Pay Any Price (16 page)

Dick was friends with Brian Mallon, whom Dick had known when they both had worked in Newark. Dick was intrigued by Rosetta. Asimos made it clear to Dick that he was willing to share Rosetta's information with TFOS for free—and without a contract, at least at first. Asimos also seemed willing to conduct operations for the FBI, and Dick thought that was an offer too good to turn down.

With what he later claimed was the approval of his supervisors at TFOS, as well as the legal blessings of an FBI lawyer, Mike Dick launched a secret relationship with Rosetta. Without a contract and without a formal agreement with the FBI, Rosetta became, in effect, an investigative arm of the FBI. In a sworn affidavit in a later court case, Patrick Jost said that Mike Dick, Mike Asimos, and Brian Mallon had “all told me that Rosetta had been designated as an FBI undercover operation.” In the process, Mike Dick became either Mike Asimos's handler—or his stooge.

By the spring of 2004, the FBI and Rosetta were working so closely that Mike Dick was given his own Rosetta e-mail address. He was regularly receiving information from Asimos and Mallon while tasking them to gather more data for the FBI. In his 2013 lawsuit against the Justice Department and the FBI, Mike Dick offers his own explanation about his involvement with Rosetta. His lawsuit states that Dick “was assigned to secure information from the Motley Rice Law Firm, which represented the families of the 9-11 victims, who were pursuing a civil law suit against high ranking Saudi Arabian officials and bankers. . . . Dick was to collect information from the Motley Firm, but was not to disclose any information from the Bureau. Dick scrupulously followed this policy. The flow of information was one way from the families' attorneys to the Bureau.”

In his suit, Dick also explains the benefits to the FBI of using Rosetta. Motley Rice's private investigators, the suit says, “pursued investigative leads outside the United States, without being subject to the limitations” imposed on federal law enforcement or the military.

Many of Rosetta's internal reports written by Asimos and Mallon were addressed to Mike Dick, who went by the Rosetta code name of GM, or “Go Mike,” according to internal Rosetta e-mails and other documents.

“Received the attached docs from S12,” Asimos wrote (referring to a source's code name) in a September 17, 2004, e-mail to Mike Dick and others. “He obtained from ISI [Pakistan's spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate]. These docs contain photos/ID info of numerous terror financiers who worked for a fraudulent charity in Peshawar. ISI facilitated their departure from PAK [Peshawar] immediately after 9/11. You guys need to run these names. If not in any USG databases, they need to be added immed.”

Soon an FBI analyst was involved in the Rosetta-FBI relationship as well, searching FBI databases, sometimes doing records checks on people that Asimos was meeting or trying to recruit as informants, according to Jost and Rosetta's internal documents. While Rosetta was being funded with millions of dollars by Motley Rice and other private investors, the evidence suggests that Rosetta was conducting some of its work on behalf of Mike Dick and the FBI, rather than just for the 9/11 lawsuit.

According to Jost, Asimos often sought to convince Ron Motley and the Motley Rice lawyers that the informants he was recruiting around the world would be of use to the
Burnett
lawsuit. But Jost said he believes that Asimos was often just trying to mollify Motley while he conducted operations that were primarily geared to the government.

Jost complained that Asimos was dismissive of investigations that would only be of benefit to Motley Rice and the 9/11 lawsuit. On one occasion Jost recounted, he had been offered an invitation to a wedding that was to be attended by Khalid bin Mahfouz, who was of great interest to the Motley Rice lawyers handling the 9/11 lawsuit. Jost had hoped that the social event would present an opportunity to talk with bin Mahfouz and perhaps network with some of his closest associates, but Asimos was unwilling to have Rosetta cover his expenses for the trip. Jost said he believes Asimos didn't want to pursue the lead because it held no interest for the government.

An Afghan official in London became one of Rosetta's most important sources. While he was serving at the Afghan embassy in London, the diplomat was given the Rosetta code name of “S-1” in many of Rosetta's internal documents. In a series of interviews, Jost said that Rosetta had paid the diplomat huge amounts on a regular basis for his information and assistance, including helping Asimos to obtain visas and other documents to get in and out of Afghanistan. In an affidavit Jost later gave a defense lawyer in a criminal case in New York (involving the Afghan drug lord brought to the United States by Rosetta), Jost said that he told the Justice Department's inspector general about the financial payments made by Rosetta to S-1, whom he described as “an Afghan diplomat serving in London.” In addition, a source directly involved with Rosetta said that, in one instance, he personally delivered cash to the Afghan in London who was codenamed S-1 by Rosetta.

 

While Asimos may have been operating under the direction of officials at the Pentagon and FBI, it does not appear that they provided any more supervision than did Motley Rice. With little direction, Rosetta seems to have cast a wide, haphazard, and sometimes costly net for sources of information. Inevitably, that sometimes led to dead ends and strange encounters.

Afghan exiles living in London who were friends of S-1 started working for Rosetta, earning code names of their own. In order to keep their primary source happy, Patrick Jost recalled, he was tasked with finding British lawyers to assist with the immigration problems of some of S-1's Afghan friends living in London. S-1 “often asked Rosetta to help Afghans in London—legal problems, asylum petitions, needing jobs, and so on,” Jost later wrote in a memorandum. “Doing this was also always a priority, as he had to be kept happy.”

Before long, word apparently circulated among exiles about the money that might be available from Rosetta. One Afghan living in Sweden who knew S-1 was “willing to cooperate with Rosetta for financial gain,” according to a Rosetta memo from Mallon to Asimos and Dick. S-1 claimed the source had information about the potential sale of 5 kilograms of uranium in Kabul, and could also help Rosetta find Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader who had been in hiding in Pakistan since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan. S-1 also claimed that the source had only recently immigrated to Sweden from Quetta, Pakistan. “S-1 stated that he recently met an Afghan in Sweden with valuable information,” Mallon wrote in a May 2004 Rosetta report sent to both Asimos and Mike Dick. “According to S-1 this individual's family is in the immediate circle of MULLAH OMAR. S-1 believes that this individual could locate OMAR for the USA in exchange for the reward of $25,000,000. . . . S-1 stated that he has information regarding the potential sale of approximately 5 Kilograms of URANIUM in Kabul.” Yet after traveling to Gothenburg, Sweden, to interview the man, Mallon reported back that the new contact was a father of four and an unemployed Swedish citizen collecting government assistance who walked with the aid of crutches and who said he wanted to work with Rosetta to earn money for a back operation.

Another eager source was an Iranian living in Germany, going by the alias Hamid Reza Zakeri, who claimed that he had been a high-ranking Iranian intelligence official and that he had firsthand knowledge that Osama bin Laden and his deputy in al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had been living in Iran. The Iranian's information about the supposed sighting of Osama bin Laden in Iran was detailed and breathless in a Rosetta field report. “Both UBL and Dr. AZ were dressed as Iranian clerics with black turbans,” the Iranian claimed, when he saw them exit a Toyota Land Cruiser and walk toward a compound in Najmabad, Iran.

Asimos and Mallon traveled to Berlin to interview Zakeri in a Marriott hotel. The Iranian engaged in a general discussion about Iran's security services before stopping to say he would require a contractual arrangement before sharing any further details. Asimos e-mailed Motley Rice lawyers recommending that a contract be drawn up immediately, with payments contingent on Zakeri's passing a polygraph.

The polygrapher hired to assess Zakeri declared the Iranian a “phony” and unsophisticated, with “poor knowledge of the proper tradecraft.” Further, the polygrapher reported, Zakeri had previously attempted and failed to sell information to a number of intelligence services including American, French, German, and Swedish agencies. The polygrapher determined, after two days of interviews, that Zakeri had “failed all of the important questions” according to a March 2004 Rosetta report on the case. The polygrapher also reported that Zakeri called him at his Berlin hotel “and attempted to woo him with a business proposition.”

In 2005, Zakeri went public in a book by Kenneth Timmerman. The book,
Countdown to Crisis,
reported that in July 2001, Zakeri had warned the CIA of the 9/11 attacks; the book also said that Zakeri had evidence indicating Iran's support for al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks. Timmerman said in an interview that Zakeri told him about the polygraph test that he took in Germany while meeting with Rosetta. “Zakeri was pissed off with that polygrapher,” Timmerman recalled, “because he pretended he was working for the FBI, or was presented as if he was working for the FBI.”

Eventually, Zakeri did provide information in another 9/11-related lawsuit that had remarkable and surprising success in Judge Daniels's court in New York. In December 2011, Daniels ruled in a case known as
Havlish et al. v. bin Laden et al.
—like
Burnett,
a lawsuit that had been consolidated into
In re Terrorist Attacks
—that Iran and Hezbollah supported al Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks. Zakeri provided an affidavit in the
Havlish
case, as did Timmerman.

There is strong evidence that one Rosetta contact, who is referred to in internal Rosetta documents by the code name S-2, was a journalist. Rosetta reports and internal communications do not say that the journalist received any payment. But the reports indicate that Rosetta considered the journalist to be at the very least a valuable contact—and perhaps a valuable intelligence asset. Some level of information trading is common practice in journalism, but the relationship between the journalist and Rosetta was unusual. According to internal Rosetta reports and communications, the journalist introduced Asimos and Mallon to sources who subsequently became Rosetta assets.

With Brian Mallon, the journalist participated in the 2004 surveillance of a suspected Islamic extremist in London, but the two were questioned about their surveillance activities by British authorities, according to Jost and an internal Rosetta report. Mallon denied this incident occurred, despite the Rosetta report that described it in detail. Mallon wrote in the report that while he and S-2 were trying to conduct their surveillance operations in May 2004, they were asked by a local police officer to accompany him to the Barking Police Station in London. About three hours later, two detectives from the anti-terrorist branch of New Scotland Yard arrived at the station. “Neither was very friendly,” Mallon wrote, and they “suggested” that Mallon abandon his efforts.

The journalist was even issued a Rosetta e-mail address, which records indicate the journalist did use. Internal Rosetta memos indicate that Asimos and Mallon sought to “task” the journalist with specific assignments.

It is unclear whether the U.S. officials on the receiving end of Rosetta reports were aware that they may have become complicit in the exploitation of a journalist as an asset for intelligence collection. The U.S. intelligence community bans American intelligence officers from posing as journalists overseas, and has tight restrictions on exploiting or manipulating the press, so the officials involved in the government's relationship with Rosetta may have been in violation of those rules.

It is certainly possible that the internal reports suggesting that the journalist was a source for Rosetta were exaggerated. The journalist denied having been a source for Rosetta. Mallon and Asimos both denied that the journalist was an intelligence asset.

Another journalist introduced Rosetta to one of England's most incorrigible con men, who claimed he had valuable intelligence to offer. Paul Blanchard had been jailed for fraud and drug trafficking in the past, but now claimed to have connections with radical Islamists that could be useful to Rosetta—as long as Rosetta could help protect him from British law enforcement. Mallon asked Mike Dick and the FBI analyst involved in the FBI-Rosetta relationship to run a check on Blanchard's name through government databases, and to recommend questions for the new source, according to Rosetta documents. Dick responded that the FBI analyst was “running some local checks for threat assessment,” and the analyst replied with a list of specific queries.

British authorities later charged and convicted Blanchard of involvement in a 2003 scheme to steal £4.3 million from a tech company. Blanchard was also busted for his role in a separate conspiracy to launder £375,000 by falsifying sales records for a nonexistent yacht. A detective with the North Yorkshire Police who pursued Blanchard told a British newspaper that investigators had “found it extremely difficult to discover a single honest transaction which he has conducted.”

Rosetta's internal communications also offer insight into the occasions when Asimos turned over sources to the FBI or Defense Department. One example was a source who had previously worked at the Islamic Development Bank (IDB), a Saudi-based international financial institution that serves as an Islamic version of the World Bank for Arab nations. Rosetta paid his expenses to travel from his home in Britain to the United States, where he was debriefed by both the FBI and the Defense Department, according to internal Rosetta documents. He also met with Motley Rice lawyers, but Mike Dick seemed more enthusiastic.