Missing Man (26 page)

Deputy for the operations: Expeditiously and with the help of the brothers should be arrested.

The second document was dated two months later and described Bob's deteriorating health.

URGENT

AIR FORCE

Kish Air Base

No: 2619-42

Date: May 2, 2007

124

In the Name of God

From: Command Center of Sahafaja [PH], Kish Air Base

To: The Honorable head of the military prosecutor office of Bandar Langeh

Subject: Accused File No. 85/3598

Greetings, I hereby inform Your Excellency that according to your order, the above subject is under the arrest of this military unit at a detention center at this base.

The subject has expressed that he is sick and his blood pressure is low for the last three days. He fell into a coma. His doctor examined him and he was diagnosed to have diabetes and noted that he is not in a good condition and ordered to transfer him to a hospital.

In regard to the importance of this matter and the subject, please inform us about the necessary actions that should be taken in this regard.

Signed on behalf of

The Commander of Intelligence Protection, Kish Air Base

Mohammad Reza Jalali

(A messenger should hand deliver the result)

Receivers:

1—The Head of the Sahahagh [B-24] for information and taking necessary action

2—The Kish Intelligence Office for information purposes

3—Secret file

When FBI technicians analyzed the documents, they doubted they were genuine. Along with the misspelling of Bob's last name, the location of his hospitalization conflicted with the information they had received from Parisi, the laboratory technician. The CIA was also suspicious. Agency officials believed Ebrahimi may have previously circulated other fabricated documents and either was an agent provocateur working for Iranian intelligence or was being duped by operatives controlled by Tehran. Still, Dan wanted to see him and asked Jeff Katz, his father's friend in London, to go with him to Berlin.

At their meeting at the Hotel Adlon Kempinski, Ebrahimi, a man in his forties who shaved his balding scalp, told them that Bob was being held at a secret Revolutionary Guards facility near Tehran's airport. He explained that his sources were telling him that an Iranian intelligence officer named Shekari accompanied Bob wherever he was taken, and that while he was not in good health, the regime was taking care of him because of his value in a possible spy trade.

Dan and Katz didn't know what to make of Ebrahimi. He didn't speak English and they had to talk with him through an interpreter. They weren't ready to dismiss him, but they also weren't convinced the documents were real. Not long after they left Berlin, Chris received a phone call from a Fox News reporter named Richard Reilly. He said he was about to post an article on Fox's website reporting her husband was probably dead. The source of his information, Reilly told Chris, was Dawud Salahuddin. “I don't think he's still alive,” the fugitive was quoted by Reilly as saying. “Levinson had some health issues, and somebody like him couldn't go from being free for fifty-nine years to all of a sudden thrown into jail and not being free.” Reilly asked Chris if she wanted to comment. She tried to calm herself. “I just don't know,” she replied. “The information is not confirmable. I still believe that Bob's alive. Dawud has been really ambiguous.”

Afterward, Chris emailed Dawud: “I hope this message finds you in good health. I spoke to Mr. Riley [
sic
] and saw the articles he wrote after talking to you. I would like to know why you told him that you believe that RL is dead. Do you have any proof?”

Several days passed before Dawud responded: “Forgive this tardy reply but I rarely go online. To answer your question, no I have no proof or evidence whatsoever and was merely stating an opinion … I pray for you and your family and though your sense of loss is not comparable to mine you should know that RL remains a real sore spot in my heart.”

When Larry Sweeney saw the Fox News report, he reacted angrily and sent out a blast email to former FBI agents following Bob's case: “This report is completely fictitious and his source is known to be completely unreliable … [Reilly] called Bob's wife to tell her he had received information that Bob was dead. Then he publicized this story on FOX.”

Dawud was far from the only person to think Bob was dead. Many inside the FBI shared that view. By the fall of 2010, his case was stone cold. The bureau hadn't found a photograph of him, a shred of his clothing, a strand of his hair. They hadn't been able to corroborate any of the stories they had heard. Parisi had disappeared. The Iranian judge brought into the United States by the FBI had returned to Iran. Bureau officials were losing faith that Oleg Deripaska would swoop into Iran on his private jet and bring out Bob.

For months, Madzhit Mamoyan had been meeting with Seyed Mir Hejazi, the reputed son of Ayatollah Khamenei's intelligence advisor, in locations such as Vienna, Beirut, and Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. Hejazi, who didn't speak English, would arrive accompanied by a translator, another man who said he was an officer in the Quds Force, and a small coterie of attractive young Iranian women. Each time, he promised to deliver proof that Bob was alive and then never did. Then, in early 2010, it appeared the long waiting game was over. Madzhit told Boris that Hejazi had sworn to him that he would come to their next meeting armed with the proof. In return, he would receive $5 million. “We are expecting evidence and we will see heavy evidence,” Boris said. The FBI agents working the operation, Martin Hellmer and Joe Krzemien, also felt certain it would happen and alerted Chris, telling her to carry her cell phone at all times because Bob might call.

But when Hejazi arrived for the meeting, he told Madzhit that if he wanted to see the evidence, he would have to come to Tehran, surrender his passport, and turn over the $5 million. Only then could he examine the material, and he would not be permitted to take it with him when he left Iran.

Hellmer and Krzemien went ballistic. For more than a year, they had relied on Madzhit to act as their intermediary. They felt foolish and embarrassed before their superiors. FBI officials also couldn't figure out Hejazi's game. They suspected he was acting with his father's approval, because Iranian operatives were spotted keeping watch on the hotels where he met with Madzhit. But it was possible Hejazi was simply using the Kurd to underwrite his jaunts outside Iran while his father's underlings monitored the American government's interest in Bob's case.

Krzemien told Boris he needed to meet personally with Hejazi to try to assess his credibility. He and Boris flew to Rome for two days of discussions with him. Krzemien told Hejazi, who was thirty-nine years old and had dark hair and a Vandyke beard, that he was an investigator hired by the Levinson family, adding that cigarette companies were willing to pay a substantial sum of money to learn about Bob's status and secure his release. Later that day, Martin Hellmer called Larry Sweeney to say things were going well. Sweeney passed on the news in an email to Dave McGee and Ira Silverman, referring in the note to Oleg Deripaska as “O”:

Martin finally called tonight and was very encouraging based on his conversations with Joe. Joe met with un-identified representative(s) of the Russian (O was not physically present), unidentified Iranian(s), Boris and possibly others. The Iranians admit to having Bob although his physical condition is unknown to Martin. There were preliminary discussions about $ payments but Martin did not go into details. The Iranians were told that answers to proof of life questions were necessary and they responded “no problem.” They promised to have these answers very shortly. My old employer is somewhat concerned that the Iranians are trying to pull some kind of a scam on O but feel this is unlikely since they are aware of how powerful O is. Martin indicated he will continue playing a part in this matter at least until the O matter is resolved … I realize there are many more questions I could have asked Martin but I decided not to. I didn't want to turn him off by pressing too much. He did say that Joe thought Boris was an asset during these discussions. I'm anxious to learn if Joe's opinion is similar to Martin's. Hopefully, we can all sleep a little better tonight.

After the Rome meeting, however, Hejazi's pattern of behavior continued. He gave a videotape to Joe Krzemien that he claimed showed Bob. When FBI technicians examined it, there was nothing on the tape but garble.

In the fall of 2010, the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was scheduled to visit New York to make a speech at the United Nations. Several weeks before his arrival, Chris decided to use one of the few weapons she possessed, the documents she had received from the Iranian in Berlin, Amir Farshad Ebrahimi. She wasn't sure if the records were real, but that was of little consequence. After securing an appointment with Iran's U.N. ambassador, Mohammad Khazaee, she went to see him accompanied by her daughters Sue and Sarah, her sister Suzi, and her second-oldest son, Dave. This time, the Levinsons did not come as supplicants. Instead, they put Khazaee on notice. Chris told him her family was in possession of documents that indicated his government was lying about her husband. If it continued to do so, she would publicly release them. The world could then decide if Iran was telling the truth. A day later, Dave and Dan delivered a plain manila envelope to Khazaee's office, containing the material from Ebrahimi.

It was little more than a month later, on November 13, 2010, that Ira Silverman got the email with an attachment he could not open, the one that turned out to have the video showing Bob as a hostage. Chris, after hearing Sonya play her the tape over the telephone, had tried to open the email's attachment herself so she could see her husband. When she couldn't figure out how, her youngest son, Doug, found a way to do it. She started calling her other children. “We've received a video from your father,” Chris told Stephanie. “I'm sending it to you.”

Stephanie's impulse was to race over to her computer to look at it. She stopped herself. Her youngest sister, Samantha, was standing a few feet away. Samantha, who was then twenty and a student at Florida State University, had come over to babysit Stephanie's children so she could go out to a local Tampa bar and watch her husband's garage band play. The older Levinson siblings felt a duty to protect Samantha. They saw her and her younger brother, Doug, as vulnerable kids who could be emotionally scarred by their father's disappearance. Stephanie didn't know what her father might look or sound like on the tape, so she decided to watch it privately before telling Samantha about it. Her concerns were soon swept away. Her father looked thin but he appeared healthy and there was nothing about the video that struck Stephanie as frightening or negative. Instead, she sensed its arrival was a signal his release was imminent. “This is the best day of my life,” she thought.

After she told her sister about the tape, they sat down together to watch it. Stephanie expected to see her sister's face reflect the same joy and relief she had felt. Instead, Samantha appeared impassive. Inside, Samantha knew she should be hugging her sister and sharing her happiness. She couldn't allow herself those feelings. In the chaotic days immediately after her father's disappearance, her oldest sister, Sue, told her that an FBI agent or some other visitor to their house had said it was impossible to predict when he would be back. It could be “in six weeks or in six years,” the person said. The words remained seared in Samantha's memory. Her father had lavished Samantha with attention and kindness. During her awkward teenage years, when high school boys had started buzzing around, he had reassured her he was watching her back. “I'm going to be sitting at the front door with a shotgun and a fingerprinting kit,” he said. Then, in a flash, all his love and protection vanished. She might have fallen into despair, but she wanted her father to be proud of her when he returned. The only way to do that, she decided, was to ignore the future and push forward one day at a time. She allowed herself one small indulgence, her own secret yellow ribbon. Pinned up on the bedroom wall of her childhood room was the email her father had sent her just before he disappeared, the one in which he had wished his “Turtle” good luck on her high school speech. They were the last words he had said to her and she didn't plan to take the note down until she could tell him how much she loved him.

Sarah Levinson was in the kitchen of her New Jersey home that night when her phone lit up with her mother's number. A few months earlier, she and her fiancé, Ryan Moriarty, finally were married. Her brother Dan had walked her down the aisle. Among the couple's wedding presents was a ceramic oven stone for making homemade pizza, a gift from Chris. Sarah and Ryan were trying it out for the first time when her mother called. Sarah laughed as she picked up the phone. “We're using the pizza stone you gave us,” she said. Then she heard the news about her father and dinner was forgotten.

In their joy, Sarah and other members of Bob's family didn't immediately examine the email to which it had been attached. There were striking resemblances between it and the email sent in mid-2007 to Ira Silverman and several other friends of Bob, the one that the FBI had dismissed as a fake. The 2007 email was sent through a Gmail account opened under the name “Osman.Muhamad.” The 2010 email containing the video was sent through a Gmail account opened under the name “Osman.Muhamad90.” A copy of the 2010 email was also sent to one of the journalists, Chris Isham, who was copied on the 2007 email.

The similarities weren't coincidences. FBI officials, through incompetence or sloth, had blown a huge clue by dismissing the 2007 email, one that could have dramatically altered the course of the bureau's investigation and Bob's fate. There was little question now that he had managed to get his captors to put his friends' names on that email. A hacker hadn't stolen them. They were his cries for help. His answer, day after day, was silence.