Missing Man (18 page)

Dave, Ira, and Larry had begun their hunt for Bob by hiring an investigative firm called SCG International Risk that did contract work for the FBI. SCG International was part of the new military-style security industry that had emerged after 9/11, and some of its employees, like those of similar firms, were former commandos. The best-known of the companies was Blackwater, which was accused of killing seventeen Iraqi civilians during a 2007 incident there. The head of SCG International, Jamie Smith, said he was a founder of Blackwater and a decorated military veteran who had once worked for the CIA. SCG International ran a training facility in the woods of northern Mississippi known as “G.I. Joe Fantasy Camp” where participants for a $1,200 fee could attend a course offering “real-world scenarios for real-world warriors.” The retreat's programs included training on how to fire automatic weapons and interrogate captured enemy fighters.

One of SCG International's first actions for the Levinson family was to dispatch a female operative to Kish and the Maryam hotel. The woman, whom Jamie Smith called “Mila,” told Maryam employees she was a headhunter for hotels in Dubai looking for experienced management personnel. She spoke with the hotel's manager and the supervisor of its restaurant and charmed both men, who allowed her to take their pictures and gave her their contact information.

Mohammed Para—Maryam Hotel Manager.
He is a Muslim Indian. Determined that Mohammed Para could be very useful—especially since he's unhappy in his job—the carrot could be a new job. Need to elicit more from him—but he's scared.

He said it was very difficult to speak … and pointed out that the hotel staff (Iranian) were seemingly keeping a close eye on him as he spoke with us. In fact his contact details were obtained by way of a discreet handoff.

Ali Korakumjam—Maryam Hotel Restaurant Manager.
He is a colleague of PARA and is also a Muslim Indian. He slipped SCG Asset his details while photo was being taken in the empty restaurant.

SCG Asset reports that both contacts approached at separate times and individually suggesting a further willingness to cooperate.

Mila walked around the Maryam, looking for surveillance cameras. She suspected people were monitoring her.

No spyholes in doors and feel CCTV maybe in corridors, difficult to confirm as yet. Have gone down in one lift and up in the other. Turned around and gone back to room. Suddenly both room doors left very, very slightly ajar. To the unaware would appear closed. Each time, I get back to my room—“they” do too. Building lends itself to many corners, objects to hide behind. Being careful.

Mila mentioned in passing to Mohammed Para, the hotel's manager, that she had seen news stories in Dubai about an American missing on Kish. “Oh, yes, he was my friend, he stayed here,” Para said. He told Mila the driver of the Maryam's taxi took Bob to the Kish airport and watched him walk into the terminal.

She tried to speak to the driver, but there were always too many people around. After about a day, Mila decided to leave Kish after sensing Iranian intelligence agents were shadowing her. She suggested in her report SCG might want to lure Para and other Maryam employees to Dubai with sham job offers so they could be questioned outside Iran.

Dave turned to another avenue for help, an old Justice Department friend named Richard Gregorie who was a federal prosecutor in Miami. Gregorie had worked closely with Bob on a Russian organized crime task force and he was eager to do what he could to find him. He put Dave in touch with an informant he had used for years on cases with Middle Eastern connections, a former international arms dealer named Sarkis Soghanalian, once known as “the Merchant of Death.”

In his heyday, Soghanalian, a short, corpulent man with a moustache who bore a resemblance to the 1940s actor Sydney Greenstreet, supplied a wide range of customers—Lebanese Christian militiamen, Mauritanian rebel groups, Argentina's military junta, and others—with the tools of war. He was the principal seller of guns, tanks, aircraft parts, ammunition, and even uniforms to Saddam Hussein during Iraq's long war with Iran, and the CIA covertly blessed many of his deals. Soghanalian, who was of Armenian descent, lived lavishly for decades in Beirut and Paris, flying around the world in a private full-size jet named after his daughter. “You need that comfort, you have to show that you are not a cheap S.O.B. running in the street and you are running after somebody's buck,” Soghanalian once explained to a reporter. He also loved publicity and told another journalist about a request he made to Lebanese fighters buying his weapons—he asked them for jars filled with the ears of their enemies as a testament to the quality of his weapons.

Gregorie met Soghanalian after his weapons-dealing career had fallen apart. In 1991, he was sentenced to six years in federal prison for conspiring to smuggle U.S.-made helicopters to Iraq in violation of export sanctions. Soghanalian asked the prosecutor to visit him because he wanted to share important information. When Gregorie got to the prison, Soghanalian said he knew about a counterfeit hundred-dollar bill so artfully made it was indistinguishable from a real one. Gregorie left thinking he had wasted his time, but a few weeks later one of Soghanalian's associates delivered a hundred-dollar bill to the prosecutor, who turned it over to the Secret Service. Experts examined the note and declared it one of the most skillful forgeries ever created. With Soghanalian's help, authorities traced the bill, dubbed the “Supernote,” to a counterfeiting operation in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley. Within weeks, the printing facility used by the forgers was destroyed in an explosion, though Gregorie would never learn who was behind the blast. As his reward, Soghanalian was released from prison early. A few years later, he was sent to prison again, this time on a tax fraud charge, but won another early release by assisting U.S. authorities investigating a clandestine arms deal involving Peru's intelligence chief.

Gregorie's faith in Soghanalian as a valuable informant remained steadfast, but his credibility with the FBI and other federal agencies sank with time. After 9/11, the aging arms merchant claimed to have inside information on Osama bin Laden and FBI agents spent a year on a global wild goose chase trying to track it down. Afterward, the bureau viewed him as an intelligence welfare case and immigration officials were dying to find an excuse to deport him to Lebanon, the country where he held citizenship, but the old arms dealer still had friends in the Justice Department who protected him.

When Dave contacted Soghanalian in 2007, he was seventy-eight, broke, and living in a small, broken-down house behind Miami International Airport. His health was failing and he was confined to a wheelchair. He spent most of his time in a small room containing a bed, a bureau, and a folding card table upon which sat a telephone and an old, battered address book. A large pulley was screwed into the ceiling above Soghanalian's bed. By pulling on a thick rope he was able to hoist himself up in the morning.

He insisted to Dave he could find out where Bob was and bring him back. Within a few weeks, Soghanalian reported he had made contact with two Iranians living in Paris who were willing to travel to Tehran and ask questions. Soghanalian was too infirm to go himself, so he arranged for his son, Garo, a local maintenance worker, to travel to Paris for a meeting with the Iranians. When Dave told FBI officials about the plan they first tried to stop it, and when that failed, the bureau insisted Paul Myers accompany Garo on the trip.

Garo met with the Iranians at a café. Myers observed the meeting from a distance, and when it was over, Garo told him the Iranians wanted $50,000 for their trip to Tehran. After checking with his FBI superiors, Myers instructed Garo to arrange a second meeting at the café and tell the men they would get paid but only if they returned from Iran with useful information. The haggling went on for several days but ended up going nowhere.

In the late summer of 2007, Ira checked his email and found a message with a subject line that simply said “Salam.” It was sent from the Gmail account of someone named “Osman.Muhamad.” The note read:

My dear wife and friends

I am safe and health. The group which has arrested me is complaining against American policies in the region. (Specially in Iraq and Afghanistan) they are also against the regions governments. Because these Governments have a much flexibility against U.S. policies.

Please help me.

I can not tolerate to be far from you anymore and I am worry about My future. I want to come back to my wife, house, 7 children and grandchild (Ryan) as soon as possible. Please Help Me.

I love you forever.

Bob

Ira sensed the email was from Bob's captors and that Bob may have played a role in sending it. It wasn't just the message's content that made him feel that way. It was the names of the people to whom it had been sent. Along with Chris and Ira, the message was copied to four people who seemed to share a connection. Each one of them was a friend of Bob's whose work put him in a position to publicize the email. Two of the people were journalists. One was Tom Mangold, the British correspondent, and the other was an investigative producer for ABC News named Chris Isham. The two other people copied on the email were lawyers, John Moscow, the former prosecutor in the Manhattan D.A.'s office whom Bob had written to about the Bank of Cyprus case, and Scott Horton, an American lawyer who had worked with Global Witness. Not all of the email's intended recipients received it. Chris Isham's copy, for instance, was sent to his email address at ABC News, which he had left a few weeks earlier for a post at CBS News.

To Ira, it seemed inconceivable the four names were selected randomly or without input from Bob. The investigator's cell phone contained hundreds of contacts, the numbers and email addresses of clients, friends, intelligence sources, and others. Ira expected the FBI would jump on the email as a big break. But bureau officials, after reviewing the note, dismissed it as a hoax.

One of the agents then working on Bob's case, Jonathan Beery, explained the bureau's thinking in an email to Chris's sister Suzi.

Some input my colleagues gave me in-house that their opinion leans strongly toward Osman being a fake. You're probably already thinking of these things, so this can just serve to shape the response that Christine sends back to Osman …

Two things that point toward Osman likely being an imposter without current access to Bob:

1. Lack of any singular facts or personal knowledge clues in content of email: It's highly likely that if Bob were attempting to (or being asked by captors to) get a message out to us, that he would include a personal fact or a memory that only the family would know. Instead everything described in the email is accessible on the internet.

2. The string of email addresses is somewhat of a mystery—but it is possible that it was obtained through hackers in months prior to March 2007 while Bob was traveling overseas using his laptop to link to the internet perhaps, or logging on at internet cafes overseas, or something similar.

Bureau officials wrote a note for Chris to send back.

Greetings,

I would like to thank you for sending me the e-mail from Bob. My children and myself are so happy and grateful to know that Bob is safe and in good health. I hope that you will be able to keep sending Bob's e-mails to me and giving my e-mails to him. Unfortunately, as I said in my other e-mail I did not see the August 6th e-mail until today and as you can imagine we have received a lot of e-mails from people pretending to have Bob or pretending to know who has him. This has made our very difficult situation nearly unbearable. So that we know you are talking with Bob or with people who are, please respond with the color of Bob's first car. I am giving you two of our children's e-mail addresses in the hope that if I do not receive your next e-mail they will receive it.

Bob can confirm that these are good e-mail addresses. Again, thank you, I know that if you have a family you know how important it is to finally be able to communicate with Bob.

Sincerely,

Christine Levinson

She didn't get a reply, and FBI officials considered the email of such little interest they didn't bother to send agents out to interview its intended recipients. Sarah Levinson, Bob's daughter in New York, was flabbergasted by the bureau's reaction. Her father raised her and her siblings to respect the FBI and complained to them whenever a news article or a movie cast it in a bad light. She couldn't understand how the bureau could ignore a possible signal from her father's captors. She began to wonder for the first time whether his faith in the FBI had been misplaced.

After Paul Myers returned from Paris, his frustrations with the Levinson case and the demands of his FBI job seemed to grow. He was juggling several investigations at once and frequently traveling on them. But nearly every day—and sometimes more than once a day—Chris would call him for updates about his progress or to ask what he planned to do next to bring her husband home. Within the bureau, officials had started referring to Chris and Suzi as “the Housewife and the Barracuda.” Agents such as Myers who dealt regularly with Chris knew she could be just as aggressive as her sister when it came to Bob. Her calls became so constant, agents would recognize her number flashing on their cell phones and dread answering.

In the fall of 2007, Myers was still trying to figure out Bob's precise relationship with CIA analysts such as Anne Jablonski, and he asked Ira if there were any agency insiders who could help him. The only person Ira could think of was a former CIA operative named Ben Wickham, whom he knew through the occasional luncheons held by friends of Carl Shoffler, the late detective. Wickham agreed to speak with Myers and the three men started having get-togethers at the retired spy's home. Myers described the formal process through which the FBI obtained information from the CIA as bullshit. Inquiries to the agency were channeled through an FBI liaison who dealt with a CIA counterpart. The answers coming back from the agency were useless. The FBI agent was also unhappy with his supervisors because they were pressuring him to spend time on work that had nothing to do with solving cases. One manager wanted him to serve as the FBI's representative with a group of Arabic-speaking immigrants in the Washington area. “What the fuck, I'm not a diplomat,” he said. “I don't want to be nice to these people.”