Missing Man Read online

  A few years after Tabatabai’s murder, James Grady, the author of the book made into Three Days of the Condor, got an unexpected call from Shoffler, who invited him to meet at a greasy spoon diner in downtown Washington. Grady had never met the detective and found him seated at a back table talking on a shoebox-size portable phone, a rarity in that era. As the author approached, he could see Shoffler speaking excitedly into the device, saying, “He’s here … He’s here.” Then the detective, covering the phone’s mouthpiece, said to Grady, “It’s him … It’s him.” The writer was baffled, and when Shoffler handed him the phone he found Dawud on the line. To score points with the fugitive, the detective had promised to introduce him to Grady and get him an autographed copy of his book.

  Shoffler’s interest in Dawud waned for a time, but it was reignited in 1993 after Islamic terrorists used a truck bomb to try to topple the World Trade Center. By then Shoffler had retired from the D.C. police force and was working as the chief fire investigator in a suburban Maryland county, though he still retained close ties with U.S. intelligence agencies. The detective feared that another terrorist attack was imminent and believed that Dawud, if he could be persuaded to return home, might share his insights about Islamic terror groups. Over the next few years, the two men exchanged letters and talked regularly by phone. Shoffler suggested he and Dawud had areas of common interest they could work on together, such as reducing the supply of opium from Afghanistan that was fueling heroin addiction in Iran and the United States. They talked about American politics and religion, and Shoffler relayed messages between Dawud and his aging mother. To further their intimacy, the detective confided in the fugitive about the health of his daughter, who suffered from juvenile diabetes. “Don’t think I’m going soft with age, but over the past few months I have developed a bit of a soft spot in my heart for you,” Dawud wrote him. “Ten years ago, we probably would have had to try to kill each other if our paths crossed. Life is strange indeed.”

  In time, Shoffler swung the conversation around to his real purpose, trying to negotiate terms for Dawud’s surrender. The fugitive had made it clear in their talks that his own infatuation with Iran was over. “This country, this regime, I think it has seen its best days,” he told Shoffler. “I think it is going to be history, not before too long. And any idea about this country leading the Muslim world, excuse the language, is pure bullshit.”

  The detective told Dawud that he thought he could get him a relatively short prison term for Tabatabai’s murder, maybe about eight years, in exchange for information about terrorist organizations. Dawud, then in his mid-forties, was interested, but he wanted less prison time. He drafted a letter to the Justice Department that outlined the kind of help he was prepared to give and what he wanted in return:

  I believe that I am in a position to increase your government’s depth of insight into Iran, a state mistakenly perceived as the heart of the international Islamic movement; that is provided anyone really wants to know. The price for this service is freedom from all prosecution related to charges I face in the Bethesda affair. From what I see coming at America down the road in the Middle East, I believe that what I am offering to you is of no small value.

  Soon afterward, Shoffler called him to say that prosecutors in Maryland were insisting that he spend his time in a state penitentiary rather than a federal prison. Dawud was disappointed. “Maryland is a slave state,” he responded. “I don’t think they’d appreciate a guy like me in Maryland.” When Shoffler suggested he might have better luck working with another law enforcement official, the fugitive asked him not to hand off his case. “I’m not looking to be a notch in somebody’s gun belt,” Dawud said. Shoffler reassured him, “I don’t need a notch. I gave you my word on certain things and I’d like to see that happen. I just wanted to make sure that you knew that I was shooting straight with you and that I will continue to shoot straight with you.”

  But by that time, Shoffler had realized that the fugitive’s demands were absurd and that the only way to bring him back was to capture him. To do that, he needed to lure the fugitive out of Iran, and he decided to exploit what he had come to see as Dawud’s biggest vulnerability—his vanity and incessant need for attention. Nothing would thrill Dawud more, he knew, than boasting on American television about his killing of Tabatabai.

  Shoffler knew dozens of reporters and television producers, and every one of them would have jumped at the chance to get Dawud’s confession. However, Shoffler needed to find the right journalist. He didn’t want to burn any of his regular contacts like Ira by making them the bait in his trap, so he contacted a freelance journalist named Joseph Trento, who specialized in intelligence issues and tended to see the CIA’s hand behind many events. Shoffler told him that Dawud was prepared to publicly admit to the Iranian diplomat’s murder and asked him if he was interested in the story. Trento pounced, and brought the project to 20/20, the ABC television news magazine, which agreed to hire him as a consultant to help produce the segment. Since an American television crew couldn’t get into Iran, Shoffler suggested to Trento that he interview Dawud in Moscow. He then notified FBI agents there so they could arrest the fugitive as soon as he landed. At the last moment, Trento learned about the setup from an intelligence source and, without telling Shoffler, shifted the interview’s location to Istanbul.

  In his 20/20 interview, Dawud came across as an eager job applicant, dressed in a double-breasted sports jacket, a white shirt, a tie, and a tie clip. He recounted his killing of Tabatabai with calm and apparent relish, offering a description of the look on his victim’s face after he realized he had been shot. “Our eyes locked and he gave me the very strong impression of a man who expected to die,” Dawud said. The 20/20 correspondent who conducted the on-air interview, Tom Jarriel, then ticked down the checklist of questions journalists feel obliged to ask when speaking with a murderer. Had he felt any remorse about the shooting? Had he ever lost any sleep over it? Dawud assured him that he hadn’t. “All governments kill traitors. So on that level, I never had any doubt about the man’s death,” he responded.

  A few months after the interview was broadcast in 1995, Shoffler developed acute pancreatitis and died. When a CIA agent called Dawud to tell him, the fugitive broke into tears. He was so moved by Shoffler’s death he sent flowers to his funeral. Ira also was distraught. He had felt as close to Carl Shoffler as he did to Bob Levinson; ever since meeting Carl some eighteen years earlier, he had spoken with him nearly every day. Some journalists maintain distance from their sources and avoid socializing with them. Ira was never like that. He treated his sources like family members and cherished friends. He and Shoffler also belonged to a circle of Washington journalists, lawyers, congressional staffers, and cops who met regularly for drinks or got together on weekends at one another’s homes.

  To honor his late friend, Ira wrote a eulogy of him for The New Yorker that praised his skills as a cultivator of informants and recounted his attempt to convince Dawud to surrender.

  Other cops call their informants snitches or stoolie and often hold them in contempt. Carl Shoffler … called them “sources” and, sometimes, friends. He gave out his home telephone number to mobsters on the run, to suspected terrorists and to defectors from hate groups. For most people engaged in police work, especially those devoted to their families, such a practice would be unthinkable. But for Shoffler, it was a way to build trust. He needed those unsavory informants; he didn’t coddle them, but they knew that he would always be upfront and straight with them.

  The article was among several that Ira wrote for The New Yorker after he retired from NBC News in the mid-1990s. He had started his television career in the 1960s with the network’s local affiliate in New York and had gone on to a high-profile career as a producer of investigative pieces for its flagship program, NBC Nightly News. As a producer, he was a behind-the-scenes workhorse, developing sources, digging out stories, directing film crews, writing scripts, and editing pieces. In the mid-1970
s, NBC paired him with a young on-air correspondent, Brian Ross, whom the network brought to New York from Cleveland after he had won a prestigious journalism award for pieces about Jackie Presser, a corrupt Teamsters union official. The two men were polar opposites. The baby-faced Ross had blond hair and the looks of a choirboy. Ira was pudgy, balding, and bespectacled. He had grown up in Brooklyn and liked to spout Yiddish phrases and act like a street tough. But they clicked as a team, and Ira helped pioneer techniques such as stakeouts, hidden cameras, and confrontational interviews that soon became standard fare for investigative programs. The two journalists, dubbed “Batman and Robin” by their colleagues, became network news stars, winning awards for breaking big stories and appearing as guests on The Dick Cavett Show, a popular late-night program.

  Ira also earned a reputation for tenaciousness and for the self-confidence to roll over his bosses when they got in the way of a story. In 1980, he got a tip the FBI was running a sting operation in which undercover agents, disguised as Arab sheiks, were making payoffs to congressmen in exchange for political favors. The head of NBC News thought the scheme sounded too crazy to be real and told Ira to forget about it. He didn’t and secretly brought in a camera crew from outside Washington, parked a mobile home outside the Hill house where the payoffs were taking place, and, using night-vision equipment, filmed politicians going in and out. He and Ross then broke the story of the investigation, which was code-named “ABSCAM.” It became one of the biggest political scandals of its time, and the FBI sting later served as the basis for the popular film American Hustle.

  Not all of Ira’s pieces were triumphs; some competitors thought he hyped stories, and the newsman, like other investigative journalists, sometimes was prone to obsession and even a little paranoia. After collaborating on a book with a New York City detective who had blown the whistle on police corruption, he turned up at NBC wearing a pistol. He told colleagues he had gotten death threats. By the mid-1990s, his relationship with Brian Ross had unraveled after the on-air correspondent accepted an offer to move to ABC News. Ross offered to take Ira with him, but Ira felt loyal to NBC and thought Ross’s departure a betrayal. The men would never talk again.

  After his retirement from NBC, Ira tried to make a fresh start in television, this time in front of the camera. He developed a show called Ira’s People, on which he planned to interview the interesting criminals and scalawags he had met during his career. One episode of it aired on a cable channel, Court TV, before it was dropped. He also wrote crime stories for The New Yorker, and soon after 9/11 he pitched the magazine on a story idea—to profile Dawud as the prototypical Islamic terrorist. While he was writing Carl Shoffler’s eulogy, the detective’s family had given Ira his correspondence with Dawud and tape recordings he had made of their phone conversations. Ira’s proposal was timely: in 2001, the fugitive had attracted public attention again, not as an assassin but as an actor in a critically acclaimed Iranian film, Kandahar. The movie tells the story of an Afghan-born journalist living in Canada who returns to Afghanistan to search for her sister after the country has fallen under the Taliban’s oppressive rule. In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, a doctor examines the journalist. Because of religious strictures, she has to stand hidden behind a sheet drawn across a room. The sheet has a peephole, through which he peers at her. They recognize each other as English speakers. The doctor explains that he is an American who originally came to Afghanistan to fight as a jihadist. But after wearying of endless battles, he says, he decided to teach himself medicine so he could do some good. He picks up a small bottle of liquid and pours its contents along the edges of his long beard, peeling off his fake whiskers. “I too have to come out from behind the curtain,” he remarks.

  In the film’s credits, the actor playing the doctor is listed as “Hassan Tantai.” When Kandahar was shown in the United States, Dawud was recognized and a flurry of newspaper articles appeared about the escaped killer’s new film career. After Ira called him and mentioned he was a close friend of Carl Shoffler, the fugitive said he would be happy to meet. With the New Yorker assignment in hand, Ira contacted two Canadian journalists who worked for The Fifth Estate, an investigative television program that is Canada’s equivalent of 60 Minutes. A few years earlier, Ira had worked with the men, Linden MacIntyre and Neil Docherty, on a piece about Russian organized crime, and he had arranged for them to interview Bob Levinson on camera about his days tracking Russian mobsters in Miami. The Canadians agreed to accompany Ira and do a piece about Iran for The Fifth Estate.

  When the journalists arrived in Tehran in early 2002, oversized dump trucks were still hauling away debris from the site where the Twin Towers had once stood. After the 9/11 attacks, thousands of Iranians had taken to the streets in a show of solidarity with the United States, holding candles and shouting, “Death to terrorists.” Behind the scenes, a diplomatic window also briefly opened—a crack in the decades-long wall of hatred and distrust that had characterized the relationship between the United States and Iran. Since the shah’s overthrow, the countries had been engaged in what one historian called a twilight war, a hidden conflict in which they had used proxies to strike at each other. The United States had armed Iran’s enemy Iraq during eight years of war in which three hundred thousand Iranians had died. Hezbollah, the terrorist group funded by Iran, had carried out a 1983 suicide bombing of a marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 U.S. troops.

  In the Taliban and Al Qaeda, Iran and the United States found common enemies. Prior to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, American and Iranian officials held secret diplomatic talks, their first in decades. Iranian officials, along with providing the United States with data on Taliban troop locations, offered to rescue American combat pilots forced to bail out over Iran. Then President George W. Bush, in his first State of the Union address after 9/11, named Iran, along with Iraq and North Korea, as a member of an “axis of evil,” countries that were exporting terrorism and developing weapons of mass destruction. The diplomatic window between Washington and Tehran slammed shut again and the secret talks ended.

  Dawud was waiting at the airport to greet Ira and the Fifth Estate crew when they landed. Despite his long exile in Iran, he looked so unassimilated he appeared as if he could have walked off the same flight. He was also homesick. All he wanted to talk about was American politics, movies, music, and books. In interviews with Ira, he displayed the same braggadocio he had shown seven years earlier during his appearance on 20/20. He claimed that he tried to convince his handlers to let him assassinate a political bigwig like the former secretary of state Henry Kissinger rather than a nobody like Ali Akbar Tabatabai. He also expressed mixed feelings about the 9/11 attacks. While he thought it had been wrong to hit the World Trade Center because regular people worked there, the situation at the Pentagon was different. “I felt sorry for the people who died there, especially the civilians. But in a situation like that they knew where they were working,” he said.

  Dawud also repeated an old complaint. Iran, he told Ira, had not turned into the egalitarian, color-blind paradise that he had hoped to help create. Instead, its religious leaders, or mullahs, exercised autocratic control over all aspects of life, and people who questioned their authority faced imprisonment, torture, and death. “The Iranians of my immediate association turned out to be far from paragons of virtue,” he said. “The corruption here among the highest levels of the mullahs is incredible. It includes financial malfeasance, gross human-rights violations, extrajudicial murder and two systems of justice, one for the mullahs and one for the citizens.”

  His wrath was especially focused on one figure—Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a religious leader who had served as Iran’s president from 1989 to 1997. Since leaving office, Rafsanjani had become one of Iran’s wealthiest men, with business interests spanning auto making, construction, real estate, and pistachio nut farming. Dawud contemptuously referred to him as the “pistachio man.” One day he took the Fifth Estate team, which was do
ing a broad piece about the suppression of political dissent in Iran, to a Tehran mosque to film a prayer service. During it, Rafsanjani stepped out from behind a prayer screen to lead the service. Salahuddin told the Canadian journalists that the ex-politician had siphoned off millions of dollars from government oil sales while in office and then used front companies to secretly invest the money in Canada, both in real estate and in business ventures. Linden MacIntyre felt Dawud wanted him and his Fifth Estate colleagues to do an exposé of Rafsanjani, whom the fugitive called “the biggest thief in the history of Iran.”

  On their last day in Iran, Ira and the Canadians went to Dawud’s home in Karaj, an industrial city not far from Tehran, to share a final meal prepared by the fugitive’s wife. Afterward, the Fifth Estate crew left for the airport. Ira, whose flight departed later, figured he would be more comfortable spending time at Dawud’s house than inside the terminal. Once alone with the fugitive, he began to regret that decision. He had seen a side of Dawud that hadn’t come through in Carl Shoffler’s letters or tape recordings. The fugitive told Ira that he suffered frequent bouts of depression, including some that lasted for months. At times, Dawud stammered or broke off speaking mid-sentence, staring out blankly for a few seconds before completing his thought. With the Canadians around, there had been safety in numbers. Now that he was left alone with Dawud, Ira’s fears mounted. The fugitive told Ira that he would not hesitate, if needed, to kill again.