Authors: Barry Meier
The flight back to the United States had a four-hour layover in Paris, and Chris, Dan, and Suzi took a taxi to Notre-Dame Cathedral, where Chris prayed for Bob. Snow was falling in New York when they landed at John F. Kennedy. Waiting FBI agents escorted them into a section of Air France's passenger lounge, which was cleared of other travelers. Agents questioned them about the trip, trying to get information while it was fresh. Chris handed over the copy of
The Black Dahlia
, which was sent to the FBI's forensics laboratory to be examined for fingerprints, DNA, and other clues.
A few weeks later, the Levinson family gathered for their first Christmas without Bob. His daughter Sarah kept hoping for a “Christmas miracle,” imagining her mother's trip to Iran might have struck a humanitarian chord with her father's captors, who would release him in time for the holidays. There were presents under the tree just in case.
At Dave McGee's home in Gulf Breeze, the lawyer and his wife, Joyce, were also getting ready for Christmas. They had started a family tradition when their two children were young of making Cornish game hens rather than a turkey for their holiday meal, so each kid could have a bird. Their children were now young adults, but the McGees continued the tradition.
As Christmas Eve approached, the telephone rang at Dave's home. The call was from Jonathan Winer, the money laundering expert and consultant to the Illicit Finance Group. Dave hadn't ever spoken before to Winer, but Ira had known him since the late 1980s when he was on the staff of Senator John Kerry.
Not long after Bob's disappearance, Winer had called Ira and asked if he could be of help. Ira hadn't known at first that the lawyer worked for the Illicit Finance Group, and he told him about Bob's ties to the CIA unit. Ira also said he was trying to get ahold of Bob's agency handler, Anne Jablonski, and asked Winer if he knew of any way to do so. It was at that point that Winer told Ira he was a consultant to the Illicit Finance Group, adding that Anne was a close friend who had just helped him through a bad patch.
Over the previous year, a financial con man named R. Allen Stanford had tried to make Winer's life miserable. Prior to leaving government, the lawyer was investigating Stanford for running what appeared to be a massive Ponzi scheme. When
Businessweek
magazine published an article questioning Stanford's operation, the con man suspected Winer was its source. He hired Kroll, the big private investigations firm, and ordered it to dig up dirt on him. He “is a pure cockroach,” Stanford told a Kroll investigator, a former DEA agent named Tom Cash. “Go after him hard on as many fronts as possible.” Winer was going through a divorce and Cash started chasing rumors his wife had left him for another woman. Anne had stood by him through the ugly episode, Winer told Ira. He agreed to call her about Bob, and a few days later he phoned Ira back from his car while waiting to get cleared into Langley. He said Anne had told him her superiors had ordered her not to talk to anyone about Bob.
By the time of Winer's call to Dave in late December, Anne was under siege. After the CIA's deputy director, Stephen Kappes, returned red-faced from his Senate intelligence panel briefing, he had put together a team of investigators to look into Bob's work for the CIA. The group included operatives from the CIA's Counterintelligence Center, the agency unit that hunts foreign spies and moles. They started examining files and interviewing Anne and other members of the Illicit Finance Group. Anne was in a panic and reached out to Winer and other friends for advice.
Winer told Dave he knew Anne and made it clear he was aware of the internal CIA investigation. He said it was his impression that it wouldn't go anywhere and suggested to Dave that the interests of the Levinson family might be better served if Dave reached a financial settlement with the CIA. Dave wasn't certain why Winer had called, but he sensed the lawyer was doing so unofficially to try to start a negotiation between him and the CIA to resolve the case. He told Winer he appreciated his interest in the Levinsons' welfare but added that Chris and her children had a goal besides moneyâthey wanted to see justice done. “We aren't going away,” Dave told him.
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Chris and her children held a rally on March 9, 2008, at a Coral Springs restaurant called Wings Plus, a favorite of Bob's, to mark the first anniversary of his disappearance and celebrate his sixtieth birthday. The event received some news media coverage, and after their meal, the family stood in the restaurant's parking lot and sang “Happy Birthday.”
A day earlier, Chris had exchanged emails with Dawud Salahuddin, who had promised earlier to contact Iranian officials about her husband. In his reply, he told her he would have to wait a few more weeks to do so because Iranian government offices were closing for the Persian New Year, or Norooz.
This is an odd and painful “anniversary” so to speak and I just want you to be assured that I have not forgotten it or one word of what I have said to you. On correspondence, bear in mind that there are some 11 days to the end of the Iranian calendar year and everybody is trying to get their desk cleared for the next year which following a two-week holiday will begin on April 1, give or take a day. That is to say this is not a good time to put a sensitive letter on a person's desk so I will wait till the holidays and then make the submission I spoke of but that will be to a high-ranking judicial authority and as I have said many times in the past, this is not a judicial matter, it is not a police matterâit is a political question between two mule-headed governments, each suffering its own version of the disorder “center of the world complex” and as the Swahili proverb has it, “When elephants fight the grass suffers” âgrass' here of course meaning people and specifically in this context the family of Robert and Christine Levinson.
I know this past year has not been a good one for me and perhaps it is a blessing that you have kids to keep you busy. My situation allows for too much introspection and too much of anything is not good. Be aware too that our communications are read by interested parties besides us on both sides. Over here, I was told prior to meeting you to stay away and again last week was called in and given what I took as indirect but genuine threats. But not to worry it is simply not in me to be afraid of men. Don't want to get melodramatic but that is where I sit in all this and I am comfortable with that probably because discomfort had been a major theme of my adult life so bureaucratic nonsense does not move me very much and I have simply seen too much real mayhem to be fearful of the sameâespecially when I have done no moral or criminal action.
This started out as a just to let you know line but then I got carried away a bit. Forgive me for that. Hope your demonstration is a real success and be sure that I will keep up my part of the bargain but truth to tell, God hears the prayers of mothers in distress for their loved ones faster I think than those of anyone else.
That week, FBI officials invited Chris to Washington for an update about the status of the search for her husband. Dave McGee, Ira Silverman, Larry Sweeney, and Suzi Halpin also attended the meeting, which was held at the bureau's Washington field office. A senior FBI official named Sean Joyce presided, and officials from the CIA and the State Department were present. Joyce didn't delve into the details of the agency's investigation because there wasn't much new to say. In recent months, FBI agents had finally started to retrace Bob's activities prior to his trip to Kish, but even a year later they hadn't interviewed some key witnesses, such as Houshang Bouzari, the oil consultant in Toronto. Joyce assured Chris that the FBI, the CIA, and the State Department were now working together to bring Bob home. He also acknowledged the bureau had made “some mistakes” in its initial handling of the investigation. Joyce didn't go into details about what he meant, but upon hearing his comment Ira couldn't restrain himself. He first looked at Joyce and then at the CIA officials present. “Not mistakes, crimes,” he said.
The CIA, eager to avoid another confrontation with the Florida senator Bill Nelson, had taken other steps. An agency lawyer, Joseph Sweeney, contacted Dave to discuss Chris's financial claims. It was a welcome call. For months, Dave had been hunting to find money to keep her afloat. Both he and John Moscow, the former prosecutor in New York, had contacted Reed Smith, the law firm in the Bank of Cyprus lawsuit, to collect Bob's bill. But the firm never paid the money, and Dave and Moscow concluded it had decided to stiff Bob because he wasn't around to collect.
At his meeting with Sweeney, Dave took an immediate liking to him. He noticed the CIA lawyer was wearing a graduation ring from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, which Dave viewed as a sign he was trustworthy. He also appeared sympathetic. After listening to Dave's description of Chris's money problems, Sweeney said he could arrange for the CIA to immediately pay her $121,000, the amount Bob would have gotten in June when his consulting contract renewed. Dave added he wanted to discuss a global settlement to provide Bob's family with long-term security. One possibility was to set up a large annuity for Chris funded by the CIA that would provide her with enough annual income to make up for the loss of Bob's earnings. Dave ran some rough numbers. Looking at Bob's billings, he estimated his income in peak years ranged between $250,000 and $300,000. Taking Bob's FBI annual pension of $60,000 into account, a financial consultant advised Dave that Chris would need a $2.5 million annuity to make up the difference. When Dave mentioned the figure to Sweeney, he expected the CIA lawyer to start dickering. Instead, Sweeney said it sounded doable but he needed to run the proposal past his bosses.
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.