Missing Man Page 12

  On Saturday, March 17, a week after Bob went missing, Chris and her family went to Disney World in Orlando. She had paid weeks earlier for the vacation to celebrate Bob’s birthday, and Chris thought the trip might offer a diversion, particularly for her younger children. It didn’t. No one wanted to go on any rides and Doug, instead of having fun, became angry and upset. “This isn’t supposed to be fun,” Chris told him. “This is supposed to be a distraction.” For the remainder of March, Chris, Ira, and Dave waited as the days ticked by, hoping for news of Bob’s release. Then, at the beginning of April, a State Department official called Chris and told her several newspapers were about to publish articles about her husband’s disappearance.

  At the same time, Ira got a phone call from John Miller, the press spokesman for the FBI. Miller was a former television newsman and he had landed some coups during his career, including the first interview by a U.S. television reporter with Osama bin Laden. Some journalists disliked and distrusted Miller because he continually bounced between jobs as a reporter covering cops and jobs as a spokesman for cops. As a result, it was never clear whether Miller, during his turns as a journalist, was carrying water for his law enforcement sources because he had once worked for them or hoped to do so in the future. He asked Ira to provide him with an explanation he could give reporters asking questions about why Bob went to Kish. Ira suggested saying his friend was investigating cigarette smuggling and money laundering, but Miller said he didn’t like Ira’s idea and hopped off the phone to deal with another call.

  The initial stories about Bob’s disappearance appeared on April 4, 2007. An article in The Washington Post was headlined “Man Missing in Iran Named; He Worked for DEA and FBI.” Spokesmen for the FBI and State Department insisted to reporters for the Post and other publications that Bob did not work for the U.S. government, adding they believed he had gone to the Iranian island on behalf of a corporate client or a documentary filmmaker.

  Most of those first accounts described Bob as a highly experienced organized crime investigator. A piece in New York’s Daily News struck a different tone. In it, Bob’s old FBI supervisor in New York, James Moody, declined to say whether he thought Bob was a “competent investigator,” and an unnamed former bureau supervisor was quoted as describing him as a “total nutcase” whose “grandiose schemes never panned out.” Moody called Larry Sweeney, Bob’s old friend from the FBI in New York, and insisted he wasn’t the person who had made those remarks.

  The burst of news about Bob caught Dawud’s attention. On April 4, the same day stories about the missing man appeared in the United States, an article was posted on the website of Press TV, the government-run English-language news organization in Tehran where Dawud worked. It carried the headline “Ex-FBI Man in Iran Not ‘Missing’ at All.” From all appearances, Dawud both wrote or dictated the article and served as the anonymous “informed sources” quoted in it.

  Informed sources have told PRESS TV that the story of an American businessman and retired FBI agent gone missing from Iran’s Kish Island is somewhat misleading.

  The truth of the matter is that he has been in the hands of Iranian security forces since the early hours of March 9, and his inability to communicate with his family or company has raised the alarm about his health, safety and whereabouts. Speaking to PRESS TV on condition of anonymity, the sources made clear that aside from the usual inconvenience, the person is being well looked after.

  The sources also said that the matter, though routine, has been complicated by the mounting tensions stemming from repeated American threats against Iran, actual ongoing covert activities within Iran run by the Americans and the particulars of the man’s background with the FBI. Not a happy configuration under the circumstances. Nevertheless the authorities are well on the way to finishing the procedural arrangements that could see him freed in a matter of days.

  It has been established that his retirement from law enforcement took place nearly a decade ago, his area of expertise was organized crime and not intelligence and that his trip to Kish was purely that of a private businessman looking to make contact with persons who could help him make representations to official Iranian bodies responsible for suppressing trade in pirated products which is a major concern of his company. The outstanding reason for making such a connection is the man has no prior experience in this part of the world.

  The enterprise he works for deals in low technology high visibility brand name products sold worldwide and the Persian Gulf has been proving to be a major problem area for illegal production and marketing of these products. Iran is not the origin of this activity but is the largest market by far on the waterway and thus a primary target for the pirated goods.

  His visit to Kish was supposed to be a one-day affair but drew the attention of the security forces because his Iranian national host registered in the same hotel room as he did and local police thought they had discovered some discrepancy in the Iranian’s identification papers routinely handled in the hotel. Turns out, there was nothing irregular in the Iranian national’s papers but this drew the attention of the local police onto the American and he was detained some 12–15 hours after arriving on the island.

  It is a case of ordinary business running into extraordinarily bad circumstances. It is expected that the matter will be over in a few days time. The Swiss Embassy in Teheran is in the process of or had already delivered a note from the U.S. State Department concerning his welfare and whereabouts to the Iranian Foreign Ministry. One of the ironies of the retired FBI man’s ordeal is that he had been instrumental in persuading his former colleagues not to put former president Mohammed Khatami and his retinue through the ordeal of fingerprinting when he traveled to that country in September 2006.

  Chris found herself in a situation she had never faced, having to deal with the news media. Fortunately, one of her sisters, Suzanne Halpin, worked for a big New York public relations concern, Rubenstein Associates. Personality-wise, Suzi was the flip side of her older sister; she was hard charging and insistent. She handled one of Rubenstein Associates’ biggest accounts, News Corp., the media conglomerate run by Rupert Murdoch. Suzi helped draft a press statement from Chris about Bob and distributed it on April 4 to reporters.

  We miss him and love him very much. We are worried about him and want him home safe and sound as soon as possible. This has been a very difficult time. In the past 48 hours, as this has become public, we’ve heard from many of our friends. We are touched and so grateful for the support and prayers we’ve received.

  Paul Myers, the FBI agent handling Bob’s case, flew to Florida to meet with Chris. There was little doubt about his investigative tenacity. Along with other agents, Myers had spent years pursuing terrorists in Indonesia who had carried out a deadly 2002 attack on a school bus carrying ten American teachers, eventually capturing the group’s ringleaders. He was also very tightly wound; his leg would jiggle up and down when he sat, and his bedside manner was not the best.

  When Chris told Myers soon after his arrival about her husband’s CIA connection, he almost snapped at her, saying the agency had insisted its relationship with her husband had ended long before Kish. Myers and a bureau colleague who had accompanied him to Florida then spent several hours going through Bob’s files and copying documents. As they prepared to leave, he thanked Chris but didn’t say anything particular about whether he had found anything of interest. Once outside the house, Myers called an FBI supervisor in Washington and told him he had copied documents showing that Bob had gotten recent assignments from the Illicit Finance Group. “I’m looking at tasking memos,” Myers said.

  The next morning at the FBI’s Washington field office, Michael Heimbach, a senior manager, was holding his regular weekday meeting with the supervisors of the squads he oversaw, including the extraterritorial unit. At 9:00 a.m. each day, the supervisors would gather at a large conference table and, as Heimbach went around the room, give him updates about their cases. A CIA official also participated
in the meeting. Since 9/11, the spy agency had stationed an operative at major FBI bureaus like the one in Washington as part of an effort to better coordinate intelligence gathering between the agencies. The move was largely symbolic. At heart, the CIA and FBI remained rivals, and most operatives and agents viewed each other with disdain and distrust. FBI agents at the Washington field office referred to the CIA official stationed there as “the Mole.” Whenever Heimbach asked the Mole if he had any updates to share, his response was the same: “Nope. Nope.”

  At the meeting on the day after Myers’s visit with Chris, Heimbach went around the table as usual. When it was his turn to report, the supervisor of the Extraterritorial Squad said there was news about the Levinson case. He recounted the discovery Myers made at Chris’s house, adding that the agent was on a flight back from Florida with the agency records. He then looked across the table at the Mole. “Those sons of bitches have lied to us,” he said.

  10

  One of Their Own

  After word of Bob’s disappearance became public, theories spread among his friends and acquaintances about what happened to him. Some of them believed Russian gangsters had caught wind of his Global Witness investigation, followed him to Kish, and made short work of him. Others of them suspected cigarette smugglers were holding him for ransom. Still other people speculated Iran would use Bob as a bargaining chip to be traded for the five Revolutionary Guards officials seized by American forces in Iraq.

  Amid the heightening twilight war in early 2007, people were disappearing or being grabbed. A former Revolutionary Guards general, Ali Reza Asgari, who was involved in Iran’s nuclear program, went missing while on a visit to Turkey, and Iranian officials said they suspected American agents had convinced him to defect to the United States. A few weeks later, Iranian naval forces seized fifteen British sailors and marines inspecting merchant ships for contraband off the coast of Iraq, claiming the British vessel had illegally entered Iranian waters.

  In mid-April, the Financial Times broke the news that Bob had gone to Kish Island to meet Dawud Salahuddin. The article was based on an interview with the fugitive, who stuck with Bob’s cover story, telling the newspaper that the former FBI agent had come to Kish to investigate cigarette smuggling for a tobacco company. He described Bob as an “innocent victim” of the political tensions between the United States and Iran and said Iranian officials knew his whereabouts. “I don’t think he is missing, but don’t want to point my finger at anyone,” Dawud was quoted as saying. “Some people know exactly where he is.”

  With the disclosure of Dawud’s role in the incident, reporters started connecting the dots among the fugitive, Carl Shoffler, and Ira Silverman. In a follow-up article, the Financial Times cited Ira’s statement in The New Yorker about Dawud’s potential value to American officials as an intelligence asset inside Iran. Ira, who had spent a career chasing stories, suddenly found himself at the center of one. He was getting emails and telephone calls from reporters eager to interview him, but he wasn’t responding. He was in a state of shock. He had assumed that Bob’s trip to Kish had the CIA’s approval, and Bob never gave him any reason to think otherwise.

  Throughout his career, Ira thought he understood the shadowy world he covered and saw himself as a player in it. Now he didn’t know what to think. Despite everything, he still trusted Dawud. He didn’t have a choice. The alternative—the possibility Dawud had used him to lure Bob into a trap—was too painful to consider.

  The two Canadian journalists, Linden MacIntyre and Neil Docherty, who had accompanied Ira to Tehran had also returned home infatuated with the fugitive. Since then, they had gotten a reality check. The American public television program Frontline refused to air their documentary about Iran with Dawud in it because show producers felt he was being portrayed too sympathetically. They had also spent months searching for evidence to connect Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani to the Highway 407 toll road in Toronto but gave up after running into an impenetrable maze of corporate filings in Spain. Afterward, Linden MacIntyre asked his car mechanic, who was Iranian, if he had heard about any Rafsanjani assets in Canada. “Do you know about Highway 407?” the mechanic replied. When Macintyre asked how the man knew the rumor was true, he said, “Everyone knows it for a fact.”

  One of Dawud’s other contacts in the United States, Tommy Cauffiel, soon got in touch with Ira. Cauffiel was a former Maryland homicide detective who had taken over Carl Shoffler’s role as Dawud’s main connection with law enforcement. In April, Cauffiel had emailed the fugitive after reading about Bob’s meeting with him on Kish. In his message back, Dawud said he suspected Bob’s trip had been part of a setup.

  To the best of my knowledge Ira and Levinson put their own collective ass in a crack in an attempt to somehow have me waylaid down the line. I had nothing to do with Levinson being disappeared or whatever has happened to him, that was all circumstances gone awry.

  They had been running a game up under me for I guess about a year and a half and it was all a game about getting me sensitive material, etc. I have not communicated with Ira for long days now and imagine he is too shamefaced to email me. I know he is your friend, but fuck Ira because with me he feigned friendship when his real intent was treachery. As for Levinson, I will leave him to the tender mercies of the Iranian authorities. Would you assist someone who was trying to cornhole you?

  Ira was shaken. He didn’t want to do anything to upset Dawud, for Bob’s sake and his own. Since their ride together to the Tehran airport, he had feared the fugitive and believed he might be able to reach back into the United States and harm him or his family. He talked with Cauffiel, who passed on a message to Dawud.

  I talked with Ira and he asked me to convey this to you. He said “that he was not part of anything ever to harm you in any way and everything that we exchanged over the years is absolutely genuine. The relationship that we have should go on and should not be destroyed.” I’m just the messenger but I think you two should exchange some emails to work this out. You’ve known each other too long to end a relationship this abruptly.

  Joe Trento, the freelancer whom Shoffler had tried to use to snare Dawud, was also in contact with the fugitive. He disliked Ira and thought him arrogant. He remained angered by Ira’s failure to give him credit in his New Yorker profile of Dawud for the role he played in setting up the 20/20 interview in which the fugitive first had admitted killing Ali Akbar Tabatabai. Trento considered Ira’s omission intentional and had written a letter of complaint to The New Yorker pointing it out, along with what he saw as other errors in the article. He also believed the retired newsman was in the pocket of former agency operatives still intent on capturing Dawud.

  When Trento called Dawud after reading about his role in Bob’s disappearance, the fugitive revealed a fact to him that he hadn’t disclosed to other reporters—that Bob was in Kish to give him damaging information about former Iranian president Rafsanjani. He also told Trento a lot that wasn’t true. He insisted it was Ira and Bob who had proposed digging up dirt on Rafsanjani and claimed he had tried to convince them to delay Bob’s visit because of the increasing hostilities in early 2007 between the United States and Iran. Trento accepted it all without question. He also agreed to abide by a condition set by Dawud; he would not disclose Rafsanjani’s name in his article about Bob because the fugitive said doing so might jeopardize his safety. A lengthy story appeared on Trento’s website under the headline “Levinson Had Damaging Information on Iranian Leadership,” in which the journalist referred to his operation as the National Security News Service.

  Iran is dissembling. Despite official denials, the government there has had former FBI agent Robert Levinson under their control since March 8. The semantic game they are playing has to do with who in Iran is holding Levinson. New information from the last man known to meet with Levinson may demonstrate that the Iranians may have a very good reason for not owning up to be holding Levinson. It seems the former FBI agent in their custody may have brough
t highly embarrassing allegations of wrongdoing about at least one top-tier Iranian leader. The National Security News Service has obtained the name of the Iranian leader in question but is not releasing it at this time.

  Trento then went on to describe Dawud as a “very credible source” in whom he placed great stock. He quoted the fugitive as saying he was unimpressed by the material that the former FBI agent brought with him to Kish. Dawud said:

  I don’t think there ever was any material, though Levinson knew some general information and he knows the language so it’s easy for him to make something appear big when it’s only him talking and his hands are empty. As I said earlier even the cigarette smuggling conversation was smoke, no meat and potatoes. And if they think I would get booted out of here, again they were off base and out of context.

  For a month, Ira had refused to speak with other journalists about Bob. But in late April, an article in Newsweek magazine that portrayed Ira as a journalistic Captain Ahab obsessed with completing Carl Shoffler’s quest to land Dawud forced him to respond.

  One acquaintance of both Levinson and Silverman told Newsweek he learned earlier this year that the former FBI agent was about to leave for the Middle East on a trip apparently designed to make renewed contact with Salahuddin.

  Silverman told this acquaintance that Levinson’s plan was to meet the fugitive in Iran and try to persuade him to return to the United States. It is not clear why Levinson apparently believed he could convince Salahuddin to do this.

  Silverman did not return phone calls to Newsweek. He has made no public comments since Levinson’s disappearance.