Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

by James Risen

  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.

  Dick praised Rosetta’s work in bringing the source and his information on the Islamic Development Bank to the FBI, according to Rosetta’s internal e-mails:

  Hey guys . . . Just got off the phone with you . . . fantastic work!!! The home run he gave us concerned details as to the IDB’s Management team (unofficial IDB operations of course) that controlled/distributed Saudi money going to the “Al-Aqsa Fund.” He gave us the full names of three Saudi nationals that the USG had no knowledge of. . . . He was also able to give us enough clues to locate these guys living inside Jordan . . . where two of them are currently . . . still passing money to Hamas and others. . . . I’m in the process of passing this via official USG channels to our Israeli friends.

  In some cases, Asimos was open with Motley Rice about the degree to which he was cooperating with the government. In the case of the source with information about the Islamic Development Bank, Asimos sent an e-mail to Ron Motley and other lawyers involved in the Burnett case laying out the source’s schedule with the government investigators: “He will fly into Dulles where he will be met by Federal Agents,” Asimos wrote in 2004. “They will take him to the Doubletree Inn in Tyson’s Corner.” The source’s “interactions with the USG will be COMPLETELY non-threatening. In fact, he will be treated like a valuable asset to the USG. I hope he conducts himself appropriately (i.e., doesn’t get drunk before noon, doesn’t whine and complain incessantly). He will be very busy for a week in DC, then come to Charleston. At that point, he’s completely yours. . . . Rosetta is responsible for
paying [the source’s] travel, lodging, out-of-pockets, monthly stipend, etc. during his entire stay in the US.”

  In other instances, however, Asimos seemed to be working solely for the FBI. In November 2004, Mike Dick asked Rosetta for help in locating three United Nations personnel who had been taken hostage in Afghanistan. “Received a request from GM to query Rosetta sources regarding the recent hostage situation in Afghanistan (3 UN employees kidnapped),” Brian Mallon wrote in a November 2004 internal Rosetta report. Mallon contacted one of Rosetta’s Afghan sources in London, tasking him to reach out to contacts in his native country and see if the hostages could be located. The source, referred to as S-12 in Mallon’s report to Asimos, made a round of calls, reporting back the next day that a friend of a friend knew the kidnappers. Mallon requested that S-12 pinpoint the location of the hostages.

  In this case, Rosetta was forced to halt its activities after the U.S. ambassador in Kabul queried FBI headquarters about the firm’s involvement. The reaction at FBI headquarters was swift: Dick had recruited Rosetta for the mission without getting prior approval from his superiors. FBI management reined him in, and issued Dick a harsh verbal reprimand. “GM [Rosetta’s code name for Dick] believed that Rosetta would be asked to assist SEAL Team 6 on the ground in Afghanistan to assist in locating the hostages,” Mallon wrote in his internal Rosetta report. “GM stated that the USAMB [U.S. ambassador] in Kabul heard about the situation prior to FBI Executives and it was presently causing a problem. GM feared being pulled off the Rosetta Project. . . . GM suffered a severe verbal reprimand. . . . GM opined that the people in Afghanistan [U.S. officials in Kabul] were not familiar with Rosetta and didn’t want to deal with a private outfit.”

  Dick told Mallon that he had been ordered to hand off the hostage operation to an agent from the FBI’s military liaison unit. Yet even after that episode, Rosetta continued to serve the government, according to interviews as well as Rosetta’s internal reports and other communications.

  Soon, Asimos became fixated on recruiting one potential informant in particular—Afghan drug lord Haji Bashir Noorzai.

  In 2000, Patrick Hamlette, a young agent in the New York office of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), received an anonymous letter in the mail revealing the existence of a heroin trafficking network in the New York area that had its roots in Afghanistan. The letter triggered a five-year investigation that would eventually lead to the arrest of Haji Bashir Noorzai, the drug lord at the Afghan end of the network. Yet Hamlette’s years of quiet legwork leading to the DEA’s breakthrough in the case were overshadowed by the drama at the end, when Mike Asimos and Brian Mallon from Rosetta lured Noorzai to the United States in one of the most surreal operations in the DEA’s history.

  While Hamlette gradually built his case against Noorzai, there were plenty of other people throughout the U.S. government who were also interested in the Afghan, and not just because he was an infamous narcotics trafficker in opium-rich southern Afghanistan. Noorzai was a wealthy tribal leader from Kandahar Province, the same region that produced the Taliban. He had three wives and thirteen children and was living in Quetta, Pakistan, at the time of the 9/11 attacks. Under the Taliban regime, Noorzai had been a major figure in the Afghan heroin trade, controlling huge poppy fields while providing financial backing for the Taliban.

  The U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan that toppled the Taliban upended the Afghan drug business, and Noorzai was smart enough to realize that he had to try to reach some kind of arrangement with the country’s new American occupiers. In the 1990s, he had agreed to try to help the CIA track down Stinger missiles that the Americans had originally provided to the Afghan resistance; after 9/11, he thought he could renew his relationship with the CIA.

  In November 2001, he met with men he later described as American military officials at Spin Boldak, near the Afghan-Pakistani border. Noorzai was taken to Kandahar where he was detained and questioned for six days by the Americans about Taliban officials and operations. He agreed to work with the military and CIA, and was released. In January 2002, he handed over fifteen truckloads of weapons, including about four hundred antiaircraft missiles that had been hidden by the Taliban inside his tribe’s territory.

  Noorzai also offered to act as an intermediary between Taliban leaders and the Americans, and helped to persuade the Taliban’s former foreign minister, Wakil Ahmad Mutawakil—the son of the mullah in Noorzai’s hometown of Maiwand—to meet with the Americans.

  But there was growing confusion within the U.S. government about what to do with Noorzai, confusion that would last right up until his 2005 arrest. Even as he was cutting deals with the U.S. military and CIA in Afghanistan, a counterterrorism team at CIA headquarters wanted to place him on a list to be targeted and captured or killed. The headquarters team was finally stopped from taking action against him because of his new relationship with CIA case officers on the ground.

  Attitudes about Noorzai within the U.S. government kept shifting over the next few years as American priorities in Afghanistan kept changing. In the immediate aftermath of the invasion, the Bush administration ignored the Afghan drug trade, which flourished as U.S. military and intelligence officials dealt openly with drug traffickers who offered information about the Taliban or al Qaeda. At the time, Noorzai’s value as an informant trumped other considerations.

  Mike Asimos included Noorzai on his KIL list, and Patrick Jost said that he believed that Asimos was told to target Noorzai by the Defense Department or the FBI, who were mostly interested in his connections to Mullah Omar. But Mike Dick insisted in an interview that Asimos came up with the KIL list on his own. Mike Elsner, a Motley Rice lawyer assigned to the Burnett case, said that he thought Asimos was trying to bring Noorzai to the United States as a witness in the 9/11 case. Nonetheless, interviews with sources as well as Rosetta e-mails and documents indicate that the Noorzai operation was conducted in cooperation with and at the behest of U.S. government officials.

  As Asimos developed his network of Afghan sources, built around S-1, the Afghan diplomat in London, he was introduced to a Major Babar, a well-connected former Pakistani ISI officer. Asimos told Major Babar that if he cooperated with Rosetta, he could be included in a significant business opportunity in the United States, according to Rosetta’s audio recordings of their meetings. The audio recordings of the secret meetings in Pakistan among Asimos, Mallon, and Babar are revealing, showing the extent to which Rosetta depended on and perhaps manipulated Babar in order to deliver Noorzai. Babar’s value as a source for Asimos and Rosetta was that he could communicate directly with Noorzai. The Afghan drug lord had gone into hiding from the Americans after one of his partners was killed in a raid, which made him suspect that he was being hunted. So Asimos relied on Babar to pass messages and arrange meetings with Noorzai.

  Asimos had an initial phone conversation with Noorzai arranged by intermediaries in July 2004. In his summary of the conversation, Asimos reported back to colleagues, including Mike Dick, that he had informed Noorzai (referred to as HBN) that “Rosetta was potentially in a position to intermediate HBN’s surrender to the USG, perhaps even brokering a deal if HBN would agree to cooperate with Rosetta’s project and also agree to fully cooperate with USG officials.” According to Asimos, “HBN reiterated . . . that he would hold Rosetta responsible for his security during any meetings and he expressed some concern that he not be arrested as part of any Rosetta meeting and interview.” Asimos reassured Noorzai, telling him “that Rosetta was not interested in arresting HBN and that no such activity would occur as part of any HBN-Rosetta dialogue.”

  With Babar’s help, Asimos and Mallon arranged a meeting in the fall with Noorzai in Dubai, where Noorzai felt safe. Mike Dick was scheduled to join them there and negotiate a deal in which Noorzai would become a full-fledged informant. Asimos and Dick planned to arrange for Noorzai to come to the United States for secret debriefings with analysts from the FBI and Pentagon.

  For Mike Dick, gettin
g directly involved in an off-the-books overseas operation with Rosetta was worth the bureaucratic risk. In interviews, Dick said that Noorzai claimed to have current information about Mullah Omar’s location.

  Mike Dick and another FBI official were preparing to leave for Dubai in October 2004 when the CIA stepped in and blocked them. Officially, Michele Sison, the U.S. ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, denied the FBI agents “country clearance”—the ambassadorial permission that every U.S. government official is supposed to obtain from the local ambassador when traveling overseas. But in reality, she barred them at the request of CIA officials, who had, at the last minute, discovered what Rosetta was doing with Noorzai and were furious. While Noorzai was not a fully paid-up asset of the CIA, agency officials did not want Rosetta and the FBI getting in the middle of their Afghan operations.

  But Asimos still needed Mike Dick’s help. While in Dubai, Asimos had run up huge expenses to arrange the meeting with Noorzai, and he needed an immediate cash infusion. Mike Dick was unable to convince his supervisors at the FBI to cover Rosetta’s Dubai bills; Rosetta didn’t even have a contract with the bureau. So Dick withdrew approximately $10,000 from his personal savings and wired it to Asimos in Dubai. Asimos repaid him after he returned to the United States. “Mike and Brian were in Dubai, meeting Noorzai, and the FBI was supposed to send guys over there,” Mike Dick recalled in an interview. “Motley was paying for it. And he cut them off, and decided it wasn’t worth it to him anymore. And Mike said we need $30,000 for expenses and the whole Noorzai entourage and security. I couldn’t get the FBI to agree to give them the money. The FBI said drop it. I got pissed. So I gave them $10,000 of my own money. They then paid me back.”