Missing Man

by Barry Meier

  Chris asked him if he thought smugglers on Kish might have seized her husband. Khazaee replied it was highly likely; smuggling was rampant in the Persian Gulf and Mafia-like gangs operating in places such as Kish routinely killed Iranian police officers. Her husband’s captors, he added, may have taken him to Iraq, Afghanistan, or Pakistan. If U.S. officials learned of his whereabouts, Iran stood ready to assist in his rescue, the diplomat said. Several months earlier, Chris had hired a lawyer in Iran, and she asked Khazaee if he thought it would be helpful to retain private investigators in his country. He looked at her askance. “Have you not been listening to anything I just said? What makes you think this case is any more important to you than it is to us?”

  Sarah Levinson reached into her bag and took out a photo album filled with pictures of Bob and Chris, their seven children, and Ryan, their grandson. Sarah, who was crying, defended her mother, saying she had always acted respectfully toward the Iranian government. She was a wife trying to find her husband and bring him home. “She is doing everything she can,” said Sarah. “Our father is a wonderful man and in the end of the photo album are pictures of my sister’s wedding. I know my boyfriend is waiting to propose to me until he can ask my father for my hand and it is so hard. We appreciate anything you can do to bring him home.”

  Khazaee took the album and leafed through the pages. His tone softened. He explained he had experienced the loss of a family member, the death of a son. He said he understood how the Levinsons felt. This wasn’t their fault. It was a matter between governments. Sue Levinson was crying, too. Suddenly, she lashed out at Khazaee, telling him how they were all struggling to survive the trauma of her father’s disappearance. “We just want you to send him home,” she said.

  The diplomat’s reaction turned again. He became combative, though this time he wasn’t reading from a script. “You say send him home, like you think that we have him. Well, to that I say to you, maybe you should ask why did the FBI send him over there in the first place!”

  Khazaee stood up, indicating the meeting was over. Chris hastened to thank him, and Sue, still crying, tried to apologize. As the family left his office, the diplomat spoke to her. “Susan, be strong. Life has its ups and downs; we all go through these things. I told you I lost my son. You need to be strong.”

  About the time of that meeting, massive political demonstrations were taking place on the streets of Tehran. Iranians were about to vote in a presidential election, and it was not clear Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would win a second term. Political rivals blamed his strident stance toward the West for worsening economic conditions inside the country. The desire for political change was strong among middle-class Iranians and students. Pre-election polls put a reformist candidate, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, in the lead. The former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was also running, having rebranded himself as a political moderate. When results were announced, the official tally gave Ahmadinejad a sizeable majority of the vote.

  The news was met in Tehran and other cities with cries of derision and claims of election fraud. Large, spontaneous protests erupted and Iran hovered on the edge of a popular political uprising. Religious autocrats and ultraconservatives responded with a ruthless, bloody crackdown, one that was broadcast to the outside world through photographs and video captured on cell phones and posted on Twitter and other forms of social media. Leather-jacketed plainclothes officers known as the Basij were seen riding motorcycles into crowds of protesters in Tehran, whipping bystanders with sticks. The dying moments of a young Iranian woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, were captured on video as she lay on the pavement after being shot. Hundreds of students and political dissidents were rounded up and taken to prisons. Reports emerged that dozens of them were tortured and killed.

  Not long afterward, a twenty-seven-year-old computer engineering student walked into the American consulate in Ankara, Turkey. He showed officials burn and bruise marks and explained he had been tortured at a secret Revolutionary Guards prison following a roundup of students protesting President Ahmadinejad’s reelection. After his head was shaved, he was brought to a cell, which reeked from the smell of blood. On the cell’s door, a previous occupant had scratched three lines of text in English and a name. After his release from captivity, he said, he had gone onto the Internet and discovered the name’s significance. It was “B LEVINSON.”

  President Obama and other Western politicians issued statements protesting the Iranian crackdown. A few months earlier, the American president had extended Iran an olive branch in an effort to coax its leaders into resuming nuclear control talks. In a videotaped message addressed to the Iranian people, he had referred to Iran as “the Islamic Republic,” one of the rare times an American leader acknowledged its clerical government. But Iranian officials responded to the West’s criticism of their repressive tactics with the same simple and brutal strategy they had used many times before—they seized foreigners and imprisoned them on trumped-up spying charges. In 2009, three young Americans became the newest political pawns in that game. The trio, Sarah Shourd, Joshua Fattal, and Shane Bauer, were on vacation, hiking in the Zagros Mountains in western Kurdistan, along the border between Iraq and Iran. They were trying to find their way to a scenic waterfall when they spotted a soldier on a nearby ridge. He waved at them and indicated he wanted the hikers to come over to where he was standing. They couldn’t tell what uniform he was wearing, but when the Americans approached him they unwittingly crossed into Iran and were taken into custody. They were soon charged with espionage and sent to Evin Prison.

  The seizure of the hikers came as FBI officials sensed they were about to make a breakthrough in the search for Bob. Ever since Chris’s return from Iran, the bureau, under the watchful eye of Senator Bill Nelson, had been pouring more resources and more experienced agents into the case. In 2009, FBI agents, using the ruse suggested by Mila, the operative with SCG International, lured the Maryam hotel’s manager and its restaurant supervisor, Mohammed Para and Ali Korakumjam, to Dubai with fake offers of jobs there. But the two men refused to talk when questioned by agents, and the driver of the Maryam’s taxi, the person FBI agents wanted most to interview, had been sent back to Kish by airport officials in Dubai because he didn’t have the right travel documents.

  A few months later, FBI agents were again at Dubai International Airport, this time awaiting the arrival of a flight from Tehran. Aboard it was an Iranian judge who had passed word to the United States through intermediaries that he had seen Bob and could provide information about him. The Iranian judge was coming voluntarily and bringing his two daughters with him. Given the risks involved, U.S. officials were ready to offer him asylum if his story checked out. When his plane arrived, FBI agents escorted him and his children through the terminal to a connecting flight to Washington, D.C. Before they got to the gate, his older daughter, who was about eighteen, broke away and started running. An FBI agent took off after her, but she disappeared into a crowd of passengers. The man explained that his daughter didn’t want to go to the United States because her boyfriend was in Iran. She also believed her father was betraying his country. FBI agents assured him they would find the girl and bring her with them on a later flight.

  In Washington, the man and his younger daughter were taken to a safe house outside the nation’s capital, where investigators questioned him. He said Bob was brought before him during a secret court proceeding and charged with espionage. But because he viewed the evidence against him as flimsy, prosecutors had transferred the case out of his court and given it to a more compliant judge, who found Bob guilty. For the bureau, assessing the judge’s credibility wasn’t easy. He apparently suffered from mental health problems. When FBI officials gave him an initial polygraph test, the result was inconclusive. A doctor was called to the safe house to examine him. He was polygraphed again, and this time the test suggested he might be telling the truth. However, the operation soon fell apart. When FBI agents in Dubai found his older daughter, she refused to come to the
United States. Instead, she went back to Iran, where she denounced her father to authorities as a traitor. The man, fearing retribution against members of his family, decided to go home. FBI agents tried to talk him out of it and told him he could stay, but he and his younger daughter soon boarded a flight and left.

  Meanwhile, another writer for The New Yorker returned from Iran, where he had interviewed Dawud Salahuddin. Seven years had passed since Ira Silverman spoke with the fugitive, but Dawud’s act hadn’t changed. He told the New Yorker writer, Jon Lee Anderson, that Iran’s religious leaders were destroying the country. “The mullahs have industrialized the religion and turned it into a money-making venture, and they are the main beneficiaries,” Dawud said. At some point, Dawud must have realized Anderson needed something fresh because, out of the blue, he said he was planning to leave Iran. When the writer asked him where he intended to go, Dawud simply replied, “The first law of a fugitive is not to tell anyone where you are headed.”

  16

  The Young Man

  The man seated across from Boris Birshtein in a Paris hotel room was in his forties, young enough to be Boris’s son. But the divide between them was greater than age. The man, Oleg Deripaska, was among the best-known members of Russia’s new business elite, the oligarchs, and stood atop one of his country’s most strategic businesses, the aluminum industry. His company, United Company RUSAL, was an international industrial powerhouse. It was the same Russian company that one of the Iranians who met with Bob Levinson and Boris in Istanbul had mentioned while discussing Iran’s need for bauxite.

  Deripaska, whose Cossack heritage could be seen in his broad forehead and strong cheekbones, was worth an estimated $14 billion. He lived close to Vladimir Putin in a wealthy Moscow suburb, and Deripaska’s wife, Polina, was the daughter of the top aide to Boris Yeltsin, the former Russian president. He owned homes in England, France, and Italy; a private jet; and an oceangoing yacht, the Queen K, which had a crew of twenty-one. But the State Department treated Deripaska much as it did Birshtein, as an undesirable. American officials never publicly said why they wouldn’t issue him a visa, but it was apparently related to his meteoric rise in the aluminum industry. During the 1990s, southern Siberia, home to Russia’s metal smelters, was the setting for the “aluminum wars,” a period of Chicago-style gangland violence replete with murders and assassinations as rivals fought for control. Deripaska, who had earned degrees in economics and physics, was depicted in some accounts as a ruthless genius, and a lawsuit filed against him in an American court in the 1990s claimed he had made death threats against two competitors.

  Deripaska denied doing so and insisted that the only payments he had made to gangs during the aluminum wars were to buy protection for his facilities. Over time, he had spent millions of dollars on lobbyists, including the former Senate leader Bob Dole, to get the State Department to change its stance. U.S. officials briefly lifted the ban, then reinstated it. Vladimir Putin was furious. “They give us nothing, explain to us nothing, and forbid him from entry,” he told one newspaper. Deripaska also courted U.S. politicians, meeting in 2006 with the Arizona senator John McCain during the World Economic Forum, a conference in Davos, Switzerland. One of the lawmaker’s advisors, Rick Davis, arranged the meeting for McCain, who was then gearing up to become the 2008 Republican presidential nominee. Deripaska later hosted McCain aboard the Queen K, while it was moored off the coast of Montenegro. Nothing the oligarch tried had worked, and Boris had come to Paris to offer him a chance to earn what his money and influence couldn’t buy: a visa. To get it, he would have to finance a secret operation to find and rescue Bob.

  It had taken FBI officials about six months to connect with Boris after John Good’s initial call to the bureau to offer the businessman’s help. Two FBI agents were assigned to deal with him. One of them, Martin Hellmer, was a member of the Extraterritorial Squad, and the other, Joe Krzemien, was a retired agent with experience on Russian cases who was working for the FBI as a contractor. Initially, Boris proposed an undercover operation in which Krzemien, posing as a business associate, would go with him to Istanbul and see the same Iranians whom Bob had met in December 2006. But the plan never materialized and Boris next spent months searching for someone who might have connections to Iran. The person he found was an ally of Turkey’s most notorious terrorist, Abdullah Öcalan. For two decades, a group founded by Öcalan, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, had waged a guerrilla-style war against the Turkish government, ambushing troops and blowing up buildings and bridges in its campaign to create an autonomous Kurdish nation. Finally, in 1999, Öcalan was arrested during a joint operation between the CIA and Turkish forces and sentenced to life in prison.

  Boris’s contact, an ethnic Kurd named Madzhit Mamoyan, was still a backer of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, and he looked more at home in a leather jacket than in a business suit. A short, thickly built chain-smoker in his fifties with dark eyes, Mamoyan lived in Moscow and described himself as a businessman. He hated Turks with a passion; if he went into a restaurant where a Turk was working as a waiter, he would leave.

  After meeting Mamoyan through a mutual acquaintance, Boris told him U.S. officials wanted to find an American private investigator missing in Iran and were willing to do favors for people who helped. As a Kurd, Madzhit had plenty of connections in the region. Along with Turkey, there are large Kurdish communities in Iraq, Syria, and Iran. He told Boris he had a friend imprisoned in Spain he wanted released. When the FBI discovered the link between Madzhit and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, they hesitated to move forward—the group, which is known as the PKK, was designated during the Bush administration as a terrorist organization.

  But the FBI didn’t have any better alternatives, so Martin Hellmer and Joe Krzemien told Boris he could bring Madzhit to Washington for an interview so long as he financed the trip himself. Boris did it in style. A black stretch limousine picked up Madzhit at the airport and ferried him to a luxurious hotel near the White House, where he popped out of the car wearing a worn tracksuit smelling of cigarettes. That evening, Boris hosted Madzhit, Hellmer, and Krzemien at a lavish dinner that included champagne, oysters, and several bottles of wine.

  FBI supervisors, fearing Madzhit might conduct PKK-related business while in the United States, kept him under surveillance. They didn’t see signs of problems, but bureau officials told Boris that the Kurd lacked the political clout they needed in an intermediary. That might have ended the FBI’s interactions with Boris and Madzhit. However, the two men weren’t the type of people used to taking no for an answer, and they soon devised a plan to which FBI officials couldn’t say no—one involving the aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska.

  Madzhit had met Deripaska in the 1990s when the Soviet Union was collapsing. The Kurd ended up owning a chain of television stations in Russia but was squeezed out, he would later say, by a notoriously corrupt mayor of Moscow named Yury Luzhkov. Over the years, he had stayed in touch with Deripaska, and after his trip to Washington, he thought of the oligarch’s campaign to get a visa and his many business and political connections to Iran. He told Deripaska that U.S. officials were willing to reward those who helped find a missing American and suggested he speak with Boris. Before long, the two men were flying to Paris aboard the oligarch’s private jet. Prior to the meeting, FBI officials gave Boris his instructions. The message was simple—if Deripaska delivered definitive evidence showing that Bob was either alive or dead, he would get his visa. There were a few ground rules. The oligarch would have to sever his ties with Washington lobbyists and fund the search for information with his money. “I know that people are sucking your blood with all their stories about how they are going to help you,” Boris told Deripaska. “I don’t want anything from you, nothing.”

  Deripaska mulled the proposal. Boris sensed the younger man was seething with the same anger and humiliation he had felt for years. Leaders of other countries accorded them respect. But in the United States, which held itself out as the
world’s moral arbiter, they were ostracized and treated with contempt. Boris had agreed to help Bob for a reason: he wanted his name off the watch list. But Bob’s disappearance had opened bigger doors. By rescuing a missing American, he and Deripaska would be publicly celebrated as heroes, their old reputations cleansed forever. There were other possibilities as well. Boris could envision business partnerships with Deripaska, or the “young man,” as he called him, and the opportunity to assume his place among the oligarchs.

  Boris was elated when Deripaska told him he was willing to meet with American officials. As their meeting ended, Boris couldn’t resist letting him know that he had once been a major player in Russia. “Haven’t you heard about me?” Boris asked. When Deripaska didn’t reply, he explained that Boris Yeltsin, the godfather of the oligarch’s wife, was his mortal enemy. In the early 1990s, the Russian president ran Boris out of the country after reports surfaced he had bribed Yeltsin’s vice president to win baby food contracts for his trading company, Seabeco. Boris rejected the charge and chalked it up to political infighting. But Yeltsin didn’t forget the incident, even mentioning Boris in his memoir. “I was to learn much more about him and Seabeco, his ill-reputed firm,” Yeltsin wrote. Boris told Deripaska he was surprised, given the bad blood, that the oligarch had agreed to see him. “That is very interesting,” Deripaska replied. “It was very nice meeting you.”

  A few weeks later, Martin Hellmer and Joe Krzemien walked into the lobby of the luxurious Le Grand Hotel, not far from Place Vendôme in Paris. Fashion Week was in full swing and celebrities were in town to see shows by designers such as Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney. The hotel’s lobby was swarming with willowy models, and the agents paused briefly to take in the view before finding the elevator and riding up to a suite. Before leaving Washington, Hellmer and Krzemien had read up about Deripaska, and they expected to find a typical oligarch dressed in a custom-made Savile Row suit with a gold Patek Philippe watch strapped to his wrist. Deripaska didn’t fit the part. His suit looked like it was pulled off a department store rack, and a plastic strap secured his cheap digital watch. His closely cropped hair appeared unevenly cut, as though his wife trimmed it at home. Joe Krzemien’s attention was drawn to Deripaska’s eyes. They were pale and icy cold. Krzemien had spent much of his FBI career on dangerous assignments, chasing spies and terrorists. When he shook the oligarch’s hand, he felt a chill. Deripaska was one of the few people he had ever met who scared him.