Authors: Barry Meier
FBI agents typically solve cases when criminals or terrorists make mistakes. Those missteps might involve a sloppy email, an impulsive Internet posting, repetitive travel patterns, or other fumbles. A mistake can provide the thread on which an investigator starts pulling. The more James McJunkin looked at the information in Bob's caseâthe emails, the video, the photographsâthe more he was struck by a single impression. He couldn't find a mistake. Each possible lead had led investigators this way and that way before turning back on itself and evaporating. The supposed “clues” made sense only if seen in a different light: as part of a counterintelligence operation, a series of false leads and seductive crumbs scattered by an Iranian intelligence unit to lure the United States into making moves that would disclose how it spied on Iran. The Iranians even appeared to have used the talks about Bob for that purpose. At one point, they gave the FBI the names of several people who they claimed had information about Bob. But when the bureau ran down those names, they discovered they were aliases used by people held in Iranian prisons. At that juncture, U.S. officials decided further talks would be fruitless and broke them off.
The FBI's only remaining operation to find Bob involved Seyed Mir Hejazi, the man described by the CIA as the son of Ayatollah Khamenei's intelligence advisor. Hejazi kept insisting to Madzhit Mamoyan that all the previous hang-ups he had experienced in getting proof of life were the result of infighting among different factions within Iran over who would benefit financially and politically from Bob's release. In early 2011, he told the Kurd that the stars had finally aligned. He claimed that Ayatollah Khamenei had given his group authority to negotiate the terms under which Bob would be freed. Madzhit passed the message along to Boris Birshtein, emphasizing the potential dangers to Hejazi.
HE IS 99% SURE OF GETTING A RESULT. HE ALSO INSISTED THAT HE DOES NOT FIND ANY REASON TO BELIEVE THAT HIS PEOPLE NEED TO LIE TO HIM. THEY COULD SIMPLY TELL HIM TO STAY OUT OF IT INSTEAD OF GIVING HIM PROMISES.
HE ALSO SAID THAT WHAT HE HAS TOLD ME IS 2% OF THE WHOLE SITUATION AND WHAT HAS BEEN GOING ON. FOR EXAMPLE SOME PEOPLE TRYING TO ELIMINATE HIM. IF THEY COULD THEY WOULD HAVE DONE SO ALREADY.
Hejazi suggested an escape plan for Bob worthy of a thriller. He was to be brought by van from an undisclosed location to the Swiss embassy in Tehran. Once he was there, embassy officials would send a coded message to the State Department that would serve as the signal that the former FBI agent had been freed. Bob would then be spirited out of Iran by hiding him inside the trunk of a Swiss embassy car with diplomatic license plates. The vehicle would travel through northwestern Iran and across the Turkish border, delivering Bob into the waiting arms of U.S. officials.
FBI officials, having been burned by Hejazi, kept their expectations low. But Boris Birshtein started working on ways to get the Iranian the ransom payment he wanted for Bob's release while disguising that the source of those funds would be Oleg Deripaska, the Russian oligarch. Boris apparently had a knack for creating complicated chains of bank accounts, the kinds of networks money launderers use, and soon had devised a series of accounts in Cyprus, a country with loose financial regulations. When he showed his handiwork to Joe Krzemien, the FBI agent expressed appreciation for his skills. “I can show you how we can take over one of Deripaska's businesses if we want,” Boris replied.
Hejazi's plan required the cooperation of Swiss diplomats in Tehran, and he told Madzhit that he would soon make contact with them. He also kept coming up with excuses to delay his visit to that country's embassy. Finally, Hejazi must have gone there, because U.S. officials received a message from Swiss diplomats warning them that the Iranian shouldn't be trusted, apparently because of his father's role in Iran's intelligence service. When Boris heard the news, he was irate. Throughout his career, he had rubbed shoulders with corrupt politicians and unscrupulous criminals. Those dealings invariably revolved around money, who needed to get it and who was going to get screwed. But the Iranians Boris had encountered seemed more interested in duplicity than in cutting a deal. “These fucking people are the worst,” he said.
The FBI soon washed its hands of Boris, Madzhit, and Oleg Deripaska. The bureau considered them bullshit artists who had used Bob's case as a means to try to get the United States to do what they wanted without ever delivering anything. The three men hadn't succeeded, but the bureau's judgment was also a reflection of its inability to penetrate Iran. After years of investigations costing millions of dollars, FBI officials couldn't point to a single breakthrough they had made as a result of gumshoe work by agents.
Several months later, in the fall of 2011, the two remaining American hikers held in Iran, Joshua Fattal and Shane Bauer, were released from Evin Prison and put on a flight to Oman, where their families waited. The government of Oman had helped negotiate the pair's release and reportedly paid the $500,000 fines that an Iranian court had assessed against each man. There was plenty of speculation among political observers as to why Iranian officials chose to let the pair go, but it was largely seen as a public relations move by the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who took the action just days before he was to speak at the U.N.
Not long afterward, James McJunkin arrived in Coral Springs to meet with Chris. He did not bring good news. The bureau didn't see any purpose in pursuing further talks with Tehran, because the Iranians were continuing to claim that a terrorist or rebel group was holding Bob. Chris soon went to Washington to meet again with FBI Director Robert Mueller. He urged her to remain patient. She didn't have a choice. For Chris and her family, 2011 hadn't turned out to be a “good” year.
FBI officials decided there was no longer a reason to keep the video secret. In late 2011, the bureau distributed it to the news media on compact discs labeled
LEVINSON FAMILY/PLEA/PROOF OF LIFE
. The tape was preceded by an introduction in which a somber-looking Chris sat next to her son Dave. He had graduated two years earlier from Emory University with magna cum laude honors. Chris got to stand during the school's commencement ceremony with the other proud parents whose children had earned the achievement. Then parents who had themselves graduated magna cum laude were asked to stand. Dave's heart sank. Had his father been there, he would have stood with them. On the video distributed by the FBI, Dave spoke in a calm, steady voice.
My name is David Levinson. And I am speaking on behalf of my mother, Christine Levinson, and my entire family. I am making a plea to the people who are holding my father. My mother has received your messages. Please tell us your demands so we can work together to bring my father home safely. Thank you for taking care of my father and for continuing to provide him with the care and medical treatment he needs to stay alive. My father is a loving and caring man who has always worked hard to provide for his family. He is the father of seven children, a dear husband, a grandfather of two beautiful children, and the pillar of our family. We are not part of any government and we are not experts on the region. No one can help us but you. Please help us. We tried to contact you but you never responded. I am sending this message because we need to know what you want our family to do so that my father can come home safely. We will do everything within our power to bring him home. I don't know how else to communicate with you but my father knows how to contact us. We don't know what else to do.
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A giant digital billboard in Times Square greeted President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the fall of 2012 when he arrived in New York to speak before the U.N. General Assembly for the last time. In nine months, Iranian voters were scheduled to elect his successor. The billboard, which was arranged by the FBI, consisted of a stark image of Bob as a captive and a message that diplomatically accused Iran of stonewalling. Video monitors located in subway stations near U.N. headquarters carried the same image:
United Nations Delegates
Please Encourage the
Islamic Republic of Iran to work
with the United States
Government to bring Bob home
On behalf of the Levinson Family
For Chris and her children, another year had passed in numbing silence. The FBI had hoped the video's public release would generate new leads. Bob's picture was plastered on billboards on roads leading into Iran offering $1 million for information, and in-flight airline magazines in the region contained similar announcements. Dave McGee, Ira Silverman, and Larry Sweeney continued their search, though there had been a turnover in the cast of characters claiming they could help. In late 2011, Sarkis Soghanalian, the old arms merchant, died of heart failure. Soghanalian had insisted up until his final days that he was cooking up a deal to bring Bob home. It was hard to know whether he believed that or whether he had been cruelly using the Levinson family to try to make one last arms deal. In either case, there were plenty of criminals, arms traffickers, and con men eager to fill his shoes, all swearing to Dave, Ira, and Larry that they were connected to Tehran.
About that time, Chris was contacted by a former movie star, Linda Fiorentino. The actress had portrayed a smoldering and double-crossing femme fatale in the 1994 noir-style crime film
The Last Seduction
and had starred in the 1997 science-fiction comedy hit
Men in Black
before her Hollywood career petered out. Fiorentino knew about Bob through an ex-boyfriend, Mark Rossini, a former FBI agent. Rossini had been forced to resign from the bureau in 2008 after it emerged that he had illegally downloaded FBI documents that ended up in the hands of lawyers representing one of Fiorentino's friends, Anthony Pellicano, a private investigator in Hollywood charged with blackmailing clients. Pellicano's lawyers tried to use the FBI records to convince a judge to throw out the case, arguing that prosecutors had withheld evidence from them because it could clear the investigator. The strategy backfired and a Justice Department inquiry uncovered Rossini's role in the theft of the records. Fiorentino insisted she did no wrong, and she was never charged in the incident, but law enforcement officials told reporters they believed she was the person who delivered the bureau documents to Pellicano's lawyers.
Before long, Ira and Fiorentino started speaking regularly. She told him that Rossini, before his downfall at the FBI, had recommended Bob as a private investigator to a close associate of Patrick M. Byrne, the head of an online retailer, Overstock.com, which sold clothing, jewelry, and other products. In 2006, Byrne was leading a public campaign to ban a Wall Street practice known as “naked” short selling, because he believed speculators were using it to manipulate the stock price of his company and others. Then, in early 2007, three of his associates received identical phone calls from a man calling himself “Paul Taylor” who said, “I am the messenger. Patrick Byrne will be killed by Russian entities,” if he did not stop his campaign to ban naked short selling.
Bob had submitted a proposal to look into the incident not long before he disappeared. Fiorentino suspected the Iranians might somehow have learned about him through Byrne's associate, who had a brother living in Dubai. It was a far-fetched guess, and Ira and Dave could never figure out whether Fiorentino wanted to help, was bored, or had slipped back into the thrill-seeking character she had portrayed in
The Last Seduction
.
Throughout the frustrating years they had spent looking for their friend, the two men had stayed focused on another goalâtrying to make sure those at the CIA who had concealed Bob's ties to the agency went to prison for doing so. They were certain that Anne Jablonski had misled investigators and that the CIA, absent the involvement of Senator Bill Nelson, would still be lying about Bob. But in late 2012, Dave realized they faced a problem. The last time FBI agents formally interviewed Anne and others about Bob had been in 2008, when the CIA referred the case to the Justice Department for possible criminal investigation. Dave viewed the department's decision to close that inquiry without bringing charges as more evidence of bungling by federal officials. He was certain that if he were still a prosecutor, he could have built a case against Anne. But the window to bring charges against her and other CIA officials was closing, because the five-year statute of limitations on any false statements made in those 2008 FBI interviews was about to expire. After that, they would be immune from prosecution even if evidence later emerged to show they had knowingly lied or withheld information. Dave's only option was to play for time. With Chris's support, he started lobbying Justice Department officials to conduct new interviews of Anne and other witnesses. He knew they would likely repeat their earlier statements, but the statute-of-limitations clock would be reset for another five years, in case a “smoking gun” emerged.
Justice Department officials eventually agreed. In early 2013, prosecutors invited Chris and Dave to come to department headquarters in Washington to hear the results of the new inquiry. Dave was surprised to learn about a piece of evidence that he hadn't known about and that wasn't anything he was expecting. Prosecutors said they had found an internal CIA email that supported a key part of Anne's testimony. She had sent the message on September 14, 2007, four days after Bob's disappearance and right around the time she would have learned of it. Justice Department officials did not show the email to Dave but described it to him. In it, they said, Anne notified her CIA superiors about Bob's role as an agency consultant. In her most recent FBI interview, Anne repeated that she didn't know Bob was going to Kish and that if she had, she would have tried to stop him. A top federal prosecutor, Michael Mullaney, told Dave and Chris there was only one person who could challenge Anne's version of events. “We're just going to have to wait until Bob comes back,” he said.