Missing Man (27 page)

I need the help of the United States government to answer the requests of the group that has held me for three and a half years … And please help me … get home … Thirty-three years of service to the United States deserves something.

 

18

Tradecraft

The video's arrival threw the FBI's search for Bob into high gear. Bureau officials kept its existence a closely guarded secret even inside the government. Investigators quickly focused on the email's message, the “last ultimatum” on which Bob's life supposedly hinged. Along with a payment of $3 million, the note demanded the release of three men—Salem Mohamad Ahmad Ghasem, Ahmad Ali Alarzagh, and Ebrahim Ali Ahmad. The names sounded Arabic, not Persian, and U.S. officials suspected they might be people that the United States was holding in American military detention facilities in Iraq. But a thorough search of records failed to find any trace of the men in U.S. custody there or anywhere else.

Using the email's IP address, FBI officials determined it had been sent from a computer in an Internet café in Pakistan. An agent was dispatched to stake out the shop. But that trail soon went cold. It became clear that the email, prior to being sent from the café, was routed through a network of cell phones to disguise its origins.

Inside the bureau's forensic laboratory in Quantico, Virginia, a glass-walled, industrial-looking building with a roof line studded with chimneys and vents, technicians pulled apart the video. Terror groups had turned to video as their preferred medium to spread propaganda and display hostages, and the FBI had developed expertise in analyzing it, compiling an informal cookbook to help technicians identify the organization involved based on a video's visual aesthetics and level of technical sophistication. While some groups preferred a bare-bones look and used a single camera and minimal lighting, others employed high production values involving multiple cameras and studio effects.

Audio specialists identified the music heard in the background of Bob's video as a song played at wedding ceremonies by Pashto-speaking tribes. Pashto is a common language, and groups speaking it are spread throughout Afghanistan, Iran, and Pakistan. The generic music was chosen by Bob's captors, analysts concluded, to both conceal his true location and mask any outside sounds, such as car traffic or the voice of a passerby, that might help investigators identify it. Psychological experts scrutinized Bob's words and gestures for signals. One comment that caught their attention was his reference to his “thirty-three years of service” to the United States. Bob worked a total of only twenty-eight years for the DEA and FBI, and it was possible he might be signaling that his captors knew about his CIA connection.

When Dave and Ira watched the video, they thought Bob might have chosen some of his words himself. To FBI analysts, everything about the email and video appeared carefully stage-managed and scripted to give the impression that Bob was in the hands of a group without any connection to the Iranian government. The demand for the release of the three men with Arabic-sounding names fit that scenario. So did Bob's comment that he was “running very quickly out of diabetes medicine.” If anything, he would have run out of diabetes medicine, and every other prescription drug he was taking, within days of disappearing on Kish, not years later. That meant his captors were supplying him with drugs and taking care of his medical needs. When government doctors reviewed the video, they concluded that Bob appeared well given his circumstances and suggested all the weight he had lost as a prisoner might have improved his health.

Despite the intense review of the video, the FBI was unable to wring substantive leads from it. The only firm conclusion they made was that the video was shot shortly before it was sent. Officials from the FBI, the CIA, the National Security Council, and the State Department gathered to discuss what to do next. They felt fairly certain that either the Iranian government or a faction tied to the country's intelligence or religious hierarchy was holding Bob. Nothing else made sense. No one else would have a reason or the resources to hold him for so long. Cigarette smugglers or Russian thugs would have killed Bob long ago. Keeping him alive and hidden for years was costly and complicated. It required the involvement of a highly disciplined and organized group, one whose members obeyed orders because they feared death if they failed to do so.

When it came to deciding how to respond to the video, officials disagreed. The State Department was worried that using it to confront Iran over Bob might jeopardize nuclear control talks. The CIA suspected their Iranian counterparts were behind the video and warned that it might be part of an intelligence trap. The FBI had a different perspective. Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, while vehemently claiming his country knew nothing about Bob, had repeatedly boasted with smug satisfaction that his country would be happy to assist the FBI if new information about Bob emerged. It was time, FBI officials argued, to call him on it.

An FBI counterterrorism expert named James McJunkin was a vocal proponent of that view. A onetime Pennsylvania state trooper, McJunkin was short, bald, and built like a block from hours spent lifting weights. He imagined that the Iranians had first believed Bob was a big-time CIA spy. It probably hadn't taken them long to figure out he wasn't, but they had kept him, probably hoping that the United States would reach out to inaugurate a prisoner swap. That hadn't happened either, and McJunkin thought the Iranians might have sent the video to signal they were looking for a face-saving way to let Bob go while being able to deny any involvement in his captivity. It was fine with McJunkin if playing along with some Iranian fairy tale meant getting Bob back.

The FBI's argument prevailed, and in early 2011 Chris flew to Washington to meet with the bureau's director, Robert Mueller. A onetime federal prosecutor, Mueller had assumed his post just after the 9/11 attacks. He told Chris something she never expected to hear—that as a result of back-channel diplomacy, secret talks were starting between the United States and Iran aimed at winning her husband's release. Mueller was upbeat about the prospects. Just a few months earlier, Iran had released one of the imprisoned American hikers, Sarah Shourd, after the government of Oman intervened on her behalf. A senior FBI official told Chris that 2011 “was going to be a very good year for the Levinson family.”

Chris felt Bob's return was near. After his disappearance, FBI agents specially trained to work with the families of kidnapping victims regularly visited her to check on her psychological well-being. More recently, they had started talking to her and the older children about the process Bob would need to go through after his release to help him overcome the trauma he had experienced. The government's plan called for him to be taken to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, a large U.S. military hospital in Germany, for a battery of physical and psychological assessments. During those first few days, Chris was told, she might not be able to speak with her husband. Once cleared for travel, he would go next to Brooke Army Medical Center, in San Antonio, Texas, a facility that specializes in treating soldiers and civilians held as prisoners or hostages, including those subjected to torture. Experts at the hospital were highly trained in treating emotional and mental trauma, and many of them had gone through the same course used to train members of elite military units, such as the Navy SEALs, on ways to withstand torture. Bob's stay in San Antonio could prove lengthy, and Chris was prepared to find accommodations near the hospital so she could be close to him.

Two FBI officials were selected to represent the United States in the talks with Iran. One of them was Sean Joyce, who had presided over the 2008 meeting at the bureau's Washington field office at which he acknowledged the bureau's mistakes in its initial search for Bob. The other was Carl Ghattas, who had overseen Bob's case during those early months. Both were veterans of terrorism-related operations. In the mid-1990s Joyce took part in a raid in Pakistan that captured a man named Mir Qazi, who had opened fire in 1993 on cars waiting to enter CIA headquarters at Langley, killing two people. Ghattas, a tall, thin man of Lebanese ancestry, spent two years heading FBI intelligence operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was a former prosecutor who came across as cold and aloof, and Ira Silverman took a particular dislike to him, believing that Ghattas was one of the bureaucratic stumbling blocks at the start of Bob's case.

Joyce and Ghattas were briefed prior to the talks by experts from the FBI and CIA in behavioral science, hostage negotiations, and Iranian culture and politics. Joyce was told it was critical for him, given the importance of hierarchy in Iran, to project authority and make it clear he was speaking for the United States. Agency specialists developed scripts of questions and replies, gaming out responses Joyce could make to statements by the Iranians. Hostage negotiators counseled the men not to show deference to their counterparts.

The first meeting between FBI officials and their Iranian counterparts took place in Europe, at a hotel closely monitored by intelligence agents from both sides. The CIA identified the Iranians attending the meeting as mid-level operatives in the Ministry of Intelligence with little authority. Whenever Joyce posed a question, the men would say they didn't know the answer and leave the room, apparently to confer with superiors. When they returned, it was typically with an empty response. They did throw out one piece of supposed information. They claimed intelligence gathered by Iran indicated a terrorist group opposed to their country's government was holding the former FBI agent in the rugged tribal regions along Iran's eastern border with Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Iranians then made a demand. Their country was prepared to walk away from further discussions if the United States did not issue a statement absolving it from involvement in Bob's disappearance. They suggested President Obama should be the person to make the announcement. The ultimatum was absurd, but the FBI argued to the White House that the Iranians might want a public display of good faith by the United States as a prelude to Bob's release. Administration officials rejected the idea of President Obama making any statements and passed the job to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In March 2011, Clinton, without disclosing the existence of the secret talks or the video of Bob, released a statement saying the United States had recently received information showing he was alive. In deference to Iran, she added that American officials believed he was being held in “southwest Asia,” a large geographical region that includes Iran and several surrounding countries:

As we approach the fourth anniversary of Bob Levinson's disappearance, we have received recent indications that Bob is being held somewhere in southwest Asia. As the government of Iran has previously offered its assistance in this matter, we respectfully request the Iranian government to undertake humanitarian efforts to safely return and reunite Bob with his family. We would appreciate the Iranian government's efforts in this matter.

Afterward, the Iranians offered more details about Bob's supposed captors and claimed Iranian military units were conducting raids on suspected rebel camps, as part of a campaign to find and free him. Soon FBI officials realized the Iranians were playing them. Data from U.S. spy satellites didn't show signs of any military activity in the areas where the Iranians said it was occurring. James McJunkin began to worry. He still believed Iran wanted to create a narrative about Bob, but he wondered if it was a very different story from the one he had first imagined. Rather than manufacturing a story to explain away their involvement in Bob's captivity, the Iranians seemed to be devising a tale to set the stage for his execution. It would be simple enough to take Bob to a remote area, mount a raid on a supposed “rebel” camp, and announce afterward that he had been killed by cross fire during a valiant effort by Iranian forces to rescue him. There would even be a body to send home.

A few weeks after Secretary Clinton's statement, Chris received another email from Bob's captors, this one with five photographs of Bob attached. They were completely different in tone and appearance from the video. In the pictures, his hair and beard were wild and bushy and he was dressed in what looked like a bad Halloween costume of a Guantánamo prisoner. He wore a mock orange jumpsuit, and a cheap metal chain was draped around his neck and wrists. He stood in front of a dark blue curtain and in each picture held a piece of white paper on which a different message was written. A stencil might have been used to draw the characters, because the outlines of the letters were neat and clearly defined. The grammar was so irregular and sloppy that the mistakes appeared intentional. Some words were capitalized or written in boldface letters, others were not. All the messages had a political overtone. They said:

I Am HERE IN
GUANTANAMO

DO YOU KNOW

WHERE IT IS?

THIS IS THE

RESULT OF

30 YEARS

SERVING

FOR
USA

HELP ME

WHY YOU

CAN NOT

HELP ME

4 TH

YEAR …

You Cant

or you don't

want…?

FBI technicians had trouble dating the photographs. But they suspected the pictures were shot before the video, because it was unlikely Bob's hair and beard would have grown that much during the five months since the video's arrival. When FBI agents traced the new email, they found it came from Afghanistan, not Pakistan. Using its IP address, agents identified the computer from which it had been sent and managed through sales records to track down its owner in Afghanistan. The man told investigators someone had stolen the computer several months earlier, and his story checked out.