Missing Man (7 page)

The article was among several that Ira wrote for
The New Yorker
after he retired from NBC News in the mid-1990s. He had started his television career in the 1960s with the network's local affiliate in New York and had gone on to a high-profile career as a producer of investigative pieces for its flagship program,
NBC Nightly News
. As a producer, he was a behind-the-scenes workhorse, developing sources, digging out stories, directing film crews, writing scripts, and editing pieces. In the mid-1970s, NBC paired him with a young on-air correspondent, Brian Ross, whom the network brought to New York from Cleveland after he had won a prestigious journalism award for pieces about Jackie Presser, a corrupt Teamsters union official. The two men were polar opposites. The baby-faced Ross had blond hair and the looks of a choirboy. Ira was pudgy, balding, and bespectacled. He had grown up in Brooklyn and liked to spout Yiddish phrases and act like a street tough. But they clicked as a team, and Ira helped pioneer techniques such as stakeouts, hidden cameras, and confrontational interviews that soon became standard fare for investigative programs. The two journalists, dubbed “Batman and Robin” by their colleagues, became network news stars, winning awards for breaking big stories and appearing as guests on
The Dick Cavett Show
, a popular late-night program.

Ira also earned a reputation for tenaciousness and for the self-confidence to roll over his bosses when they got in the way of a story. In 1980, he got a tip the FBI was running a sting operation in which undercover agents, disguised as Arab sheiks, were making payoffs to congressmen in exchange for political favors. The head of NBC News thought the scheme sounded too crazy to be real and told Ira to forget about it. He didn't and secretly brought in a camera crew from outside Washington, parked a mobile home outside the Hill house where the payoffs were taking place, and, using night-vision equipment, filmed politicians going in and out. He and Ross then broke the story of the investigation, which was code-named “ABSCAM.” It became one of the biggest political scandals of its time, and the FBI sting later served as the basis for the popular film
American Hustle
.

Not all of Ira's pieces were triumphs; some competitors thought he hyped stories, and the newsman, like other investigative journalists, sometimes was prone to obsession and even a little paranoia. After collaborating on a book with a New York City detective who had blown the whistle on police corruption, he turned up at NBC wearing a pistol. He told colleagues he had gotten death threats. By the mid-1990s, his relationship with Brian Ross had unraveled after the on-air correspondent accepted an offer to move to ABC News. Ross offered to take Ira with him, but Ira felt loyal to NBC and thought Ross's departure a betrayal. The men would never talk again.

After his retirement from NBC, Ira tried to make a fresh start in television, this time in front of the camera. He developed a show called
Ira's People
, on which he planned to interview the interesting criminals and scalawags he had met during his career. One episode of it aired on a cable channel, Court TV, before it was dropped. He also wrote crime stories for
The New Yorker
, and soon after 9/11 he pitched the magazine on a story idea—to profile Dawud as the prototypical Islamic terrorist. While he was writing Carl Shoffler's eulogy, the detective's family had given Ira his correspondence with Dawud and tape recordings he had made of their phone conversations. Ira's proposal was timely: in 2001, the fugitive had attracted public attention again, not as an assassin but as an actor in a critically acclaimed Iranian film,
Kandahar
. The movie tells the story of an Afghan-born journalist living in Canada who returns to Afghanistan to search for her sister after the country has fallen under the Taliban's oppressive rule. In one of the film's most memorable scenes, a doctor examines the journalist. Because of religious strictures, she has to stand hidden behind a sheet drawn across a room. The sheet has a peephole, through which he peers at her. They recognize each other as English speakers. The doctor explains that he is an American who originally came to Afghanistan to fight as a jihadist. But after wearying of endless battles, he says, he decided to teach himself medicine so he could do some good. He picks up a small bottle of liquid and pours its contents along the edges of his long beard, peeling off his fake whiskers. “I too have to come out from behind the curtain,” he remarks.

In the film's credits, the actor playing the doctor is listed as “Hassan Tantai.” When
Kandahar
was shown in the United States, Dawud was recognized and a flurry of newspaper articles appeared about the escaped killer's new film career. After Ira called him and mentioned he was a close friend of Carl Shoffler, the fugitive said he would be happy to meet. With the
New Yorker
assignment in hand, Ira contacted two Canadian journalists who worked for
The Fifth Estate
, an investigative television program that is Canada's equivalent of
60 Minutes
. A few years earlier, Ira had worked with the men, Linden MacIntyre and Neil Docherty, on a piece about Russian organized crime, and he had arranged for them to interview Bob Levinson on camera about his days tracking Russian mobsters in Miami. The Canadians agreed to accompany Ira and do a piece about Iran for
The Fifth Estate
.

When the journalists arrived in Tehran in early 2002, oversized dump trucks were still hauling away debris from the site where the Twin Towers had once stood. After the 9/11 attacks, thousands of Iranians had taken to the streets in a show of solidarity with the United States, holding candles and shouting, “Death to terrorists.” Behind the scenes, a diplomatic window also briefly opened—a crack in the decades-long wall of hatred and distrust that had characterized the relationship between the United States and Iran. Since the shah's overthrow, the countries had been engaged in what one historian called a twilight war, a hidden conflict in which they had used proxies to strike at each other. The United States had armed Iran's enemy Iraq during eight years of war in which three hundred thousand Iranians had died. Hezbollah, the terrorist group funded by Iran, had carried out a 1983 suicide bombing of a marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 U.S. troops.

In the Taliban and Al Qaeda, Iran and the United States found common enemies. Prior to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, American and Iranian officials held secret diplomatic talks, their first in decades. Iranian officials, along with providing the United States with data on Taliban troop locations, offered to rescue American combat pilots forced to bail out over Iran. Then President George W. Bush, in his first State of the Union address after 9/11, named Iran, along with Iraq and North Korea, as a member of an “axis of evil,” countries that were exporting terrorism and developing weapons of mass destruction. The diplomatic window between Washington and Tehran slammed shut again and the secret talks ended.

Dawud was waiting at the airport to greet Ira and the
Fifth Estate
crew when they landed. Despite his long exile in Iran, he looked so unassimilated he appeared as if he could have walked off the same flight. He was also homesick. All he wanted to talk about was American politics, movies, music, and books. In interviews with Ira, he displayed the same braggadocio he had shown seven years earlier during his appearance on
20/20
. He claimed that he tried to convince his handlers to let him assassinate a political bigwig like the former secretary of state Henry Kissinger rather than a nobody like Ali Akbar Tabatabai. He also expressed mixed feelings about the 9/11 attacks. While he thought it had been wrong to hit the World Trade Center because regular people worked there, the situation at the Pentagon was different. “I felt sorry for the people who died there, especially the civilians. But in a situation like that they knew where they were working,” he said.

Dawud also repeated an old complaint. Iran, he told Ira, had not turned into the egalitarian, color-blind paradise that he had hoped to help create. Instead, its religious leaders, or mullahs, exercised autocratic control over all aspects of life, and people who questioned their authority faced imprisonment, torture, and death. “The Iranians of my immediate association turned out to be far from paragons of virtue,” he said. “The corruption here among the highest levels of the mullahs is incredible. It includes financial malfeasance, gross human-rights violations, extrajudicial murder and two systems of justice, one for the mullahs and one for the citizens.”

His wrath was especially focused on one figure—Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a religious leader who had served as Iran's president from 1989 to 1997. Since leaving office, Rafsanjani had become one of Iran's wealthiest men, with business interests spanning auto making, construction, real estate, and pistachio nut farming. Dawud contemptuously referred to him as the “pistachio man.” One day he took the
Fifth Estate
team, which was doing a broad piece about the suppression of political dissent in Iran, to a Tehran mosque to film a prayer service. During it, Rafsanjani stepped out from behind a prayer screen to lead the service. Salahuddin told the Canadian journalists that the ex-politician had siphoned off millions of dollars from government oil sales while in office and then used front companies to secretly invest the money in Canada, both in real estate and in business ventures. Linden MacIntyre felt Dawud wanted him and his
Fifth Estate
colleagues to do an exposé of Rafsanjani, whom the fugitive called “the biggest thief in the history of Iran.”

On their last day in Iran, Ira and the Canadians went to Dawud's home in Karaj, an industrial city not far from Tehran, to share a final meal prepared by the fugitive's wife. Afterward, the
Fifth Estate
crew left for the airport. Ira, whose flight departed later, figured he would be more comfortable spending time at Dawud's house than inside the terminal. Once alone with the fugitive, he began to regret that decision. He had seen a side of Dawud that hadn't come through in Carl Shoffler's letters or tape recordings. The fugitive told Ira that he suffered frequent bouts of depression, including some that lasted for months. At times, Dawud stammered or broke off speaking mid-sentence, staring out blankly for a few seconds before completing his thought. With the Canadians around, there had been safety in numbers. Now that he was left alone with Dawud, Ira's fears mounted. The fugitive told Ira that he would not hesitate, if needed, to kill again.

Dawud didn't drive, and when it was time for Ira to leave for the airport, he found a neighbor who agreed to take them. It was dark when the man arrived. Ira and Dawud climbed into the backseat. On the way to Dawud's home, Ira's taxi had traveled along a well-lit motorway. The fugitive's neighbor zigzagged along pitch-black roads that could have been headed anywhere. It was only an hour later, when Ira saw signs for the airport, that he began to relax.

His profile of Dawud, “An American Terrorist,” appeared in the August 5, 2002, issue of
The New Yorker
. In the piece's conclusion, Ira hammered home Carl Shoffler's view of the fugitive, which he had come to share—Dawud knew secrets of enormous value to U.S. intelligence. Ira wrote: “Although his capture would be a triumph for law enforcement, Salahuddin may be, from an intelligence perspective, more useful left in place. His efforts on behalf of the revolution have afforded him a high level of access to the inner circle of the government, especially among moderates and others interested in rapprochement with the United States.”

The article would prove to be Ira's last assignment for the magazine or any other publication. In 2006, he was seventy-one, and the years since his trip to Tehran hadn't treated him kindly. His career as a journalist appeared over, and, to stave off retirement, he tried his hand at writing screenplays, though none of them went anywhere. He also continued to speak regularly with Dawud. They talked about politics, events in the news, or whatever was on the fugitive's mind. But Ira kept hoping for more—a tip from Dawud that might point him toward one more big story, like the warning of a coming terrorist attack. In late 2005, Dawud told Ira he sensed the “curtain” was coming down on him in Iran. With the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the country's new president, the political protection he had enjoyed was disappearing and he worried he might soon be jailed or expelled. Iran was also becoming increasingly chaotic. People were falling ill with radiation sickness, he said, because the Iranian government was using nuclear waste to “harden” conventional bombs.

It was also in late 2005 that Bob started asking Ira about Dawud. The two friends had spoken over the years about the fugitive, but Bob's questions became more pointed and he wanted to know if Ira could connect him with Dawud. Ira knew Bob wanted to get government work, and if he could help him, he was happy to do it. He saw himself passing along to Bob the torch left behind by the journalist's other confidant, Carl Shoffler.

After their lunch in June 2006 at Clyde's, Ira and Bob started kicking around ways in which the investigator could approach the fugitive. Dawud had made it clear to Ira that he didn't intend to return to the United States to “face the music,” but they figured that Bob could offer other favors, such as arranging a reunion in a safe place outside Iran where Dawud could see his mother before she died. To start the ball rolling, Bob suggested a strategy that dovetailed with the Illicit Finance Group's interests—Ira would tell Dawud he was a private investigator hired to locate assets in Canada purchased by former Iranian president Rafsanjani with looted money. Earlier, Dawud had told Ira and the
Fifth Estate
team that one of those ventures was a privately operated expressway that ran through Toronto called Highway 407. Ira sent Bob an email with information about it, referring to Iranians such as Rafsanjani as the “I” guys or people.