug smuggling case against Robert Vesco, the famous financial swindler who had fled the United States for Cuba after his indictment on fraud charges. Dave had been trying to get information from his superiors at Justice Department headquarters about Vesco, but every request he made ran into some kind of roadblock. When Dave mentioned to Bob he thought that a Justice higher-up had put in a political fix to block his case, the FBI agent told Dave to expect a call from a friend of his named Ira who worked for NBC News. The prosecutor and the newsman struck a deal. When Dave wanted information from the Justice Department about Vesco, he gave his questions to Ira, who contacted his sources in the department, got the answers, and relayed them back to the prosecutor. Dave was never able to bring drug charges against Vesco, but he and Ira had remained friends ever since.

  Dave’s first call that Saturday morning was to a former Justice Department colleague, Greg Miller, the U.S. attorney in Tallahassee. Dave had stayed at Miller’s home the previous evening, and Miller had mentioned in passing that a new prosecutor in his office used to work for the CIA. Dave got his number from Miller and asked the lawyer to alert the CIA that it had a man missing in Iran. He then contacted an FBI agent he knew in Tallahassee and asked him to call a twenty-four-hour crisis center in Washington, D.C., that notifies federal agencies about emergencies involving government employees.

  Chris was also making calls. On his way home from Dubai, Bob had planned to stop over in London for several days to meet with clients, and she called the Marriott Heathrow, the hotel where he had a reservation. She was told he hadn’t checked in as yet. Then she phoned a neighbor, Ron Jordison, a former DEA agent who sometimes worked with Bob. Jordison knew Bob was going to Dubai and had made a connection for him there, an agent for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service named Doug Einsel. But he hadn’t been aware Bob had left on the trip until two days earlier, on Thursday, when Jordison had called Bob to suggest they go out and grab a bagel at a local place in Coral Springs. Bob laughed and told him he would have to take a rain check because he was in Dubai.

  Chris decided for the moment not to say anything to the kids. It was still early and anything was possible. Her husband could be up in the air over the Atlantic or ill somewhere in a hospital. She was fiercely protective of her children and she did whatever she felt she needed to do to shield them. Chris was one of seven kids, and when her father fell ill, she dropped out of college and came home to help out.

  Along with Samantha and Doug, who were sixteen and thirteen, two of the older Levinson children were at home that Saturday. Sue, who was thirty, had recently moved back in to save money while she worked at a nearby JetBlue facility training flight attendants. Dave, nineteen, was on spring break from Emory College in Atlanta. Chris did her best to pretend nothing was wrong. But as the day wore on, Sue sensed something was going on. Her mother kept darting in and out of her bedroom. Then, around noon, Chris emerged from her room and announced she was running out for a while to visit the Jordisons.

  That’s when Sue started to worry about her father. The Levinson children knew their mother usually left home only when she needed to buy groceries, run errands, or shuttle them back and forth from sports or events. Chris wasn’t a hermit or
a shut-in. But she was an intensely shy and private person, and spontaneously socializing with friends or running over to a neighbor to chat was the kind of thing she rarely did. Once in a while she hosted women from the neighborhood who got together to play bunco, a dice game. For the kids, it was a huge event. They almost never saw their parents entertaining, and suddenly card tables set with bowls of candy would appear in the house. Bob sometimes worried that Chris found being a mother to seven a convenient excuse to avoid social contact. He told friends that when their big nest was finally empty, he was going to take Chris traveling and find other ways to pull her into the world.

  Chris didn’t go to the Jordisons. Instead, she drove to a local Panera Bread restaurant, where she had arranged to meet Ron Jordison and an FBI agent who was driving up from Bob’s old office in Miami. When the agent arrived, Chris told her that Bob had gone to Iran for the CIA. The agent replied that the bureau would start checking airline manifests and alert embassies in the region. She assured Chris the bureau would call her with updates.

  While their mother was out, Sue told her brother Dave she was worried their father might be sick or in trouble. She thought Ira might know if something had happened to him, so she and Dave, without telling their younger siblings, snuck upstairs to call him. Sue spoke to Ira for a few moments and then put him on speakerphone so Dave could hear. Ira told them their father wasn’t responding to phone calls and that people were looking for him. He didn’t mention anything about Iran, but Dave assumed his father was somewhere in the Middle East. Sue then phoned her sister Stephanie, who was living in Tampa. Earlier in the day, Stephanie had called her mother to chitchat and give her the latest update on her infant son, Ryan. Her mother hadn’t said anything specific then about her father, though she had mentioned in passing she was starting to worry about his health. At the time, Stephanie hadn’t made much of the comment; maybe it was just her mother’s attempt to get Stephanie to remind her father to take better care of himself when she saw him at his birthday party at Disney World. As Stephanie listened to Sue, her stomach dropped. She hung up the phone and burst out crying. Her husband, Randy, had left home about twenty minutes earlier for a rare evening out practicing with his garage band. She called him. “You need to come home, something has happened to my dad,” she said.

  When Chris arrived back from Panera Bread, she asked Dave to take Samantha and Douglas out for dinner at Chicken Kitchen, a nearby restaurant. Dave did his best to pretend nothing was wrong, and while he was at the restaurant, he got a text message from Sue that put him at ease. After speaking with their mother, she thought their father wasn’t missing but had been detained briefly. Her impression proved mistaken. Around 7:00 p.m., after Dave returned home with Samantha and Doug, Chris asked her children to sit together at the dining table. “Your father is missing and I don’t know where he is,” she told them. Samantha burst out crying and ran upstairs to her room. Doug sat in his chair looking numb.

  Meanwhile, Ron Jordison called Doug Einsel, the NCIS agent in Dubai. It was the middle of the night there and Einsel was startled out of a deep sleep. Einsel had been among Bob’s luncheon companions at the Emirate Towers and he was alarmed to learn Bob had gone to Kish. Every American investigator who worked in the Middle East or knew about Iran knew that its intelligence agencies believed there was no such thing as a retired FBI agent and considered ex-agents like Bob to still be working for the United States. Einsel assured Jordison that a search would start at daybreak.

  At 10:00 p.m. that Saturday night, two FBI agents from the bureau’s Washington field office arrived at Ira’s home, a pleasant, modern house at the end of a wooded cul-de-sac. An FBI supervisor had called Ira earlier in the evening to let him know the agents were coming. After they settled down in the Silvermans’ living room, an agent named Paul Myers took charge of the questioning while his partner, Julian Sheppard, jotted down notes. Myers was assigned to a unit in Washington known as the Extraterritorial Squad, which investigated crimes against Americans overseas. The bureau operated similar squads in New York, Miami, and Los Angeles, and each was responsible for a different region of the world. The Washington-based squad covered the Middle East. There were about a dozen agents in it, and many of them, including Myers, were relatively new to the bureau. Working in the unit was grueling, required constant travel, and had a high burnout rate because of the strains it put on family life.

  Myers walked Ira through a series of questions about his friendship with Bob, his understanding of Bob’s relationship with the CIA, and Bob’s meeting with Dawud on Kish. He wanted to know if Bob had ever gone off the radar before only to reemerge a few days later. At another point, he asked Ira and his wife, Betsy, whether either of them ever worked for the CIA. It was close to midnight when Myers and his partner left.

  The following day, FBI agents came to the Levinson home in Coral Springs to examine Bob’s files. Chris also gave them a memory stick onto which the contents of his computer’s hard drive had been copied. There was a lot of activity in the house, with agents coming and going, and Doug became upset. To escape the chaos, he went into the den, the room where his father liked to sit and read. It was a shelter where Doug could be alone. Before Bob left Dubai for Kish, he had sent his youngest son an email telling him how much he missed him. Sitting in the den, Doug replied to his father’s message. He was scared, he said. He was worried. All he wanted was for his father to be home.

  U.S. officials in Dubai reported Bob’s disappearance to the closest FBI official in the region, a legal attaché stationed at the American embassy in Abu Dhabi. The official did not appear to express much urgency about pursuing the case, but the American investigators such as Doug Einsel who had met with Bob in Dubai for lunch had their own reason to be concerned. If Bob was in the hands of Iranian intelligence officials, so probably were their business cards with their names and telephone numbers. Two of the investigators went to the Dubai Marriott and asked a manager to see any videotape taken by hotel cameras at the time of Bob’s departure. There was a camera mounted above the building’s entrance and they went into a security office to review the tape from Thursday morning. The men saw grainy images of Bob leaving the hotel, pulling a small wheeled overnight bag behind him. The manager explained that Bob asked the hotel to hold his large suitcase for a day and brought it out from storage. The U.S. investigators decided to break open the lock. Inside, they found Bob’s big black binder and their business cards.

  Ira called Dawud to ask what he knew. The fugitive said his first hours with Bob had gone well. They had met as planned in the Maryam’s lobby and then gone for a walk before returning to the hotel for a meal. Afterward, they had gone to their room to talk more. Then, as Dawud put it, things went “south.” There had been a knock on the door and two Iranian policemen entered. Dawud insisted the police were more interested in him than in Bob and that he was taken into custody and brought to a local police station, where he was questioned and held overnight. The following morning, Dawud said, he was released and went back to the Maryam, where a manager told him that Bob had just left for the airport in the hotel’s taxi. Dawud assured Ira there was nothing to worry about; his friend was either in Dubai or on his way back to the United States.

  A few days later, there was still no sign of Bob, and FBI agents returned to Ira’s house with recording equipment to tape his calls with Dawud. They coached him on how to handle the conversations. “Don’t be a reporter. Don’t ask so many questions. Silence can be your friend,” one agent said. With each call, Dawud’s story changed. At times, two Iranian police officials were at the Maryam; in other versions, there were three. After a succession of calls, Dawud told Ira he had learned from his sources that Iranian authorities were holding Bob for questioning, though he expected he would be quickly released if his detention wasn’t publicized. “Everyone just needs to stay quiet,” Dawud insisted.

  When Ira asked him if he could arrange for Bob to speak to Chris so she could hear his voice, Dawud went int
o a tirade about U.S. foreign policy. “What about all the oppressed people on the streets of Iraq?” he demanded to know. At the urging of the FBI, Chris also called Dawud and asked him what she should tell her children about their father. “That’s not my problem,” he replied. FBI officials concluded the fugitive was either an attention-seeking narcissist or a collaborator with Iranian intelligence who had lured Bob to Kish. Either way, taping his calls was a waste of time.

  Chris was contacted by Jeff Katz, the private investigator who ran Bishop International in London. Katz had expected to see Bob during his layover there and had arranged for one of his associates to meet him at Heathrow when his flight from Dubai landed, so that Bob could hand over some packages of counterfeit cigarettes he had gotten from a source. After Chris told Katz about Bob, the investigator notified British American Tobacco about his disappearance. Katz also went to the U.S. embassy in London with a file folder containing copies of his correspondence with Bob about counterfeit cigarette cases and told officials there that he hadn’t gone to Kish for British American Tobacco.

  After the FBI sent a query to the CIA about Bob, word of his disappearance in Iran started circulating inside the agency. When Anne Jablonski heard the news, she walked into a Langley bathroom and threw up. An FBI supervisor contacted a friend in the CIA’s clandestine division and was told the agency’s spy side had never heard of Bob Levinson. The FBI got a similar response from officials at the National Counterterrorism Center, a large operation in McLean, Virginia, jointly run by the CIA, the FBI, and the Defense Department.

  FBI agents also went to Langley to see agency analysts. Prior to the meeting, a CIA supervisor, Todd Egeland, who headed the branch of the Directorate of Intelligence that oversaw the Illicit Finance Group, asked Tim Sampson and others in the unit for information about Bob. He was told that Bob’s CIA consulting contract had expired in late 2006 and that his work for the unit had never involved Iran. That same information was conveyed to FBI agents, and CIA analysts insisted to them that the CIA hadn’t paid Bob to go to Kish and knew nothing about his trip.