Missing Man (9 page)

A decade earlier, just before Bob retired from the bureau, Mogilevich had met with federal prosecutors and FBI agents in an attempt to cut a plea deal and avoid indictment for his Wall Street scam. For two days, the gangster ratted out other reputed Russian mobsters. He also claimed that Birshtein, to nail down business deals, had paid huge bribes to top officials in the KGB and its successor agency, the FSB. Eventually, other criminals had declared Birshtein “out,” or persona non grata, because he spoke too publicly about the bribes, Mogilevich said.

Prosecutors hadn't considered Mogilevich's claims worthy of a deal, and they did not take any action against Birshtein based on what the gangster said. But years later, the impact of Mogilevich's comments still lingered. When Birshtein went to an airport to take a flight to the United States or attempted to cross the Canadian-U.S. border by car, his name would flash up on a watch list and American customs officials would question him for hours about the reason for his visit. Over the years, he had spent a small fortune on lawyers and lobbyists in a failed effort to get his name off the watch list.

In mid-2006, Bob, accompanied by John Good, arrived at a three-story building in Toronto's elegant Yorkville district. A glass insert above a large wooden door was etched with the initials
HTM
, which stood for the Royal HTM Group, one of Birshtein's companies. The elegantly furnished offices could have been mistaken for a small, discreet wealth management firm. A photograph displayed on a credenza showed a short, stocky man in his late fifties with snow-white hair and a moustache flashing a wide smile as he posed alongside a dozen towering Africans dressed in colorful tribal robes. The photograph was taken in Nigeria's oil-rich and corruption-plagued Niger Delta region, from which Birshtein had recently returned after signing an agreement for Royal HTM to build a fertilizer plant, seaport, and power generating station. Nearby, there were two large diplomas awarded by a group called the International Informatization Academy to “Dr. Boris Birshtein.” Bob sensed that Boris was just the type of guy with whom he could do business.

After some small talk, Bob told Boris about his FBI file and what Mogilevich had said. Boris, who spoke in a thickly accented English, said he had met Mogilevich only a few times and regarded him as a thug who tried to muscle in on his businesses. Bob made it clear he had come to seek Boris's help in his investigation of the Russian gangster. Then he played his trump card. One of the biggest lures an FBI agent can use to attract an informant is to get him a visa or clear up an immigration problem. Bob told Boris he was certain he could convince U.S. officials to take his name off the watch list. “I'd take whatever bullshit they give you at the airport one last time and let ME try to get this straightened out once and for all,” he emailed him after their meeting.

Before long, Bob and Boris were talking on a regular basis about Mogilevich, the Ukrainian gas industry, Eastern European politicians, and gangsters. Then, about two months after their first meeting, Bob called the businessman and asked him whether he knew any Iranians. Boris understood how the game was played and he knew better than to ask why. He told Bob that a retired KGB colonel, Aleksei Sisoev, had introduced him in 2005 to an Iranian, Ali Magamidi Riza, who lived in Moscow. Sisoev described Riza as a businessman and a liaison between Iran and Russia in the weapons business. Boris spoke by phone with Riza in mid-2005 but decided not to pursue further conversations, he told Bob, after the Iranian started feeling him out about doing arms deals. At Bob's suggestion, Boris called Riza in August 2006 to discuss the possibility of meeting in Europe in the coming weeks. Bob sent a report about the conversation to Anne, identifying Boris in it as “the Russian businessman.” In an accompanying email, Bob noted that the head of the Illicit Finance Group, Tim Sampson, was “definitely” interested in the subject.

The Russian businessman who operates internationally indicated that Riza talked openly of being active and having interests in neighboring Tadjikistan [
sic
]. This country shares the same language and culture as Iran, and has what he characterized as “Persian origins.”

It was apparent to the Russian businessman, from both this conversation as well as with another well-connected Iranian businessman, Farshid Ali Zadeh, that a similar theme was being sounded; Iranians are seeking to “take over” Tadjikistan in order to gain access to its lucrative industries. The Russian businessman mentioned that two areas of great interest to the Iranians included aluminum resources and hydro-electric power plants.

The Russian businessman indicated that from the way both Aleksei Sisoev and Ali Magamidi Riza spoke in late August 2006, both could possibly be instrumental in the Government of Iran's efforts to circumvent any upcoming trade sanctions imposed by the United Nations.

Anne's response was quick. “Wow!!!!!!… Mucho thanks!” she wrote.

Along with pushing for more U.N.-imposed sanctions, U.S. officials in 2006 also blacklisted one of Iran's biggest banks and intensified their financial surveillance of Iran. Bob soon heard again from Houshang Bouzari, the oil consultant in Toronto. Bouzari liked Bob, but he wanted him to understand that the people he was asking about, the Rafsanjani clan, were ruthless. He suggested he contact an Iranian journalist named Akbar Ganji, who several years earlier had written a series of articles about the killings of dissident writers, an episode known as the “Chain Murders of Iran.” In his reports, Ganji had pointed to the role of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani in the deaths. Long after his final conversation with Bob, the consultant would remember telling him during it that he suspected he worked for American intelligence. Bouzari recalled, “I told him, Bob, whatever you do, never, ever, think about going to Iran.”

 

5

A Gold Mine

A “gold mine,” that's what the CIA was calling him, a goddamn gold mine. It was right there in Anne Jablonski's email, the one in which she quoted her boss, Tim Sampson, as saying, “This guy is a damn GOLD MINE!” Bob knew that stroking people to get information was a part of the intelligence business. He did it all the time. But he was certain Anne was telling him they were on the right track and scoring points with the right people. “Toots, say no more. You made my day—forget that, my year. Some of the best stuff is yet to be written up and sent you, so strap your seat belt on.”

In the late fall of 2006, Bob felt the wind at his back. Even his kids noticed he looked happier and asked him what was going on. “I'm doing important work again,” he told them. His second-oldest daughter, Stephanie, was about to deliver his first grandchild, and lots of work from private clients was coming in the door. A big consulting firm in Washington, TD International, was using him regularly to do background reports about Russian businessmen for American companies. A firm in London, Bishop International, which did counterfeit product investigations, assigned him work from one of its clients, British American Tobacco. He had so much on his plate he was farming out cases with links to Central America to a friend living there, a retired CIA agent named Robert Seldon Lady. The former CIA station chief in Milan, Lady had helped mastermind the 2002 kidnapping in that city of a Muslim cleric known as Abu Omar, who was grabbed on a street and flown to Egypt, where he was imprisoned and questioned while tortured. The episode was one of the first extraordinary “renditions” after 9/11 of a terror suspect, and when Italian authorities learned of the CIA's role in it, they tried to arrest the agency operatives involved, including Lady, who fled Italy for Central America, one step ahead of the police.

That fall, Bob banged out forty analytical reports over a two-month period for the Illicit Finance Group, including five on a single day. Anne's home on South June Street in Arlington was now a regular FedEx stop, and his CIA bosses were so pleased with his work they added $20,000 in travel money to his contract because he had already spent down its original funding. His arrangement with the Illicit Finance Group was lucrative because his reports to the agency often didn't require additional work but were rewrites of information that private clients were paying him to gather. For instance, he was giving Anne Jablonski constant updates about the status of his investigation for Global Witness into Semion Mogilevich and the Ukrainian gas industry. Global Witness would have fired Bob if it found out what he was doing, because his contract with the group called for his work to be kept confidential. But Bob didn't need to worry; Anne and her CIA colleagues weren't about to give the game away.

The kind of material Bob gathered was known in the trade as “raw” intelligence, a catchall category covering leads, hearsay, and rumors that needed follow-up to verify the information's accuracy, because often it wasn't true. His informants were often inhabitants of the shadow world among crime, business, and espionage who peddled information for a living. The two men who were his main conduits for material about Hugo Chávez and Venezuela were emblematic of the breed. One of them was a disbarred lawyer in Miami named Kenneth Rijock, who, after doing time in a federal prison for laundering Colombian cartel money, reinvented himself as a financial crime consultant. The other man, Thor Halvorssen, was a former business executive from Venezuela who became so infatuated with spying that a journalist described him in a profile as suffering from a “James Bond complex.”

One report from Venezuela that Bob forwarded to the Illicit Finance Group detailed life aboard Hugo Chávez's presidential jet. It depicted Chávez as a vain, unbalanced, and sexually charged madman, who reportedly destroyed the plane's bathroom after finding a container of Nivea skin cream in it because he took the product's presence as a message from his staff that “he was prematurely showing his age.” Rijock and Halvorssen also told Bob that their sources in Venezuela were reporting that Iranian engineers had arrived in the South American country to help expand its production of uranium, the key material in nuclear weapons.

In early November, Bob was scheduled to meet at Langley with the Illicit Finance Group and he checked with Anne to make sure it was on. “Yup! The 9th is definitely a go—8:30 in Tim's office,” she replied. At the meeting, he discussed a report from Venezuela that Hugo Chávez was sending planes loaded with cash to Hezbollah, Iran's ally in Lebanon. CIA analysts apparently considered the information so important they told Bob to forward it to the National Security Council, the panel that advises the White House on intelligence and security issues. Bob had also prepared a memo for the Langley meeting outlining possible assignments he could take on in the coming weeks for the Illicit Finance Group, a process known in intelligence parlance as “tasking.” His proposals ranged from a trip to Panama to meet a source knowledgeable about the FARC, the Colombian paramilitary group holding the Defense Department hostages, to gathering information about how Hugo Chávez was laundering money.

The memo also included several possible assignments involving Iran. Though Bob did not mention Houshang Bouzari or Dawud Salahuddin by name, he outlined the type of intelligence he anticipated finding. He wrote:

An individual who has previously provided information concerning the alleged use of Canada as a safe-haven for funds obtained in bribery and extortion schemes related to the production and distribution of petroleum products in the Islamic Republic of Iran, has advised that he continues to acquire data concerning the names, businesses and locations of “fronts” for the former president of the IRI, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, as well as his sons Mehdi and Mohsen.

This individual can be contacted again on multiple occasions during the next thirty to ninety days at which time the information he provides can be included in appropriate analytical reports to be submitted. (Location of anticipated interview to be provided upon request.)

A second individual has indicated that he has access to data which concerns the same activity by former President Rafsanjani and his “clan” and it is believed that this person's information can be utilized to corroborate or substantiate the reporting of the first individual. (Location of anticipated interview to be provided upon request.)

Anticipated costs involved in the production of analytical reports concerning these matters over the next thirty to ninety days is $15,000 (this includes compensation for time and estimated travel expenses).

Another Iran-related project was outlined in the same memo, one involving Boris Birshtein. Since their first meeting in Toronto, Bob had cultivated his relationship with Boris, stepping up his efforts to resolve the businessman's U.S. entry problems. He had also arranged for a private detective in Belgium to recover one of Boris's most prized possessions, a collection of antique pistols seized by the court there during a legal proceeding against him. Boris had reciprocated by setting up a potential meeting with Ali Magamidi Riza, the Iranian living in Moscow, that Bob could attend. In his memo Bob wrote:

An Iranian businessman identified as Ali Magamidi Riza, who is operating between Teheran and Moscow, has been the subject of one previous analytical report (25 August 2006). Riza has been described by a Russian businessman who shared information about him confidentially as involved in the clandestine acquisition of arms and other sensitive material for the Iranian government.

An opportunity exists to acquire detailed and specific information concerning this individual, as well as his reported objectives for the Iranian government, and this data could be the subject of a future analytical report.

Days after the Langley meeting, Boris arranged to see Riza in Istanbul in early December. The timing fit with Bob's other travel plans. At the beginning of December, he was scheduled to be in the Austrian city of Graz to testify at the drug trafficking trial of Leonid Venjik, his former informant who had double-crossed him. Bob worried that some of the criminals involved with Venjik's counterfeit cigarette and cocaine trafficking operations might try to harm him there, and he asked a friend who was an FBI agent based in Budapest to try to coordinate protection.