Missing Man

by Barry Meier

  Despite the intense review of the video, the FBI was unable to wring substantive leads from it. The only firm conclusion they made was that the video was shot shortly before it was sent. Officials from the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Council, and the State Department gathered to discuss what to do next. They felt fairly certain that either the Iranian government or a faction tied to the country’s intelligence or religious hierarchy was holding Bob. Nothing else made sense. No one else would have a reason or the resources to hold him for so long. Cigarette smugglers or Russian thugs would have killed Bob long ago. Keeping him alive and hidden for years was costly and complicated. It required the involvement of a highly disciplined and organized group, one whose members obeyed orders because they feared death if they failed to do so.

  When it came to deciding how to respond to the video, officials disagreed. The State Department was worried that using it to confront Iran over Bob might jeopardize nuclear control talks. The CIA suspected their Iranian counterparts were behind the video and warned that it might be part of an intelligence trap. The FBI had a different perspective. Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, while vehemently claiming his country knew nothing about Bob, had repeatedly boasted with smug satisfaction that his country would be happy to assist the FBI if new information about Bob emerged. It was time, FBI officials argued, to call him on it.

  An FBI counterterrorism expert named James McJunkin was a vocal proponent of that view. A onetime Pennsylvania state trooper, McJunkin was short, bald, and built like a block from hours spent lifting weights. He imagined that the Iranians had first believed Bob was a big-time CIA spy. It probably hadn’t taken them long to figure out he wasn’t, but they had kept him, probably hoping that the United States would reach out to inaugurate a prisoner swap. That hadn’t happened either, and McJunkin thought the Iranians might have sent the video to signal they were looking for a face-saving way to let Bob go while being able to deny any involvement in his captivity. It was fine with McJunkin if playing along with some Iranian fairy tale meant getting Bob back.

  The FBI’s argument prevailed, and in early 2011 Chris flew to Washington to meet with the bureau’s director, Robert Mueller. A onetime federal prosecutor, Mueller had assumed his post just after the 9/11 attacks. He told Chris something she never expected to hear—that as a result of back-channel diplomacy, secret talks were starting between the United States and Iran aimed at winning her husband’s release. Mueller was upbeat about the prospects. Just a few months earlier, Iran had released one of the imprisoned American hikers, Sarah Shourd, after the government of Oman intervened on her behalf. A senior FBI official told Chris that 2011 “was going to be a very good year for the Levinson family.”

  Chris felt Bob’s return was near. After his disappearance, FBI agents specially trained to work with the families of kidnapping victims regularly visited her to check on her psychological well-being. More recently, they had started talking to her and the older children about the process Bob would need to go through after his release to help him overcome the trauma he had experienced. The government’s plan called for him to be taken to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, a large U.S. military hospital in Germany, for a battery of physical and psychological assessments. During those first few days, Chris was told, she might not be able to speak with her husband. Once cleared for travel, he would go next to Brooke Army Medical Center, in San Antonio, Texas, a facility that specializes in treating soldiers and civilians held as prisoners or hostages, including those subjected to torture. Experts at the hospital were highly trained in treating emotional and mental trauma, and many of them had gone through the same course used to train members of elite military units, such as the Navy SEALs, on ways to withstand torture. Bob’s stay in San Antonio could prove lengthy, and Chris was prepared to find accommodations near the hospital so she could be close to him.

  Two FBI officials were selected to represent the United States in the talks with Iran. One of them was Sean Joyce, who had presided over the 2008 meeting at the bureau’s Washington field office at which he acknowledged the bureau’s mistakes in its initial search for Bob. The other was Carl Ghattas, who had overseen Bob’s case during those early months. Both were veterans of terrorism-related operations. In the mid-1990s Joyce took part in a raid in Pakistan that captured a man named Mir Qazi, who had opened fire in 1993 on cars waiting to enter CIA headquarters at Langley, killing two people. Ghattas, a tall, thin man of Lebanese ancestry, spent two years heading FBI intelligence operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was a former prosecutor who came across as cold and aloof, and Ira Silverman took a particular dislike to him, believing that Ghattas was one of the bureaucratic stumbling blocks at the start of Bob’s case.

  Joyce and Ghattas were briefed prior to the talks by experts from the FBI and CIA in behavioral science, hostage negotiations, and Iranian culture and politics. Joyce was told it was critical for him, given the importance of hierarchy in Iran, to project authority and make it clear he was speaking for the United States. Agency specialists developed scripts of questions and replies, gaming out responses Joyce could make to statements by the Iranians. Hostage negotiators counseled the men not to show deference to their counterparts.

  The first meeting between FBI officials and their Iranian counterparts took place in Europe, at a hotel closely monitored by intelligence agents from both sides. The CIA identified the Iranians attending the meeting as mid-level operatives in the Ministry of Intelligence with little authority. Whenever Joyce posed a question, the men would say they didn’t know the answer and leave the room, apparently to confer with superiors. When they returned, it was typically with an empty response. They did throw out one piece of supposed information. They claimed intelligence gathered by Iran indicated a terrorist group opposed to their country’s government was holding the former FBI agent in the rugged tribal regions along Iran’s eastern border with Afghanistan and Pakistan.

  The Iranians then made a demand. Their country was prepared to walk away from further discussions if the United States did not issue a statement absolving it from involvement in Bob’s disappearance. They suggested President Obama should be the person to make the announcement. The ultimatum was absurd, but the FBI argued to the White House that the Iranians might want a public display of good faith by the United States as a prelude to Bob’s release. Administration officials rejected the idea of President Obama making any statements and passed the job to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In March 2011, Clinton, without disclosing the existence of the secret talks or the video of Bob, released a statement saying the United States had recently received information showing he was alive. In deference to Iran, she added that American officials believed he was being held in “southwest Asia,” a large geographical region that includes Iran and several surrounding countries:

  As we approach the fourth anniversary of Bob Levinson’s disappearance, we have received recent indications that Bob is being held somewhere in southwest Asia. As the government of Iran has previously offered its assistance in this matter, we respectfully request the Iranian government to undertake humanitarian efforts to safely return and reunite Bob with his family. We would appreciate the Iranian government’s efforts in this matter.

  Afterward, the Iranians offered more details about Bob’s supposed captors and claimed Iranian military units were conducting raids on suspected rebel camps, as part of a campaign to find and free him. Soon FBI officials realized the Iranians were playing them. Data from U.S. spy satellites didn’t show signs of any military activity in the areas where the Iranians said it was occurring. James McJunkin began to worry. He still believed Iran wanted to create a narrative about Bob, but he wondered if it was a very different story from the one he had first imagined. Rather than manufacturing a story to explain away their involvement in Bob’s captivity, the Iranians seemed to be devising a tale to set the stage for his execution. It would be simple enough to take Bob to a remote area, mount a raid on a supposed “rebel
” camp, and announce afterward that he had been killed by cross fire during a valiant effort by Iranian forces to rescue him. There would even be a body to send home.

  A few weeks after Secretary Clinton’s statement, Chris received another email from Bob’s captors, this one with five photographs of Bob attached. They were completely different in tone and appearance from the video. In the pictures, his hair and beard were wild and bushy and he was dressed in what looked like a bad Halloween costume of a Guantánamo prisoner. He wore a mock orange jumpsuit, and a cheap metal chain was draped around his neck and wrists. He stood in front of a dark blue curtain and in each picture held a piece of white paper on which a different message was written. A stencil might have been used to draw the characters, because the outlines of the letters were neat and clearly defined. The grammar was so irregular and sloppy that the mistakes appeared intentional. Some words were capitalized or written in boldface letters, others were not. All the messages had a political overtone. They said:

  I Am HERE IN GUANTANAMO

  DO YOU KNOW

  WHERE IT IS?

  THIS IS THE

  RESULT OF

  30 YEARS

  SERVING

  FOR USA

  HELP ME

  WHY YOU

  CAN NOT

  HELP ME

  4 TH

  YEAR …

  You Cant

  or you don’t

  want…?

  FBI technicians had trouble dating the photographs. But they suspected the pictures were shot before the video, because it was unlikely Bob’s hair and beard would have grown that much during the five months since the video’s arrival. When FBI agents traced the new email, they found it came from Afghanistan, not Pakistan. Using its IP address, agents identified the computer from which it had been sent and managed through sales records to track down its owner in Afghanistan. The man told investigators someone had stolen the computer several months earlier, and his story checked out.

  FBI agents typically solve cases when criminals or terrorists make mistakes. Those missteps might involve a sloppy email, an impulsive Internet posting, repetitive travel patterns, or other fumbles. A mistake can provide the thread on which an investigator starts pulling. The more James McJunkin looked at the information in Bob’s case—the emails, the video, the photographs—the more he was struck by a single impression. He couldn’t find a mistake. Each possible lead had led investigators this way and that way before turning back on itself and evaporating. The supposed “clues” made sense only if seen in a different light: as part of a counterintelligence operation, a series of false leads and seductive crumbs scattered by an Iranian intelligence unit to lure the United States into making moves that would disclose how it spied on Iran. The Iranians even appeared to have used the talks about Bob for that purpose. At one point, they gave the FBI the names of several people who they claimed had information about Bob. But when the bureau ran down those names, they discovered they were aliases used by people held in Iranian prisons. At that juncture, U.S. officials decided further talks would be fruitless and broke them off.

  The FBI’s only remaining operation to find Bob involved Seyed Mir Hejazi, the man described by the CIA as the son of Ayatollah Khamenei’s intelligence advisor. Hejazi kept insisting to Madzhit Mamoyan that all the previous hang-ups he had experienced in getting proof of life were the result of infighting among different factions within Iran over who would benefit financially and politically from Bob’s release. In early 2011, he told the Kurd that the stars had finally aligned. He claimed that Ayatollah Khamenei had given his group authority to negotiate the terms under which Bob would be freed. Madzhit passed the message along to Boris Birshtein, emphasizing the potential dangers to Hejazi.

  HE IS 99% SURE OF GETTING A RESULT. HE ALSO INSISTED THAT HE DOES NOT FIND ANY REASON TO BELIEVE THAT HIS PEOPLE NEED TO LIE TO HIM. THEY COULD SIMPLY TELL HIM TO STAY OUT OF IT INSTEAD OF GIVING HIM PROMISES.

  HE ALSO SAID THAT WHAT HE HAS TOLD ME IS 2% OF THE WHOLE SITUATION AND WHAT HAS BEEN GOING ON. FOR EXAMPLE SOME PEOPLE TRYING TO ELIMINATE HIM. IF THEY COULD THEY WOULD HAVE DONE SO ALREADY.

  Hejazi suggested an escape plan for Bob worthy of a thriller. He was to be brought by van from an undisclosed location to the Swiss embassy in Tehran. Once he was there, embassy officials would send a coded message to the State Department that would serve as the signal that the former FBI agent had been freed. Bob would then be spirited out of Iran by hiding him inside the trunk of a Swiss embassy car with diplomatic license plates. The vehicle would travel through northwestern Iran and across the Turkish border, delivering Bob into the waiting arms of U.S. officials.

  FBI officials, having been burned by Hejazi, kept their expectations low. But Boris Birshtein started working on ways to get the Iranian the ransom payment he wanted for Bob’s release while disguising that the source of those funds would be Oleg Deripaska, the Russian oligarch. Boris apparently had a knack for creating complicated chains of bank accounts, the kinds of networks money launderers use, and soon had devised a series of accounts in Cyprus, a country with loose financial regulations. When he showed his handiwork to Joe Krzemien, the FBI agent expressed appreciation for his skills. “I can show you how we can take over one of Deripaska’s businesses if we want,” Boris replied.

  Hejazi’s plan required the cooperation of Swiss diplomats in Tehran, and he told Madzhit that he would soon make contact with them. He also kept coming up with excuses to delay his visit to that country’s embassy. Finally, Hejazi must have gone there, because U.S. officials received a message from Swiss diplomats warning them that the Iranian shouldn’t be trusted, apparently because of his father’s role in Iran’s intelligence service. When Boris heard the news, he was irate. Throughout his career, he had rubbed shoulders with corrupt politicians and unscrupulous criminals. Those dealings invariably revolved around money, who needed to get it and who was going to get screwed. But the Iranians Boris had encountered seemed more interested in duplicity than in cutting a deal. “These fucking people are the worst,” he said.

  The FBI soon washed its hands of Boris, Madzhit, and Oleg Deripaska. The bureau considered them bullshit artists who had used Bob’s case as a means to try to get the United States to do what they wanted without ever delivering anything. The three men hadn’t succeeded, but the bureau’s judgment was also a reflection of its inability to penetrate Iran. After years of investigations costing millions of dollars, FBI officials couldn’t point to a single breakthrough they had made as a result of gumshoe work by agents.

  Several months later, in the fall of 2011, the two remaining American hikers held in Iran, Joshua Fattal and Shane Bauer, were released from Evin Prison and put on a flight to Oman, where their families waited. The government of Oman had helped negotiate the pair’s release and reportedly paid the $500,000 fines that an Iranian court had assessed against each man. There was plenty of speculation among political observers as to why Iranian officials chose to let the pair go, but it was largely seen as a public relations move by the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who took the action just days before he was to speak at the U.N.

  Not long afterward, James McJunkin arrived in Coral Springs to meet with Chris. He did not bring good news. The bureau didn’t see any purpose in pursuing further talks with Tehran, because the Iranians were continuing to claim that a terrorist or rebel group was holding Bob. Chris soon went to Washington to meet again with FBI Director Robert Mueller. He urged her to remain patient. She didn’t have a choice. For Chris and her family, 2011 hadn’t turned out to be a “good” year.

  FBI officials decided there was no longer a reason to keep the video secret. In late 2011, the bureau distributed it to the news media on compact discs labeled LEVINSON FAMILY/PLEA/PROOF OF LIFE. The tape was preceded by an introduction in which a somber-looking Chris sat next to her son Dave. He had graduated two years earlier from Emory University with magna cum laude honors. Chris got to stand during the school’s commencem
ent ceremony with the other proud parents whose children had earned the achievement. Then parents who had themselves graduated magna cum laude were asked to stand. Dave’s heart sank. Had his father been there, he would have stood with them. On the video distributed by the FBI, Dave spoke in a calm, steady voice.

  My name is David Levinson. And I am speaking on behalf of my mother, Christine Levinson, and my entire family. I am making a plea to the people who are holding my father. My mother has received your messages. Please tell us your demands so we can work together to bring my father home safely. Thank you for taking care of my father and for continuing to provide him with the care and medical treatment he needs to stay alive. My father is a loving and caring man who has always worked hard to provide for his family. He is the father of seven children, a dear husband, a grandfather of two beautiful children, and the pillar of our family. We are not part of any government and we are not experts on the region. No one can help us but you. Please help us. We tried to contact you but you never responded. I am sending this message because we need to know what you want our family to do so that my father can come home safely. We will do everything within our power to bring him home. I don’t know how else to communicate with you but my father knows how to contact us. We don’t know what else to do.

  19

  Breaking News

  A giant digital billboard in Times Square greeted President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the fall of 2012 when he arrived in New York to speak before the U.N. General Assembly for the last time. In nine months, Iranian voters were scheduled to elect his successor. The billboard, which was arranged by the FBI, consisted of a stark image of Bob as a captive and a message that diplomatically accused Iran of stonewalling. Video monitors located in subway stations near U.N. headquarters carried the same image: