Missing Man (4 page)

He faced a big financial shortfall and realized he couldn't keep on living from case to case. He needed steady income. One possible job was a full-time position with a group that investigated auto theft. He also applied for a job as a part-time instructor at the CIA's training center, where new operatives learn skills such as how to interview sources. Then Anne Jablonski, the CIA Russian crime analyst, told him she thought she could get him a part-time consulting contract with the spy agency. Bob and Anne had stayed close since their meeting in the early 1990s, regularly swapping information about cases. Anne was now working in an analytical unit called the Illicit Finance Group, which specialized in gathering information about international crime, foreign government corruption, and money laundering. The intelligence was summarized in briefs sent to top government officials at the White House and elsewhere.

To Bob, it sounded like a dream job. He would get to work with an old friend on big, heady assignments. But getting his contract written and approved seemed to take forever. Every month, Anne told him about a hang-up, budgetary constraint, or technical snafu. Several times, the contract's language had to be reworked to make certain that it would be awarded to Bob rather than being put up for competitive bid. Numerous CIA officials, including ones from the agency's spy side, had to review the contract and sign off on it. He tried to stir the pot by sending Anne notes about the hot leads he could pursue once he was on board and proposals for areas to investigate. He kept his notes friendly, but there was also an insistence in their tone. “I strongly believe that I will be able to pull this one off,” he wrote her, about a possible Russian crime investigation. “If so, we would be right in the proverbial center of the action.”

In early 2006, Anne brought him to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, to meet with the head of the Illicit Finance Group, Timothy Sampson, and other analysts who worked in the unit. He jotted down their names and specialties: Anne, Sarah, and George covered Russian organized crime and business in Eastern Europe; Kristin followed corruption in the Middle East; Katy's area of expertise was Venezuela and international bribery; Eric followed the global trade in narcotics; other analysts were responsible for countries such as Iran or North Korea or oversaw broad subject areas like money laundering. Soon after he returned home, he went through his files, pulling old reports and sending them to Anne to distribute to her colleagues. “Attached is another paper I promised your staff when I was up there earlier in the week,” he wrote.

Finally, in June 2006, his CIA contract was approved. When Anne notified him about it, Bob quickly replied. He was thrilled to be back in the game.

Today is my thirty-second wedding anniversary and aside from celebrating those years with Christine, I'm going to (prematurely) celebrate this. It seems like something too good to be true. I really look forward to working with you and trying to make a contribution. Yeah, you really made my day, Toots.

 

2

Toots

The lights inside the three-bedroom white Colonial on South June Street went on early, usually around 5:00 a.m. Anne Jablonski liked the still hours before sunrise. It was her time to meditate and practice yoga. She also fed Duke, the cat. As a kitten, Duke had suffered from severe diarrhea. When a series of veterinarians failed to cure him, Anne decided to approach the study of feline digestive problems with the same intensity she applied to the monitoring of Russian organized crime. She read everything she could find on the subject, textbooks, articles, and medical journal reports. She spoke to experts in the field. After a lengthy investigation, she concluded that Duke's problem was a basic one. In the wild, feral cats hunted birds and rabbits, eating their entire prey—organs and eyes included. Some of these nutrients were not found in commercial cat foods, even “natural” brands, and Duke, along with many other cats, was suffering as a result.

To test her theory, Anne began buying whole rabbit carcasses from local butchers and, with her husband's help, processed them at home using a commercial meat grinder. Duke recovered, but Anne didn't stop there. She wrote a letter to schools of veterinary medicine nationwide in which she detailed her experiment and its successful results, including with it a list of recommended reading materials for the institutions to distribute to students. For fellow cat lovers, she created a website called Cat Nutrition, on which she described her beloved “Dukie-boy's” return to health. “Meow … And welcome,” its homepage read.

Around dawn, Anne, slightly built, with dirty-blond hair and a toothy grin, made the short drive from her home in Arlington, Virginia, to CIA headquarters in nearby Langley, arriving there ahead of fellow analysts. By the summer of 2006, she had passed her twentieth anniversary at the agency, and had worked long enough to collect a federal pension when she was ready. She had begun thinking more about what she wanted to do next, and a second career as a yoga instructor was high on the list of possibilities. Anne had started at the agency in the mid-1980s, a decade after graduating from the University of Wisconsin fluent in Russian. The CIA's analytical division, or the Directorate of Intelligence, as it is formally known, was an ideal fit for her, a place that appreciated her quirkiness and sense of humor and rewarded her obsessiveness and attention. Many of her Langley colleagues resembled graying graduate students, brilliant misfits absorbed in obscure studies while buffered from everyday pressures.

Anne first worked alongside other Soviet analysts collecting data on economic and military issues. Then, as the Soviet Union began to collapse, she saw an important pattern emerge. In the United States and Western Europe, politicians, businessmen, intelligence operatives, and criminals tended to stay in their own orbits. But amid the scramble for power and economic wealth in Russia and the newly independent republics, such players were forging alliances and operating together. A businessman from Kiev might be a KGB operative, and a politician from Moscow might be allied with a major gang. To make policy, U.S. officials needed to know how these people connected together, and “Anne-ski,” as some colleagues called her, became their guide. Anne's “customers” were typically officials at the White House, the State Department, or the Treasury Department who needed information about an Eastern European politician, company, or criminal in order to shape a decision. Along with her own wealth of knowledge, Anne could draw on several sources of information to put together a report. The agency maintained a massive database of books, newspaper articles, journal reports, broadcast transcripts, and Internet postings, and she could tap the expertise of CIA consultants. Analysts could also ask operatives overseas to gather information about a target. Such requests were funneled through a CIA center, which prioritized them based on national security needs. Analysts needed to be aggressive to push their assignments to the top of the pile. Anne made sure everyone knew her requests were urgent.

In 2000, she officially became a star when she was included in the first class of analysts inducted into the senior analytical service, a new rank created by the CIA to reward its most valued intelligence researchers. Then 9/11 happened and no one cared anymore about Russia. Scores of Russia analysts within the CIA were ordered to place their personal belongings into cardboard boxes so they could be moved into new jobs with the agency's Counterterrorism Center. Because of her rank, Anne escaped that fate and was assigned instead to a group of CIA employees who provided early-morning intelligence briefings to top U.S. officials about overnight developments affecting the country's security. The job sounded impressive. The reality could be different. One day, after briefing the then attorney general, John Ashcroft, Anne told a colleague, “I'd rather brief my cat.”

After, she continued to write intelligence reports about Russian organized crime that few people read. It was as though she spoke a forgotten language that only the aging members of a dwindling sect were trying to keep alive. Her husband, Robert Otto, who worked at the State Department, was among them. So was Bob Levinson. She and her husband would have dinner with Bob during his visits to Washington, and they would swap gossip about Russian gangsters the way other people talked about movie stars or baseball players. “There is something very calming about spending time with people who have the same perspective, the same commitment, the same values,” Bob wrote them after one get-together. “You don't feel as crazy as usual.”

During the course of her career, Anne had gotten to know a lot of FBI agents, but she always felt particularly close to Bob. He wasn't the typical button-down choirboy who followed the rules. She viewed him much as she saw herself: as a free spirit caught inside a bureaucracy. The FBI and the CIA were competitors, and agents and analysts weren't supposed to work together, but she and Bob didn't care and they both got a kick out of knowing their collaborations were driving their colleagues nuts. When Bob retired from the bureau, Anne flew to Miami to attend the party for him at the FBI's office and then spent hours debriefing him before returning home. Their relationship, both professional and personal, continued from there. Every holiday season, she and her husband sent a Christmas card to the Levinson family. When Bob's daughter Sarah came to Washington for a summer internship at a foundation, Anne met her at Union Station and they spent an afternoon together shopping for shoes. Sarah had dreaded the meeting, expecting to be stuck with a frumpy, middle-aged spinster. She told her father afterward that he was right: Anne was a lot of fun.

In 2004, Anne found a landing spot with the Illicit Finance Group. The unit had been created a year earlier during a reorganization of the Office of Transnational Affairs, one of the major divisions of the Directorate of Intelligence. Since 2001, Congress had quadrupled spending on intelligence gathering, and the CIA had expanded, hiring new operatives and analysts. Some of the new funding filtered down to units like the Illicit Finance Group, which had bigger budgets to hire consultants and buy information from private investigators and other sources of “gray market” intelligence. One of the part-time consultants used by the Illicit Finance Group was a former staffer for the Massachusetts senator John Kerry named Jonathan Winer, who then worked as a lawyer at a Washington lobbying firm, APCO International. While in government, Winer had served on a Senate panel investigating a notorious financial institution, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, engaged in money laundering, a subject that he was expert in. Anne wanted to bring Bob on board as a consultant, but his case was a little trickier. She was certain that he could supply great material to her group, the type of information only a seasoned developer of informants could collect. But his skills and methods of operating could also pose a problem.

Under CIA rules, the agency's analytical branch is barred from engaging in clandestine operations overseas, which are the province of the “other side of the house,” the agency's Directorate of Operations. The division exists for many reasons. Analysts aren't schooled in the tradecraft of spying, and ad hoc missions can jeopardize real ones and endanger operatives. CIA spies also have long viewed analysts as beneath them, and at one time they were barred from setting foot inside the cafeteria where operatives ate. Analysts had a different view of the agency's pecking order. In it, they were the brains without whom operatives would be useless. CIA management wasn't above stoking the competition. One day in 2004, a top official of the Directorate of Intelligence convened a meeting of analysts inside the CIA's main auditorium, known as “the Bubble,” and declared that, under his watch, they were “going to destroy” their rivals on the agency's clandestine side.

Even before Bob got his consulting contract, he occasionally sold information to the CIA on a freelance basis, and Anne found herself dealing with the agency's bureaucracy. In mid-2005, a woman working at the agency named Bonnie balked at paying Bob for an intelligence memo he had sent to Anne because it didn't read like the kind of report she was used to seeing from analysts. He told Anne about the problem and she wrote him back: “Ugh … Pay NO attention to Bonnie—she's interjecting herself in this in ways that are driving me nuts. NO! We don't want/need analysis from you … what we want is what you know/hear! I'm going to get that message to her.”

A few months later, while his contract still was undergoing CIA review, he alerted Anne about a potential break in a big case involving American hostages. In 2003, a surveillance aircraft operated by contractors for the Defense Department crashed in Colombia while monitoring drug trafficking. The three men aboard, all employees of Northrop Grumman, were captured by a left-wing paramilitary group known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which held them prisoner in rebel camps deep inside impenetrable jungles. In October 2005, one of Bob's old informants, the fashion photographer Baruch Vega, contacted him with a tip. His sister, Olga Vega, who was a television journalist in Colombia, had just interviewed a top FARC official who told her afterward that the group might be willing to cut a deal to release the three Americans. Bob relayed the information to the FBI and the CIA and asked Anne if the agency could pay his travel expenses to New York to meet with Baruch Vega, who had the videotape of the interview his sister had conducted. He formalized the request in a memo:

TO:
Appropriate Recipients

FROM:
Robert A. Levinson

DATE:
12 October 2005

RE:
Kidnapping of 3 US Contractors by Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia

Re my e-mail of 12 October 2005.

Request consideration be given to authorizing my travel to New York, New York for a maximum of two (2) days for the purpose of meeting and debriefing the confidential source referred to in the referenced e-mail.