Missing Man Page 4

  A month later, the logjam finally broke. Brian O’Toole, an analyst with whom Anne worked, oversaw Bob’s contract. But she acted as his agency handler, distributing his reports, depending on their subject, to the right people within the CIA. The contract’s language was vague. It called for Bob to provide the Illicit Finance Group over the next year with “ten (10) papers on topics of interest to analysts such as, but not limited to: the mechanism of international organized crime groups, money laundering, narcotics trafficking, counterfeiting, corruption in key countries and regions of US government interest, repercussions of these activities in areas of interest and abroad, and possible US strategies to counter illicit activities.” The contract’s value was $64,688, of which $10,000 was earmarked for travel and expenses. That worked out to an hourly rate of about $57, a fifth of what Bob charged his private clients. Still, the arrangement had advantages. Bob could work for the CIA, Anne told him, while traveling for his private clients and whenever he wanted. “You could work a few hours in some months, more in others,” she wrote him.

  But as soon as Bob got going, Anne was inundated by dozens of investigative memos from him on subjects ranging from Russian crime to narcotics smuggling to arms trafficking. Another of his sources wanted to sell the CIA a stolen database compiled by the Venezuelan government that listed the cell phone numbers and email addresses of political dissidents whom officials there were monitoring. In the summer of 2006, he traveled on the CIA’s behalf to a federal prison in North Carolina to meet with Peter F. Paul, a con man who had been Hillary Clinton’s biggest fund-raiser during her successful 2000 New York Senate campaign. Paul, once a business partner of the comic book legend Stan Lee, the cocreator of Spider-Man and the Hulk, wanted to trade information to reduce his prison term for fraud. He told Bob that while in Brazil, where he was on the lam from U.S. authorities, he had shared a jail cell with an inmate who claimed to be the nephew of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terror group based in Lebanon. Paul said the man, Josef Nasrallah, told him that he once ran a major cocaine trafficking ring that operated under his uncle’s protection and that Hassan Nasrallah had arranged for him to escape Lebanon after he was arrested there on drug charges. According to Bob’s report:

  Nasrallah indicated to the source that during the late 1990s, he was arrested, tried and convicted of drug trafficking offenses, and subsequently received a sentence of twenty years imprisonment. Nasrallah confided, however, that he never served the sentence because his uncle, Hassan Nasrallah, intervened and was able to “spring” him from the Lebanese prison where he was being held. Subsequently, Hassan Nasrallah placed his nephew on an airplane to Brazil.

  As more memos from Bob poured in, Anne and others in the Illicit Finance Group decided they needed to meet with him. For one, they wanted to get him focused on topics that were priorities for the unit. There was another problem as well. His reports read like FBI investigative memos, and people at the CIA who read them might conclude he was involved in clandestine work. In August 2006, Anne suggested to Bob that it might be a good time for him to take a breather and regroup. In her email, she also referred to the Illicit Finance Group’s head, Tim Sampson.

  And for heaven’s sake, take some time off. Pace yourself, my man! Tim said the other day, “Crikey, I thought he might produce this much in, oh, say two YEARS” … We’re all delighted with the material. Now we have a new problem on our hands—how to PROCESS it without pissing off the folks who are SUPPOSED to be collecting this kind of material for us but are too busy jumping through bureaucratic hoops and making excuses. Really … we’re having meetings to figure this one out! You rock our world.

  A few weeks later, Bob traveled to Langley to meet with the CIA unit. Anne told him beforehand that her colleagues were looking for ways to reframe his reports, rather than change what he was doing. “We teeter on the edge of some legal issues here—since we’re NOT anything but an ‘analytical shop.’ So we have to kind of shape things a bit differently (same info, different prism) and maybe work with you to change the ‘format’ of the material you send.”

  The solution presented to Bob was simple. Going forward, he would use a standardized format to make his reports look more like those written by an analyst. Each submission would be labeled as an “A.R.,” short for “analytical report,” be numbered sequentially, and contain a brief summation of its contents as well as an assessment of the reliability of its source. Previously, he had been faxing his memos to Anne at CIA headquarters. He was told to burn future reports onto compact discs and ship them by FedEx to her home, procedures he quickly adopted.

  He was also given a list of the Illicit Finance Group’s main targets for intelligence gathering. It was short. One subject was Iran. The other subject was Iran’s principal ally in South America, Hugo Chávez, the president of Venezuela. To anyone following the news in 2006, those choices would not have been a surprise. Iran had recently elected a new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a conservative firebrand who had quickly gained the world’s attention by describing the Holocaust as a “hoax.” He had restarted Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, putting it on the path to developing an atomic bomb. Pushing back, President George W. Bush called for a tightening of trade and financial embargoes against Iran. Some administration hawks argued for war. In neighboring Iraq, a growing number of U.S. soldiers were dying in explosions of improvised bombs known as IEDs, and American officials had evidence that Iranian operatives were teaching Shiite paramilitary groups there how to build ever more powerful devices.

  In 2006, the CIA’s presence in Iran was all but nonexistent. The small cadre of spies it retained in Iran after the country’s Islamic Revolution in 1979 had all been imprisoned or executed as the result of a careless mistake by a CIA clerk that revealed their identities. The main tools that the agency used to peer into Iran were spy satellites, cell phone intercepts, and computer programs that could track the flow of money into and out of the country. There was little human intelligence coming from inside.

  The CIA wanted the Illicit Finance Group to gather information to help U.S. officials anticipate Iran’s response to new sanctions and also dig up dirt that could be used as political ammunition against its leaders. The Iranian government was rife with corruption and competing political and clerical factions. Its religious leaders had long operated supposedly charitable organizations, known as “bonyads,” that they used to consolidate the country’s wealth for their own benefit. Top officials of the elite military force, the Revolutionary Guards, operated major companies, and political power brokers in Iran controlled key industries.

  When it came to Venezuela and Chávez, Bob felt covered; he had sources with ties to South America who could provide information about the Venezuelan president’s finances and associates. Bob had never gone near the Middle East, though he knew someone who had spent a week in Tehran—his old television buddy, Ira Silverman. Ira had gone to Iran in 2002 to interview a fugitive American long wanted in the United States for murder and was still in contact with the man, Dawud Salahuddin.

  In June, after a meeting at the CIA, Bob phoned the retired newsman and suggested they grab lunch. They met at Clyde’s, a Washington-area bar and restaurant that bills itself as the place where “patriots of all stripes come to dine.” When Bob strolled in, Ira saw a big change in his friend. He looked buoyant again, like his old self. As they ate, Bob filled in Ira about his meeting at Langley. “Iran is the flavor of the day,” he told him.

  He didn’t have to say more. It was time to call Dawud.

  3

  The Fugitive

  At about the same time as Bob and Ira’s lunch at Clyde’s, Dawud Salahuddin was standing in front of a television camera in Iran, talking about himself. A Canadian filmmaker was making a documentary called American Fugitive, and Dawud was strolling around a room lined with movie posters. His once narrow features, which had glared out decades ago from WANTED posters in the United States, had thickened with age. H
e had a neatly trimmed beard and wore a black beret perched above his aviator eyeglasses. As he walked, a knee-length brown tunic grabbed at the midsection of his out-of-shape frame.

  When asked by the documentary’s director about the names he had used over the years, Dawud ticked off his aliases and noms de guerre before mentioning his given name: “In the past, I was Teddy when I was a kid … Teddy. Short for Theodore … David Theodore Belfield.” Asked why he was speaking on camera, since he could put himself in danger, Dawud let a few beats pass before responding. He had been through this drill many times before with journalists and he had learned long ago how to deliver a money quote. “At this point in time, I can’t give you a lucid answer, because there is really nothing in it for me, okay,” he said. “There could be trouble from … from different sides. It’s exposure … Some people say I’m reckless … Maybe it’s recklessness … But ah … well, if I had to really, if I had to really dredge up an answer for you … I guess one of the reasons that I am doing it is to say that there is life after America.”

  Dawud’s life as a fugitive had started three decades earlier. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the fiery Islamic cleric, was poised in the late 1970s to overthrow the shah of Iran, who had long enjoyed the U.S. government’s patronage. In Washington, D.C., Dawud had spent years adrift, committing petty crimes and looking for a cause. He found one in Khomeini’s ideals of a pure Islamic state.

  He fell in with a cadre of Khomeini supporters based at Washington’s Islamic Center, a white marble mosque near the Embassy Row section of Massachusetts Avenue. His group frequently clashed with the mosque’s elders who supported the shah, and Dawud attracted the attention of the intelligence division of the Washington police department, which identified him as a potentially dangerous radical. One police surveillance report described him as the head of a little-known group called the Islamic Guerrillas in America, which distributed leaflets “containing threats of domestic insurrection in the U.S. and indicated that one of the targets should be Zionist females.”

  In November 1979, months after the shah’s overthrow, Dawud and other Khomeini supporters traveled to New York and chained themselves to the Statue of Liberty. In Tehran, on that same day, students seized the U.S. embassy, starting a hostage crisis that would last fifteen months. Soon afterward, Dawud was hired as a security guard at Iran’s remaining diplomatic outpost in Washington, an office, or “interest section,” housed inside the Algerian embassy. At the time, the fate of Iran’s religious revolution remained unsettled as supporters of the ayatollah vied with other factions for power, including former associates of the shah. Fearing a counterrevolution, Khomeini’s confederates began dispatching assassins to eliminate the shah’s allies, and Dawud, then twenty-nine, was approached about undertaking such a mission. He was assigned to kill a former spokesman at the Iranian embassy in Washington, Ali Akbar Tabatabai, who was close to the leader of a failed coup attempt against Khomeini.

  In July 1980, Dawud drove to Tabatabai’s home in Bethesda, Maryland, in a U.S. Postal Service jeep that he paid a mailman to let him borrow. He emerged wearing a postman’s uniform and holding what appeared to be two special-delivery packages. Concealed inside one of them was a 9 mm Browning semiautomatic pistol. When he rang the buzzer, a visitor at Tabatabai’s home, an Iranian-born graduate student, opened the door and offered to take the packages. Dawud insisted he needed Tabatabai’s signature and the former diplomat, who was in his late forties, came to the door. A few weeks earlier, he had spoken on a television news program about the threats he was receiving from Khomeini followers. “They had left messages, numerous messages of threats, of physical harm to me,” he said. “In fact, they very clearly said we are going to kill you.”

  The postman waiting at his doorstep didn’t appear threatening. “I need your signature,” Dawud told him as he moved the packages closer. He then squeezed off three rounds, each bullet hitting Tabatabai in the abdomen. Dawud turned and walked back to the postal jeep. Forty-five minutes later, Tabatabai was declared dead at a local hospital.

  Dawud quickly ditched the postal vehicle and climbed into a car driven by an accomplice. His original plan called for him to escape the United States by taking a flight to Europe from John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, but as he approached the city, the radio was buzzing with news of the killing, including descriptions of the shooter as a young black man. He decided to divert to Canada and, after driving north through the night, crossed the border. In Montreal he boarded a plane for Paris. It was on the next leg of his journey, a short flight from Paris to Geneva, that he picked up a newspaper and read that he was the subject of a manhunt. He hid out for a week in Switzerland and then, with the aid of an Iranian woman, slipped onto a flight to Tehran and safety.

  In the United States, the public was shocked that a homegrown terrorist could carry out a brazen assassination near the nation’s capital at the behest of one of America’s enemies. For weeks, reporters from The Washington Post, The New York Times, and other newspapers dug into Dawud’s past to try to understand the path that had taken him to Tabatabai’s door. Friends and family who had known Teddy Belfield were stunned. In Bay Shore, New York, the Long Island suburb where he grew up, he had been regarded as smart, sociable, and athletic. His four siblings were all straight arrows; an older brother was a police officer.

  People expected Teddy to follow in his siblings’ footsteps. In 1968, he started as a freshman at Howard University in Washington, but before finishing the year he dropped out. Soon afterward, he converted to Islam, taking his new name, Dawud Salahuddin, in honor of a twelfth-century Muslim warrior. Plenty of students dropped out of college during the late 1960s; the Vietnam War was raging, race riots flared throughout the United States after the assassination of Martin Luther King, and black power groups such as the Black Muslims were in ascendancy. But becoming an assassin was totally different. “I don’t understand this at all,” Dawud’s aunt told reporters after the murder. “When I saw his picture flashed up on the television screen and heard what the newscaster was saying about him, I nearly died. People here are so shocked. They know the family is much different.”

  Journalists seized on Dawud’s use of a postman’s disguise, suggesting he had gotten the idea from Three Days of the Condor, a thriller released in the mid-1970s that starred Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway. In the movie Redford plays a CIA analyst, code-named Condor, who is marked for execution by the spy agency. Hiding out in a New York brownstone, he answers a knock at the door and finds a postman holding a special delivery package. Redford’s character lets the man in, unaware he is a CIA hit man, and is forced to dodge bullets. The writer of the novel on which the film was based, James Grady, was so shaken by how closely Tabatabai’s murder resembled the scene he had created that he wrote a newspaper editorial lamenting the collision of art and life. “When I came up with the idea in 1972, I meant to inject paranoia into the plausible, not to write a script for assassins,” he wrote.

  For Dawud, the glamour of serving the Islamic Revolution quickly faded. He intended Iran only to be a stopover on his way to China, where he wanted to study herbal medicine and martial arts. Decades later, he was stuck there, afraid to leave because U.S. officials might grab him if he left the country. He married an Iranian woman and worked on English-language publications in Tehran, including a website called Press TV. Before long, the only people outside Iran who remembered him were his family, the relatives of his victim, some cops, and a few reporters who came to Iran to interview him.

  The stories Dawud told the journalists were colorful, and invariably he was at the center of the action. He claimed he had fought courageously in Afghanistan alongside the mujahideen to drive out the Russians and had traveled clandestinely through the Middle East as a trusted courier for Islamic activists. His email address also rang a dramatic and cultural chord. He used the name David Jansen, after David Janssen, the actor in the popular 1960s television series The Fugitive who played the role of Dr. Richard
Kimble, a physician wrongly accused of murder.

  Journalists had no way of knowing which, if any, of Dawud’s stories were true. For most of them that wasn’t a big problem. The fugitive was well-read and charismatic, and he shared his stories so freely that journalists were flattered into thinking that he was opening up to them because of their skills as interviewers. He was also a canvas onto which they could paint a portrait of their choosing. In some journalistic renderings, he was depicted as an unrepentant idealist; in others, as a sympathetic pawn in a global intelligence game; in still others, as a man caught between two countries and ideologies, uncertain of where he belonged. Writers tended to downplay his cold-blooded murder of Tabatabai or to absolve him entirely. “Who am I, who grew up privileged and white in a small and stable country, England, to take to task a man who grew up black in 1960s America? That would be intolerably arrogant,” one writer responded when asked about his sympathetic portrayal of Dawud. Ira Silverman had embraced another view of the fugitive; he thought Dawud might want to seek redemption by becoming an informant.

  Ira inherited the idea from one of his best law enforcement sources, Carl Shoffler, a celebrated police detective in Washington, D.C. Shoffler first gained fame in 1972 when he and two fellow plainclothes officers arrested five burglars breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex. He then rose through the ranks of the intelligence division of the D.C. police, developing close ties to the FBI and the CIA. Shoffler didn’t look like a master detective. He was short and overweight with a choppy haircut and a bad complexion. He smoked and drank constantly. Fellow cops nicknamed him “Mr. Chips” because he always had one hand in a bag of junk food or a box of donuts while sitting in a car on a surveillance operation. But Shoffler possessed a sixth sense about how to work people for information, whether they were criminals he was trying to flip or journalists with whom he traded tips. He developed an infatuation with Dawud and became obsessed with cutting a deal for him to surrender and return home.