Missing Man (23 page)

The Hikers

Iran's mission to the United Nations is located on the eighth floor of a modern office building set back slightly from Third Avenue near the corner of East Fortieth Street in Manhattan. Inside is a small waiting area furnished with a few chairs, a love seat, and a coffee table. The walls are decorated with posters of tourist sites in Iran, such as Persepolis, the ancient capital of Persia. A woman wearing a bright blue headscarf and dark buttoned jacket appeared and smiled warmly at Chris. She introduced herself as Mrs. Kamali and said she recognized Chris from newspaper photographs, adding she looked much prettier in person. She said Iran's U.N. ambassador, Mohammad Khazaee, was ready to see Chris and her companions—her daughters Sue and Sarah, and her sister Suzi.

The diplomat, a short, trim man in his mid-fifties with graying hair, smiled and welcomed each of his visitors individually. He told Chris he had been hoping to meet all of her children, but she explained that several of them had other obligations or were traveling. Two of Khazaee's aides, a man and a woman, sat on either side of his desk with notepads on their laps. Chris was there to make another personal appeal to Iranian officials. Prior to coming to the meeting, she had discussed with FBI agents what she should and shouldn't say to the ambassador. Khazaee, an economist by training, had assumed his post in New York shortly after Bob's disappearance and served as his government's principal contact with U.S. officials and notables asking about him. Along with Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, those people included Bill Richardson, Bill Clinton's secretary of energy and a former U.S. ambassador to the U.N.

When Khazaee invited Chris to start their conversation, she mentioned she had watched Brian Williams's interview of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and was impressed by the Iranian president's knowledge of Bob's case. But she became confused, she added, when he talked about Bob's failure to get an Iranian visa because her husband was visiting Kish, an area where he didn't need one.

The diplomat didn't respond directly. Instead, he explained to Chris that he had worked hard to set up her trip to Iran and was curious about how it went. She thanked him and said she greatly enjoyed the opportunity to meet Iranians. “Were they not hospitable?” he asked. When Chris responded that everyone had been very kind, the diplomat's demeanor abruptly changed and his voice got louder. If that was the case, he demanded to know, why was she continuing to make “false statements in the media.”

He glanced down at four pages of notes spread out on his desk. They were written in Farsi and parts of each page were highlighted. For the next thirty minutes, he lectured Chris and her family members, coming back repeatedly to several points he wanted to emphasize. He said her husband's situation was as important for Iran as it was for the United States to resolve. He said he was tired of being asked about him because he didn't know about the case. He repeated that he and his colleagues remained suspicious of Bob's reasons for coming to Iran, echoing the Foreign Ministry official's claims that Bob might have offered $500 to a boat operator on Kish to take him to the Iranian mainland.

He asked Chris about the cigarette company for whom her husband was supposedly working and why he was traveling alone. Then he mentioned the FBI and the CIA and said it was entirely possible that a retired agent might still be doing work for the U.S. government. He said his government would not hesitate to put such a person on trial. “If we had him, we would announce it, we would accuse him of spying or whatever it might be.”

Khazaee continued, adding that he found the congressional resolutions introduced about Bob by Senator Nelson and others to be insulting because they effectively accused Iran of lying. Dozens of Iranians were in U.S. prisons on trumped-up embargo violations, he said, and they were being held under degrading conditions without access to lawyers or their families. Khazaee then drew himself up, placed the notes into a folio, and leaned back, signaling it was the Levinson family's turn to talk.

Chris asked him if he thought smugglers on Kish might have seized her husband. Khazaee replied it was highly likely; smuggling was rampant in the Persian Gulf and Mafia-like gangs operating in places such as Kish routinely killed Iranian police officers. Her husband's captors, he added, may have taken him to Iraq, Afghanistan, or Pakistan. If U.S. officials learned of his whereabouts, Iran stood ready to assist in his rescue, the diplomat said. Several months earlier, Chris had hired a lawyer in Iran, and she asked Khazaee if he thought it would be helpful to retain private investigators in his country. He looked at her askance. “Have you not been listening to anything I just said? What makes you think this case is any more important to you than it is to us?”

Sarah Levinson reached into her bag and took out a photo album filled with pictures of Bob and Chris, their seven children, and Ryan, their grandson. Sarah, who was crying, defended her mother, saying she had always acted respectfully toward the Iranian government. She was a wife trying to find her husband and bring him home. “She is doing everything she can,” said Sarah. “Our father is a wonderful man and in the end of the photo album are pictures of my sister's wedding. I know my boyfriend is waiting to propose to me until he can ask my father for my hand and it is so hard. We appreciate anything you can do to bring him home.”

Khazaee took the album and leafed through the pages. His tone softened. He explained he had experienced the loss of a family member, the death of a son. He said he understood how the Levinsons felt. This wasn't their fault. It was a matter between governments. Sue Levinson was crying, too. Suddenly, she lashed out at Khazaee, telling him how they were all struggling to survive the trauma of her father's disappearance. “We just want you to send him home,” she said.

The diplomat's reaction turned again. He became combative, though this time he wasn't reading from a script. “You say send him home, like you think that we have him. Well, to that I say to you, maybe you should ask why did the FBI send him over there in the first place!”

Khazaee stood up, indicating the meeting was over. Chris hastened to thank him, and Sue, still crying, tried to apologize. As the family left his office, the diplomat spoke to her. “Susan, be strong. Life has its ups and downs; we all go through these things. I told you I lost my son. You need to be strong.”

About the time of that meeting, massive political demonstrations were taking place on the streets of Tehran. Iranians were about to vote in a presidential election, and it was not clear Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would win a second term. Political rivals blamed his strident stance toward the West for worsening economic conditions inside the country. The desire for political change was strong among middle-class Iranians and students. Pre-election polls put a reformist candidate, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, in the lead. The former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was also running, having rebranded himself as a political moderate. When results were announced, the official tally gave Ahmadinejad a sizeable majority of the vote.

The news was met in Tehran and other cities with cries of derision and claims of election fraud. Large, spontaneous protests erupted and Iran hovered on the edge of a popular political uprising. Religious autocrats and ultraconservatives responded with a ruthless, bloody crackdown, one that was broadcast to the outside world through photographs and video captured on cell phones and posted on Twitter and other forms of social media. Leather-jacketed plainclothes officers known as the Basij were seen riding motorcycles into crowds of protesters in Tehran, whipping bystanders with sticks. The dying moments of a young Iranian woman, Neda Agha-Soltan, were captured on video as she lay on the pavement after being shot. Hundreds of students and political dissidents were rounded up and taken to prisons. Reports emerged that dozens of them were tortured and killed.

Not long afterward, a twenty-seven-year-old computer engineering student walked into the American consulate in Ankara, Turkey. He showed officials burn and bruise marks and explained he had been tortured at a secret Revolutionary Guards prison following a roundup of students protesting President Ahmadinejad's reelection. After his head was shaved, he was brought to a cell, which reeked from the smell of blood. On the cell's door, a previous occupant had scratched three lines of text in English and a name. After his release from captivity, he said, he had gone onto the Internet and discovered the name's significance. It was “B LEVINSON.”

President Obama and other Western politicians issued statements protesting the Iranian crackdown. A few months earlier, the American president had extended Iran an olive branch in an effort to coax its leaders into resuming nuclear control talks. In a videotaped message addressed to the Iranian people, he had referred to Iran as “the Islamic Republic,” one of the rare times an American leader acknowledged its clerical government. But Iranian officials responded to the West's criticism of their repressive tactics with the same simple and brutal strategy they had used many times before—they seized foreigners and imprisoned them on trumped-up spying charges. In 2009, three young Americans became the newest political pawns in that game. The trio, Sarah Shourd, Joshua Fattal, and Shane Bauer, were on vacation, hiking in the Zagros Mountains in western Kurdistan, along the border between Iraq and Iran. They were trying to find their way to a scenic waterfall when they spotted a soldier on a nearby ridge. He waved at them and indicated he wanted the hikers to come over to where he was standing. They couldn't tell what uniform he was wearing, but when the Americans approached him they unwittingly crossed into Iran and were taken into custody. They were soon charged with espionage and sent to Evin Prison.

The seizure of the hikers came as FBI officials sensed they were about to make a breakthrough in the search for Bob. Ever since Chris's return from Iran, the bureau, under the watchful eye of Senator Bill Nelson, had been pouring more resources and more experienced agents into the case. In 2009, FBI agents, using the ruse suggested by Mila, the operative with SCG International, lured the Maryam hotel's manager and its restaurant supervisor, Mohammed Para and Ali Korakumjam, to Dubai with fake offers of jobs there. But the two men refused to talk when questioned by agents, and the driver of the Maryam's taxi, the person FBI agents wanted most to interview, had been sent back to Kish by airport officials in Dubai because he didn't have the right travel documents.

A few months later, FBI agents were again at Dubai International Airport, this time awaiting the arrival of a flight from Tehran. Aboard it was an Iranian judge who had passed word to the United States through intermediaries that he had seen Bob and could provide information about him. The Iranian judge was coming voluntarily and bringing his two daughters with him. Given the risks involved, U.S. officials were ready to offer him asylum if his story checked out. When his plane arrived, FBI agents escorted him and his children through the terminal to a connecting flight to Washington, D.C. Before they got to the gate, his older daughter, who was about eighteen, broke away and started running. An FBI agent took off after her, but she disappeared into a crowd of passengers. The man explained that his daughter didn't want to go to the United States because her boyfriend was in Iran. She also believed her father was betraying his country. FBI agents assured him they would find the girl and bring her with them on a later flight.

In Washington, the man and his younger daughter were taken to a safe house outside the nation's capital, where investigators questioned him. He said Bob was brought before him during a secret court proceeding and charged with espionage. But because he viewed the evidence against him as flimsy, prosecutors had transferred the case out of his court and given it to a more compliant judge, who found Bob guilty. For the bureau, assessing the judge's credibility wasn't easy. He apparently suffered from mental health problems. When FBI officials gave him an initial polygraph test, the result was inconclusive. A doctor was called to the safe house to examine him. He was polygraphed again, and this time the test suggested he might be telling the truth. However, the operation soon fell apart. When FBI agents in Dubai found his older daughter, she refused to come to the United States. Instead, she went back to Iran, where she denounced her father to authorities as a traitor. The man, fearing retribution against members of his family, decided to go home. FBI agents tried to talk him out of it and told him he could stay, but he and his younger daughter soon boarded a flight and left.

Meanwhile, another writer for
The New Yorker
returned from Iran, where he had interviewed Dawud Salahuddin. Seven years had passed since Ira Silverman spoke with the fugitive, but Dawud's act hadn't changed. He told the
New Yorker
writer, Jon Lee Anderson, that Iran's religious leaders were destroying the country. “The mullahs have industrialized the religion and turned it into a money-making venture, and they are the main beneficiaries,” Dawud said. At some point, Dawud must have realized Anderson needed something fresh because, out of the blue, he said he was planning to leave Iran. When the writer asked him where he intended to go, Dawud simply replied, “The first law of a fugitive is not to tell anyone where you are headed.”

 

16

The Young Man

The man seated across from Boris Birshtein in a Paris hotel room was in his forties, young enough to be Boris's son. But the divide between them was greater than age. The man, Oleg Deripaska, was among the best-known members of Russia's new business elite, the oligarchs, and stood atop one of his country's most strategic businesses, the aluminum industry. His company, United Company RUSAL, was an international industrial powerhouse. It was the same Russian company that one of the Iranians who met with Bob Levinson and Boris in Istanbul had mentioned while discussing Iran's need for bauxite.