Missing Man (19 page)

At one of their meetings, Myers showed Ira and Wickham Bob's report from the meeting in Istanbul. He took care to make it clear that he wasn't breaking the law by pointing out that the word “Unclassified” was stamped on the document. Myers wanted to know if Colonel Sisoev, the former KGB officer who had originally introduced Boris to Ali Magamidi Riza, was a significant player. Wickham, who was once stationed with the CIA in Eastern Europe, replied he had heard of him. Myers also kept pressing the ex-spy to introduce him to lower-level CIA personnel who might help him understand how the Illicit Finance Group operated. Wickham, who had played a role in the Reagan-era scandal known as Iran-Contra, warned Myers he would put his FBI career in jeopardy if he went around bureau procedures.

Later that fall, when Myers arrived at Wickham's house for another meeting, he looked more relaxed than Ira and Wickham had ever seen him. He announced he was resigning from the FBI to take a job with a contractor for the CIA. He said it had long been his dream to work for the spy agency, and he appeared elated to be leaving behind his battles with FBI supervisors and Chris's calls. After leaving Wickham's home, Ira and Myers walked together to their cars. Ira told him about the dire state of Chris's finances and asked Myers if he could do anything to help Chris get the $12,000 she said the CIA still owed Bob. Myers turned to Ira. He told him that FBI officials, in going through Bob's records, had found instances where he had double-billed the CIA for expenses such as hotel rooms that he was also charging to his private clients. He warned Ira that making money an issue could backfire and end up embarrassing Chris. “I wouldn't push it,” Myers said. Then he got into his car and drove off.

 

12

Passwords

Sonya Dobbs organized an annual charity event at Beggs & Lane, the law firm where she and Dave McGee worked. It was a skeet-shooting contest, with the winner getting a new shotgun. Sonya loved guns. She was certified by the National Rifle Association as a firearms instructor and drove around Pensacola with a pistol tucked beneath the seat of her car. Sonya, who grew up in rural Alabama and had a thick accent to prove it, was smart with a sharp sense of humor. As Dave's paralegal she kept him on track, solved his technological challenges with computers and other devices, and usually knew as much about his cases as he did.

In the fall of 2007, Dave told Sonya about a problem he was having with Chris. At the time, the lawyer had seen only a few documents pointing to Bob's relationship with the CIA, including his original consulting contract with the Illicit Finance Group. Chris had given the FBI a copy of Bob's computer hard drive, but Dave had been urging her for weeks to send him her husband's work files so he could examine them. The lawyer was growing increasingly concerned that Chris, without Bob's income, was plunging toward bankruptcy. Banks were threatening to repossess the family's cars because the Levinsons were so far behind on their auto loans. Dave believed the CIA bore an obligation, both legally and morally, to financially provide for Chris and her children, and he needed Bob's records in case suing the agency was the only way to get it to do what was right.

Sonya, who was short with dark hair and eyes, offered a suggestion. Chris was probably too distraught, she said, to wade through Bob's office, so it might be easier to ask her for permission to review his email account. Sonya proposed the idea to Chris, who gave her the password to an AOL account she and Bob shared. Sonya logged into it and noticed something unusual. Bob had been using the AOL account as a kind of electronic way station to forward emails to accounts he had opened with Yahoo!, Hotmail, Gmail, and other providers. Sonya thought she wouldn't be able to go further. Like most people, she used separate passwords for each of her email accounts. But when she tried a slight variation of Bob's AOL password on his Yahoo! account, it worked, and soon she was able to get into all his accounts, using either the same password or a slight variation of it, such as capitalizing one letter.

Many of the emails had attachments. She started launching them and Bob's CIA life began to unfold. She saw his contract and some of his intelligence reports for the Illicit Finance Group. There were also messages between him and “Toots” as well as his note to Tim Sampson in February 2007 about his Dubai “side trip.” She printed out some of the documents and walked into Dave's office. “You are not going to believe what I found,” she said. As Dave went through them, he couldn't understand why FBI agents, if they had reviewed the same material, weren't pulling in CIA officials for questioning or arresting them. He picked up the phone and called Ira Silverman. “Whom do you know in Washington that you trust?” he asked.

Soon afterward, Ira was shown into the Capitol Hill office of Melvin Dubee, a staff member on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Ira hadn't meet Dubee before, but an old source from his days as a journalist had suggested him because the Senate intelligence panel had oversight of the CIA. Dubee, who spoke with a slight Texas drawl, listened to Ira's story and agreed to send an inquiry to the CIA's congressional liaison asking for information about Bob. Several weeks later, he called Ira to say he had gotten a response. It was the same one the CIA had given to the FBI six months earlier—Bob's contract had expired before his disappearance on Kish, and his agency work had never involved Iran.

By that time, Dave had figured out a way to get Bob's files. He told Chris that Sonya was going to fly to Coral Springs, come to her house, and pack them up. The prospect of Sonya poking around her home was the push Chris needed. Cardboard file boxes loaded with documents soon arrived at Dave's office. Inside were file folders labeled with the names of Bob's assignments, clients, or investigative targets. Several folders were marked
GLOBAL WITNESS
, while another was labeled
DAOUD SALAHUDDIN
. Bob's reports to the Illicit Finance Group were contained in five folders, labeled
IFG
and numbered sequentially in Roman numerals. Another folder, marked
MAKE SEPARATE FILE AND ACTING FILE
, contained a mix of material, including emails between Bob and Anne Jablonski, expense reports, proposed CIA projects, and billing records on which he logged the number of hours he had spent interviewing a source or writing up a report for the Illicit Finance Group, including ones about Iran.

Chris attached a handwritten note on one file, explaining to Dave how she and Bob had argued before his Dubai trip over the money the CIA owed him:

In Feb. before his last trip, Bob & I had a heated discussion over the fact that the CIA had not paid him since his Nov. invoice and it was now Feb. I told him that he treated them differently from other clients and that he would never let anyone else get away with not paying him. This was after he took away a whole day to write reports for them knowing he was going on another trip. He told me that Anne told him that he would be paid because they had gotten funding but it would be another month before his invoices could be addressed.

Dave and Sonya made a rough pass through the boxes, pulling out records that grabbed their attention. Dave's fury was growing. It was one thing to hear Paul Myers say the CIA was lying. It was another for him to see mounds of evidence pointing to the fact. Bob's work for the CIA had clearly involved Iran, and the former FBI agent and Anne Jablonski had discussed money just before his disappearance on Kish. In October 2007, Dave flew to Washington and went with Ira to see Melvin Dubee.

Seeing the documents, Dubee became irate and contacted the CIA's congressional liaison to demand a meeting with agency officials in his Senate office. When they arrived, he showed them some of Bob's reports. The CIA officials acted as though they had never seen the records before, and an analyst with the Illicit Finance Group claimed that Bob's reports were considered to have such little intelligence value they were tossed into a storage box upon arrival without being read.

Dubee told Dave and Ira that to force answers out of the CIA they would need the involvement of lawmakers on the intelligence panel. He suggested they approach a Democratic senator from Florida, Clarence “Bill” Nelson, who was serving a temporary term on the committee. Nelson was already involved in Bob's case. By the fall of 2007, he was writing letters to Iran's ambassador to the United Nations urging his country to let Chris visit Iran.

Initially, Dave and Ira were not enthusiastic about seeing Nelson. A former state insurance commissioner, the Florida Democrat was better known for the space flight he took as a sitting congressman than for being a political heavyweight. But at a meeting in late 2007 at his Florida office, Nelson, a small, tautly built man with a wide smile, assured them he wouldn't hesitate to cross swords with the CIA. He assigned the matter to Carolyn Tess, his staffer on the Senate intelligence panel. Tess was young and idealistic about working in government. After speaking with Dubee, she was appalled by the CIA's handling of Bob's disappearance and decided that the agency needed to answer for its lack of action.

Soon afterward, a top CIA official, Stephen Kappes, arrived at the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill to give the intelligence panel one of its periodic briefings on national-security-related issues. The committee's hearing room is located on the building's second floor, and to reach it, lawmakers, staffers, and other officials must pass through a screening station manned by Capitol Hill police officers. The room itself has a thick, vault-like door and specially lined walls to prevent electronic eavesdropping.

Kappes, then the CIA's deputy director, had previously served as a spy in international hot spots and once headed the agency's “rendition” program, in which suspected terrorists were kidnapped overseas. Balding and with a graying beard, he was an old hand at doing briefings. After he made his presentation, lawmakers took turns asking him questions. When it was Senator Nelson's time, he looked at the CIA official and said, “What can you tell me about the status of an agency contractor missing in Iran?” Kappes sat silently for a few moments and then responded he didn't know what Nelson was asking about. The Florida lawmaker then started reading him excerpts culled by Carolyn Tess from Bob's emails and memos to the Illicit Finance Group. Kappes listened without showing any reaction. When Nelson was finished, he said that neither he nor the CIA's director, General Michael Hayden, were ever alerted about Bob's disappearance and they didn't know anything about the episode. He assured Nelson that he would investigate the matter and report back to the committee.

Around the same time as the panel's meeting, Chris stepped off a plane in Tehran accompanied by her oldest son, Dan, and her sister Suzi. Iranian officials had finally granted them visas. It was early December and the towering mountains to the north of Tehran, the Alborz, were covered with snow. At age fifty-seven, Chris was making her first trip outside the United States and she was spending it searching for her husband. Two officials from the Swiss embassy escorted Chris and her family to the Esteghial hotel, a five-star facility with luxurious rooms, a fitness center, and a twenty-four-hour coffee shop. After checking in, Chris and Suzi went up to the room they were sharing and Chris started looking around for a box of tissues. She asked Suzi if she had seen any and the sisters spent a few minutes looking for a tissue box before they gave up. The following morning, returning to their room after breakfast, they found five boxes of tissues strategically placed around it. They realized their room was probably bugged and Iranian intelligence was monitoring them.

Chris went to Iran's Foreign Ministry to meet with a top official there. Government officials remained publicly adamant that they knew nothing about Bob, adding that a police investigation on Kish had failed to yield any clues. Chris hoped they might be more forthcoming when speaking privately. Her meeting dispelled those illusions. After some initial pleasantries, the official turned hostile and told Chris that everything he had learned from media reports made him suspicious of her husband's real reason for coming to Kish. He also claimed a boat operator on the island told authorities Bob had offered to pay him $500 to take him to Iran's mainland and that the taxicab driver who drove her husband to the Kish airport reported overhearing him making cell phone calls to people elsewhere in Iran. Chris, who was keeping her hair covered in respect for Muslim culture, tried to maintain her composure. FBI officials had urged her not to challenge Iran's official line.

The following day, she, Dan, and Suzi flew to Kish and took a taxi to the Maryam hotel. When they walked into the lobby, Chris saw an English-language Iranian newspaper placed strategically on the registration desk, as if to catch her eye. A headline on its front page read “Wife of Missing American in Iran.” A photograph showed Chris and Dan looking tired and jet-lagged after their arrival in Tehran. She was shown the room where her husband stayed and an entry in a registration book indicating he checked out at 11:00 a.m. on Friday, March 9. It was signed in Bob's handwriting. That afternoon, Chris, Dan, and Suzi took a taxi to the Kish airport and spent several hours handing out flyers with a photograph of a beaming Bob holding his grandson, Ryan, to ticket agents, baggage handlers, and airport workers. They asked everyone if they recognized him. No one did.

The family returned to Tehran to prepare for their flight home. Suzi waited in her room while Chris and Dan went down to the hotel's lobby for one final meeting. It was with Dawud. Prior to coming to Iran, Chris was in touch with the fugitive and he had agreed to meet her. He appeared ill at ease. Seated in a chair, he repeatedly glanced around the room as if trying to spot Iranian operatives watching them. He stuttered at times. He told Chris and Dan how much he had liked Bob and how he felt he shared blame for what had happened. It was foolish, he said, to think two Americans—particularly, a white one and a black one—could meet safely on Kish without attracting police attention. Still, he was certain whoever was holding Bob was treating him well. “He might be sitting in a hotel room somewhere learning Farsi,” he told Dan. Dawud then reached into a bag and gave Chris one of the gifts her husband had brought with him to Kish. It was the copy of
The Black Dahlia
, the murder mystery.