Missing Man Page 16

  Another CIA official met with Chris. He first explained he couldn’t tell her his real name because he worked in the agency’s clandestine division and suggested she call him “Mike.” He then apologized to her on behalf of the CIA for the agency’s behavior. Mike, who was a tall, athletically built man in his fifties with red hair, explained he was leading the CIA’s internal inquiry into what had happened at the agency. He told Chris he believed what she was saying about Bob’s work for the CIA but added that he needed to find out for himself. Mike assured her that when the review was completed, he would tell her the results. Chris thanked him. A year after her husband’s disappearance, the CIA had finally broken its silence.

  Within the agency, Anne Jablonski had experienced a roller-coaster ride. Not long after Bob went missing, life within the Illicit Finance Group had quickly resumed its normal rhythm. FBI agents, after asking a few questions, had gone away and did not come back. The book on Bob seemed closed. Anne’s days took on their familiar pattern. A few months after Bob went missing, she agreed to be interviewed by The Wall Street Journal for an article about one of her favorite topics, the growing number of people preparing homemade food for their cats. “All of a sudden, the idea of making your own cat food didn’t seem so insane,” she told the newspaper.

  At first the inquiries in the fall of 2007 from Mel Dubee, the Senate staffer, were viewed within the CIA as more of an annoyance than a threat. But when the agency’s inquiry began in December, Anne’s equilibrium quickly unraveled. During her twenty-three years at the CIA, she had watched witch hunts unfold as scared supervisors searched for scapegoats to protect their careers. Anne lost her appetite and lay in bed at night unable to sleep. In mid-January, she stepped on a bathroom scale, looked down, and saw she had lost a lot of weight.

  Then, in February 2008, the questions about Bob suddenly stopped. Anne took it as a sign that the agency’s internal investigation was over and she had been cleared. She couldn’t imagine any other possibility. She certainly hadn’t done anything wrong. If she had any regrets, it might have been her decision to push for Bob to get a contract. He had made a terrible mistake and Anne felt awful for his wife and children. Her appetite returned and she started sleeping well again. Washington, D.C., was still in winter’s grip, but Anne was close to completing her training as a yoga instructor and, inspired by her teacher, a man named Erich Schiffmann who had made a popular yoga video with the actress Ali MacGraw, she started writing essays.

  Her period of tranquility didn’t last. The internal CIA investigation hadn’t stopped, and in March, around the first anniversary of Bob’s disappearance, it resumed with a vengeance. Anne was summoned one day from her office and escorted into a windowless room by two former CIA operatives hired to work on the inquiry. She was told to sit in a chair and grilled for hours. Her interrogators said Bob’s work for the CIA was worthless crap and she was probably glad to see him gone. “You were angry with your friend, you sent him to Iran to get killed,” one of them said. Her heart was pounding and she protested, accusing the men of lying. She thought of Bob’s efforts to help the Defense Department contractors held by the FARC. “What about those hostages in Colombia, was that crap, too?” she asked. Her inquisitors then changed tactics and told Anne it would all go away if she told them how her boss, Tim Sampson, concealed Bob’s activities from his superiors. She replied he hadn’t done anything wrong. When she finally was allowed to leave, Anne realized her days at the CIA might end in a way she had never imagined.

  In the spring, Anne was notified she was being put on paid leave pending the outcome of the CIA’s inquiry. When it was completed, an internal panel made up of senior CIA officials known as an “accountability board” would review the investigation’s findings and decide what disciplinary actions, if any, to take. Those possibilities ranged from a mild reprimand to a brief suspension to a firing, an extremely rare, worst-case scenario.

  Some agency officials saw what was happening. It was the same crap that had been going on within the CIA for years. Analysts in the Illicit Finance Group had been doing their job, gathering the kind of critical intelligence the agency’s clandestine operatives either wouldn’t or couldn’t get. But now it was payback time, and the agency’s spy side was seizing an opportunity to teach analysts a lesson about staying in their place. At home, Anne tried to put those thoughts aside and stay calm by concentrating on yoga, meditation, and her cats.

  She wondered whether she should go back to the CIA, regardless of the verdict. She would feel like a battered wife going back to an abusive husband. Anne started looking for a new job. She knew that the types of private investigative firms for which Bob had worked doing due diligence inquiries would pay plenty for her knowledge about Russian crime. She didn’t find the prospect of working in the private sector appealing. There was an opening for an analyst at another federal agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It didn’t sound that exciting, but it would be a fresh start. Another possibility was working for a public interest group, such as Global Witness, which exposed political or economic corruption. Over the years, Anne got to know reporters who covered Russian crime, and one of them, David Kaplan, now worked at the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit group in Washington that specialized in investigative journalism. In the spring of 2008, he invited Anne to accompany him to an event at the Newseum, a local journalism museum, and introduced her to the heads of other public interest groups.

  The CIA’s board soon started issuing its recommendations. One by one, eight CIA employees were called into meetings. Five staffers, including personnel in the agency’s contracting office, received mild rebukes ranging from an official reprimand to a two-week suspension. The panel’s recommendations for the three other employees were more serious. Timothy Sampson was given the option of resigning voluntarily, with his security clearances intact, or being fired. Sampson, who would later publicly state he did not know that Bob’s CIA work involved Iran, chose to resign. Todd Egeland, who headed the CIA branch overseeing the Illicit Finance Group, was given the same option. Egeland would later say he had never met or communicated with Bob. But some analysts told CIA investigators during the agency’s internal review that he had promoted a culture of risk-taking. Egeland was the official, they said, who had urged CIA analysts at the rally in “the Bubble” to take on the agency’s spy side, and he supposedly rewarded subordinates who pushed the envelope. Egeland, who disputed those assertions, also chose to resign.

  The board’s harshest punishment was reserved for Anne. She was also given the option of resigning or being fired, but the panel recommended she lose her security clearances because it concluded she hadn’t been forthright with agency investigators. It was essentially a death sentence as far as government intelligence work was concerned. Without a security clearance, she wouldn’t be able to get a job with the Director of National Intelligence or any other sensitive post. She was being cast out from the circle of secrecy she had inhabited for two decades, never to return. Anne was devastated. She hadn’t seen it coming. She told friends the CIA’s clandestine side was throwing her under the bus, and to do so it needed to destroy her reputation and career. She insisted to friends she hadn’t lied about anything. She had given the CIA panel a complete statement explaining all the facts of Bob’s case and all the actions she had taken. But the board, she said, twisted her words and turned them against her. She was accused, she told friends, of not disclosing information she was never asked about.

  The three forced departures were the strongest disciplinary actions taken by the agency in decades. For Anne, one step in the process remained. The CIA’s director, General Michael Hayden, would review the board’s recommendations against her and decide whether to adopt them. Her friends were furious. They believed that Anne was being cast aside to satisfy the demands of Senator Nelson and the Senate intelligence panel for a body. It was absurd to think she had kept her CIA colleagues in the dark about Bob, they said, because she was a �
��stickler” for agency rules. One of Anne’s CIA mentors, a retired clandestine official named Paul Redmond, lobbied agency officials on her behalf. So did one of her closest friends, a former spy named Margaret Henoch. As far as Henoch was concerned, Bob had put his own neck into the noose by going off to Kish and there was no reason for Anne to take the fall for his misadventure.

  Many of Anne’s friends and acquaintances didn’t know anything about Bob. Instead, they thought she had become the innocent victim of internal agency jockeying. After hearing about Anne’s situation, Richard Clarke, a former top counterterrorism official, called her. Since leaving government, Clarke had become a bestselling author as well as an on-air personality for ABC News on national security issues. He told her he could arrange for media coverage about her mistreatment by the CIA. Anne begged off. If her case drew media attention, both reporters and Bob’s captors would find out about Bob and the spy agency, and she wanted to avoid that happening in case he was alive.

  At the urging of friends, Anne decided to hire a lawyer. She retained a former CIA operative named Janine Brookner who knew firsthand about agency infighting. In the 1990s, Brookner, a onetime station chief in Central America, sued the CIA, accusing it of widespread sexual discrimination. In her complaint, she detailed episodes where male subordinates refused to work for her because she was a woman and, as part of a campaign to sabotage her career, accused her of provocative sexual behavior. The CIA settled Brookner’s claims for more than $400,000, money she used to pay for law school and start a practice specializing in suing the spy agency on behalf of former employees. Brookner helped Anne draft her appeal to CIA Director Hayden. They also discussed other steps Anne could take, including the “nuclear option,” filing a public lawsuit in which the analyst accused the CIA of unjust dismissal.

  Anne’s friends were elated when they learned about her counterattack. Many of them were former CIA employees who had left the agency disillusioned with the imperious attitudes of its leaders. Anne felt like her decision to challenge the panel’s decision was either the bravest or the most foolish thing she would ever do.

  Anne was summoned to Langley and taken to the building’s seventh floor, where the agency’s senior officials are located. She was brought to see Stephen Kappes. When she was seated, he told her the CIA was adopting the accountability board’s recommendations. He asked her if she had any questions. She looked at him. They had started their CIA careers at about the same time. She asked if he had anything to say to her, as one person to another. His response was a brief “No.” With that, Anne left Langley.

  A CIA official went to Capitol Hill to brief the staff of the Senate intelligence panel about the agency’s findings and the actions taken against Anne and others. Committee staffers were told the Illicit Finance Group had violated agency policies by essentially running Bob as a “rogue” spy, who went on intelligence-gathering missions overseas without the knowledge of the clandestine division. Anne and others had known what they were doing was wrong, but technically speaking, they hadn’t broken any rules because there weren’t any rules in place for them to violate. During the agency’s post-9/11 hiring boom, the CIA had failed to draft guidelines governing the activities of consultants such as Bob. To prevent similar episodes, the committee’s staff was told, the agency was drafting rules for contractors, and Stephen Kappes was personally reviewing all existing contracts.

  At a separate meeting, Anne’s lawyer, Janine Brookner, made her case to panel staffers. Anne would later say she sent extensive memos immediately after Bob went missing to her boss, Tim Sampson, and to a senior official in the CIA’s analytical division named Peter Clement that outlined all of Bob’s activities for the Illicit Finance Group. She said she offered the FBI help and wanted to call Chris, but Sampson and Clement had told her they would “handle” everything inside the agency related to Bob’s disappearance.

  To committee staffers, Brookner’s arguments were unpersuasive and Anne’s story sounded convenient and self-serving. The Senate intelligence panel considered the inquiry over. Afterward, Anne still had one weapon; she could trigger the “nuclear option” and force a confrontation with the CIA by filing a lawsuit. But along the way, she lost the stomach to fight or thought better about it and decided not to sue.

  The Senate intelligence panel’s inquiry probably shouldn’t have ended. If Anne’s version of events came across as self-serving, so were the accounts the CIA gave to Congress, such as agency claims that Bob’s reports were tossed in boxes and never read. CIA officials might have done so prior to his disappearance. But the idea that they would not have closely culled his reports immediately after he went missing to see if he might disclose agency secrets to Iran either was a lie or spoke to a level of agency incompetence that is almost unimaginable. In addition, if the Senate intelligence panel had probed further, it would have also discovered that the spy agency had long been aware of Bob’s interest in recruiting Dawud Salahuddin.

  Back in December 2005, when Bob was pitching Anne on projects he might take on when his CIA contract was approved, he sent her a lengthy memo about Dawud’s potential as an informant, an idea based on his conversations then under way with Ira Silverman. It’s not clear if Anne got it or responded. But Bob didn’t stop there. That same month, he sent a similar memo to Robert Seldon Lady, the retired CIA spy who had fled Italy for Central America to avoid arrest. Bob asked Lady to pass along his memo to a top official on the CIA’s clandestine side.

  Attached is something I would like you to review and consider forwarding on to your old buddy who is now way up in the stratosphere of your alma mater—it is, what I consider anyway, an extraordinary opportunity, operationally, if anyone has any balls or imagination left up there in the pickle factory. For your further information, I received this morning the subject’s home telephone number in Iran, some additional background information on how he might possibly be, in fact, recruited, and what he’s capable of providing, including political and potentially military-type data. What I was hoping for is an audience and a go-ahead to talk by phone with this guy. I could then set up a meeting in a third country with one of our folks present. Anyway, take a look, have a great Christmas, best to your family and let’s talk about this—I’d just like to run it up the flagpole as high as possible before being shot down.

  In February 2006, Lady told Bob that he had been trying to stir interest at the CIA for the project, and while he hadn’t succeeded, he was about to visit Langley and would try again.

  I will personally push them when I go. I’ve been asking for an expression of interest, but so far all I get is silence. I’m afraid our bureaucracies have grown beyond their own usefulness. I won’t let this just sit there and stew.

  Two years after that memo was written, Joe Sweeney, the CIA lawyer, and “Mike,” the counterintelligence officer, came to Pensacola to meet with Chris at Dave’s office. They told her the inquiry hadn’t found a “smoking gun,” proving Anne knew beforehand about Bob’s trip to Kish. But they remained suspicious. In examining emails and records of telephone calls between Bob and the analyst, they found evidence he had called his travel agent to book his Kish flight just after a long phone call with her, presumably the one in which she said the Illicit Finance Group had found more money for him. The events didn’t prove Anne knew about the Kish trip, but the CIA decided to refer the case to the Justice Department for possible criminal investigation. The agency also finalized a financial settlement with Chris worth more than $2 million. In some ways, it was a small price. Dave was told by a congressional official that the CIA hadn’t taken steps to try to locate Bob after hearing he had disappeared in Iran, such as alerting the National Security Agency to monitor cell phone conversations in the region for chatter about a captured American.

  Both Chris and Dave were convinced Anne knew about Bob’s trip. Dave viewed the analyst as a manipulative Mata Hari who had knowingly sent Bob into danger and then walked away when it went wrong. Chris’s perspective was differ
ent. It was personal. She had never talked with Anne, but she had seen her at Bob’s retirement party, sent her daughter to visit her, and gotten a Christmas card from her every year. The way Chris saw it, Anne had faced a choice. She could have called her when she learned Bob was missing and helped sound the alarm. If she had, maybe things would have turned out differently. But Chris also knew that Anne, by making that call, would have likely lost her job. So she had taken the route most people would; she had kept quiet. Chris could understand why she had. But that didn’t mean she would forgive her.

  Around the first anniversary of Bob’s disappearance, a CIA official gave Chris an envelope containing a lengthy letter to her from Anne. In it, Anne described her long friendship with Bob, her admiration for him, and her concern about his safety. Chris was not a person given to displays of emotion. But as she read Anne’s letter, she started to seethe. Every sentence rang hollow. Every profession of friendship seemed empty. Chris finished reading the letter. Then she put it back into its envelope, stuffed it inside a cabinet, and never read it again.

  14

  “Heloo Cheristi”

  In mid-2008, an email arrived at the Help Bob Levinson website with the subject line “Heloo Cheristi,” an apparent phonetic attempt at “Hello Christine.” The accompanying message was written in Farsi and its writer, who said her name was Parisi, explained she had heard Chris talking about Bob on a recent Voice of America interview broadcast into Iran. Parisi described herself as a technician at a hospital in Gachsaran, an industrial city located five hundred miles south of Tehran. One night, she explained, she was called to the hospital to deal with a medical emergency. A male patient, described to her as a prisoner at a nearby detention facility run by the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence, was experiencing significant internal hemorrhaging caused by a bleeding ulcer. His hemoglobin count was at a dangerously low level. After doctors treated him, intelligence officers took the man away. Parisi said she had gone onto the Levinson family’s website after hearing Chris’s interview and looked at pictures of her missing husband. The man treated at the hospital appeared much thinner than Bob, but Parisi was certain it was him.