Missing Man (15 page)

Meanwhile, Ron Jordison called Doug Einsel, the NCIS agent in Dubai. It was the middle of the night there and Einsel was startled out of a deep sleep. Einsel had been among Bob's luncheon companions at the Emirate Towers and he was alarmed to learn Bob had gone to Kish. Every American investigator who worked in the Middle East or knew about Iran knew that its intelligence agencies believed there was no such thing as a retired FBI agent and considered ex-agents like Bob to still be working for the United States. Einsel assured Jordison that a search would start at daybreak.

At 10:00 p.m. that Saturday night, two FBI agents from the bureau's Washington field office arrived at Ira's home, a pleasant, modern house at the end of a wooded cul-de-sac. An FBI supervisor had called Ira earlier in the evening to let him know the agents were coming. After they settled down in the Silvermans' living room, an agent named Paul Myers took charge of the questioning while his partner, Julian Sheppard, jotted down notes. Myers was assigned to a unit in Washington known as the Extraterritorial Squad, which investigated crimes against Americans overseas. The bureau operated similar squads in New York, Miami, and Los Angeles, and each was responsible for a different region of the world. The Washington-based squad covered the Middle East. There were about a dozen agents in it, and many of them, including Myers, were relatively new to the bureau. Working in the unit was grueling, required constant travel, and had a high burnout rate because of the strains it put on family life.

Myers walked Ira through a series of questions about his friendship with Bob, his understanding of Bob's relationship with the CIA, and Bob's meeting with Dawud on Kish. He wanted to know if Bob had ever gone off the radar before only to reemerge a few days later. At another point, he asked Ira and his wife, Betsy, whether either of them ever worked for the CIA. It was close to midnight when Myers and his partner left.

The following day, FBI agents came to the Levinson home in Coral Springs to examine Bob's files. Chris also gave them a memory stick onto which the contents of his computer's hard drive had been copied. There was a lot of activity in the house, with agents coming and going, and Doug became upset. To escape the chaos, he went into the den, the room where his father liked to sit and read. It was a shelter where Doug could be alone. Before Bob left Dubai for Kish, he had sent his youngest son an email telling him how much he missed him. Sitting in the den, Doug replied to his father's message. He was scared, he said. He was worried. All he wanted was for his father to be home.

U.S. officials in Dubai reported Bob's disappearance to the closest FBI official in the region, a legal attaché stationed at the American embassy in Abu Dhabi. The official did not appear to express much urgency about pursuing the case, but the American investigators such as Doug Einsel who had met with Bob in Dubai for lunch had their own reason to be concerned. If Bob was in the hands of Iranian intelligence officials, so probably were their business cards with their names and telephone numbers. Two of the investigators went to the Dubai Marriott and asked a manager to see any videotape taken by hotel cameras at the time of Bob's departure. There was a camera mounted above the building's entrance and they went into a security office to review the tape from Thursday morning. The men saw grainy images of Bob leaving the hotel, pulling a small wheeled overnight bag behind him. The manager explained that Bob asked the hotel to hold his large suitcase for a day and brought it out from storage. The U.S. investigators decided to break open the lock. Inside, they found Bob's big black binder and their business cards.

Ira called Dawud to ask what he knew. The fugitive said his first hours with Bob had gone well. They had met as planned in the Maryam's lobby and then gone for a walk before returning to the hotel for a meal. Afterward, they had gone to their room to talk more. Then, as Dawud put it, things went “south.” There had been a knock on the door and two Iranian policemen entered. Dawud insisted the police were more interested in him than in Bob and that he was taken into custody and brought to a local police station, where he was questioned and held overnight. The following morning, Dawud said, he was released and went back to the Maryam, where a manager told him that Bob had just left for the airport in the hotel's taxi. Dawud assured Ira there was nothing to worry about; his friend was either in Dubai or on his way back to the United States.

A few days later, there was still no sign of Bob, and FBI agents returned to Ira's house with recording equipment to tape his calls with Dawud. They coached him on how to handle the conversations. “Don't be a reporter. Don't ask so many questions. Silence can be your friend,” one agent said. With each call, Dawud's story changed. At times, two Iranian police officials were at the Maryam; in other versions, there were three. After a succession of calls, Dawud told Ira he had learned from his sources that Iranian authorities were holding Bob for questioning, though he expected he would be quickly released if his detention wasn't publicized. “Everyone just needs to stay quiet,” Dawud insisted.

When Ira asked him if he could arrange for Bob to speak to Chris so she could hear his voice, Dawud went into a tirade about U.S. foreign policy. “What about all the oppressed people on the streets of Iraq?” he demanded to know. At the urging of the FBI, Chris also called Dawud and asked him what she should tell her children about their father. “That's not my problem,” he replied. FBI officials concluded the fugitive was either an attention-seeking narcissist or a collaborator with Iranian intelligence who had lured Bob to Kish. Either way, taping his calls was a waste of time.

Chris was contacted by Jeff Katz, the private investigator who ran Bishop International in London. Katz had expected to see Bob during his layover there and had arranged for one of his associates to meet him at Heathrow when his flight from Dubai landed, so that Bob could hand over some packages of counterfeit cigarettes he had gotten from a source. After Chris told Katz about Bob, the investigator notified British American Tobacco about his disappearance. Katz also went to the U.S. embassy in London with a file folder containing copies of his correspondence with Bob about counterfeit cigarette cases and told officials there that he hadn't gone to Kish for British American Tobacco.

After the FBI sent a query to the CIA about Bob, word of his disappearance in Iran started circulating inside the agency. When Anne Jablonski heard the news, she walked into a Langley bathroom and threw up. An FBI supervisor contacted a friend in the CIA's clandestine division and was told the agency's spy side had never heard of Bob Levinson. The FBI got a similar response from officials at the National Counterterrorism Center, a large operation in McLean, Virginia, jointly run by the CIA, the FBI, and the Defense Department.

FBI agents also went to Langley to see agency analysts. Prior to the meeting, a CIA supervisor, Todd Egeland, who headed the branch of the Directorate of Intelligence that oversaw the Illicit Finance Group, asked Tim Sampson and others in the unit for information about Bob. He was told that Bob's CIA consulting contract had expired in late 2006 and that his work for the unit had never involved Iran. That same information was conveyed to FBI agents, and CIA analysts insisted to them that the CIA hadn't paid Bob to go to Kish and knew nothing about his trip.

On Saturday, March 17, a week after Bob went missing, Chris and her family went to Disney World in Orlando. She had paid weeks earlier for the vacation to celebrate Bob's birthday, and Chris thought the trip might offer a diversion, particularly for her younger children. It didn't. No one wanted to go on any rides and Doug, instead of having fun, became angry and upset. “This isn't supposed to be fun,” Chris told him. “This is supposed to be a distraction.” For the remainder of March, Chris, Ira, and Dave waited as the days ticked by, hoping for news of Bob's release. Then, at the beginning of April, a State Department official called Chris and told her several newspapers were about to publish articles about her husband's disappearance.

At the same time, Ira got a phone call from John Miller, the press spokesman for the FBI. Miller was a former television newsman and he had landed some coups during his career, including the first interview by a U.S. television reporter with Osama bin Laden. Some journalists disliked and distrusted Miller because he continually bounced between jobs as a reporter covering cops and jobs as a spokesman for cops. As a result, it was never clear whether Miller, during his turns as a journalist, was carrying water for his law enforcement sources because he had once worked for them or hoped to do so in the future. He asked Ira to provide him with an explanation he could give reporters asking questions about why Bob went to Kish. Ira suggested saying his friend was investigating cigarette smuggling and money laundering, but Miller said he didn't like Ira's idea and hopped off the phone to deal with another call.

The initial stories about Bob's disappearance appeared on April 4, 2007. An article in
The Washington Post
was headlined “Man Missing in Iran Named; He Worked for DEA and FBI.” Spokesmen for the FBI and State Department insisted to reporters for the
Post
and other publications that Bob did not work for the U.S. government, adding they believed he had gone to the Iranian island on behalf of a corporate client or a documentary filmmaker.

Most of those first accounts described Bob as a highly experienced organized crime investigator. A piece in New York's
Daily News
struck a different tone. In it, Bob's old FBI supervisor in New York, James Moody, declined to say whether he thought Bob was a “competent investigator,” and an unnamed former bureau supervisor was quoted as describing him as a “total nutcase” whose “grandiose schemes never panned out.” Moody called Larry Sweeney, Bob's old friend from the FBI in New York, and insisted he wasn't the person who had made those remarks.

The burst of news about Bob caught Dawud's attention. On April 4, the same day stories about the missing man appeared in the United States, an article was posted on the website of Press TV, the government-run English-language news organization in Tehran where Dawud worked. It carried the headline “Ex-FBI Man in Iran Not ‘Missing' at All.” From all appearances, Dawud both wrote or dictated the article and served as the anonymous “informed sources” quoted in it.

Informed sources have told PRESS TV that the story of an American businessman and retired FBI agent gone missing from Iran's Kish Island is somewhat misleading.

The truth of the matter is that he has been in the hands of Iranian security forces since the early hours of March 9, and his inability to communicate with his family or company has raised the alarm about his health, safety and whereabouts. Speaking to PRESS TV on condition of anonymity, the sources made clear that aside from the usual inconvenience, the person is being well looked after.

The sources also said that the matter, though routine, has been complicated by the mounting tensions stemming from repeated American threats against Iran, actual ongoing covert activities within Iran run by the Americans and the particulars of the man's background with the FBI. Not a happy configuration under the circumstances. Nevertheless the authorities are well on the way to finishing the procedural arrangements that could see him freed in a matter of days.

It has been established that his retirement from law enforcement took place nearly a decade ago, his area of expertise was organized crime and not intelligence and that his trip to Kish was purely that of a private businessman looking to make contact with persons who could help him make representations to official Iranian bodies responsible for suppressing trade in pirated products which is a major concern of his company. The outstanding reason for making such a connection is the man has no prior experience in this part of the world.

The enterprise he works for deals in low technology high visibility brand name products sold worldwide and the Persian Gulf has been proving to be a major problem area for illegal production and marketing of these products. Iran is not the origin of this activity but is the largest market by far on the waterway and thus a primary target for the pirated goods.

His visit to Kish was supposed to be a one-day affair but drew the attention of the security forces because his Iranian national host registered in the same hotel room as he did and local police thought they had discovered some discrepancy in the Iranian's identification papers routinely handled in the hotel. Turns out, there was nothing irregular in the Iranian national's papers but this drew the attention of the local police onto the American and he was detained some 12–15 hours after arriving on the island.

It is a case of ordinary business running into extraordinarily bad circumstances. It is expected that the matter will be over in a few days time. The Swiss Embassy in Teheran is in the process of or had already delivered a note from the U.S. State Department concerning his welfare and whereabouts to the Iranian Foreign Ministry. One of the ironies of the retired FBI man's ordeal is that he had been instrumental in persuading his former colleagues not to put former president Mohammed Khatami and his retinue through the ordeal of fingerprinting when he traveled to that country in September 2006.

Chris found herself in a situation she had never faced, having to deal with the news media. Fortunately, one of her sisters, Suzanne Halpin, worked for a big New York public relations concern, Rubenstein Associates. Personality-wise, Suzi was the flip side of her older sister; she was hard charging and insistent. She handled one of Rubenstein Associates' biggest accounts, News Corp., the media conglomerate run by Rupert Murdoch. Suzi helped draft a press statement from Chris about Bob and distributed it on April 4 to reporters.

We miss him and love him very much. We are worried about him and want him home safe and sound as soon as possible. This has been a very difficult time. In the past 48 hours, as this has become public, we've heard from many of our friends. We are touched and so grateful for the support and prayers we've received.