Missing Man

by Barry Meier

  In March 2012, five months after the Paris meeting, Boris’s nephew, Jack Braverman, arrived at the Toronto airport with his wife and their children to take a flight for a vacation in Florida. Braverman was listed on corporate documents as an executive in several of Boris’s companies, but the businessman treated him more like a personal assistant and general gofer. For instance, after Boris learned in early 2011 that Dave McGee and Ira Silverman were flying into Toronto to visit, he summoned Braverman back from a family vacation in Florida so he could chauffeur them around. When Dave and Ira saw him at the Toronto airport, he appeared so exhausted they thought he might have driven back nonstop from Fort Lauderdale.

  As he waited with his family to board their flight, Braverman was pulled aside by U.S. border officials, who began to question him. They wanted to know if he knew a man named Madzhit Mamoyan and why the Kurd, who was on a U.S. watch list, was using a cell phone for which Braverman’s company was paying the bill. They also asked him if he ever had met Madzhit or if the Kurd had come to Canada to meet Boris. The border agents also questioned him about his associations with Boris. Braverman’s wife, who knew nothing about Madzhit or about Boris’s problems getting into the United States, was horrified. Braverman was let go, but by then his family was forced to cancel their departure and return home. Robert Destro didn’t view himself as a person given to conspiracy theories, but after the episode involving Braverman, it was hard not to think that some officials in the U.S. government were more interested in keeping tabs on Boris and his friends than in finding Bob. After the airport incident, Boris decided he was done with Bob’s case.

  In April 2015, American and Iranian government officials stood in a hotel ballroom in Lausanne, Switzerland, to announce a plan under which Iran would restrict its development of nuclear weapons in exchange for the lifting of economic and financial sanctions. The final details of a deal remained to be worked out. But the framework for that agreement, which followed months of talks between the United States, Iran, and several European countries, was hailed as a major breakthrough. President Obama, in a speech in the White House Rose Garden, called it “a historic understanding with Iran.”

  Obama administration officials had made it clear during the talks that Bob’s fate and those of several Americans held in Iran were not a part of the negotiations. Along with Saeed Abedini, the pastor, and Amir Hekmati, the former marine, another Iranian-American, Jason Rezaian, a reporter for The Washington Post, had joined them in Evin Prison. U.S. officials insisted they didn’t include the men in the talks because they didn’t want the Iranians to use them as pawns they could play to their advantage. But if Ambassador Miraboutalebi’s demands in 2011 were any indication, Bob had long ago become one.

  After the announcement in Switzerland, Chris got a call from President Obama’s top advisor on homeland security and terrorism, Lisa Monaco. She told Chris she wanted to assure her the White House hadn’t forgotten her husband and would continue to press Iran about him. “We plan to talk to them about Bob,” Monaco said.

  Chris hung up the phone. Since the start of her long ordeal, her faith in her family, her religion, and the FBI had sustained her. For seven years, she followed the instructions of the bureau and the State Department to the letter. She lied because it was necessary. She performed on cue when required. She swallowed her pride and exhibited respect to Iranian officials even as they treated her and her family with contempt. During that time, she watched happy reunions take place for families other than her own. She had endured it all for one reason—she believed if she did what U.S. officials told her to do, Bob would return home. Those close to her, including some of Chris’s children, wondered at times if she wasn’t blinded by her allegiance to the FBI. They didn’t blame her because they knew she could not have acted differently. As Chris saw it, she and Bob had entered into a covenant of trust with the U.S. government when he had joined the bureau, a bond to which both sides were still obligated. She never imagined her government might have withheld information from her about Bob or failed to take a step that might have resulted in his freedom, such as releasing the Fellowship’s report about what Ambassador Miraboutalebi had said.

  21

  The Twilight War

  On most Wednesdays at 11:00 a.m., officials from the FBI, the CIA, and the State Department gathered at bureau headquarters to talk about Bob Levinson’s case. By early 2015, such meetings had been going on for years and there wasn’t much left to discuss.

  Back in 2012, after the last two American hikers were released from Evin Prison, U.S. officials had quietly taken several steps to encourage prisoner swaps with Iran, hoping one might include Bob. An Iranian woman, Shahrazad Mir Gholikhan, had spent nearly five years in a federal prison following her conviction in 2008 for conspiring to export three thousand military-grade night vision goggles to Iran. Rather than requiring her to spend more time in a halfway facility, American officials allowed the government of Oman to negotiate her departure from the United States. Around that same time, the Justice Department dropped its effort to extradite to the United States a former Iranian diplomat living in London to face charges of trying to ship American-made military equipment to Iran.

  Iranian officials hadn’t responded to those gestures and the FBI decided in 2015 that a larger reward for news about Bob might bring in new information. That March, on the eighth anniversary of his disappearance, the bureau increased the reward from $1 million to $5 million. The lure of big money attracted plenty of people, all claiming to know something about the missing man’s whereabouts. Agents chased down promising leads and, at the urging of Bob’s old friend Larry Sweeney, traveled to Beirut to see an associate of the late arms dealer Sarkis Soghanalian. The man had insisted for years that he had connections who could help free Bob. When he was polygraphed, FBI agents found his answers to be so deceptive that they packed up their equipment after thirty minutes and left to fly home.

  By then, some FBI officials thought the only way to try to break the logjam with Iran over Bob was to publicly admit the obvious—that he had gone to Kish as a “rogue” spy. Officially confirming Bob’s CIA connection would hardly have surprised anyone. His agency ties had received extensive media publicity, and many FBI officials felt certain his captors knew about them. Chris and Dave were also urging the State Department to bring in an outside negotiator to restart talks with Tehran about Bob. For an intermediary to have credibility in such negotiations, he would need to be forthright about Bob.

  But many U.S. officials still had an autoimmune response when it came to revealing Bob’s CIA connection. Some FBI supervisors clung to the notion that officially confirming it would remove any last doubts in the minds of his captors, further jeopardizing his safety. By 2015, bureau officials had manufactured so many different stories about Bob they couldn’t keep them straight. For years, they had said he went to Kish to investigate cigarette smuggling. In announcing the new $5 million reward, however, an FBI press release declared that Bob had gone there on “behalf of several large corporations.” The claim was so unhinged from reality that it might have sprung from the fertile imagination of Dawud Salahuddin.

  CIA officials were dead set against disclosing the nature of Bob’s relationship; their collective DNA recoiled at the prospect. It’s natural for an intelligence agency to go into disavowal mode when one of its operatives or assets is captured or disappears; such denials are so commonplace they serve as plot devices in espionage movies. The CIA’s desire to suppress the facts about Bob’s case was especially strong because agency officials had lied not only to the outside world about him but also to their own government. White House officials had no way of knowing how Iran would react to an acknowledgment of Bob’s agency ties. Iranian leaders might greet the concession as a signal to start negotiations or seize on it as a vehicle to whip up a public frenzy against the “Great Satan” and arrest other Americans on bogus spying charges.

  In the spring of 2015, Bob and the three Americans held in Evin
Prison—Saeed Abedini, Amir Hekmati, and Jason Rezaian—became front-page news again, this time as part of the political debate that erupted after the United States and Iran announced a preliminary nuclear deal. Republican lawmakers mounted a furious campaign to derail the plan, inviting the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, to speak about it before Congress, where he denounced the proposal as a disaster. Soon afterward, forty-seven Republican senators wrote a joint letter to Ayatollah Khamenei warning him that a nuclear agreement signed by President Obama could be annulled by his successor. Opponents also argued that the Obama administration had forsaken Bob and the three imprisoned men to score a foreign policy victory. Some in the American public were outraged that the U.S. government had negotiated with a country holding their fellow citizens hostage.

  Amid the maneuvering, Dan Levinson, Bob’s oldest son, spoke before a congressional hearing. A year earlier, Dan had seriously considered traveling to Kish. The way he imagined it, he would arrive on the island and get arrested by Iranian authorities, an event that would give him a stage from which to declare that his father had gone to Iran at the urging of the CIA. He saw the action as a way to refocus attention on his family’s plight and force a public confrontation between the United States and Iran that would finally provide answers about his father. Dan’s sisters convinced him to drop the plan, arguing that their mother would be unable to bear the prospect of his imprisonment in Tehran.

  Dan had come to believe, based on his talks with Ira Silverman and Dave McGee, that Iran’s former president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, might be behind his father’s detention, a possibility at which he hinted during his comments to Congress. “It is true that those involved in the talks may not know where my father is or what happened to him,” Dan told a congressional committee. “But we are certain that there are people in Iran who do.”

  In July, soon after Dan’s testimony, negotiators reached agreement on the terms of a final nuclear control deal between Iran and the West. Iran agreed to keep its atomic energy program peaceful by reducing stockpiles of uranium, dismantling some equipment used to make nuclear weapons, and allowing inspectors to review its compliance with the agreement. In return, the United States and other nations involved in the plan said they would lift economic embargoes and release billions of dollars in Iranian funds that had been frozen in banks outside that country.

  Chris and her children believed that the deal between the United States and Iran was Bob’s best and possibly last hope for freedom. “We believe that right now is the time that my father’s case can be prioritized, resolved and he can be brought home,” Dave Levinson told People in 2015. Bob’s daughter Sarah woke up one morning with a premonition that her father’s story was about to have a happy ending.

  The political fight over the nuclear plan continued, with opponents arguing that Iran shouldn’t be trusted and would resume its pursuit of an atomic bomb. By the late summer of 2015, it became apparent that President Obama had secured enough support in Congress to get the agreement passed. Its adoption marked a new chapter in the twilight war, and a possible end to decades of distorted relations between the United States and Iran.

  A wave of news reports appeared about possible prisoner swaps between the two countries, many mentioning Jason Rezaian, the Washington Post reporter. One Iranian official claimed the United States was illegally detaining nineteen of Iran’s citizens in American prisons on embargo violations charges. Leaders in both Washington and Tehran disputed suggestions that an exchange was in the works, but it seemed inevitable that such a deal would take place.

  White House officials assured Chris that American diplomats had continued to press Iran about her husband. Bob was mentioned in every newspaper account about Americans detained or unaccounted for in Iran. His place among that group, however, had begun to fade. His name was always there, but typically at the end of an article, almost as an afterthought. It was understandable. The three Americans held in Evin Prison were tangible and alive. Bob existed apart from them, in the realm of memory. The last image of him alive was five years old. His family had taken to calling him the “longest-held hostage” in American history, but his fate had long been unclear.

  Most of the people involved in his case had moved on. Anne Jablonski still worked for investigative firms doing reports about Russian businessmen and taught yoga to injured U.S. soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Along with her website devoted to healthy living for cats, she had created a new one called Yoga Set Free, on which she posted her spiritual musings. “The yogi sages say that your divine teacher is your deepest self,” she wrote in one of them. “But at first it feels like it’s not you, it’s something ‘other’—it’s fine if it feels like that. So chill. And just ask it, like you’re asking someone else, a good friend: ‘Are you there?’”

  Dave, Ira, Larry Sweeney, and Jeff Katz, the private detective in London, continued to try to find out what had happened to Bob. Dave concentrated on his law practice, though he still provided Chris with legal advice when she needed it. Ira had gone back to writing movie scripts as a way of occupying his time and to avoid obsessing about Bob. He wasn’t very successful. He continued to speak regularly with FBI agents, including some who told him they were outraged that the Justice Department hadn’t pursued its investigation into the CIA’s handling of Bob’s case. Ira had also resumed his telephone talks with Dawud. The fugitive told him that he suspected Bob’s captors had taken him out of Iran, possibly across the border into Afghanistan. Those conversations came to an abrupt end amid the intense media publicity about Bob’s CIA ties. The Levinson family had provided CNN with one of the proposals Bob wrote in late 2005 to the CIA suggesting the possibility of recruiting Dawud as an agency informant. In it, Bob had described Ira as his “source” who would connect him with the fugitive. After CNN aired the segment, Dawud sent Ira an angry email, saying that he couldn’t believe that the retired journalist would ever imagine he would agree to become a “snitch.” Ira didn’t hear from him again.

  The Levinson children, despite the anguish of their father’s absence, managed to thrive. Dan worked for a government contractor that put together briefing reports for the Treasury Department about overnight news developments affecting economic issues. Because of the job’s nature, Dan could do it from wherever he chose, and stung by his father’s wanderlust, he traveled widely. During his campaign to keep his father’s name in the news, he had met many politicians, and Dan began to think about a career in politics, possibly as a congressman from Florida. Sue, the oldest of the Levinson daughters, had given birth to a child, Bob and Chris’s fourth grandchild. Dave got married in the fall of 2015, and Samantha, the youngest Levinson daughter, had moved to New York and was working at the new Freedom Tower, the soaring building in lower Manhattan erected at the site of the Twin Towers, as a manager on its 102nd-floor observation deck. The youngest of the family’s children, Doug, was on track to graduate from Florida State University in 2016.

  The big new house that Bob and Chris had purchased in the 1990s to celebrate the start of a new and better life together was now an empty nest. Chris traveled a lot to be with her children, and under normal circumstances she might have sold the house and bought a smaller one. But as with much else in her life, that option was stuck in limbo. To do so, she would have to file legal papers declaring Bob dead, a step she had no interest in taking. Dave had given thought to ways to work around that roadblock, such as getting a sympathetic judge to hold that Bob was too incapacitated to consent to a sale. Whatever the case, the sale of the house was a symbolic step that Chris was not yet prepared to take.

  Over time, hundreds of senators and representatives had signed on to congressional declarations demanding answers from Iran about Bob. Their anger was understandable; the idea that political and religious power brokers within Iran, one of the most repressive countries in the world, didn’t know about the fate of a captured American spy was absurd. But American leaders and lawmakers had also ut
terly failed to give Chris and her children what they deserved most—the truth about Bob. The CIA had never been forced to publicly explain why it suddenly found $10,000 extra for Bob when it heard about his Dubai “side trip,” nor had the agency divulged the names of those officials who misled the FBI and Congress.

  The Senate intelligence panel allowed the CIA to cast Bob’s case as the fault of a few renegade analysts. Former spy agency officials say that explanation doesn’t ring true to them. They believe that many CIA staffers and managers, even if they weren’t aware of Bob’s role with the agency prior to his disappearance, learned of it in the days and weeks after he vanished. Then each day, while Chris waited for news about her missing husband, those CIA officials went home to their spouses and children.

  One day, well before the Iranian nuclear deal was struck, Chris got a phone call from James McJunkin, one of the FBI agents who had been involved in the search for Bob. In 2011, McJunkin had pushed for talks with the Iranians following the arrival of the video showing Bob as a hostage. Since then, he had retired from the FBI and gone to work for Discover, the credit card company headquartered in Chicago. While in Florida on business, McJunkin suggested to Chris that they get together, and she agreed to meet him at the place where she saw most visitors, the Panera Bread restaurant in Coral Springs.

  FBI officials had continued to assure Chris they believed Bob was alive. The bureau’s stance wasn’t the result of any new evidence gathered by agents so much as a reflection of FBI policy, which considers a person to be alive absent proof of his or her death. Since leaving the FBI, McJunkin had begun to wonder whether such proof about Bob would ever be found. He and other agents suspected that Bob’s value to his Iranian captors might have expired after they had used the video to lure the FBI into talks about him. It was hard to imagine another reason for his captors to devote the resources needed to keep him alive for another five years.