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Overview
In late 2013, Americans were shocked to learn that a former FBI agent turned private investigator who disappeared in Iran in 2007 was there on a mission for the CIA. The missing man, Robert Levinson, appeared in pictures dressed like a Guantánamo prisoner and pleaded in a video for help from the United States.
Barry Meier, an award-winning investigative reporter for The New York Times, draws on years of interviews and never-before-disclosed CIA files to weave together a riveting narrative of the ex-agent's journey to Iran and the hunt to rescue him. The result is an extraordinary tale about the shadowlands between crime, business, espionage, and the law, where secrets are currency and betrayal is commonplace. Its colorful cast includes CIA operatives, Russian oligarchs, arms dealers, White House officials, gangsters, private eyes, FBI agents, journalists, and a fugitive American terrorist and assassin.
Missing Man is a fast-paced story that moves through exotic locales and is set against the backdrop of the twilight war between the United States and Iran, one in which hostages are used as political pawns. Filled with stunning revelations, it chronicles a family's ongoing search for answers and one man's desperate struggle to keep his hand in the game.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780374712792 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 05/03/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 624 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Missing Man
The American Spy Who Vanished in Iran
By Barry Meier
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2016 Barry MeierAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-374-71279-2
CHAPTER 1
The House on Ninety-Second Street
When they were teenagers, Bob Levinson's oldest sons thought the greatest way to spend a Sunday afternoon was to sprawl out on the living room couch with a bag of Famous Amos cookies and watch Mafia movies. Dan and Dave were big fans of Goodfellas, and Dave had memorized nearly every line spoken by Ray Liotta, who portrayed Henry Hill, a mobster in the federal witness protection program. The boys would crack up as Dave reeled off dialogue. Their father liked to sit nearby, at the kitchen table reading a book. But sooner or later, he would get up and walk over to his sons with a disapproving look. "I used to put guys like this away for a living," he would remark, and tell them again he thought movies like Goodfellas romanticized thugs. Dan and Dave knew it came with the turf when your father was an FBI agent. "That's cool, Dad," they responded before going back to the movie.
Bob and Chris had seven children. The three oldest were girls, Susan, Stephanie, and Sarah, followed by Dan and Dave, then Samantha, and finally, Douglas. Their children had been born over sixteen years and they were all brought up to revere the FBI; they liked having an agent for a father. As kids, they would race to the front door when they heard it open in the evening because the first one to greet him got to pull off his shoes. He always came back from FBI trips with presents. One time, he handed out tee shirts decorated with pictures of pineapples, a reference to "Old Pineapple Face," the name coined by Panamanians for Manuel Noriega, their pockmark- faced president who was arrested by the United States on drug trafficking charges. The kids helped him keep his files organized by stapling his expense receipts into them. None of them realized some of the receipts were records of cash that their father had paid to criminals and other sources for information.
For Bob and Chris, raising a big family on a $90,000 FBI salary wasn't easy. The couple's first home in Coral Springs, Florida, where they moved in 1984 after Bob transferred to the bureau's office in Miami from New York, was tiny. The three oldest girls shared a bedroom outfitted with bunk beds and a trundle underneath that was pulled out at night. When a new baby arrived, Bob created a nursery by cordoning off part of the dining room with a curtain. Chris never went food shopping without filling her purse with coupons, and a big family night out meant going to McDonald's on days when two hamburgers were on sale for the price of one. No one minded and the kids were happy and thriving.
By the late 1990s, the family needed more money. Susan, Stephanie, and Sarah were in college or about to start, and soon there would be four more college tuitions to pay. Bob also wanted Chris to have a bigger home and a more comfortable life. During their long marriage they had never gone away alone together for a weekend. In 1998, when he was fifty, Bob decided to leave the FBI, seven years before mandatory retirement age. After three decades as a federal agent, he joined the exodus of graying government detectives into the private sector, where he could triple his salary. But leaving the FBI behind would prove far harder than he imagined.
When Bob started in law enforcement in the 1970s, private investigators were regarded as sleazy snoops hired to catch cheating spouses or find runaway teenagers. By the 1990s a new corporate investigations industry was feeding a growing demand for information from companies, Wall Street firms, lawyers, and others. Manufacturers making pharmaceuticals, cigarettes, and high-fashion handbags needed investigators to track down criminals producing counterfeit versions of their products. Hedge funds and private equity firms were hungry for secrets about investment targets. American companies and banks doing deals with businessmen in Russia and Eastern Europe wanted to know if they were corrupt or had criminal ties.
The big investigative firms were staffed by former prosecutors, retired agents from the FBI and other agencies, and ex–newspaper reporters. They adopted the veneer of law firms and charged clients similar rates. One of the largest, Kroll Associates, employed dozens of investigators and had offices throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. It was a highly competitive industry in which firms won contracts by convincing clients they had the connections to deliver valuable "strategic" information. Often, they produced high-priced smoke — reports that blended fact, rumor, and speculation. Their tactics could also be as bare-knuckled as those of the old-time private eyes who spied on love nests. In the late 1990s, one major new source of work for corporate investigative firms came from Russian oligarchs, financial and industrial magnates who had gained astronomical wealth after the fall of the Soviet Union. The oligarchs liked to depict themselves as a new breed of Russian entrepreneurs, Western-style capitalists who succeeded through shrewd dealings and risk-taking, rather than payoffs and political corruption. That often wasn't the case, and some oligarchs hired investigative firms to dig up dirt that could be used to blackmail a critic into silence, a technique known in the trade as a "hard shoulder."
Bob preferred to keep his nose clean. His first job was with a firm called DSFX, in its Miami office. Construction was then under way on the American Airlines Arena, the indoor stadium that became home to the Miami Heat basketball team, and DSFX was hired to help local officials monitor possible fraud on the project. Bob also began to work with Philip Morris, the maker of Marlboro cigarettes, trying to locate pirate factories producing counterfeits of its famous brand. At the time, drug gangs in Latin America were also doing a brisk business in kidnapping American executives and demanding large ransoms for their release, and companies used Bob to negotiate those deals. "If you do this right, it's not like in the movies," Bob told a reporter then writing an article about corporate kidnappings. "You don't hear music in the background, only the sound of pens on paper."
With more money, Bob and Chris, like most people, found ways to spend it. They bought a big new home in a gated community in Coral Springs and two new cars. While their three older daughters had gone to Florida State University, their two older sons wanted to go to more expensive private colleges outside the state and Bob and Chris agreed to send them.
When DSFX was sold in 2001, Bob started his own one-man shop, R. A. Levinson & Associates, which he ran out of his home. He had never operated a business before and it proved a constant hustle. He had to scramble for work, cater to clients, pay bills, collect on accounts, and make sure more money was coming in than going out. As a lone wolf, he took what he could get. His assignments were a hodgepodge, running from background investigations into Russian businessmen to counterfeit product cases. In a typical month, he might take three or four trips, including travel abroad to cities like London, Kiev, and Managua. He would book a hotel room to meet with a source and, in the evening, go to a different hotel to sleep. Before turning in, he would order room service and spend hours typing up reports to clients, responding to emails, and sending out feelers to drum up new work. The constant travel and bad eating habits took a toll. At six feet four, Bob had always been a very big man, but he soon weighed 240 pounds and had diabetes and high blood pressure.
In 2004, another large investigations firm, SafirRosetti, hired him to open an office in Boca Raton, Florida. With a steady salary, he didn't constantly have to scramble for clients and could provide his family financial security. But there was a problem — his head and his heart weren't in the work. Chasing product counterfeiters didn't compare to the thrill of an FBI agent hunting criminals for Uncle Sam. After he worked hard to investigate a case, a company's executives might decide not to alert law enforcement officials to his findings, fearing that the resulting publicity might damage their reputation or give a competitor a leg up. He would tell friends he was working for the "rich people's police," and even some of his kids could see that he wasn't happy. He tried to strike a balance by taking on assignments for public interest groups. One organization, the Center for Justice and Accountability, used investigators like Bob to track down people who had committed human rights abuses in their native countries and had since moved to the United States, often under an assumed name. When Bob met one of the group's lawyers at a Miami café, he beamed and said, "I love what you guys do." He couldn't imagine saying that to a corporate executive.
When he traveled on jobs, he fed information he picked up back to friends at the FBI and other federal agencies. Every ex-cop turned private investigator does that in order to keep doors open when they need help. Bob, however, wanted more. He still wanted to be part of the action. Every few months, he traveled to FBI field offices in cities like Memphis, Kansas City, and Seattle to teach seminars for young agents on techniques for identifying and recruiting informants.
From the very start of his career, Bob was a collector of information, intelligence, and people. He cast himself as the proverbial "good cop," a big, friendly guy who liked everybody and who wanted everybody to like him. It wasn't an act or even a stretch. By nature, he was gregarious and possessed an instinct for knowing how people wanted to be treated and what they wanted to hear. Ten minutes after sitting down in a restaurant, he would be on a first-name basis with the waiter or waitress serving him, and he would leave a big tip behind to make sure they remembered him. He loved handing out nicknames; everybody got one, family members, friends, and new acquaintances. The names were usually corny — stuff like "Professor" or "Doctor" — but people walked away charmed, thinking that Bob had coined the name just for them. He even varied how he introduced himself, depending on the impression he wanted to create. Some people knew him as Bob. Others called him Bobby. He liked to use "Bobby" at times, he explained to one of his sons, because its boyish sound made his large stature and status as an agent seem less threatening.
Once Bob got people talking, they often kept talking. If they were criminals, they might hope he would cut them a break. Other people might cooperate to get cash or because they wanted him to solve an immigration problem. Whatever the specifics, his relationships involved the give-and-take that binds together a cop and an informant. From the start of his law enforcement career, Bob believed he could make more cases from informants than he could from working the street. Once he ran into a Drug Enforcement Administration agent he knew outside a Manhattan courthouse. The DEA agent, who did undercover buys, was dressed for the part in jeans, a battered leather jacket, and a bulletproof vest. Bob, who worked for the DEA before joining the FBI, had on his own uniform — a suit, a white shirt, and a rep tie. He looked at his friend and pulled a pen out of his jacket pocket. "I'm going to put more people in jail with this than you are with all that armor," he told him.
During his seminars for young FBI agents, he talked about his experiences and showed PowerPoint slides. He discussed the types of personality traits found in people willing to become informants. They tended to be independent thinkers, he said, rather than rule followers and were often empathetic, imaginative, and social. A variety of motives might cause them to open up; some even saw cooperation with the cops as a way to eliminate or take revenge against a rival. Other informants were thrill seekers or wannabe cops. Bob sprinkled his presentation with references to espionage and true crime books, quoting passages from authors such as David Ignatius, a journalist who wrote spy thrillers, and Robert Baer, a former agent for the Central Intelligence Agency who chronicled his experiences as an operative in the Middle East. "'Soon recruiting agents became as natural as ordering a pizza over the telephone. It's all a matter of listening to what people are really saying,'" read one of Bob's slides quoting Baer. He warned agents about the pitfalls of dealings with informants and urged them not to get too close to a source or consider one a friend. Another slide read:
When you are trying to recruit a member of a criminal organization or terrorist group, remember one thing — you are, in effect
• Selling suicide
• If that person is discovered cooperating with the FBI or law enforcement, the penalty is usually death
* * *
Bob knew from the age of eight what he wanted to be. His inspiration came from a movie called The House on 92nd Street, released in 1945, three years before he was born. The film was a B-grade thriller about a college student who goes undercover for the FBI during World War II to infiltrate a Nazi spy ring trying to steal secrets about the atomic bomb. The FBI officially sanctioned the movie, and it contained a brief introduction by Director J. Edgar Hoover extolling the agency's mission. After Bob saw it, he was all law-and-order. While other teenagers played sports, he hung out with friends in the attic of his parents' home in New Hyde Park, a Long Island suburb, acting out courtroom dramas. For dialogue they used transcripts from real trials that his mother typed up for lawyers to make extra money. He attended the City College of New York and worked during summers as an aide in the New York City Department of Investigations, an agency that ferrets out municipal corruption. When he graduated from college in 1970 with Phi Beta Kappa honors, he didn't attend the ceremony because he was training to be a DEA agent. The FBI required five years of law enforcement experience to qualify for a job and the DEA was the place where he would cut his teeth.
One evening two years later, he went to TGI Friday's, then a popular singles bar on Manhattan's Upper East Side. An attractive twenty-two-year-old office worker, Christine Gorman, was there with a girlfriend. Chris, who was short and had dark hair, was convinced that Bob was interested in her friend. He was interested in her. Before leaving the bar, he got Chris's phone number, and they soon began seeing each other. The only obstacle to their romance was his parents. Chris, who had grown up on Long Island in a large Catholic family, wanted to raise her children Catholic. Bob couldn't have cared less about religion, but his family was Jewish, and when he and Chris got married in 1973, Bob's father cut him off and sat shiva, the Jewish mourning ritual for the dead.
The DEA transferred Bob to Denver, and it was there in 1976 that he got the call he had been waiting for — the FBI wanted to hire him. He went to the bureau's training facility in Quantico, Virginia, and was assigned to its office in Los Angeles. It was a short-lived posting. Chris, who had already given birth to the couple's first child, was again pregnant and wanted to return to the East Coast to be close to her family. In 1978, she and Bob got their wish; he was offered a plum assignment in New York working on organized crime cases.
In the early 1980s, one of those Mafia cases captured the country's attention. It involved President Ronald Reagan's choice for secretary of labor, Raymond Donovan, and allegations that his New Jersey construction company had Mafia ties. Donovan, a top executive of Schiavone Construction, denied the rumors, and FBI officials testified during his Senate confirmation hearings that a bureau investigation had found nothing to suggest connections between Donovan's company and the mob. But after the new secretary of labor assumed his post, Time magazine published a bombshell — during an investigation in the late 1970s, the FBI had secretly recorded members of the Genovese crime family discussing Donovan, Schiavone, and a scheme to use minority-owned firms as fronts to win public construction contracts. To Bob, the revelation wasn't news. He had headed the investigation that produced those recordings, and a bitter dispute within the bureau over his handling of the informant in the case had nearly destroyed his young FBI career.
That informant, Michael Orlando, was a onetime schoolteacher who had turned to theft and armed robbery. Another FBI agent, Larry Sweeney, initially recruited Orlando as a source, and after he learned Orlando was close to Genovese family members, he introduced him to Bob. Orlando, who was being paid $500 a week by the FBI to be a top, or "high-echelon," informant, told Bob he was willing to infiltrate a Bronx meatpacking warehouse, run by a Genovese lieutenant named William Masselli, that served as a drop-off point for hijacked trucks and other criminal activities. In return, Bob reiterated Larry Sweeney's earlier promise to Orlando not to disclose his identity as a bureau source even to other FBI agents working on the case, for fear it might leak out and get him killed.
In 1978, Bob wrote a fourteen-page memo to FBI headquarters based on information picked up by bureau listening devices planted inside the Bronx warehouse. In it, he said the material being gathered had "excellent prosecutive potential" for cases of political corruption, fraud, labor racketeering, police corruption, and narcotics trafficking. But the inquiry ran into trouble when other bureau agents, unaware of Orlando's role as an informant, started reporting that he was taking part in truck hijackings and other crimes. When Bob and Sweeney confronted Orlando, he offered the informant's perfect excuse — fellow gangsters would quickly finger him as a stoolie, he said, if he walked away whenever a crime was going down. He promised to behave, but some FBI managers viewed Orlando as an informant run amok, and before long it wasn't clear who was playing whom. In addition, William Masselli was heard on an FBI bug telling a fellow gangster that Orlando had carried out multiple contract killings for the mob. "This kid Mike ... When I say he's a bad kid ... Forget about it ... He knows it," Masselli said. "This guy's got about ten under his belt already."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Missing Man by Barry Meier. Copyright © 2016 Barry Meier. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Prologue,
1. The House on Ninety-Second Street,
2. Toots,
3. The Fugitive,
4. Boris,
5. A Gold Mine,
6. Christmas,
7. The Black Dahlia,
8. An Appointment on Kish,
9. The Missing Man,
10. One of Their Own,
11. The Merchant of Death,
12. Passwords,
13. The Nuclear Option,
14. "Heloo Cheristi",
15. The Hikers,
16. The Young Man,
17. Proof of Life,
18. Tradecraft,
19. Breaking News,
20. The Fellowship,
21. The Twilight War,
Notes,
Acknowledgments,
Index,
Also by Barry Meier,
A Note About the Author,
Copyright,
Related Subjects
Customer Reviews
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