Missing Man (6 page)

The postman waiting at his doorstep didn't appear threatening. “I need your signature,” Dawud told him as he moved the packages closer. He then squeezed off three rounds, each bullet hitting Tabatabai in the abdomen. Dawud turned and walked back to the postal jeep. Forty-five minutes later, Tabatabai was declared dead at a local hospital.

Dawud quickly ditched the postal vehicle and climbed into a car driven by an accomplice. His original plan called for him to escape the United States by taking a flight to Europe from John F. Kennedy Airport in New York, but as he approached the city, the radio was buzzing with news of the killing, including descriptions of the shooter as a young black man. He decided to divert to Canada and, after driving north through the night, crossed the border. In Montreal he boarded a plane for Paris. It was on the next leg of his journey, a short flight from Paris to Geneva, that he picked up a newspaper and read that he was the subject of a manhunt. He hid out for a week in Switzerland and then, with the aid of an Iranian woman, slipped onto a flight to Tehran and safety.

In the United States, the public was shocked that a homegrown terrorist could carry out a brazen assassination near the nation's capital at the behest of one of America's enemies. For weeks, reporters from
The Washington Post
,
The New York Times
, and other newspapers dug into Dawud's past to try to understand the path that had taken him to Tabatabai's door. Friends and family who had known Teddy Belfield were stunned. In Bay Shore, New York, the Long Island suburb where he grew up, he had been regarded as smart, sociable, and athletic. His four siblings were all straight arrows; an older brother was a police officer.

People expected Teddy to follow in his siblings' footsteps. In 1968, he started as a freshman at Howard University in Washington, but before finishing the year he dropped out. Soon afterward, he converted to Islam, taking his new name, Dawud Salahuddin, in honor of a twelfth-century Muslim warrior. Plenty of students dropped out of college during the late 1960s; the Vietnam War was raging, race riots flared throughout the United States after the assassination of Martin Luther King, and black power groups such as the Black Muslims were in ascendancy. But becoming an assassin was totally different. “I don't understand this at all,” Dawud's aunt told reporters after the murder. “When I saw his picture flashed up on the television screen and heard what the newscaster was saying about him, I nearly died. People here are so shocked. They know the family is much different.”

Journalists seized on Dawud's use of a postman's disguise, suggesting he had gotten the idea from
Three Days of the Condor
, a thriller released in the mid-1970s that starred Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway. In the movie Redford plays a CIA analyst, code-named Condor, who is marked for execution by the spy agency. Hiding out in a New York brownstone, he answers a knock at the door and finds a postman holding a special delivery package. Redford's character lets the man in, unaware he is a CIA hit man, and is forced to dodge bullets. The writer of the novel on which the film was based, James Grady, was so shaken by how closely Tabatabai's murder resembled the scene he had created that he wrote a newspaper editorial lamenting the collision of art and life. “When I came up with the idea in 1972, I meant to inject paranoia into the plausible, not to write a script for assassins,” he wrote.

For Dawud, the glamour of serving the Islamic Revolution quickly faded. He intended Iran only to be a stopover on his way to China, where he wanted to study herbal medicine and martial arts. Decades later, he was stuck there, afraid to leave because U.S. officials might grab him if he left the country. He married an Iranian woman and worked on English-language publications in Tehran, including a website called Press TV. Before long, the only people outside Iran who remembered him were his family, the relatives of his victim, some cops, and a few reporters who came to Iran to interview him.

The stories Dawud told the journalists were colorful, and invariably he was at the center of the action. He claimed he had fought courageously in Afghanistan alongside the mujahideen to drive out the Russians and had traveled clandestinely through the Middle East as a trusted courier for Islamic activists. His email address also rang a dramatic and cultural chord. He used the name David Jansen, after David Janssen, the actor in the popular 1960s television series
The Fugitive
who played the role of Dr. Richard Kimble, a physician wrongly accused of murder.

Journalists had no way of knowing which, if any, of Dawud's stories were true. For most of them that wasn't a big problem. The fugitive was well-read and charismatic, and he shared his stories so freely that journalists were flattered into thinking that he was opening up to them because of their skills as interviewers. He was also a canvas onto which they could paint a portrait of their choosing. In some journalistic renderings, he was depicted as an unrepentant idealist; in others, as a sympathetic pawn in a global intelligence game; in still others, as a man caught between two countries and ideologies, uncertain of where he belonged. Writers tended to downplay his cold-blooded murder of Tabatabai or to absolve him entirely. “Who am I, who grew up privileged and white in a small and stable country, England, to take to task a man who grew up black in 1960s America? That would be intolerably arrogant,” one writer responded when asked about his sympathetic portrayal of Dawud. Ira Silverman had embraced another view of the fugitive; he thought Dawud might want to seek redemption by becoming an informant.

Ira inherited the idea from one of his best law enforcement sources, Carl Shoffler, a celebrated police detective in Washington, D.C. Shoffler first gained fame in 1972 when he and two fellow plainclothes officers arrested five burglars breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex. He then rose through the ranks of the intelligence division of the D.C. police, developing close ties to the FBI and the CIA. Shoffler didn't look like a master detective. He was short and overweight with a choppy haircut and a bad complexion. He smoked and drank constantly. Fellow cops nicknamed him “Mr. Chips” because he always had one hand in a bag of junk food or a box of donuts while sitting in a car on a surveillance operation. But Shoffler possessed a sixth sense about how to work people for information, whether they were criminals he was trying to flip or journalists with whom he traded tips. He developed an infatuation with Dawud and became obsessed with cutting a deal for him to surrender and return home.

A few years after Tabatabai's murder, James Grady, the author of the book made into
Three Days of the Condor
, got an unexpected call from Shoffler, who invited him to meet at a greasy spoon diner in downtown Washington. Grady had never met the detective and found him seated at a back table talking on a shoebox-size portable phone, a rarity in that era. As the author approached, he could see Shoffler speaking excitedly into the device, saying, “He's here … He's here.” Then the detective, covering the phone's mouthpiece, said to Grady, “It's him … It's him.” The writer was baffled, and when Shoffler handed him the phone he found Dawud on the line. To score points with the fugitive, the detective had promised to introduce him to Grady and get him an autographed copy of his book.

Shoffler's interest in Dawud waned for a time, but it was reignited in 1993 after Islamic terrorists used a truck bomb to try to topple the World Trade Center. By then Shoffler had retired from the D.C. police force and was working as the chief fire investigator in a suburban Maryland county, though he still retained close ties with U.S. intelligence agencies. The detective feared that another terrorist attack was imminent and believed that Dawud, if he could be persuaded to return home, might share his insights about Islamic terror groups. Over the next few years, the two men exchanged letters and talked regularly by phone. Shoffler suggested he and Dawud had areas of common interest they could work on together, such as reducing the supply of opium from Afghanistan that was fueling heroin addiction in Iran and the United States. They talked about American politics and religion, and Shoffler relayed messages between Dawud and his aging mother. To further their intimacy, the detective confided in the fugitive about the health of his daughter, who suffered from juvenile diabetes. “Don't think I'm going soft with age, but over the past few months I have developed a bit of a soft spot in my heart for you,” Dawud wrote him. “Ten years ago, we probably would have had to try to kill each other if our paths crossed. Life is strange indeed.”

In time, Shoffler swung the conversation around to his real purpose, trying to negotiate terms for Dawud's surrender. The fugitive had made it clear in their talks that his own infatuation with Iran was over. “This country, this regime, I think it has seen its best days,” he told Shoffler. “I think it is going to be history, not before too long. And any idea about this country leading the Muslim world, excuse the language, is pure bullshit.”

The detective told Dawud that he thought he could get him a relatively short prison term for Tabatabai's murder, maybe about eight years, in exchange for information about terrorist organizations. Dawud, then in his mid-forties, was interested, but he wanted less prison time. He drafted a letter to the Justice Department that outlined the kind of help he was prepared to give and what he wanted in return:

I believe that I am in a position to increase your government's depth of insight into Iran, a state mistakenly perceived as the heart of the international Islamic movement; that is provided anyone really wants to know. The price for this service is freedom from all prosecution related to charges I face in the Bethesda affair. From what I see coming at America down the road in the Middle East, I believe that what I am offering to you is of no small value.

Soon afterward, Shoffler called him to say that prosecutors in Maryland were insisting that he spend his time in a state penitentiary rather than a federal prison. Dawud was disappointed. “Maryland is a slave state,” he responded. “I don't think they'd appreciate a guy like me in Maryland.” When Shoffler suggested he might have better luck working with another law enforcement official, the fugitive asked him not to hand off his case. “I'm not looking to be a notch in somebody's gun belt,” Dawud said. Shoffler reassured him, “I don't need a notch. I gave you my word on certain things and I'd like to see that happen. I just wanted to make sure that you knew that I was shooting straight with you and that I will continue to shoot straight with you.”

But by that time, Shoffler had realized that the fugitive's demands were absurd and that the only way to bring him back was to capture him. To do that, he needed to lure the fugitive out of Iran, and he decided to exploit what he had come to see as Dawud's biggest vulnerability—his vanity and incessant need for attention. Nothing would thrill Dawud more, he knew, than boasting on American television about his killing of Tabatabai.

Shoffler knew dozens of reporters and television producers, and every one of them would have jumped at the chance to get Dawud's confession. However, Shoffler needed to find the right journalist. He didn't want to burn any of his regular contacts like Ira by making them the bait in his trap, so he contacted a freelance journalist named Joseph Trento, who specialized in intelligence issues and tended to see the CIA's hand behind many events. Shoffler told him that Dawud was prepared to publicly admit to the Iranian diplomat's murder and asked him if he was interested in the story. Trento pounced, and brought the project to
20/20
, the ABC television news magazine, which agreed to hire him as a consultant to help produce the segment. Since an American television crew couldn't get into Iran, Shoffler suggested to Trento that he interview Dawud in Moscow. He then notified FBI agents there so they could arrest the fugitive as soon as he landed. At the last moment, Trento learned about the setup from an intelligence source and, without telling Shoffler, shifted the interview's location to Istanbul.

In his
20/20
interview, Dawud came across as an eager job applicant, dressed in a double-breasted sports jacket, a white shirt, a tie, and a tie clip. He recounted his killing of Tabatabai with calm and apparent relish, offering a description of the look on his victim's face after he realized he had been shot. “Our eyes locked and he gave me the very strong impression of a man who expected to die,” Dawud said. The
20/20
correspondent who conducted the on-air interview, Tom Jarriel, then ticked down the checklist of questions journalists feel obliged to ask when speaking with a murderer. Had he felt any remorse about the shooting? Had he ever lost any sleep over it? Dawud assured him that he hadn't. “All governments kill traitors. So on that level, I never had any doubt about the man's death,” he responded.

A few months after the interview was broadcast in 1995, Shoffler developed acute pancreatitis and died. When a CIA agent called Dawud to tell him, the fugitive broke into tears. He was so moved by Shoffler's death he sent flowers to his funeral. Ira also was distraught. He had felt as close to Carl Shoffler as he did to Bob Levinson; ever since meeting Carl some eighteen years earlier, he had spoken with him nearly every day. Some journalists maintain distance from their sources and avoid socializing with them. Ira was never like that. He treated his sources like family members and cherished friends. He and Shoffler also belonged to a circle of Washington journalists, lawyers, congressional staffers, and cops who met regularly for drinks or got together on weekends at one another's homes.

To honor his late friend, Ira wrote a eulogy of him for
The New Yorker
that praised his skills as a cultivator of informants and recounted his attempt to convince Dawud to surrender.

Other cops call their informants snitches or stoolie and often hold them in contempt. Carl Shoffler … called them “sources” and, sometimes, friends. He gave out his home telephone number to mobsters on the run, to suspected terrorists and to defectors from hate groups. For most people engaged in police work, especially those devoted to their families, such a practice would be unthinkable. But for Shoffler, it was a way to build trust. He needed those unsavory informants; he didn't coddle them, but they knew that he would always be upfront and straight with them.