Missing Man

by Barry Meier

  United Nations Delegates

  Please Encourage the

  Islamic Republic of Iran to work

  with the United States

  Government to bring Bob home

  On behalf of the Levinson Family

  For Chris and her children, another year had passed in numbing silence. The FBI had hoped the video’s public release would generate new leads. Bob’s picture was plastered on billboards on roads leading into Iran offering $1 million for information, and in-flight airline magazines in the region contained similar announcements. Dave McGee, Ira Silverman, and Larry Sweeney continued their search, though there had been a turnover in the cast of characters claiming they could help. In late 2011, Sarkis Soghanalian, the old arms merchant, died of heart failure. Soghanalian had insisted up until his final days that he was cooking up a deal to bring Bob home. It was hard to know whether he believed that or whether he had been cruelly using the Levinson family to try to make one last arms deal. In either case, there were plenty of criminals, arms traffickers, and con men eager to fill his shoes, all swearing to Dave, Ira, and Larry that they were connected to Tehran.

  About that time, Chris was contacted by a former movie star, Linda Fiorentino. The actress had portrayed a smoldering and double-crossing femme fatale in the 1994 noir-style crime film The Last Seduction and had starred in the 1997 science-fiction comedy hit Men in Black before her Hollywood career petered out. Fiorentino knew about Bob through an ex-boyfriend, Mark Rossini, a former FBI agent. Rossini had been forced to resign from the bureau in 2008 after it emerged that he had illegally downloaded FBI documents that ended up in the hands of lawyers representing one of Fiorentino’s friends, Anthony Pellicano, a private investigator in Hollywood charged with blackmailing clients. Pellicano’s lawyers tried to use the FBI records to convince a judge to throw out the case, arguing that prosecutors had withheld evidence from them because it could clear the investigator. The strategy backfired and a Justice Department inquiry uncovered Rossini’s role in the theft of the records. Fiorentino insisted she did no wrong, and she was never charged in the incident, but law enforcement officials told reporters they believed she was the person who delivered the bureau documents to Pellicano’s lawyers.

  Before long, Ira and Fiorentino started speaking regularly. She told him that Rossini, before his downfall at the FBI, had recommended Bob as a private investigator to a close associate of Patrick M. Byrne, the head of an online retailer, Overstock.com, which sold clothing, jewelry, and other products. In 2006, Byrne was leading a public campaign to ban a Wall Street practice known as “naked” short selling, because he believed speculators were using it to manipulate the stock price of his company and others. Then, in early 2007, three of his associates received identical phone calls from a man calling himself “Paul Taylor” who said, “I am the messenger. Patrick Byrne will be killed by Russian entities,” if he did not stop his campaign to ban naked short selling.

  Bob had submitted a proposal to look into the incident not long before he disappeared. Fiorentino suspected the Iranians might somehow have learned about him through Byrne’s associate, who had a brother living in Dubai. It was a far-fetched guess, and Ira and Dave could never figure out whether Fiorentino wanted to help, was bored, or had slipped back into the thrill-seeking character she had portrayed in The Last Seduction.

  Throughout the frustrating years they had spent looking for their friend, the two men had stayed focused on another goal—trying to make sure those at the CIA who had concealed Bob’s ties to the agency went to prison for doing so. They were certain that Anne Jablonski had misled investigators and that the CIA, absent the involvement of Senator Bill Nelson, would still be lying about Bob. But in late 2012, Dave realized they faced a problem. The last time FBI agents formally interviewed Anne and others about Bob had been in 2008, when the CIA referred the case to the Justice Department for possible criminal investigation. Dave viewed the department’s decision to close that inquiry without bringing charges as more evidence of bungling by federal officials. He was certain that if he were still a prosecutor, he could have built a case against Anne. But the window to bring charges against her and other CIA officials was closing, because the five-year statute of limitations on any false statements made in those 2008 FBI interviews was about to expire. After that, they would be immune from prosecution even if evidence later emerged to show they had knowingly lied or withheld information. Dave’s only option was to play for time. With Chris’s support, he started lobbying Justice Department officials to conduct new interviews of Anne and other witnesses. He knew they would likely repeat their earlier statements, but the statute-of-limitations clock would be reset for another five years, in case a “smoking gun” emerged.

  Justice Department officials eventually agreed. In early 2013, prosecutors invited Chris and Dave to come to department headquarters in Washington to hear the results of the new inquiry. Dave was surprised to learn about a piece of evidence that he hadn’t known about and that wasn’t anything he was expecting. Prosecutors said they had found an internal CIA email that supported a key part of Anne’s testimony. She had sent the message on September 14, 2007, four days after Bob’s disappearance and right around the time she would have learned of it. Justice Department officials did not show the email to Dave but described it to him. In it, they said, Anne notified her CIA superiors about Bob’s role as an agency consultant. In her most recent FBI interview, Anne repeated that she didn’t know Bob was going to Kish and that if she had, she would have tried to stop him. A top federal prosecutor, Michael Mullaney, told Dave and Chris there was only one person who could challenge Anne’s version of events. “We’re just going to have to wait until Bob comes back,” he said.

  Dave left dismayed. Soon after his return to Pensacola, he wrote an email to Michael Mullaney. He pointed out that if Anne had told the truth—and he still wasn’t convinced she had—then others within the CIA had covered up the information: “I have thought about your disclosure that Jablonski reported to her superiors ‘a relationship’ with Levinson on March 14, 2007 and find it hard to reconcile that with what we were being told.”

  Dave never received a reply from Mullaney. The prime piece of evidence on which Dave had relied to convince himself Anne had known beforehand about Bob’s Kish trip was a fairly thin reed. It was his February 2007 memo to Tim Sampson seeking added funds for his Dubai-related “side trip,” though in the memo he mentioned neither Dawud nor Kish. Still, given the weight that prosecutors such as Mullaney put on Anne’s email to her superiors about Bob’s CIA ties, Justice Department officials never made it clear to Chris or Dave whether they ever followed that thread to learn who at the spy agency had misled the FBI and Congress about his relationship.

  Not long after Chris and Dave’s trip to the Justice Department, Iranian voters went to the polls in the summer of 2013 and elected a moderate cleric, Hassan Rouhani, as their country’s next president. It was a stunning repudiation of Iran’s hard-liners, and Rouhani immediately made clear his desire to forge better relations with the West, calling for new talks to reach an agreement on Iran’s nuclear capabilities that would also end economic sanctions against his nation. He also freed prominent political activists imprisoned during the regime of his predecessor, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and urged ultraconservative clerics to loosen the cultural strictures constraining what Iranians could wear or read. “Everybody should accept the people’s vote. The people have chosen a new path,” he said.

  For the Levinson family, the change in Iranian leadership meant renewed hope. Dave believed that Ahmadinejad and his cronies would have never freed Bob, and during his regime’s last year, two Iranian-Americans—Saeed Abedini, a pastor, and Amir Hekmati, a former U.S. Marine—were arrested in Iran and sent to Evin Prison. In the fall of 2013, President Rouhani came to New York to speak for the first time. He gave lengthy interviews to several journalists, including the CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour, intended to project a new image for his co
untry. But when Amanpour asked him about Bob, Rouhani sounded as though he was reading from the same script his predecessor had used.

  You mentioned a person I’ve never heard of, Mr. Levinson. We don’t know where he is, who he is. Sometimes, you are speaking of people who come before a court of trial and other times, there are people who disappear. It’s not a clear question to put these two categories side by side. He is an American who has disappeared. We have no news of him. We do not know where he is. We are willing to help and all the intelligence services in the region can come together to gather information about him to find his whereabouts. And we’re willing to cooperate on that.

  By then, more than six years had elapsed since Bob’s disappearance. The last pieces of evidence showing him alive, the video and the photographs, were three years old. Among journalists who had been following Bob’s case, there was a sense that the change in Iran’s government would bring an end to his story, with either his release or the discovery that he was dead. A growing number of news organizations had learned over time about his CIA connection. In late 2007, Chris and Dave gave a reporter for The New York Times access to Bob’s files, but the newspaper decided not to disclose his agency ties because of concerns it would jeopardize his safety. Brian Ross, Ira Silverman’s old partner and now the chief investigative correspondent for ABC News, also knew about Bob’s role as a CIA consultant but decided not to report about it.

  Two other reporters who found out about Bob’s secret worked for the Associated Press. Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman covered national security issues out of the news service’s Washington office, and both were relatively young and aggressive. In 2010, they learned about Bob’s connection to the spy agency and the internal CIA investigation that had led to the ouster of Anne and others. It is common for news organizations to alert the CIA prior to publishing sensitive information about national security. The practice gives government officials an opportunity to comment on an article or to argue why a story shouldn’t be published. Upon learning about Apuzzo and Goldman’s story, FBI officials called senior editors at the AP and urged them not to publish it, citing its potential impact on Bob’s safety. CIA officials were so concerned that the story would appear they contacted other reporters who knew about the agency investigation and briefed them about its findings. Such sanctioned leaks of classified information are commonplace when officials hope to put their spin on a potentially damaging story, and CIA managers were eager to get out the message that Bob’s case involved a “rogue” operation run by a few analysts who had breached agency rules.

  In deciding whether to publish Apuzzo and Goldman’s story, AP editors faced a dilemma earlier confronted by other organizations, weighing the news value of disclosing Bob’s role as a CIA contractor against the possibility that revealing it could get him killed or jeopardize efforts to free him. In 2010, they decided to hold the article rather than release it and adopted the same stance taken by other news outlets, such as The New York Times and ABC News. In an effort to protect Bob, the organizations, when reporting about developments in his case, didn’t challenge the official U.S. line that he went to Kish as a “private citizen” to investigate cigarette smuggling.

  But by 2013, the relationship between the government and the news media had become more confrontational. Over vehement protests by U.S. officials, two newspapers, The Guardian and The Washington Post, published a series of articles based on National Security Agency documents stolen by Edward Snowden, a contract employee. Federal officials said that publishing the stories would jeopardize national security. The newspapers countered that the NSA documents provided an unparalleled look at a U.S. intelligence-gathering apparatus run amok.

  The previous year, Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman were part of an AP team that won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing another secret government surveillance program—an operation run by the New York City Police Department that clandestinely monitored Muslims in local mosques. The two reporters collaborated on a book based on that episode, and throughout 2013, they continued to push their reporting about Bob’s case forward, visiting Dave and getting to know members of the Levinson family.

  They kept urging their AP editors to publish their article, arguing that nothing had emerged since the video to show that Bob was still alive and that his captors already undoubtedly knew about his CIA connection. They also said their FBI sources had told them the bureau’s investigation was at a dead end. Within the news service, executives still struggled to make a decision, and a factor in their deliberations was the question of whether they should disclose Bob’s secret even if his family didn’t want it revealed.

  In the summer of 2013, editors at the AP contacted Chris’s sister Suzi and told her they wanted to set up a meeting with Chris. Both Chris and Dave knew word of Bob’s agency link would eventually come out and considered it a small miracle it hadn’t already. But they both felt that they wanted to be the ones to disclose it, particularly since they believed Bob was alive. They saw the revelation of his CIA role as a kind of last-ditch Hail Mary tactic, the bombshell they would drop to embarrass the U.S. government into forcefully confronting Iran after every other option had been exhausted. Chris and Dave weren’t ready to use that weapon, and with the change in Iran’s government, they wanted to give diplomatic talks time to work. Suzi told a top AP executive that her sister wasn’t ready to meet, and he assured her the news organization would contact her again to revisit the question.

  Within the AP, editors were leaning toward publishing the article, and with the Snowden disclosures, everything related to U.S. government efforts to keep secrets appeared to be fair game. The AP didn’t have a news “hook,” a development or a change in Bob’s situation, on which to hang his story because nothing new in it had occurred. Then something did happen that had nothing to do with Bob. In November 2013, Adam Goldman left the AP for a job with a competitor, The Washington Post. His job wasn’t scheduled to start until December and Goldman thought the AP would publish the article before he joined the Post. In early December, when Goldman began his new job, the AP article still hadn’t appeared, so he gave editors at the Post a version of Bob’s story for the newspaper to run. Typically, when a reporter leaves one publication for another, he or she leaves behind any stories in progress, and AP editors had specifically told Goldman not to take his notes about Bob with him. The reporter would later say he didn’t need those notes to write an article for the Post. All the information contained in his AP notes was in his head as well as in a book proposal about Bob’s case that he and Matt Apuzzo had sent to their literary agent.

  On December 12, 2013, a little more than a week after Goldman started at the Post, Suzi Halpin received an email from Apuzzo. It carried the subject line “Bob, a heads up for you and Christine.”

  I wanted to give you a courtesy heads-up that, after many years of deliberations, A.P.’s top editors have decided to move ahead with the larger story about Bob’s disappearance. I know this is probably not the decision you wanted us to make, but I hope you know that for the past three years, we have treated this matter as sensitively and personally as possible. I have nothing but warm thoughts for you and your family, and I know everyone here is ever hopeful that Bob comes home soon.

  Suzi quickly notified Chris, Dave, and others about the email. An FBI spokesman as well as a top White House staffer contacted the senior editor at the AP, Kathleen Carroll, and urged her to hold the article. Senator Bill Nelson was irate and also called Carroll. “You are going to get him killed,” Nelson said. The decision wasn’t up for debate. Three hours after Apuzzo’s email was sent, the AP released its story, breaking the news that Bob had been a CIA contractor. Along with the article, the AP released a statement by Kathleen Carroll explaining why the organization had gone ahead with the story. In her statement, the editor alluded to Edward Snowden and the NSA disclosures. It read in part:

  Publishing this article was a difficult decision. This story reveals serious mistakes and improper actions insi
de the U.S. government’s most important intelligence agency. Those actions, the investigation and consequences have all been kept secret from the public.

  Publishing articles that help the public hold their government to account is part of what journalism is for, and especially so at The Associated Press, which pursues accountability journalism whenever it can. This seems particularly true on this subject at a time when the decisions of intelligence agencies are being extensively debated.

  Other journalists saw a far less lofty motive behind the AP’s move: simple journalistic competition. The news service was apparently so concerned Goldman might scoop it that editors there didn’t notify him beforehand when the AP ran its article, even though it carried his byline. Goldman first saw it when it went online, and he alerted his editors at the Post, who posted the article he had written on the newspaper’s website minutes later. The revelation of Bob’s role as a CIA consultant was big news for days, and media organizations such as The New York Times that had withheld their accounts published them. Television and print reporters staked out Anne Jablonski’s house in Arlington, Virginia, and stories about her role as Bob’s secret handler appeared in numerous publications, including British tabloids. She was depicted in some as a yoga-crazed real-world counterpart of Carrie Mathison, the bipolar CIA operative played by Claire Danes on the popular television show Homeland.

  When the news about Bob came out, Samantha Levinson, his youngest daughter, was twenty-three and working at Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando as a manager at the Magic Kingdom Park. Many of Samantha’s fellow employees already knew from media accounts about her father’s mysterious disappearance, and she had started a practice at the Magic Kingdom called “Pink Shirt Thursday” as a way to remember him. Back in the 1990s, Bob and a fellow agent in the FBI’s Miami office wore pink polo shirts on Thursdays as a way of thumbing their noses at the bureau’s straitlaced dress code. As word of Bob’s CIA ties spread, the view of Samantha by coworkers changed from that of a girl whose father was missing to that of a girl whose dad was a spy. “My boss was like, ‘Whoa,’” she recalled later. Another acquaintance took a cell phone picture of her and posted it on Twitter to the attention of Anderson Cooper, the CNN newsman.