Missing Man Page 6

  Dawud didn’t drive, and when it was time for Ira to leave for the airport, he found a neighbor who agreed to take them. It was dark when the man arrived. Ira and Dawud climbed into the backseat. On the way to Dawud’s home, Ira’s taxi had traveled along a well-lit motorway. The fugitive’s neighbor zigzagged along pitch-black roads that could have been headed anywhere. It was only an hour later, when Ira saw signs for the airport, that he began to relax.

  His profile of Dawud, “An American Terrorist,” appeared in the August 5, 2002, issue of The New Yorker. In the piece’s conclusion, Ira hammered home Carl Shoffler’s view of the fugitive, which he had come to share—Dawud knew secrets of enormous value to U.S. intelligence. Ira wrote: “Although his capture would be a triumph for law enforcement, Salahuddin may be, from an intelligence perspective, more useful left in place. His efforts on behalf of the revolution have afforded him a high level of access to the inner circle of the government, especially among moderates and others interested in rapprochement with the United States.”

  The article would prove to be Ira’s last assignment for the magazine or any other publication. In 2006, he was seventy-one, and the years since his trip to Tehran hadn’t treated him kindly. His career as a journalist appeared over, and, to stave off retirement, he tried his hand at writing screenplays, though none of them went anywhere. He also continued to speak regularly with Dawud. They talked about politics, events in the news, or whatever was on the fugitive’s mind. But Ira kept hoping for more—a tip from Dawud that might point him toward one more big story, like the warning of a coming terrorist attack. In late 2005, Dawud told Ira he sensed the “curtain” was coming down on him in Iran. With the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the country’s new president, the political protection he had enjoyed was disappearing and he worried he might soon be jailed or expelled. Iran was also becoming increasingly chaotic. People were falling ill with radiation sickness, he said, because the Iranian government was using nuclear waste to “harden” conventional bombs.

  It was also in late 2005 that Bob started asking Ira about Dawud. The two friends had spoken over the years about the fugitive, but Bob’s questions became more pointed and he wanted to know if Ira could connect him with Dawud. Ira knew Bob wanted to get government work, and if he could help him, he was happy to do it. He saw himself passing along to Bob the torch left behind by the journalist’s other confidant, Carl Shoffler.

  After their lunch in June 2006 at Clyde’s, Ira and Bob started kicking around ways in which the investigator could approach the fugitive. Dawud had made it clear to Ira that he didn’t intend to return to the United States to “face the music,” but they figured that Bob could offer other favors, such as arranging a reunion in a safe place outside Iran where Dawud could see his mother before she died. To start the ball rolling, Bob suggested a strategy that dovetailed with the Illicit Finance Group’s interests—Ira would tell Dawud he was a private investigator hired to locate assets in Canada purchased by former Iranian president Rafsanjani with looted money. Earlier, Dawud had told Ira and the Fifth Estate team that one of those ventures was a privately operated expressway that ran through Toronto called Highway 407. Ira sent Bob an email with information about it, referring to Iranians such as Rafsanjani as the “I” guys or people.

  The link below gives you some of the history on the building and financing of the 407 Express Toll Route (ETR) which runs east-west just north of Toronto. As you’ll see the 407 was originally constructed in 1997 for the Ontario Provincial Government by Raytheon. In 1999, it was taken over by an international consortium—here’s where I imagine the “I” guys come in as players laundering their black money skimmed from the oil profits of the Islamic Republic.

  Our guy says he can come up with the names of the “I” people who moved the money and set up the deals.

  The “I” people feel comfortable in Toronto and have lots of clout there, our guy says, because of years and years of dealings involving the acquisition of heavy equipment for the “I” petroleum business, refineries, drilling, that kind of thing.

  In addition, our guy says there are huge investments in shopping centers and commercial and residential real estate projects in and around Toronto and Vancouver.

  Ira then called Dawud and told him that a private investigator friend was interested in the “pistachio man.” A few days later, Bob, while in Geneva for a corporate client, made contact with the fugitive. Afterward, he sent Ira an email.

  It turns out that our friend was waiting by the phone for a couple of hours thinking that I would call late into the evening. I later told him after we spoke this afternoon at 2:30 PM Geneva time that my parents on Long Island taught me never but never to call anyone’s house after 9 PM, that it was bad manners. Anyway, our friend and I spoke for about thirty-five or forty minutes. I was very careful on the phone and used your “pistachio nuts” code. Very useful I might add. And what I hoped is that I became more than just another voice on the phone. I tried to accomplish a couple of things. One, I need his patience and trust in that I want to be as complete as I can when we sit down and talk about pistachios, etc … Second, I would like to sit down with him in a place other than where he is, despite his assurances of my safety, etc. I think that I was able to get that over for starters. I wanted to be able to sit down with him one-on-one, even if it’s for a short time. I also specifically requested and tried to emphasize that if he or anybody else there has other leads I can pursue regarding pistachios in Toronto, he should send them through an email to you. I hope you can reiterate that for me. I don’t want to jump the gun, claim I’ve got everything when I still have to nail many things down on the nut business …

  Best wishes.

  Talk soon. Returning home Sunday evening.

  On behalf of Uncle, thanks (I really mean that!).

  4

  Boris

  Bob Levinson arrived in Toronto in the early fall of 2006 to meet someone who knew a lot about the “pistachio man.” He was an Iranian-born oil industry consultant named Houshang Bouzari who had served as a close advisor to Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani until he ran afoul of the politician. Then he had been nearly tortured to death.

  Bouzari was among Tehran’s best and brightest. After studying abroad and receiving a doctorate in physics, he returned home following the Islamic Revolution and attracted Rafsanjani’s attention. The politician, then chairman of Iran’s parliament, hired Bouzari as a speechwriter and appointed him an advisor to Iran’s national oil company. After several years, Bouzari decided to leave Iran and moved to Rome, where he established himself as an energy industry consultant, setting up deals between multinational producers and the Iranian government. In 1990, he helped put together a $1.8 billion plan for oil companies to exploit a massive natural gas reserve known as the South Pars field that lay beneath the Persian Gulf between Iran and Qatar. Over time, Bouzari’s commissions on the deal were scheduled to reach $35 million.

  After the deal was struck, Rafsanjani, who had become Iran’s president in 1989, summoned Bouzari to Tehran and asked him to mentor his son Medhi, who was then twenty-one, in the energy business. Over the next two years, Bouzari would later say, he subsidized Mehdi Rafsanjani’s travel through Europe, including stays at five-star hotels and evenings with escorts. Then Mehdi, through an intermediary, demanded a $50 million payment from Bouzari, threatening to scrap the South Pars project if he was not paid. The consultant’s friends warned Bouzari to flee Iran and the wrath of the Rafsanjani family, advice he failed to heed. In 1993, three Iranian intelligence agents arrived at his apartment, arrested him, and brought him blindfolded to Evin Prison, where his nightmare began. Guards forced his head into a toilet filled with excrement. Electric prods were applied to his kneecaps, throat, and genitals. He was strapped down on a table and a metal cable was used to whip his feet. On several occasions, he was informed he would be executed. Guards came to his cell and escorted him to a scaffold, where they blindfolded him. He heard a trapdoor drop o
pen. After the blindfold was removed, he realized he hadn’t been standing on the door. Eventually, through bribes and guile, Bouzari managed to escape Iran.

  Bob learned about him because of a lawsuit Bouzari filed in Toronto against Mehdi Rafsanjani. A Canadian organization working on that lawsuit was affiliated with the Center for Justice and Accountability, the human rights group for which Bob did investigations, and he used the connection to contact Bouzari. He told him he was conducting an investigation for a client interested in Iran’s oil industry and government. When Bob met the consultant, twelve years had passed since his ordeal in Evin Prison but he still bore scars. Bouzari was then in his fifties, and his hair and beard were prematurely white.

  By 2006, Mehdi Rafsanjani and the South Pars deal had drawn the interest of law enforcement officials in several countries. Documents seized by Norwegian officials during a raid on that country’s biggest energy company, Statoil, uncovered multimillion-dollar payments to a London-based firm with ties to Rafsanjani’s son. Statoil executives admitted they had retained Mehdi as a “political advisor” and were paying him to make sure the company’s work in Iran ran smoothly.

  When Bob told Bouzari he was eager to locate Rafsanjani family assets in Canada, the consultant laid out what he had heard over the years. He said the family owned condominiums near the city of Vancouver, investments made in the names of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani’s daughters. Along with the Highway 407 toll road in Toronto, the elder Rafsanjani had supposedly invested in an area shopping mall called Times Square. Bob drove out to the mall, a modest three-story suburban development, and took photographs of it. He called Ira. “I think we’ve hit the mother lode,” he told him. He typed up an analytical report for the Illicit Finance Group summarizing what Bouzari had said and sent it to Anne Jablonski.

  In mid-2006, Bob was also presented with an opening to push forward his relationship with Dawud Salahuddin. The occasion was a planned trip to the United States by the former Iranian president Mohammed Khatami, who left office in 2005 following the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Khatami was viewed in the West as a moderate, and the former U.S. president Jimmy Carter had invited him to speak at his public policy institute in Atlanta. Then Dawud called Ira to tell him that Khatami was considering canceling the trip because American officials hadn’t notified him he would be treated as a diplomat, a status that would allow him to avoid fingerprinting and other humiliating entry procedures. The fugitive asked Ira if he knew anyone who could pull strings on Khatami’s behalf, and Ira contacted Bob.

  The former agent liked to tell FBI recruits when giving lectures about developing sources that it was critical to show a potential informant you possessed the clout to fix his or her problem. He emailed Ira: “Just so you know, I’m trying to be of assistance on the fingerprints issue. If I can, in fact, deliver, I’ll let you know immediately so you can advise our mutual friend. If it’s, in fact, possible, I would like to be the one who made even this small part possible—and be viewed as a problem solver.”

  Bob sent a note to a friend with the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, in which he hyped his CIA relationship to get traction.

  Have an op going w/Iranians for the “dark side” and would like to know if you or a buddy might be able to assist quietly. A former president of Iran, Mohammed Khatami is traveling to Washington for a speech … He’s also going to hold some very hush-hush talks with former President Carter at the Carter Center in Atlanta. Hang up is that he has heartburn with being fingerprinted upon entering the U.S., saying it is, to him anyway, insulting to have to submit to same.

  If DSS is possibly going to afford security for a visit, is there any way you might be able to get DHS/Immigration to forego the normal fingerprinting. This, believe it or not, would assist me greatly in the op. Please advise ASAP if you can do me any good.

  A few days later, Bob’s contact got back to him to say he didn’t need to worry; U.S. officials had already granted Khatami diplomatic status. But Bob still wanted Dawud to think he was the one who had made it happen. He wrote Ira: “Please tell our friend that MK is going to be met planeside. As a result of a personal favor, he will not be subjected to any indignities.”

  Along with his CIA work, Bob needed to find new private clients, and in the summer of 2006, he got a juicy assignment from a London-based public interest group called Global Witness. The organization specialized in high-profile exposés that revealed political and business corruption, particularly in the area of natural resource exploitation. Global Witness got much of its funding from the billionaire investor George Soros, and it had made its name in the late 1990s by revealing the trade in so-called blood diamonds, jewels mined in strife-torn African countries that were laundered by middlemen before ending up in shops such as Tiffany and Cartier. The cash generated by sales of the diamonds was then used to buy weapons, which were shipped back to Africa.

  More recently, Global Witness had turned its attention to the natural gas industry in Eastern Europe. Much of the gas used to heat homes and generate power in Western Europe was extracted thousands of miles away in Turkmenistan, a former Soviet republic. From there, the gas was carried by a system of pipelines through Russia and Ukraine and to the West. In 2006, Global Witness published a report about possible corruption and political kickbacks in the awarding of contracts to middlemen involved in Ukraine’s pipeline system. One of those companies was a little-known firm called RosUkrEnergo. On paper, a businessman, Dmitry Firtash, owned the company. But some former Ukrainian government officials had claimed to Global Witness that the real power behind RosUkrEnergo was the man then referred to by journalists as “the most dangerous criminal in the world,” a Russian mobster named Semion Mogilevich.

  Mogilevich, a bald, morbidly obese man, presided over an international network of gangs involved in extortion, prostitution, art theft, and fraud. He reputedly enjoyed the protection of politicians and police officials throughout Eastern Europe, and he had engineered a Wall Street scam in the mid-1990s that defrauded investors out of tens of millions of dollars. Following his indictment, Mogilevich never returned to the United States to stand trial, and he held a spot on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.

  RosUkrEnergo denied any links to the gangster, but speculation continued. For Global Witness, tying Mogilevich to the firm would be a major coup. The group was funneling whatever information it was learning to U.S. prosecutors looking into the Ukrainian gas trade. To make a link between the mobster and the company stick in court, it would need hard evidence and witness statements. Investigating the business and political connections of Russian criminals was extremely dangerous. In 2004, an American journalist, Paul Klebnikov, who specialized in reporting on Russian political corruption, was shot to death gangland style on a Moscow street. At the time, Bob was working for SafirRosetti and he was hired to investigate Klebnikov’s murder. Upon his arrival in Moscow, he met a former FBI official for breakfast at an American-style coffee shop there called the Starlite Diner. When Bob explained his assignment, his old colleague was stunned. “You need to leave right now,” the man told him. “This is a high-profile assassination and it is dangerous doing this stuff.”

  Still, Mogilevich was the kind of criminal every investigator wanted to catch, and Bob drew up a proposal that would cost Global Witness $100,000 and take him to Kiev, Tel Aviv, and several other cities. Once the group signed off, Bob’s first call was to another former FBI agent, John Good, who had also become a private investigator. Years earlier, Good had contacted Bob about one of his clients, a Lithuanian-born businessman named Boris Birshtein who lived in Toronto. At the time, Good was compiling a report for stock market regulators attesting to Birshtein’s character, and he had run across newspaper articles and other material that gave him pause.

  Birshtein was depicted in those articles as a politically connected financial Music Man, who had spent his career cutting questionable deals, first in the Soviet Union and then in two former Soviet republics, Mold
ova and Kyrgyzstan, that were economic backwaters. The businessman would arrive at a remote outpost by private jet emblazoned in gold lettering with the name of his Swiss trading company, Seabeco, check into a fancy hotel, and sign contracts with local politicians for commodities such as fertilizer, natural gas, and metals. Soon after his departure, scandals might arise involving alleged bribes paid to officials by Seabeco. Some newspaper articles also suggested ties between Birshtein and Russian organized crime, a link he vigorously denied. If asked about reports questioning his business practices, Birshtein would look hurt, place his hand near his heart, and swear he had never done anything illegal.

  In 2006, Bob called Good and told him he wanted to meet Birshtein. Bob knew something about the businessman that he wanted to share with him. He felt certain that once Birshtein heard the news, he would be eager to tell everything he knew about Semion Mogilevich.

  A decade earlier, just before Bob retired from the bureau, Mogilevich had met with federal prosecutors and FBI agents in an attempt to cut a plea deal and avoid indictment for his Wall Street scam. For two days, the gangster ratted out other reputed Russian mobsters. He also claimed that Birshtein, to nail down business deals, had paid huge bribes to top officials in the KGB and its successor agency, the FSB. Eventually, other criminals had declared Birshtein “out,” or persona non grata, because he spoke too publicly about the bribes, Mogilevich said.

  Prosecutors hadn’t considered Mogilevich’s claims worthy of a deal, and they did not take any action against Birshtein based on what the gangster said. But years later, the impact of Mogilevich’s comments still lingered. When Birshtein went to an airport to take a flight to the United States or attempted to cross the Canadian-U.S. border by car, his name would flash up on a watch list and American customs officials would question him for hours about the reason for his visit. Over the years, he had spent a small fortune on lawyers and lobbyists in a failed effort to get his name off the watch list.