Authors: Barry Meier
2. In view of the November 17 deadline, two actions to be taken urgently by the Secretary of State:
delaying publication of the IAEA report
committing to a moratorium on public criticism of Iran and on “hostile actions” (for a few months)
Following these actions, the Ambassador estimated that it would be possible to release Robert Levinson prior to the Vatican meeting.
The Ambassador emphasized that unlike prior negotiations, this meeting would have to be conducted in a “truthful” and quiet way, leading to a positive outcome. In his opinion, success will depend on our common belief in God. “It was the guidance of our Lord and God that brought us here.” He looks to God to protect both nations from nuclear bombs and military conflicts.
The Ambassador sends a “very special hello to Doug.” We concluded the meeting with a prayer.
After the meeting, which lasted an hour and a half, the Iranian diplomat gave his guests a tour of his residence, which his wife, an interior designer, had decorated. One ground-floor room was lined with six decorative niches, each containing a garishly painted fresco depicting an ancient Persian city. Madzhit and Eshel were then driven to the U.S. embassy, where FBI agents debriefed them. Eshel also spoke by phone with Robert Destro and said it was his impression that Iranian government officials wanted to release Bob as a “gesture of good faith.” Later that afternoon, the Iranian ambassador called Madzhit and asked him to return to his residence for a separate meeting. In a subsequent memo to the FBI, Destro summarized the official's comments to Madzhit in bold lettering:
1. That the Ambassador needs feedback this week.
2. The Iranians also want to discuss several Iranians held by the United States.
3. The Ambassador confirmed that:
a. A deal could be reached if the November 17 publication of the IAEA report could be postponed; and that
b. Robert Levinson would be released
In a memo to the FBI, Destro suggested several steps to help the Fellowship expand its efforts to free Bob. Among other things, Destro proposed a meeting between Secretary of State Clinton, Douglas Coe, Boris, Madzhit, and Ory Eshel so Clinton could hear firsthand what occurred in Paris. “This would provide the sufficient time ahead of the scheduled publication of the IAEA report for the Secretary to consider options,” Destro wrote.
An FBI agent indicated that the bureau would pass the Fellowship's reports to the State Department. But Destro never heard another word about them. The IAEA report was released a week before its anticipated publication, and as expected it contained evidence Iran was working to develop components of a nuclear weapon. Iranian officials cast the IAEA report as a fabrication created by the United States, and Obama administration officials announced they would use the evidence of work on nuclear weapons technology as the basis for new sanctions.
Robert Destro would later wonder whether U.S. officials ever took seriously Ambassador Miraboutalebi's statements because of the FBI's disdain for Boris, or if senior State Department officials ever saw the Fellowship's reports. But whatever the case, it soon became clear to him that someone within the U.S. government wanted Boris out of the picture, once and for all.
In March 2012, five months after the Paris meeting, Boris's nephew, Jack Braverman, arrived at the Toronto airport with his wife and their children to take a flight for a vacation in Florida. Braverman was listed on corporate documents as an executive in several of Boris's companies, but the businessman treated him more like a personal assistant and general gofer. For instance, after Boris learned in early 2011 that Dave McGee and Ira Silverman were flying into Toronto to visit, he summoned Braverman back from a family vacation in Florida so he could chauffeur them around. When Dave and Ira saw him at the Toronto airport, he appeared so exhausted they thought he might have driven back nonstop from Fort Lauderdale.
As he waited with his family to board their flight, Braverman was pulled aside by U.S. border officials, who began to question him. They wanted to know if he knew a man named Madzhit Mamoyan and why the Kurd, who was on a U.S. watch list, was using a cell phone for which Braverman's company was paying the bill. They also asked him if he ever had met Madzhit or if the Kurd had come to Canada to meet Boris. The border agents also questioned him about his associations with Boris. Braverman's wife, who knew nothing about Madzhit or about Boris's problems getting into the United States, was horrified. Braverman was let go, but by then his family was forced to cancel their departure and return home. Robert Destro didn't view himself as a person given to conspiracy theories, but after the episode involving Braverman, it was hard not to think that some officials in the U.S. government were more interested in keeping tabs on Boris and his friends than in finding Bob. After the airport incident, Boris decided he was done with Bob's case.
In April 2015, American and Iranian government officials stood in a hotel ballroom in Lausanne, Switzerland, to announce a plan under which Iran would restrict its development of nuclear weapons in exchange for the lifting of economic and financial sanctions. The final details of a deal remained to be worked out. But the framework for that agreement, which followed months of talks between the United States, Iran, and several European countries, was hailed as a major breakthrough. President Obama, in a speech in the White House Rose Garden, called it “a historic understanding with Iran.”
Obama administration officials had made it clear during the talks that Bob's fate and those of several Americans held in Iran were not a part of the negotiations. Along with Saeed Abedini, the pastor, and Amir Hekmati, the former marine, another Iranian-American, Jason Rezaian, a reporter for
The Washington Post
, had joined them in Evin Prison. U.S. officials insisted they didn't include the men in the talks because they didn't want the Iranians to use them as pawns they could play to their advantage. But if Ambassador Miraboutalebi's demands in 2011 were any indication, Bob had long ago become one.
After the announcement in Switzerland, Chris got a call from President Obama's top advisor on homeland security and terrorism, Lisa Monaco. She told Chris she wanted to assure her the White House hadn't forgotten her husband and would continue to press Iran about him. “We plan to talk to them about Bob,” Monaco said.
Chris hung up the phone. Since the start of her long ordeal, her faith in her family, her religion, and the FBI had sustained her. For seven years, she followed the instructions of the bureau and the State Department to the letter. She lied because it was necessary. She performed on cue when required. She swallowed her pride and exhibited respect to Iranian officials even as they treated her and her family with contempt. During that time, she watched happy reunions take place for families other than her own. She had endured it all for one reasonâshe believed if she did what U.S. officials told her to do, Bob would return home. Those close to her, including some of Chris's children, wondered at times if she wasn't blinded by her allegiance to the FBI. They didn't blame her because they knew she could not have acted differently. As Chris saw it, she and Bob had entered into a covenant of trust with the U.S. government when he had joined the bureau, a bond to which both sides were still obligated. She never imagined her government might have withheld information from her about Bob or failed to take a step that might have resulted in his freedom, such as releasing the Fellowship's report about what Ambassador Miraboutalebi had said.
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On most Wednesdays at 11:00 a.m., officials from the FBI, the CIA, and the State Department gathered at bureau headquarters to talk about Bob Levinson's case. By early 2015, such meetings had been going on for years and there wasn't much left to discuss.
Back in 2012, after the last two American hikers were released from Evin Prison, U.S. officials had quietly taken several steps to encourage prisoner swaps with Iran, hoping one might include Bob. An Iranian woman, Shahrazad Mir Gholikhan, had spent nearly five years in a federal prison following her conviction in 2008 for conspiring to export three thousand military-grade night vision goggles to Iran. Rather than requiring her to spend more time in a halfway facility, American officials allowed the government of Oman to negotiate her departure from the United States. Around that same time, the Justice Department dropped its effort to extradite to the United States a former Iranian diplomat living in London to face charges of trying to ship American-made military equipment to Iran.
Iranian officials hadn't responded to those gestures and the FBI decided in 2015 that a larger reward for news about Bob might bring in new information. That March, on the eighth anniversary of his disappearance, the bureau increased the reward from $1 million to $5 million. The lure of big money attracted plenty of people, all claiming to know something about the missing man's whereabouts. Agents chased down promising leads and, at the urging of Bob's old friend Larry Sweeney, traveled to Beirut to see an associate of the late arms dealer Sarkis Soghanalian. The man had insisted for years that he had connections who could help free Bob. When he was polygraphed, FBI agents found his answers to be so deceptive that they packed up their equipment after thirty minutes and left to fly home.
By then, some FBI officials thought the only way to try to break the logjam with Iran over Bob was to publicly admit the obviousâthat he had gone to Kish as a “rogue” spy. Officially confirming Bob's CIA connection would hardly have surprised anyone. His agency ties had received extensive media publicity, and many FBI officials felt certain his captors knew about them. Chris and Dave were also urging the State Department to bring in an outside negotiator to restart talks with Tehran about Bob. For an intermediary to have credibility in such negotiations, he would need to be forthright about Bob.
But many U.S. officials still had an autoimmune response when it came to revealing Bob's CIA connection. Some FBI supervisors clung to the notion that officially confirming it would remove any last doubts in the minds of his captors, further jeopardizing his safety. By 2015, bureau officials had manufactured so many different stories about Bob they couldn't keep them straight. For years, they had said he went to Kish to investigate cigarette smuggling. In announcing the new $5 million reward, however, an FBI press release declared that Bob had gone there on “behalf of several large corporations.” The claim was so unhinged from reality that it might have sprung from the fertile imagination of Dawud Salahuddin.
CIA officials were dead set against disclosing the nature of Bob's relationship; their collective DNA recoiled at the prospect. It's natural for an intelligence agency to go into disavowal mode when one of its operatives or assets is captured or disappears; such denials are so commonplace they serve as plot devices in espionage movies. The CIA's desire to suppress the facts about Bob's case was especially strong because agency officials had lied not only to the outside world about him but also to their own government. White House officials had no way of knowing how Iran would react to an acknowledgment of Bob's agency ties. Iranian leaders might greet the concession as a signal to start negotiations or seize on it as a vehicle to whip up a public frenzy against the “Great Satan” and arrest other Americans on bogus spying charges.
In the spring of 2015, Bob and the three Americans held in Evin PrisonâSaeed Abedini, Amir Hekmati, and Jason Rezaianâbecame front-page news again, this time as part of the political debate that erupted after the United States and Iran announced a preliminary nuclear deal. Republican lawmakers mounted a furious campaign to derail the plan, inviting the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, to speak about it before Congress, where he denounced the proposal as a disaster. Soon afterward, forty-seven Republican senators wrote a joint letter to Ayatollah Khamenei warning him that a nuclear agreement signed by President Obama could be annulled by his successor. Opponents also argued that the Obama administration had forsaken Bob and the three imprisoned men to score a foreign policy victory. Some in the American public were outraged that the U.S. government had negotiated with a country holding their fellow citizens hostage.
Amid the maneuvering, Dan Levinson, Bob's oldest son, spoke before a congressional hearing. A year earlier, Dan had seriously considered traveling to Kish. The way he imagined it, he would arrive on the island and get arrested by Iranian authorities, an event that would give him a stage from which to declare that his father had gone to Iran at the urging of the CIA. He saw the action as a way to refocus attention on his family's plight and force a public confrontation between the United States and Iran that would finally provide answers about his father. Dan's sisters convinced him to drop the plan, arguing that their mother would be unable to bear the prospect of his imprisonment in Tehran.
Dan had come to believe, based on his talks with Ira Silverman and Dave McGee, that Iran's former president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, might be behind his father's detention, a possibility at which he hinted during his comments to Congress. “It is true that those involved in the talks may not know where my father is or what happened to him,” Dan told a congressional committee. “But we are certain that there are people in Iran who do.”
In July, soon after Dan's testimony, negotiators reached agreement on the terms of a final nuclear control deal between Iran and the West. Iran agreed to keep its atomic energy program peaceful by reducing stockpiles of uranium, dismantling some equipment used to make nuclear weapons, and allowing inspectors to review its compliance with the agreement. In return, the United States and other nations involved in the plan said they would lift economic embargoes and release billions of dollars in Iranian funds that had been frozen in banks outside that country.