Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

by James Risen

  Brisard also had to acknowledge that he had done some editing of the golden-chain document. Among the names of purported al Qaeda financiers listed in the document was someone named “bin Mahfoodh,” and Brisard was forced to admit in his court-ordered apology that in the English translation of the document he had amended the name to read “Khalid bin Mahfouz.” He said he had changed the name because he believed that it made the document more accurate. “I inserted the forename Khalid before bin Mahfouz in the amended translation, but I accept that the reality is that the name Khalid is not contained within the original Arabic document,” Brisard admitted.

  In fact, Brisard had to make a series of admissions of error—including that he had gotten it completely wrong when he wrote that Khalid bin Mahfouz was Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law. It was a brutal setback not only for Brisard but also for Ron Motley.

  But Ron Motley wasn’t willing to give up. He hired Michael Asimos, a bearded, long-haired former army officer and stockbroker who at first seemed perfectly suited to roam the world and hunt down the smoking gun Motley so desperately wanted in order to take down the Saudis.

  Years later, it was difficult for the Motley Rice lawyers to explain exactly how Asimos had arrived at their doorstep. It was also difficult for them to describe who he was, or why he had come. To this day, they aren’t certain whom he was really working for. Like the itinerant soldier in The Return of Martin Guerre, Asimos could become whatever people wanted him to be.

  In that, Asimos was hardly alone in the post-9/11 world. He was one of many dream weavers who flourished in Washington’s global war on terror, cashing in on the counterterrorism gold rush. What the stock market and the Internet bubble were to the 1990s, the counterterrorism bubble was to the first years of the new millennium, and there was a cadre of men willing and able to take advantage.

  Asimos was tall, broad-shouldered, bright, and articulate, with a presence at once friendly yet slightly conspiratorial, as if just being with him lets you in on a secret. When he met Ron Motley and the other lawyers involved in the 9/11 case, he struck them as a secret agent straight out of central casting. For tort lawyers whose idea of combat was a long day in a courtroom—lawyers who had learned most of what they knew about war from the movies—Mike Asimos seemed like Rambo come to life. He was the kind of guy they all wanted to be in high school. To Motley Rice, he appeared to have come out of nowhere at just the right time.

  Born in 1961, the son of a Greek owner of a diner in York, Pennsylvania, Asimos went to West Point, where he joined the Arabic language club and was jokingly nicknamed “the Envoy” in his West Point yearbook because of his interest in the Middle East. The yearbook suggests that, even while in college, he had already developed a reputation for being a little bit mysterious. “Whether it was drill, intramurals, or a DPE [physical education] test, ‘As’ wasn’t there,” read his yearbook inscription. “The ‘book’ grew throughout the years, but a whole chapter was needed to explain how ‘the Envoy’ missed finals for another Middle East vacation. If he wasn’t in the air assisting the U.S. resolve the Middle East crisis, he was on the road cruising to good times in his car—if it wasn’t loaned out! Mount up!”

  Asimos graduated from West Point in 1984, and by 1987, he was assigned to the staff of the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, the training center for army Special Operations, according to his military records. In 1989, he received a meritorious service medal for his work on Special Operations training programs. He left active duty in July 1989 with the rank of captain. He remained in the reserves until 1998.

  While he was in the army, Asimos experienced a strange firsthand encounter with an al Qaeda mole inside the U.S. military. At Fort Bragg, Asimos met Sgt. Ali Mohamed, a former Egyptian Army officer who had briefly been in contact with the CIA, which was interested in recruiting him as an asset. Mohamed had later immigrated to the United States and enlisted in the U.S. Army. After the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa, Mohamed was arrested and charged with conspiracy to aid terrorism. It turned out he was secretly Osama bin Laden’s chief of security, and had come to the United States in order to infiltrate the army and get to know American security tactics and methods.

  Asimos was quoted by the New York Times in its first story disclosing the existence of the government’s case against Mohamed. In a 1998 article Ben Weiser and I coauthored, Asimos recalled how, while he was stationed at the Kennedy Special Warfare Center in 1988, he had given Sergeant Mohamed some unclassified maps of Afghanistan for a trip he said he was planning to take on his own time to Afghanistan to fight with the mujahideen against the Soviets. “I remember Ali coming back at some point in 1988 and telling me how much Ahmad Shah Massoud [an Afghan rebel leader] was pleased that I took him some maps,” Asimos said in the Times article. Asimos also told the Times that in 1988, he had been running a classified war game at Fort Bragg, and that he warned participants to be careful what they said in front of Mohamed, who did not have a security clearance.

  After Asimos left active duty, he attended the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and received a master’s degree in 1991. In the early 1990s, Asimos worked as a stockbroker, but he left behind a messy paper trail exposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1994. According to an SEC report, the agency found that in 1992 and 1993, Asimos had convinced both his friends and family members to turn over large amounts of money so that he could invest it on their behalf. He claimed to have gained access to a special program that would allow small investors to put their money into the same high-earning investment vehicles normally reserved for institutional investors and wealthy individuals. He told his clients that their money would be held in his name, but he said that was the only way they could take advantage of this special offer.

  The only problem was, the special deal didn’t exist. Asimos forged documents to make it appear as if he had invested his clients’ money in the special program, according to the SEC report. In reality, he had simply deposited the money in his own bank accounts and used some of it to pay off his own debts, according to the SEC report. But Asimos was so sloppy that he was eventually caught and forced to return the money to his clients in order to avoid more serious trouble. He admitted to the scheme, cut a deal with the SEC, and was barred from acting as a stockbroker for at least three years.

  Despite his past trouble with the SEC, Asimos was able to move back into the financial industry in Charleston, where he opened his own firm, Atlantic Financial, specializing in advising small companies on mergers and obtaining lines of credit. In 1999, his company was purchased by Seaboard & Company, a local bond trading firm, which made the acquisition primarily to hire Asimos, according to a business executive who was involved with Seaboard at the time.

  But the partners in Seaboard eventually became concerned about Asimos because he frequently talked vaguely about having secret, ongoing connections to the U.S. military’s Special Operations, according to the business executive. Asimos often suggested to the Seaboard partners that he had another life in the shadows, beyond the world of finance, the business executive said. Seaboard’s staid bond traders did not want any part of that and eventually split with Asimos.

  When the 9/11 attacks occurred, some of Asimos’s erstwhile colleagues in the financial industry told each other they were happy that they had nothing to do with the world of shadows in which he seemed to revel. By contrast, Mike Asimos was reborn on 9/11. In the process, he became one of the most intriguing figures of the post-9/11 age.

  Mystery and unanswered questions have enveloped Asimos’s post-9/11 life. After 9/11, Asimos has said that he began to look for a way to get involved in the new global war on terror. Although he wasn’t interested in rejoining the military, he wanted to be in on the action, and later told me and others that he went to Afghanistan sometime after the 9/11 attacks. It appears that Asimos did go to Afghanistan for the government in some capacity soon after the a
ttacks. He told his wife that he was going to Afghanistan and left his home in Charleston for an extended period. When he came back in early 2002, he also told others that he had been in Afghanistan. But it remains uncertain exactly who sent him, whom he was working for, and what he did while he was there.

  After he returned, Asimos began working as an investigator on the 9/11 lawsuit for Ron Motley and his law firm, Motley Rice. Exactly how and why that happened is still a matter of dispute that says a lot about the bizarre nature of the global war on terror.

  Over the course of several years, Asimos repeatedly told me and many other people that he had been secretly assigned by top Defense Department officials to, in effect, infiltrate the Motley Rice lawsuit and use his job as an investigator as cover for a clandestine Defense Department intelligence operation, a kind of off-the-books covert action program. In some interviews, Asimos said that he had been secretly sent to Motley Rice by then Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; at other times he said he was sent by senior Defense Department officials close to Wolfowitz. Asimos said that Wolfowitz wanted him to turn the lawsuit into an intelligence operation through which all of the information gathered by the law firm would be turned over to the Pentagon. What’s more, he said, he was tasked to conduct clandestine missions for the government while working for Motley Rice.

  Asimos told me that he had met with Wolfowitz, who wanted him to arrange a meeting with Ron Motley. Wolfowitz, Asimos said, wished to secretly enlist Motley and his law firm in the Bush administration’s fight against terrorism. Pentagon officials, according to Asimos, wanted access to all the information that Motley Rice would acquire in its pursuit of the Saudis, using Asimos’s role as an investigator for Motley Rice as cover, essentially turning the 9/11 families’ lawsuit into an intelligence-collection enterprise for the Pentagon. That would allow Wolfowitz to conduct operations far outside the normal intelligence channels of the U.S. government.

  After Asimos had told me this story, with only slight variations, a number of times over several years, I learned that he had told essentially the same tale to a number of other people. After I told him I was going to write about it in this book, he sent me a letter denying that his work for Motley Rice had been a cover for a Pentagon operation and that anyone who had told me that was wrong. In a subsequent statement, he wrote that “a small group of people opposed to the 9/11 litigation have repeatedly made false claims about the research effort—its origins, funding goals, etc. I believe a close examination of the current situation with Mr. Risen would show many of these individuals to be his principle sources.” Asimos has refused follow-up interviews for the book, warning that writing about him would put him and his family at risk. His New York lawyer, Kelly Moore, has not responded to questions.

  When asked in an interview whether he believed that Asimos had arranged a secret relationship between the Pentagon and his law firm, Ron Motley said that he had never heard of such an idea. (Motley subsequently died in 2013.) But despite Motley’s statements, several others working on the 9/11 lawsuit said that they suspected that Asimos was operating as a clandestine agent of the government while he was working for Motley Rice. Harry Huge, a co-counsel on the Burnett case, said that he thinks there was some kind of secret relationship between Asimos and the Pentagon while Asimos was working with Motley Rice. “I began to have suspicions that he was working for the government,” recalled Huge. “I came to believe that things weren’t what they seemed.”

  Patrick Jost, who worked with Asimos as an investigator for Motley Rice, said that Asimos made it clear to him on several occasions that he had a secret relationship with the Defense Department. A former analyst at FINCEN—the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network at the Treasury Department—Jost was considered one of the government’s leading minds on hawala, the Islamic money transfer system. Short, stout, and with strong opinions, Jost could not have been more unlike Asimos. The two came to detest each other.

  Jost said that his suspicions of Asimos grew after he received a strange phone call one day from the Pentagon. A man who identified himself as an army officer started asking questions about a memorandum Jost had just written, a confidential analysis produced for lawyers on the Burnett lawsuit. Jost was stunned that the army officer had the memo and quickly got off the call. Jost phoned Mike Elsner, one of the Motley Rice lawyers handling the Burnett case, to warn him that the Pentagon had obtained privileged materials intended for the lawsuit. Elsner responded that he was sure Asimos was passing documents directly to the Defense Department, Jost recalled. Elsner told Jost that he should be careful about sharing documents in the future.

  In an internal Motley Rice document related to Asimos and the 9/11 lawsuit, the firm says that it discovered in October 2003 that Asimos was sharing Jost’s strategy and analysis memos with officials at the Defense Department (DOD). “I think I knew he was doing work on a freelance basis for DOD,” recalled Elsner. “There were certain projects for DOD. I don’t know if he was sent to us by DOD. I suppose I had a sense he had an involvement in a private intelligence operation.”

  Ansar Rahel, an Afghan lawyer hired by Motley Rice for the Burnett lawsuit, said he worked with Asimos when he was first hired as an investigator. Rahel said that Asimos told him and others at the law firm that he had been sent by the Pentagon to keep an eye on the case. “Mike told me that he was reporting to Wolfowitz,” recalled Rahel, who now lives in California. “He said he worked for him, or reported to him. He said they wanted him to keep an eye on things on the lawsuit. I assumed that was Wolfowitz’s office.”

  “Asimos would joke about it,” Rahel remembered. “He would say, make sure you give me these documents, so I can get them over to them. It was kind of known that he was turning over everything to the DOD.”

  Joe Rice, Motley’s partner, said in an interview that he believes that Asimos was working for the Pentagon, and that the Defense Department took advantage of Motley Rice and used the firm’s lawsuit for intelligence-gathering. “I think he was working for the government all along and they just used us,” said Rice. “He was using us to get stuff for the government and we got stuck with the bill. They knew we were dedicated to investigating the 9/11 suit, and they used us.”

  For his part, Paul Wolfowitz denies knowing anything about Mike Asimos or a secret plan to hijack the 9/11 lawsuit in order to turn it into a Pentagon intelligence operation. No one at the Defense Department has been willing to corroborate reports of an extensive formalized intelligence-sharing relationship between the Pentagon and Motley Rice. Steve Ganyard, who served as one of Wolfowitz’s military assistants at the time, acknowledged that he did meet with Asimos and Deena Burnett once, because they wanted to arrange a meeting with Wolfowitz to discuss greater cooperation between the law firm and the Pentagon. But he said that, as far as he knew, nothing ever came of it. Douglas Feith, who served as undersecretary of defense for policy and was one of Wolfowitz’s top lieutenants, also denied knowing anything. Patrick Jost said that he met Feith and other Defense officials through Asimos, although Asimos has repeatedly disputed Jost’s credibility, and Feith denies ever meeting with either man.

  Was Asimos just making idle boasts? One person he confided in, Mark Heilbrun, was a Capitol Hill staffer working on the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time. Heilbrun had gotten to know Asimos because the judiciary committee’s chairman, Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, had decided to try to investigate terrorist financing, and so Heilbrun was interested in what Motley Rice was finding out about the Saudis.

  In several interviews, Heilbrun said that Asimos had told him about his secret relationship with Paul Wolfowitz and the Defense Department. Heilbrun also says he received confirmation that the special relationship existed. He said that Asimos further told him that his point of contact was an old friend from the army, Col. Steven Bucci, a Special Forces officer who had risen to the position of military assistant to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. “Asimos would tell me that he was working with Paul Wolfo
witz,” recalled Heilbrun. “He said the guy to call is Steve Bucci. I probably had a dozen conversations with Bucci. I talked to Wolfowitz once about this.”

  Bucci was described to him as the conduit to Wolfowitz on this off-the-books operation, Heibrun recounted. “Bucci would tell me, yes, I’m working with Asimos. And then things would get done. There was no doubt that Bucci was the action officer, and that Asimos was on the same team as DOD. I’ve never seen that before. There was never any question that Asimos was working for Wolfowitz.” A Motley Rice internal document says that on March 8, 2003, Bucci wrote an e-mail to Asimos thanking him for “the large quantity of stuff you and your friends have provided.” He added that “quite a bit of it is becoming more and more valuable.”

  In an interview, Bucci apologized for having a fuzzy memory on many specifics but asserted that the only thing he did to foster a relationship between Motley Rice and the Pentagon was to connect Asimos with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Bucci said he had known Asimos in the army, and said that Asimos came to him sometime after he started working with Motley Rice. By that time, Asimos had acquired an Afghan document that was a directory of foreign fighters who had registered weapons with the Taliban government, Bucci recalled. Asimos told Bucci that, in addition to the weapons registry, the Motley Rice investigation had acquired a significant cache of materials extraneous to the lawsuit that they would be willing to turn over to the government.

  Bucci said that he walked the weapons registry into the office of Lt. Gen. John Abizaid, who was then the director of the Joint Staff at the Pentagon, and explained the opportunity to acquire additional information from Motley Rice. Abizaid seemed impressed by the registry and directed Bucci to deliver the document to the director of the DIA, who would determine if the agency wanted to establish a relationship with the law firm. Shortly afterward, Bucci said, the law firm delivered “a truckload” of documents to the DIA. “It was at that point, I understand, that they got interested in Mike’s connections, and the people he knew in the Pakistan/Afghanistan area, and they started a relationship and sharing information.” In a follow-up e-mail, Bucci stressed, “Once I connected Mike to DIA, I was not privy to who was managing the effort, or what it produced.”