Missing Man (22 page)

FBI officials took the message seriously. They drafted a response for Chris, and Parisi provided information in her reply about the patient's precise hemoglobin count, numbers FBI experts determined were consistent with diabetes. She also wrote: “You must rest assured that next time when they bring him in, I will talk to him; of course the Intelligence [Ministry] always has its own trusted physicians and that case was an emergency. But I will try to get some information about him and will try to send you a map of the location of where he is held.”

Using the instant messaging feature on Chris's email account, FBI agents, pretending to be Chris, engaged in online conversations with Parisi and suggested she come to Turkey for a meeting. Parisi replied she was unable to travel because of work and family obligations, and as her correspondence continued, her comments increasingly took on a political tone. One note said:

One day I will come to America because I like America very much.

When you came to Iran, how did you find it? Our country is a good country with excellent people but this government is a government that supports terrorists and is not from the people. We young people have no freedom and do not share in the most basic human rights. We cannot even dress according to our own wishes, most of the people are looking for American help for their freedom. You must have full faith in the fact that your husband is in this very place and do not let yourself be duped by these leech-like people. May you succeed!

It was the last email Chris received from her and FBI agents were left to wonder if the earlier ones were genuine. If Parisi lived just about anywhere else, FBI officials could have sent an agent to see if she existed and possibly make contact with her. But in Iran, such moves were too dangerous.

Soon after Parisi's final email, Sarkis Soghanalian phoned Dave. For months, the old arms dealer had been putting him, Ira Silverman, and Larry Sweeney in contact with a succession of shadowy figures he claimed could help locate their friend. The men shared several qualities. They were all either French or Middle Eastern. They were all connected in some manner to intelligence agencies in France or the Middle East. They were also all involved in one way or another with criminal activities, such as weapons dealing, bribery, or money laundering. Dave realized early on that Soghanalian viewed Bob's case as an opportunity to find his way back into the arms trade. It was hard to see it any other way. His proposals to win the former FBI agent's release invariably involved the sale of embargoed products to Iran, such as helicopter parts or components for jet engines. Dave wasn't troubled. He knew governments cut deals all the time, and if a few helicopter parts could win Bob's freedom, it seemed like a small price to pay.

Soghanalian told Dave that Bob's Iranian captors had turned him over to Hezbollah for safekeeping and that the terrorist group was hiding him in Lebanon by moving him around the network of refugee camps it operated there. He said one of his contacts, a Syrian-born businessman named Fouad al-Zayat, was well connected to Hezbollah and was willing to negotiate the terms of Bob's release. “It's all in the oven,” Soghanalian said. When Dave asked Senator Nelson's office to check out al-Zayat with the CIA, the feedback he received was encouraging. The businessman did have close ties to both Hezbollah and Syrian intelligence, the spy agency reported. Dave and Ira made arrangements to meet al-Zayat on Cyprus, where he had a home.

As their flight prepared to land in Nicosia, the largest city on Cyprus, Dave and Ira were buoyant. They sensed they were days away from seeing Bob and bringing him home. Ira felt a particular sense of relief. He had spent every day since his friend's disappearance hunkered down by the telephone, hoping for news and weaving the few threads he found into stories of hope. Chris and Bob's children didn't blame him for what happened on Kish. But for Ira, only Bob's return could relieve his sense of guilt.

Dave had contracted with SCG International to provide security for the trip, and they were met at the Nicosia airport by Jamie Smith, the firm's head, and two of his employees, Dino DeLaurentis and Rocky Boudreau, both former commandos. Smith, a short, stocky man with blond hair, explained that his team had flown into Cyprus on a private plane loaded with weapons and telecommunications equipment. He said that SCG owned a large C-130 military transport plane that was stationed nearby, in position to pick up Bob when he was released.

The following morning, two black SUVs were waiting at Dave and Ira's hotel to take them to see al-Zayat at his office in downtown Nicosia. For security purposes, Smith told them, they needed to ride in separate cars. He handed each man a special pen containing a concealed video camera and a slip of paper on which he had written a name and telephone number. Smith explained it was the name of the police chief in Nicosia. “If the shit hits the fan, call this guy,” he told them. The convoy departed. As the vehicles approached al-Zayat's address, Ira's driver, Rocky Boudreau, instructed the retired newsman on what to do if their car came under gunfire. He told Ira to throw himself down toward the left because he fired with his right hand and any returning rounds would be directed that way. He also urged Ira to stay calm even if bullets started whizzing in through the car's windshield. Ira sat frozen, wondering what the hell was going on.

Arriving at al-Zayat's office, Dave and Ira climbed a staircase and were ushered into a large, spacious room with white tile flooring and walls decorated with Christian icons. They were greeted affably by al-Zayat, a portly, balding man with an oversized face and heavy jowls who had been dubbed “the Fat Man” by British tabloids. The businessman had recently made headlines in England by refusing to pay off gambling losses at London's top casinos reportedly totaling $250 million. Instead, he sued the casinos, claiming his losses were the result of trickery by dealers who distracted him and managers who failed to provide him with services that were his due as a high-stakes casino “whale.” “Casinos give a service, and if the service is not good, considering the price which you are paying, then you do not pay,” al-Zayat told one newspaper. “If you go to a restaurant and you do not like the food, you do not pay. If you go to the whorehouse and do not get the pleasure you were seeking, you do not pay.”

The Syrian's ability to attract controversy wasn't limited to Britain. He was barred from entering the United States and had been involved in a political scandal that resulted in the imprisonment of a congressman on bribery and corruption charges. In the mid-2000s, al-Zayat and a partner, Nigel Winfield, struck a deal to sell Iran replacement parts for Boeing jet engines. But since the parts fell on the list of embargoed materials, they needed to find a U.S. lawmaker willing to support a congressional exemption for the sale. Winfield approached a Republican representative from Ohio, Robert W. Ney, who agreed to fly to London to discuss the issue with al-Zayat. Once he arrived, the Syrian brought Ney to an exclusive casino, Les Ambassadeurs, and gave him fistfuls of gambling chips worth tens of thousands of dollars, money federal prosecutors later charged was a bribe to get Ney's support for the waiver.

At his office on Cyprus, al-Zayat introduced Dave and Ira to another associate, whom he described as a Jordanian colleague who would serve as his go-between with Hezbollah. Dave said the Levinson family didn't have money to pay a ransom, and al-Zayat said his advice was not to offer any. On the following day, another meeting was held, this one in the lobby of Dave and Ira's hotel. SCG was monitoring the proceedings and relaying reports about it to Dave's paralegal, Sonya Dobbs. Dave and Ira didn't know it at the time, but the CIA was also secretly listening in.

The talks soon shifted to al-Zayat's home, a walled compound occupying an entire block in a Nicosia suburb. Whenever Dave and Ira arrived, a lavish meal prepared by al-Zayat's cook always awaited them. During one meal, the businessman asked Dave why the United States made it so difficult for American companies to win business abroad by barring the payments of bribes to foreign officials, lamenting that this put U.S. firms at a disadvantage. During most of the meals at al-Zayat's home, seven or eight other men were present. They didn't take part in any discussions and Ira assumed they were Syrian intelligence agents. At one gathering, Ira thought he overheard al-Zayat's Jordanian associate mention the name of the former Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the politician who had served as the link among Ira, Bob, and Dawud Salahuddin.

After about five days, al-Zayat finally announced that his Jordanian colleague was ready to leave for Beirut and would return with a Hezbollah representative. The Jordanian reappeared the following day accompanied by a man dressed in a white shirt opened at the collar and a thin gold necklace. The man, who spoke English, suggested Dave and Ira accompany him to Beirut to start talks about Bob, but they replied they preferred to conduct those discussions on Cyprus. At lunchtime, the man joined them at a poolside table. He explained their friend's release would cost $20 million. When Dave told al-Zayat about the demand, his host appeared angered. “We had made a deal that he was going to return Bob,” al-Zayat said. “There are no terms other than he is going to give Bob.”

The next morning, the supposed Hezbollah official was nowhere to be found and al-Zayat told Dave and Ira the terrorist group was now claiming to know nothing about Bob or his whereabouts. Dave and Ira were crushed. They had discussed every detail of Bob's return with Jamie Smith, including where he would be taken first for medical examination and the best place for his reunion with Chris. Now the only thing left to do was pack and leave Cyprus.

A few weeks earlier, Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had agreed to a rare television interview in Tehran. International talks were restarting about the future of Iran's nuclear program and Ahmadinejad was on a charm offensive to project a more moderate image of Iran. He summoned the NBC News anchor Brian Williams to Tehran for the interview. Ahmadinejad remarked that he was hopeful that Iran and the United States were poised to enter a new phase of their relationship. “For more than fifty years, the policy of American statesmen has been to confront the Iranian people,” he said. “Today, we see new behavior shown by the United States.”

Toward the interview's end, Williams sprung a question on Ahmadinejad—he asked him about Bob. The Iranian's response sounded more like a provocation than a reply. His country was willing to help the FBI find Bob, he said, but U.S. officials first needed to provide a better explanation of why he had come to Kish.

WILLIAMS
: An American, a former FBI agent named Bob Levinson,… disappeared in Iran. How much do you know about his case and the status, the search for him?

AHMADINEJAD
: There was a claim made some time ago, some people came over, the gentleman's family came over. They talked and met with our officials and were given our responses. I see no reason for a person who was given an Iranian visa and came into Iran, arrived in Iran through official channels, to have problems here. Our security officials and agents have expressed their willingness to assist the FBI if the FBI has any information about his travels around the world. We have said that we are ready to help, to assist with that matter. There is certain information that only the FBI … have.

After Dave and Ira's return from Cyprus, SCG International started sending bills to Larry Sweeney, who had agreed to oversee the company's payments. They were much bigger than he had expected and SCG hadn't provided receipts to support the expenditures. Some charges struck Sweeney as inflated or unrelated to the search for Bob. Jamie Smith had left Cyprus for a few days while Dave and Ira were there, apparently to go to London on other business. He had charged the Levinson family $15,000 in expenses and airfares for the trip to England. When Sweeney challenged the bill, he received a reply from an SCG official named Troy Titus, who insisted the charges were all appropriate.

Sweeney's old cop instincts went on alert. He started doing some research and discovered that Titus, who described himself as SCG's accountant, was a former lawyer who had been disbarred after his conviction in 2005 on fraud charges. In 2008, he was facing fraud charges again, this time in connection with a real estate investment scheme. “Well, this tops it all,” Larry wrote Dave and Ira. “Our account is now being handled by an accused felon.”

Dave and Larry made what they thought was a reasonable payment to SCG and broke ties with it. Years later,
Outside
magazine published an exposé of Smith, claiming he had embellished or manufactured key parts of his personal story, such as the extent of his involvement with the CIA. The article appeared just as Smith was set to publish his autobiography,
Gray Work: Confessions of an American Paramilitary Spy
. The book's publication was delayed for a time and Smith later filed a $30 million libel suit against the magazine, saying he had represented himself accurately.

Smith devoted a chapter in his book to SCG International's work on the Levinson case. In it, he wrote that he had warned Dave on Cyprus not to accompany the Hezbollah representative to Beirut, but Dave and Ira later said Smith wasn't involved in the discussion. Smith also said that the female SCG operative who had visited the Maryam hotel—the woman he called “Mila”—had quickly left Kish after discovering that someone had entered her room. Mila knew about the break-in, he wrote, because she had used an old spy's trick: she took a strand of her hair, wet it with saliva, and placed it across the gap between the door and its frame. Upon returning to her room, she discovered the strand on the floor, a sign the door had been opened. Mila might have told the story to Smith. But there was not a single word in her report from Kish about someone entering her room or a strand of hair.

 

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