Missing Man Read online

  Reading the article on Newsweek’s website, Ira became agitated and called one of its writers, Michael Isikoff, to tell him the story’s claims about Bob’s intentions were wrong and needed to be corrected. Ira also pressed Isikoff for the name of the “acquaintance” who provided the information. The reporter replied he wasn’t sure where the tip came from because a Newsweek colleague might have gotten it. Ira believed that the FBI’s spokesman, John Miller, was the source of the story and that he had put Bob in more danger by planting it.

  By the spring of 2007, many former FBI agents and private investigators were concerned about Bob’s case for another reason—the FBI’s seeming lack of interest in it. Larry Sweeney, Bob’s old FBI friend, had expected bureau supervisors would treat the case as a “special,” the FBI’s equivalent of a five-alarm fire; after all, he had been one of their own. But months into the investigation, FBI agents still hadn’t contacted many of the people with whom Bob had spoken in the weeks and days prior to visiting Kish. Also, when friends and colleagues of Bob called the bureau to offer information or leads, their efforts were ignored or rebuffed. Boris Birshtein, after seeing a news report about Bob, had contacted John Good, the former bureau agent who worked for him, and said he was eager to offer the FBI his help. Good called Paul Myers, the case agent, and left messages but he didn’t hear back.

  Meanwhile, Myers was struggling to get traction. While he had returned from Florida with some of Bob’s “tasking memos” from the CIA, bureau agents involved with the case apparently did not systematically cull through the treasure trove of documents on Bob’s hard drive. If they had, the FBI could have quickly reconstructed Bob’s steps on his way to Kish and seen that the CIA’s story didn’t jibe with the facts. Myers complained that his FBI superiors weren’t giving him much support. The agent had seen Bob’s report about the Istanbul meeting and was eager to speak with Boris Birshtein about it. He suspected that the two Iranians at the meeting might have discovered that Bob was a former FBI agent and alerted their country’s intelligence services. During Bob’s days at the FBI, Myers could have jumped on a flight to Toronto, met with Boris, and explained the trip to a supervisor later. But the bureau was now top-heavy with managers eager to avoid risks, and laden with procedures that slowed investigations. Myers told Ira his supervisors had denied his request to call Boris or to fly to Toronto to see him, saying that under bureau rules, a request to interview the businessman first needed to be sent to Canadian law enforcement authorities. That never happened. He also wanted to fly to Dubai to speak with the U.S. investigators who met with Bob, but he said his supervisors denied that request, too. The FBI would not send agents to Dubai for five months, and bureau officials, despite suspicions about CIA duplicity, did not force a confrontation with the spy agency.

  In late April, there was a brief moment when it seemed as though Bob had been freed. Dawud alerted the journalist Joe Trento that a high-ranking Iranian official was telling him that the former FBI agent was back in U.S. custody.

  I was told this morning by someone far better connected than me that L is in the air. I have not been able to confirm this with the people I have been dealing with yet because they are not answering the phone but the one who told me could very well know what he is talking about—also told me to keep it under my hat so no mention of me to anyone PLEASE because the friend is a very valuable source of information.

  Trento wrote back, saying he had checked with his CIA contacts and heard the same: “My CIA sources are confirming the release but say he has not left yet.”

  The government-run news website where Dawud worked, Press TV, posted a story about the supposed development, citing the U.S. National Security Agency as the source of its information.

  A former FBI agent the US government claimed had gone missing in the Iranian island of Kish has returned to his country amid a news blackout.

  The US National Security Agency had said that former FBI agent, Robert Levinson, had been arrested following a meeting with a former US citizen on the Iranian island of Kish on March 8 and was detained by Iranians until Sunday.

  “The Iranian officials have concluded that he was merely a businessman with no ill intentions towards Iran,” said a source in the Agency.

  The US National Security Agency reportedly received the news of his release early on Monday US time.

  U.S. officials, when contacted by American reporters about the story, said it wasn’t true, and Press TV ran another article retracting its initial report. Trento wrote Dawud that his credibility was falling fast and that plenty of people believed he had collaborated with Iranian intelligence to set up Bob. “People can think what they like and I really don’t give a rat’s ass, but I really didn’t do that,” Dawud responded.

  That spring, FBI agents worked with Bob’s daughter Stephanie to create a website called Help Bob Levinson, filled with photographs of him and his family in happier times as well as news reports about his case. The FBI used the Internet as a tool in missing person cases to gather leads from the public. Much of what came in through such sites was useless: Photoshopped pictures, rants by lunatics, messages from con artists eager to scam a grieving family out of money. Still, there was always a chance a lead would prove fruitful. A homemade video was posted on the site, in which Chris made a plea. She seemed uncertain and nervous.

  I’m Christine Levinson, wife of Robert Levinson. My children and I set up this website to ask for your help in finding Robert so he can come home.

  My husband went missing on March 8th while visiting Kish Island in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Since then, there have been conflicting reports about his condition and whereabouts. There were even reports that he had been released but they were not true.

  This experience has been a nightmare for me and our children. We’ve been living in darkness since this began. We just need to hear from him, to see him, and to help him come home.

  We are seeking the truth. Someone knows where he is.

  Chris was struggling to keep herself together. Since Bob’s disappearance, she had not heard a word from Anne Jablonski or anyone else at the CIA. She sensed that where the spy agency was concerned, Bob had not only vanished but also ceased to exist. Some days, while Samantha and Douglas were at school, she would go to a shopping mall and wander around, hoping to distract herself. At night, she would dream Bob was being tortured, or worse. Chris wanted her family to feel nothing was different and that their crisis was temporary. Several months before Bob went missing, he and Chris had decided to help Stephanie and her husband financially so their daughter could stay at home with Ryan rather than rush back to work. Stephanie was worried, though, that her mother was starting to run out of money and told her she was ready to start working again. Chris insisted that everything was fine and kept sending her a check even though she was nearly broke.

  Chris couldn’t understand why the FBI was treating her like an outcast, a crazy civilian who was making up stories about spies and secret worlds. She didn’t know why agents like Paul Myers didn’t believe her about Bob and the CIA. She had always thought of herself as an FBI wife. She understood what that meant and she knew how to keep a secret. She also knew that if this had been Bob’s case, he would have treated her differently. He would have sat with her and listened to her for as long as she wanted to talk. Then he would have told her that he wouldn’t rest until the case was solved.

  11

  The Merchant of Death

  Dave McGee was seething. He had been talking for months with Ira Silverman and Larry Sweeney and shared their view that the FBI’s search for Bob was going nowhere. Dave expected more. Like Bob, he was a believer in the system and had spent his career in it. During his three decades as a prosecutor, first with the state of Florida and then with the Justice Department, Dave earned a reputation as a hard-nosed legal straight shooter—a “cop’s prosecutor” was how some of his colleagues put it—and he still thought of himself that way. He originally wanted to work as an engineer for the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration, but when he graduated from Florida State University in 1970 the aerospace industry was in a downturn and NASA, rather than hiring engineers, was laying off thousands of them. While at FSU, he had performed in the college’s well-known student circus as a catcher in the trapeze act, but there wasn’t much demand for that skill either, so he spent three years building houses and then decided to go to law school.

  As a prosecutor, he frequently handled drug and money laundering cases. In the 1990s, he sent one of Bob’s future informants, the lawyer Ken Rijock, to prison on money laundering charges. He prosecuted capital murder cases, including one involving an anti-abortion zealot, Paul Hill, who was executed following his conviction for killing a doctor at an abortion clinic. His most memorable case involved F. Lee Bailey, one of America’s best-known criminal defense lawyers, who had worked for famous clients such as O. J. Simpson and Patty Hearst. Dave accused Bailey of keeping for himself as legal fees millions of dollars that a drug dealer client was supposed to forfeit to the Justice Department under a plea bargain. Bailey claimed he never made the forfeiture deal with prosecutors, but at a court hearing, Dave called other top defense attorneys, including Robert Shapiro, who worked with Bailey in the O. J. Simpson case, to testify the lawyer had reneged on agreements with them. Dave accused Bailey of betraying the government, the court, and his professional ethics. “He did it for the oldest, the most tiresome, and the least excusable reason—to put money in his own pocket,” he argued. When the hearing was over, the judge ordered Bailey to pay back some of the money and the lawyer was imprisoned when he failed to do so. Years afterward, a framed copy of a New York Daily News front page with a headline screaming “IT’S F. LEE JAILEY” hung like a scalp on a wall of Dave’s office at Beggs & Lane.

  In the summer of 2007, Dave, a tall, trimly built man in his late fifties with dark hair and a thick moustache, was swamped with work. He mostly handled civil cases like lawsuits brought by one company against another over issues such as contract disputes or insurance claims. A big financial collapse on Wall Street was then unfolding and plenty of new clients wanted him to sue investment firms to recover money. But the more he spoke with Ira and Larry Sweeney, the angrier he was becoming. Over the course of his career, he had seen FBI agents relentlessly chase clues to solve an investigation. He had also watched while FBI bureaucrats made it clear through lack of action that they didn’t care about a case. Dave didn’t like what was happening where Bob was concerned. The final straw came when he got a call from Paul Myers, the FBI agent, who told him the CIA was still lying to him. Dave was overwhelmed by a sense of moral outrage. As far as he could tell, the U.S. government had abandoned Bob Levinson. It was that simple and appalling. Dave, Ira, and Larry suspected that someone high up in the CIA had asked an FBI buddy to soft-pedal the hunt for Bob and that if their friend was going to be found, they would have to launch their own search-and-rescue mission.

  By then, the news media’s interest in Bob’s disappearance had waned and Chris’s sister Suzi Halpin told her she needed to keep her husband’s case in the public spotlight by doing television interviews. For a person as shy as Chris, the prospect of that kind of exposure wasn’t pleasant. But if it could help bring Bob back, she would do it.

  Her first interview was with one of television’s biggest stars, Diane Sawyer, the host of ABC’s Good Morning America. Suzi arranged the interview, and she was savvy enough to know that Sawyer would ask Chris if her husband was a spy. By then, FBI and State Department officials were consistently saying that Bob had gone to Kish to investigate cigarette smuggling, but plenty of news stories were hinting at the possibility of espionage, and Sawyer wouldn’t miss the drama of asking the question. In 2007, authorities in Tehran were regularly detaining Iranian-American scholars, businessmen, and other visitors and subjecting them to public show trials on trumped-up spying charges. Some of those arrested were sentenced to lengthy terms in Evin Prison. With Bob, the opposite had happened. The Iranian government or some group there had grabbed someone who could qualify as a real spy, but instead of parading him as a prize catch before television cameras they were continuing to deny they knew anything about him. Chris didn’t pretend to understand what was going on. But she was certain telling the truth about Bob and the CIA wasn’t an option. Any suggestion of his connection to the spy agency, she believed, would make matters worse or get him killed.

  During her interview, Chris described to Diane Sawyer how her children waited every day for news of their father’s return and often cried themselves to sleep. Two of her daughters, Sue and Sarah, appeared on the program, and Sue said she sometimes called her father’s cell phone just to listen to his voice on the recorded message. When Sawyer started asking the types of questions Chris knew were coming, she answered them with a quiet, steely resolve.

  SAWYER: Was he a spy?

  CHRIS: No. Bob could not be a spy. As we said, he’s such an open person. He went there under his own name. And so for him to, for anybody to think that he could be doing something like that, people who know him know it’s not possible. Bob is just always Bob.

  SAWYER: You would have known if he had a double life?

  CHRIS: If he had any other life going on, I would know about it. And he doesn’t. It’s twenty-four hours at home. The business is his own home-based business. We’d go to breakfast, lunch, and dinner when he wasn’t out of town. He took a lot of trips out of town. But at the same time, they were for major corporations and I knew the people who were in these corporations that he was talking to.

  SAWYER: And no corporation has come forward, though, to say “We funded this. We were part of this. We wanted him to help with this”?

  CHRIS: No, because he funded it himself. He’s a subcontractor. He’s not an employee of any of these major corporations.

  By the late summer of 2007, Chris had decided to go to Iran, hoping that the trip’s publicity might lead to Bob’s release. Iranian officials rejected her requests for a visa and she wrote Dawud Salahuddin, asking whether he had heard any news about Bob.

  Mr. Salahuddin,

  Greetings.

  I hope this message finds you well. I don’t know if you are aware that I have been talking to the press lately. I have been asked about you and RL by everyone, but I have only talked about what has already been published. I am planning a trip to Iran myself to look for RL. I would like to be able to bring RL home with me. I am wondering if you have been able to find out where RL is. How is his health and who is he with? Any information would be helpful. Thank you.

  Sincerely,

  Christine

  Dawud replied:

  Perhaps the one good point is that in all these months your husband has been incarcerated here (of course I am not supposed to say that) no one has seen him. What that probably means is that he is not being held in a jail because people go in and out of jail and RL would stick out like a sore thumb and would be a source of conversation and certainly rumor which would have circulated around by now. My bet, and I have seen this before, he is being held in a safe house and most probably under the supervision of a high level security person. This would mean he is much better cared for than people in lockup. I can not guarantee what I am telling you and I am not saying this to make you feel good—all I am doing is passing along personal experience in how these things happen here. As always, please keep this between me and you as it could have repercussions for me. That does not frighten me because if it did I would not be writing you but obviously, if one can avoid trouble he does.

  I pray you stay strong in what I know is a situation bordering or perhaps even going beyond the border of being intolerable. God bless you and the family.

  The situation has impacted me in other ways. Was sent to CCU for 48 hours observation two weeks ago. First time I have been in a hospital in 26 years and then it was something related to a tear in my medial meniscus. My heart turned out fine but they say I am suffering from stress which in some way I rela
te to the events in March.

  During that summer, the FBI finally put Bob’s cigarette smuggling cover story to rest. Long after getting access to his hard drive, the bureau sent Scotland Yard a copy of the British American Tobacco letter he had created. A British detective took it to the cigarette company’s offices, where executives declared it an amateurish forgery. They pointed out that Bob had misspelled the company’s name by hyphenating it as “British-American Tobacco,” and had dated the document two weeks before the actual date of his meeting in January at BAT headquarters.

  Dave, Ira, and Larry had begun their hunt for Bob by hiring an investigative firm called SCG International Risk that did contract work for the FBI. SCG International was part of the new military-style security industry that had emerged after 9/11, and some of its employees, like those of similar firms, were former commandos. The best-known of the companies was Blackwater, which was accused of killing seventeen Iraqi civilians during a 2007 incident there. The head of SCG International, Jamie Smith, said he was a founder of Blackwater and a decorated military veteran who had once worked for the CIA. SCG International ran a training facility in the woods of northern Mississippi known as “G.I. Joe Fantasy Camp” where participants for a $1,200 fee could attend a course offering “real-world scenarios for real-world warriors.” The retreat’s programs included training on how to fire automatic weapons and interrogate captured enemy fighters.

  One of SCG International’s first actions for the Levinson family was to dispatch a female operative to Kish and the Maryam hotel. The woman, whom Jamie Smith called “Mila,” told Maryam employees she was a headhunter for hotels in Dubai looking for experienced management personnel. She spoke with the hotel’s manager and the supervisor of its restaurant and charmed both men, who allowed her to take their pictures and gave her their contact information.