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  By that time, Dave had figured out a way to get Bob’s files. He told Chris that Sonya was going to fly to Coral Springs, come to her house, and pack them up. The prospect of Sonya poking around her home was the push Chris needed. Cardboard file boxes loaded with documents soon arrived at Dave’s office. Inside were file folders labeled with the names of Bob’s assignments, clients, or investigative targets. Several folders were marked GLOBAL WITNESS, while another was labeled DAOUD SALAHUDDIN. Bob’s reports to the Illicit Finance Group were contained in five folders, labeled IFG and numbered sequentially in Roman numerals. Another folder, marked MAKE SEPARATE FILE AND ACTING FILE, contained a mix of material, including emails between Bob and Anne Jablonski, expense reports, proposed CIA projects, and billing records on which he logged the number of hours he had spent interviewing a source or writing up a report for the Illicit Finance Group, including ones about Iran.

  Chris attached a handwritten note on one file, explaining to Dave how she and Bob had argued before his Dubai trip over the money the CIA owed him:

  In Feb. before his last trip, Bob & I had a heated discussion over the fact that the CIA had not paid him since his Nov. invoice and it was now Feb. I told him that he treated them differently from other clients and that he would never let anyone else get away with not paying him. This was after he took away a whole day to write reports for them knowing he was going on another trip. He told me that Anne told him that he would be paid because they had gotten funding but it would be another month before his invoices could be addressed.

  Dave and Sonya made a rough pass through the boxes, pulling out records that grabbed their attention. Dave’s fury was growing. It was one thing to hear Paul Myers say the CIA was lying. It was another for him to see mounds of evidence pointing to the fact. Bob’s work for the CIA had clearly involved Iran, and the former FBI agent and Anne Jablonski had discussed money just before his disappearance on Kish. In October 2007, Dave flew to Washington and went with Ira to see Melvin Dubee.

  Seeing the documents, Dubee became irate and contacted the CIA’s congressional liaison to demand a meeting with agency officials in his Senate office. When they arrived, he showed them some of Bob’s reports. The CIA officials acted as though they had never seen the records before, and an analyst with the Illicit Finance Group claimed that Bob’s reports were considered to have such little intelligence value they were tossed into a storage box upon arrival without being read.

  Dubee told Dave and Ira that to force answers out of the CIA they would need the involvement of lawmakers on the intelligence panel. He suggested they approach a Democratic senator from Florida, Clarence “Bill” Nelson, who was serving a temporary term on the committee. Nelson was already involved in Bob’s case. By the fall of 2007, he was writing letters to Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations urging his country to let Chris visit Iran.

  Initially, Dave and Ira were not enthusiastic about seeing Nelson. A former state insurance commissioner, the Florida Democrat was better known for the space flight he took as a sitting congressman than for being a political heavyweight. But at a meeting in late 2007 at his Florida office, Nelson, a small, tautly built man with a wide smile, assured them he wouldn’t hesitate to cross swords with the CIA. He assigned the matter to Carolyn Tess, his staffer on the Senate intelligence panel. Tess was young and idealistic about working in government. After speaking with Dubee, she was appalled by the CIA’s handling of Bob’s disappearance and decided that the agency needed to answer for its lack of action.

  Soon afterward, a top CIA official, Stephen Kappes, arrived at the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill to give the intelligence panel one of its periodic briefings on national-security-related issues. The committee’s hearing room is located on the building’s second floor, and to reach it, lawmakers, staffers, and other officials must pass through a screening station manned by Capitol Hill police officers. The room itself has a thick, vault-like door and specially lined walls to prevent electronic eavesdropping.

  Kappes, then the CIA’s deputy director, had previously served as a spy in international hot spots and once headed the agency’s “rendition” program, in which suspected terrorists were kidnapped overseas. Balding and with a graying beard, he was an old hand at doing briefings. After he made his presentation, lawmakers took turns asking him questions. When it was Senator Nelson’s time, he looked at the CIA official and said, “What can you tell me about the status of an agency contractor missing in Iran?” Kappes sat silently for a few moments and then responded he didn’t know what Nelson was asking about. The Florida lawmaker then started reading him excerpts culled by Carolyn Tess from Bob’s emails and memos to the Illicit Finance Group. Kappes listened without showing any reaction. When Nelson was finished, he said that neither he nor the CIA’s director, General Michael Hayden, were ever alerted about Bob’s disappearance and they didn’t know anything about the episode. He assured Nelson that he would investigate the matter and report back to the committee.

  Around the same time as the panel’s meeting, Chris stepped off a plane in Tehran accompanied by her oldest son, Dan, and her sister Suzi. Iranian officials had finally granted them visas. It was early December and the towering mountains to the north of Tehran, the Alborz, were covered with snow. At age fifty-seven, Chris was making her first trip outside the United States and she was spending it searching for her husband. Two officials from the Swiss embassy escorted Chris and her family to the Esteghial hotel, a five-star facility with luxurious rooms, a fitness center, and a twenty-four-hour coffee shop. After checking in, Chris and Suzi went up to the room they were sharing and Chris started looking around for a box of tissues. She asked Suzi if she had seen any and the sisters spent a few minutes looking for a tissue box before they gave up. The following morning, returning to their room after breakfast, they found five boxes of tissues strategically placed around it. They realized their room was probably bugged and Iranian intelligence was monitoring them.

  Chris went to Iran’s Foreign Ministry to meet with a top official there. Government officials remained publicly adamant that they knew nothing about Bob, adding that a police investigation on Kish had failed to yield any clues. Chris hoped they might be more forthcoming when speaking privately. Her meeting dispelled those illusions. After some initial pleasantries, the official turned hostile and told Chris that everything he had learned from media reports made him suspicious of her husband’s real reason for coming to Kish. He also claimed a boat operator on the island told authorities Bob had offered to pay him $500 to take him to Iran’s mainland and that the taxicab driver who drove her husband to the Kish airport reported overhearing him making cell phone calls to people elsewhere in Iran. Chris, who was keeping her hair covered in respect for Muslim culture, tried to maintain her composure. FBI officials had urged her not to challenge Iran’s official line.

  The following day, she, Dan, and Suzi flew to Kish and took a taxi to the Maryam hotel. When they walked into the lobby, Chris saw an English-language Iranian newspaper placed strategically on the registration desk, as if to catch her eye. A headline on its front page read “Wife of Missing American in Iran.” A photograph showed Chris and Dan looking tired and jet-lagged after their arrival in Tehran. She was shown the room where her husband stayed and an entry in a registration book indicating he checked out at 11:00 a.m. on Friday, March 9. It was signed in Bob’s handwriting. That afternoon, Chris, Dan, and Suzi took a taxi to the Kish airport and spent several hours handing out flyers with a photograph of a beaming Bob holding his grandson, Ryan, to ticket agents, baggage handlers, and airport workers. They asked everyone if they recognized him. No one did.

  The family returned to Tehran to prepare for their flight home. Suzi waited in her room while Chris and Dan went down to the hotel’s lobby for one final meeting. It was with Dawud. Prior to coming to Iran, Chris was in touch with the fugitive and he had agreed to meet her. He appeared ill at ease. Seated in a chair, he repeatedly glanced around the room as i
f trying to spot Iranian operatives watching them. He stuttered at times. He told Chris and Dan how much he had liked Bob and how he felt he shared blame for what had happened. It was foolish, he said, to think two Americans—particularly, a white one and a black one—could meet safely on Kish without attracting police attention. Still, he was certain whoever was holding Bob was treating him well. “He might be sitting in a hotel room somewhere learning Farsi,” he told Dan. Dawud then reached into a bag and gave Chris one of the gifts her husband had brought with him to Kish. It was the copy of The Black Dahlia, the murder mystery.

  The flight back to the United States had a four-hour layover in Paris, and Chris, Dan, and Suzi took a taxi to Notre-Dame Cathedral, where Chris prayed for Bob. Snow was falling in New York when they landed at John F. Kennedy. Waiting FBI agents escorted them into a section of Air France’s passenger lounge, which was cleared of other travelers. Agents questioned them about the trip, trying to get information while it was fresh. Chris handed over the copy of The Black Dahlia, which was sent to the FBI’s forensics laboratory to be examined for fingerprints, DNA, and other clues.

  A few weeks later, the Levinson family gathered for their first Christmas without Bob. His daughter Sarah kept hoping for a “Christmas miracle,” imagining her mother’s trip to Iran might have struck a humanitarian chord with her father’s captors, who would release him in time for the holidays. There were presents under the tree just in case.

  At Dave McGee’s home in Gulf Breeze, the lawyer and his wife, Joyce, were also getting ready for Christmas. They had started a family tradition when their two children were young of making Cornish game hens rather than a turkey for their holiday meal, so each kid could have a bird. Their children were now young adults, but the McGees continued the tradition.

  As Christmas Eve approached, the telephone rang at Dave’s home. The call was from Jonathan Winer, the money laundering expert and consultant to the Illicit Finance Group. Dave hadn’t ever spoken before to Winer, but Ira had known him since the late 1980s when he was on the staff of Senator John Kerry.

  Not long after Bob’s disappearance, Winer had called Ira and asked if he could be of help. Ira hadn’t known at first that the lawyer worked for the Illicit Finance Group, and he told him about Bob’s ties to the CIA unit. Ira also said he was trying to get ahold of Bob’s agency handler, Anne Jablonski, and asked Winer if he knew of any way to do so. It was at that point that Winer told Ira he was a consultant to the Illicit Finance Group, adding that Anne was a close friend who had just helped him through a bad patch.

  Over the previous year, a financial con man named R. Allen Stanford had tried to make Winer’s life miserable. Prior to leaving government, the lawyer was investigating Stanford for running what appeared to be a massive Ponzi scheme. When Businessweek magazine published an article questioning Stanford’s operation, the con man suspected Winer was its source. He hired Kroll, the big private investigations firm, and ordered it to dig up dirt on him. He “is a pure cockroach,” Stanford told a Kroll investigator, a former DEA agent named Tom Cash. “Go after him hard on as many fronts as possible.” Winer was going through a divorce and Cash started chasing rumors his wife had left him for another woman. Anne had stood by him through the ugly episode, Winer told Ira. He agreed to call her about Bob, and a few days later he phoned Ira back from his car while waiting to get cleared into Langley. He said Anne had told him her superiors had ordered her not to talk to anyone about Bob.

  By the time of Winer’s call to Dave in late December, Anne was under siege. After the CIA’s deputy director, Stephen Kappes, returned red-faced from his Senate intelligence panel briefing, he had put together a team of investigators to look into Bob’s work for the CIA. The group included operatives from the CIA’s Counterintelligence Center, the agency unit that hunts foreign spies and moles. They started examining files and interviewing Anne and other members of the Illicit Finance Group. Anne was in a panic and reached out to Winer and other friends for advice.

  Winer told Dave he knew Anne and made it clear he was aware of the internal CIA investigation. He said it was his impression that it wouldn’t go anywhere and suggested to Dave that the interests of the Levinson family might be better served if Dave reached a financial settlement with the CIA. Dave wasn’t certain why Winer had called, but he sensed the lawyer was doing so unofficially to try to start a negotiation between him and the CIA to resolve the case. He told Winer he appreciated his interest in the Levinsons’ welfare but added that Chris and her children had a goal besides money—they wanted to see justice done. “We aren’t going away,” Dave told him.

  13

  The Nuclear Option

  Chris and her children held a rally on March 9, 2008, at a Coral Springs restaurant called Wings Plus, a favorite of Bob’s, to mark the first anniversary of his disappearance and celebrate his sixtieth birthday. The event received some news media coverage, and after their meal, the family stood in the restaurant’s parking lot and sang “Happy Birthday.”

  A day earlier, Chris had exchanged emails with Dawud Salahuddin, who had promised earlier to contact Iranian officials about her husband. In his reply, he told her he would have to wait a few more weeks to do so because Iranian government offices were closing for the Persian New Year, or Norooz.

  This is an odd and painful “anniversary” so to speak and I just want you to be assured that I have not forgotten it or one word of what I have said to you. On correspondence, bear in mind that there are some 11 days to the end of the Iranian calendar year and everybody is trying to get their desk cleared for the next year which following a two-week holiday will begin on April 1, give or take a day. That is to say this is not a good time to put a sensitive letter on a person’s desk so I will wait till the holidays and then make the submission I spoke of but that will be to a high-ranking judicial authority and as I have said many times in the past, this is not a judicial matter, it is not a police matter—it is a political question between two mule-headed governments, each suffering its own version of the disorder “center of the world complex” and as the Swahili proverb has it, “When elephants fight the grass suffers” ‘grass’ here of course meaning people and specifically in this context the family of Robert and Christine Levinson.

  I know this past year has not been a good one for me and perhaps it is a blessing that you have kids to keep you busy. My situation allows for too much introspection and too much of anything is not good. Be aware too that our communications are read by interested parties besides us on both sides. Over here, I was told prior to meeting you to stay away and again last week was called in and given what I took as indirect but genuine threats. But not to worry it is simply not in me to be afraid of men. Don’t want to get melodramatic but that is where I sit in all this and I am comfortable with that probably because discomfort had been a major theme of my adult life so bureaucratic nonsense does not move me very much and I have simply seen too much real mayhem to be fearful of the same—especially when I have done no moral or criminal action.

  This started out as a just to let you know line but then I got carried away a bit. Forgive me for that. Hope your demonstration is a real success and be sure that I will keep up my part of the bargain but truth to tell, God hears the prayers of mothers in distress for their loved ones faster I think than those of anyone else.

  That week, FBI officials invited Chris to Washington for an update about the status of the search for her husband. Dave McGee, Ira Silverman, Larry Sweeney, and Suzi Halpin also attended the meeting, which was held at the bureau’s Washington field office. A senior FBI official named Sean Joyce presided, and officials from the CIA and the State Department were present. Joyce didn’t delve into the details of the agency’s investigation because there wasn’t much new to say. In recent months, FBI agents had finally started to retrace Bob’s activities prior to his trip to Kish, but even a year later they hadn’t interviewed some key witnesses, such as Houshang Bouzari, the oil consultant in Toronto. Joyce assure
d Chris that the FBI, the CIA, and the State Department were now working together to bring Bob home. He also acknowledged the bureau had made “some mistakes” in its initial handling of the investigation. Joyce didn’t go into details about what he meant, but upon hearing his comment Ira couldn’t restrain himself. He first looked at Joyce and then at the CIA officials present. “Not mistakes, crimes,” he said.

  The CIA, eager to avoid another confrontation with the Florida senator Bill Nelson, had taken other steps. An agency lawyer, Joseph Sweeney, contacted Dave to discuss Chris’s financial claims. It was a welcome call. For months, Dave had been hunting to find money to keep her afloat. Both he and John Moscow, the former prosecutor in New York, had contacted Reed Smith, the law firm in the Bank of Cyprus lawsuit, to collect Bob’s bill. But the firm never paid the money, and Dave and Moscow concluded it had decided to stiff Bob because he wasn’t around to collect.

  At his meeting with Sweeney, Dave took an immediate liking to him. He noticed the CIA lawyer was wearing a graduation ring from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, which Dave viewed as a sign he was trustworthy. He also appeared sympathetic. After listening to Dave’s description of Chris’s money problems, Sweeney said he could arrange for the CIA to immediately pay her $121,000, the amount Bob would have gotten in June when his consulting contract renewed. Dave added he wanted to discuss a global settlement to provide Bob’s family with long-term security. One possibility was to set up a large annuity for Chris funded by the CIA that would provide her with enough annual income to make up for the loss of Bob’s earnings. Dave ran some rough numbers. Looking at Bob’s billings, he estimated his income in peak years ranged between $250,000 and $300,000. Taking Bob’s FBI annual pension of $60,000 into account, a financial consultant advised Dave that Chris would need a $2.5 million annuity to make up the difference. When Dave mentioned the figure to Sweeney, he expected the CIA lawyer to start dickering. Instead, Sweeney said it sounded doable but he needed to run the proposal past his bosses.