Missing Man Page 8
Hair: Black
Affects moustache and goatee
(“Van Dyke” beard)
Eyes: Brown
Remarks: Speaks fluent Russian
Ahmed Rowshandel was described as follows:
Race: White
Sex: Male
Age: Approximately 60–65 years
Nationality: Iranian
Height: Approximately 5'10"
Weight: Approximately 180 pounds
Hair: Gray, balding with fringe
Affects moustache and goatee
(“Van Dyke” beard)
Eyes: Brown
Remarks: Has distinctive wide-set eyes
Speaks Farsi, English, Arabic and German languages
Riza and Rowshandel got down to business. With the U.N. poised to adopt new U.S.-supported trade sanctions against Iran, they said their government was looking for foreign businessmen willing to go around those embargoes and supply their country with needed commodities. As an incentive, Tehran was prepared to reward cooperative companies by selling them oil at a sharp discount, which the businesses could then resell at market prices, pocketing the profit. It was the same strategy Saddam Hussein had used to convince companies to go around the U.S.-led embargo against Iraq. In his report to the Illicit Finance Group, Bob wrote:
Ahmad Rowshandel said privately that he has what he termed “direct access to Iranian President Mahmud [sic] Ahmadinejad” and, further, that he held an unidentified position in the Iranian government.
Rowshandel stated that he had the ability to arrange travel into Iran for international businessmen interested in doing business with that country’s government.
Rowshandel talked about the need for the Iranian government to have the assistance of international businessmen, particularly those based in Europe, as opposed to the United States and Canada, and it was looking for opportunities to develop the metals and urea businesses.
Rowshandel said that he also had the ability to “reward” cooperative international businessmen with lucrative contracts from the Iranian government for quantities of oil at discounts of approximately seven dollars ($7.00) (US) per barrel.
During the meeting, Riza said Iran was particularly looking to buy large quantities of bauxite, an ore used in the production of aluminum. He explained that his country bought bauxite at one time through Marc Rich, an American-born commodities trader who had fled the United States for Switzerland in the 1980s amid tax evasion charges. More recently, Iranian officials had tried to negotiate a deal with the Russian government to get bauxite. Those talks had fallen apart, Riza said, because Russia was concerned the arrangement could limit supplies of the ore needed by its biggest producer of aluminum, United Company RUSAL, or RUSAL, as it was often called.
Bob was still buzzing with excitement when he returned home to Florida and finalized his reports about the Istanbul meeting. He sent them to Anne, who was coming back from a trip to Los Angeles, telling her he was certain Tim Sampson and others would be pleased.
This has got to be the REAL “welcome back” message.
There’s a Fedex which should arrive later this morning which contains a personal note to you and a memo for Mr. B and Mr. T …
Hope we can talk later in the week, once you’re back to work and back up to speed (hope THAT doesn’t take too long.)
Glad you enjoyed L.A.—was stationed there in the mid-70s and literally had a blast running around in Hollywood and Beverly Hills chasing mobsters.
Bob also wanted to do something for Boris. The Christmas holiday season was approaching and the businessman planned to take his wife to Florida. He was driving there and his route would take him into the United States over the Peace Bridge in Buffalo, New York. Bob didn’t want Boris to get hassled and sent a note to an FBI agent in New York City, asking him to make sure Boris’s border crossing went smoothly. The note contained the date and time of his anticipated arrival at the bridge and the license plate number of his Mercedes: “Our friend, together with his wife, plans to spend a few days down here in my neck of the woods for the holiday season. He did us, meaning the U.S., a real biggie when we were overseas together.”
Bob’s note did the trick. Boris and his wife were soon enjoying the sun in Fort Lauderdale, about to board a relaxing five-day luxury cruise.
6
Christmas
Christmas was the best time of the year for the Levinson family. Everyone stopped what they were doing and gathered together, usually in Coral Springs. In 2006, only Dan, Bob’s oldest son, was missing because he was in Japan teaching English while he waited to hear from law schools. A new addition to the Levinson clan was attracting much of the attention: Stephanie’s infant son, Ryan.
One family tradition was to pile into cars and head over to a nearby mall, Sawgrass Mills, for a shopping spree. On Christmas Eve, Chris and a few of the kids went to church. The holidays gave Bob a chance to catch up with Sarah, his third-oldest daughter. She was living in New York, working for Goldman Sachs writing business proposals about potential new investments the firm could make. Sarah saw her father less often than her siblings did and she was struck by the changes in him. He was only fifty-eight, but he was starting to look old and even a little frail. He kept promising his children, including Sarah, that he would take care of himself by eating better and getting more exercise. To prove he was serious, he would open his wallet and pull out a gym membership card. Sarah worried that her father might not stay healthy enough to celebrate many more holidays.
Since returning from Istanbul, Bob had tallied the amount spent in recent months on projects for the Illicit Finance Group and discovered that he had drawn down all the money available under his contract, including the extra $20,000 he had gotten. By his accounting, the CIA now owed him $12,000 in unpaid time and expenses. If more money wasn’t added to his account, he would be dead in the water until May 2007, the time when his contract was scheduled to renew. He couldn’t imagine Anne and Tim letting him sit on his hands for the next six months; the material he was providing them was too good. If anything, he sensed an opportunity. He wanted a bigger role at the CIA, and this seemed like the right moment to make his pitch.
He drafted a memo, recommending amendments to his contract. Currently, the agreement limited the amount of time he could charge to the Illicit Finance Group to 80 hours per month. He proposed raising that monthly cap to 135 hours, a 70 percent increase that would boost his contract’s value to about $130,000, and suggested a proportional rise in his expense allowance. In a lengthy note to Anne, he cited the number of analytical reports he had provided since joining the agency in June, highlighting his contributions to CIA efforts in areas such as counternarcotics (CNC), counterterrorism (CTC), and counterintelligence (CI).
Sorry to have inundated your front yard with FEDEX packages!
Attached is a memorandum which requests that Brian and Tim consider augmenting the budget on the contract since, in effect, as of 31 December, my funding runs out.
I know that when things were drawn up last spring, no one anticipated exactly how much would be needed or, in fact, how successful I might be at producing reports for the shop.
It’s six months later and, as I put it in my memo, I think I have written approximately 111 reports on a variety of subjects, all hopefully of interest to your shop, CNC, CTC, or the CI people.
Most recently, while you were away, I went over to Istanbul and, using Boris B., was able to meet with and fully identify two (2) people who appear to be covert Iranian government agents involved in recruiting European and Western businessmen for the cause—and identify the system the Iranians are utilizing to reward those who cooperate with them.
… I hope that at least some, if not most, of this stuff, has been both new and of interest to the guys and gals.
I have a number of opportunities to keep up the flow of reports but need to know that if I spend this amount of time on your work, I’ll be 1) compensated (at the same rate, mind you—not look
ing for more money) and 2) have the ability to be reimbursed for those out-of-pocket expenditures I’m making on a regular basis, both for travel and for other things.
I do not want to be a pain in the butt and want to assure you that I am loving every minute of it—I just want to be able to continue …
If Brian or Tim need more information, either via documentation, by phone, or from me IN PERSON, for example, just whistle, and I’ll be on a plane to DC to meet.
Please insure that the “powers that be” know that I continue to regard this work as a unique opportunity to serve my country and do not take anything for granted.
When Bob heard back from Anne, it wasn’t the response he was expecting. She told him the legislation authorizing the CIA’s new fiscal year budget was stuck in Congress and that agency expenditures were on hold until it passed.
Minor problem. We’re OUT of cash on this contract for extras. Brian is searching high and low to scare up some cash to cover some recent expenses you billed. The well is sorta’ dry thanks to some cuts here. So … feel free to take some TIME off, as right now we’ve got to start robbing Peter and paying Paul to cover things … Lovin’ the stuff, though.
Bob could hardly believe it. During the past six months, all his feedback was positive and upbeat. He began to worry that maybe Tim Sampson or Brian O’Toole was unhappy he had used up his funding too quickly. He wrote Anne: “Wanted to make sure you knew that I was sorry for any aggravation caused, tried to stay within budget and get the job done. Also wanted to know if Mr. T. and Mr. B. were satisfied with what I’ve been doing.”
She reassured him the agency’s budget was the only issue: “Oh, Bobby, everybody’s MORE than satisfied, they’re thrilled. Right now the problem is the coffers are EMPTY and so there’s just nothing to pay for the extra at this point. But trust me, everyone is THRILLED.”
He managed to hide his disappointment from Chris and the kids. Some of his sources, including Ken Rijock, the ex-lawyer in Miami, were clamoring for money and he needed to hold them at bay. Rijock kept emailing Bob about the dynamite intelligence Thor Halversson was getting from his informants in Venezuela. Rijock said if the CIA wasn’t going to pay, Bob should start shopping Thor’s material to another part of the U.S. government, like the Defense Intelligence Agency: “T is losing faith that the sponsor will come up with the money. There is uranium activity by Iranians in VZ and T has 2 weeks of intel on many important subjects sitting on his desk waiting for funds. If the sponsor fails to deliver, what do we do? Go to DIA? I think that’s our next move here. The stakes are too high.”
Bob responded he was also frustrated with the agency. “I too am pissed off to a fare-thee-well … My feeling is that if this stuff is so important and so good, they should have begun re-funding the project on December 13th.”
He sent Anne another memo listing projects he could pursue if funding was freed up. He wrote:
Enroute to your house for delivery on Friday 29 December is something I put together for you and the gang, dealing with your own favorite subjects. I know that I’m supposed to be a “good boy” and stand down but, as I explain in the accompanying note in the package, I felt an obligation to get what I got and get it in your hands. After more than 35 years of doing this stuff, I still love it and can do it in my sleep. Best wishes for a happy, healthy and successful New Year. Hoping that I can continue helping out!
His accompanying memo mentioned several projects, including a report about an upcoming meeting between Hugo Chávez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to discuss what Venezuela might do if Israel attacked Iran. Bob had also contacted Houshang Bouzari, the oil consultant in Toronto, and asked him to run down information about Ahmad Rowshandel, one of the Iranians he had met in Istanbul. Without mentioning Bouzari’s name in his memo to Anne, Bob wrote that one of his sources had “conducted detailed inquiries concerning six (6) companies which were registered in the Islamic Republic of Iran by Ahmad Rowshandel of Teheran and Berlin—these inquiries show that Rowshandel is probably running these companies as ‘fronts’ for the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.”
It was also around Christmas that a juicy case came through Bob’s door, one he knew Anne would love. It had everything—Russian organized crime, Kremlin politics, espionage, and a mysterious murder—and the case was making front-page news around the world. The dead man was a former KGB agent named Alexander Litvinenko, who had been living and working in London as a private investigator. He was an outspoken critic of the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and publicly blamed him for the murder of a Russian investigative journalist and other crimes. On a November day in 2006, Litvinenko developed severe stomach cramps and diarrhea. After he was hospitalized, doctors discovered that an assassin had slipped him a lethal dose of a radioactive material, polonium, and on his deathbed Litvinenko accused Putin of ordering his murder.
Bob’s connection to the case was through another former KGB agent turned private investigator named Yuri Shvets. When Bob got assignments from clients seeking information about Russian businessmen, he often subcontracted the jobs out to the former Soviet spy, who had been living in the United States since the early 1990s. Shvets told Scotland Yard detectives that Litvinenko had asked him for similar help on a background investigation he was hired to conduct on a very highly placed member of Putin’s inner circle. Their inquiry had turned up damaging material on the man, Viktor Ivanov, the chairman of Aeroflot airlines and a Moscow power broker known as the “Cardinal of the Kremlin.” Then Litvinenko made a fatal mistake, Shvets told British detectives. He gave the report to another former KGB operative working on the assignment. Shvets said he was certain that the man, Andrei Lugovoi, was a double agent working for Russian intelligence and that when Putin and his allies learned about Litvinenko’s findings, they ordered him killed.
Shvets shared much of his story with a British journalist, Tom Mangold, who had known Bob for many years. Mangold had the same type of relationship with Bob that Ira Silverman enjoyed; he tipped off the journalists to information and they reciprocated by treating him well. Mangold had suggested to Bob after his bureau retirement that they collaborate on a book about his law enforcement career that the British writer wanted to call “Manhunter.” With England transfixed in late 2006 by the bizarre murder of Alexander Litvinenko, Mangold did a radio program about the case called The Litvinenko Mystery, on which both Bob and Yuri Shvets appeared as guests. Bob explained how the results of due diligence investigations could make or break multimillion-dollar business deals, suggesting the stakes were high enough to provide a motive for murder.
Around the time the program aired, a Canadian-born lawyer living in London, Robert Amsterdam, contacted Bob about the Litvinenko case. Bob had worked earlier for Amsterdam, who represented Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former head of a major Russian energy company, Yukos Oil. In 2005, Khodorkovsky had been convicted of tax fraud charges and sent to a Soviet-era prison that once served as a forced labor camp. Many people suspected Vladimir Putin of engineering his downfall, and Amsterdam believed that any information tying Putin or his allies to Litvinenko’s murder might help free his client. He hired Bob to find out what he could.
Right after New Year’s Day, Bob sent Anne another note, alerting her to his involvement in the Litvinenko case. He also told her he was about to take another overseas trip for Global Witness as part of his continuing investigation into Semion Mogilevich and would be meeting in the coming weeks with sources in the United States and abroad who could provide valuable information for Illicit Finance Group. In the note, he abbreviated counterterrorism as “CT” and Russian organized crime as “ROC.”
Can you give me any guidance on what to realistically expect regarding the possibilities of obtaining continued funding? I’m asking for the following reasons, which hopefully will show why this is on my mind.
I’m going to be meeting with a couple of people this week here in Miami, one of whom had been very helpful on the situation down south. The other has been helping
on CT stuff down south.
Next week, I’ll be in Tel Aviv in connection with the natural gas investigation.
I was contacted during the holidays by Khodorkovsky’s Canadian lawyer, whom I helped out on a couple of international cases a few years ago, and he is interested in turning me loose to document connections between Yukos and the Litvinenko poisoning.
I’m going to Budapest on the 20th and while most of my time is to be spent on the natural gas thing, an intermediary is going to be setting up a meeting with a top level Russian “businessman” who should be able to assist us with the ROC program.
Please let me know if you can share anything, even at this early time.
When he didn’t hear anything from her for two days, he emailed Anne again. “If Mr. Brian and Mr. Tim have any news, please share when you get a chance,” he wrote. This time, she responded. Anne said that the CIA, like other government offices, had been closed an extra day over the New Year’s break to mark the funeral of the former president Gerald Ford, who had died in late December.
Brian and Tim? Poor chumps got the flu! Our office is a dang sick ward. Everyone, myself included, is just coming back off a lonnnnnnng holiday weekend. We got Monday off for New Year’s, Tuesday for Ford’s day of mourning and I took Wednesday to burn up some use/lose leave. Lovely. And we were in NJ for the annual family holiday (dys)function. We’re desperately hunting for money. The budget is AWFUL. We barely have travel money left for the analysts. But we’re still hopeful. You’re doing AWESOME stuff. Don’t doubt that for a second.
He emailed her back:
Thanks for the update—trying to stay out of your way and keep what for me would be a very low profile (can’t seem to do it, though!)—I truly and I mean TRULY appreciate the kind words—having been doing my best to keep all of my “friends” happy and hopeful—expect to be back from across the pond on the 13th. If there’s anything new just email me.
Best to Mr. Bob and the sick ward inhabitants.