WASHINGTON - The Obama administration faced intensified pressure Friday to find former CIA contractor Robert Levinson - both from lawmakers and the Levinson family - nearly seven years after he disappeared in Iran during what now has been revealed as an unofficial spy mission.
Levinson’s family urged the government “to step up and take care of one of its own.”Members of Congress said they wanted to know more about the case, which led to three veteran analysts being forced out of the agency and seven others being disciplined.
Levinson vanished after a March 2007 meeting with an admitted killer on Kish Island, an Iranian resort. For years, the U.S. publicly described him as a private citizen who traveled to the tiny Persian Gulf island on business. But an Associated Press investigation revealed that Levinson actually was a contractor working for the CIA and was paid by a team of agency analysts who were acting without authority to run spy operations to gather intelligence.
White House spokesman Jay Carney said Levinson, who retired after 28 years at the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration, was not a U.S. employee at the time of his disappearance.
A contractor would not be considered a government employee, but no one wanted a lawsuit that would air the secret details, so the CIA paid Levinson’s family about $120,000, the value of the new contract the agency was preparing for him when he left for Iran. The government also gave the family a $2.5 million annuity, which provides tax-free income, multiple people briefed on the deal said.
Carney declined to discuss the case in detail but said numerous U.S. officials, including President Barack Obama, have pressed Iran for help on finding and returning Levinson.
“Since Bob disappeared, the U.S. government has vigorously pursued and continues to pursue all investigative leads, as we would with any American citizen missing or detained overseas,” Carney said Friday. “We continue to be focused on doing everything we can to bring Bob home safely to his family. This remains a top priority of the U.S. government.”
The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said the U.S. believes that Levinson, 65, is alive and is being held by the Quds Force, which is the special-operations wing of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.
“He is in the custody of some pretty bad people,” Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., told Fox News.
Other lawmakers said they would seek more answers in Levinson’s case, and his family in Florida pleaded for the government to do more.
“After nearly seven years, our family should not be struggling to get through each day without this wonderful, caring man that we love so much,” the family said in a statement.
After his disappearance, the FBI began asking about Levinson’s mission, and the CIA started a formal inquiry into whether anyone at the agency had sent Levinson to Iran or whether he was working for the CIA at the time. CIA analysts acknowledged he had done some work for them but said his contract was out of money.
The CIA then told the FBI and Congress that the agency had no current relationship with Levinson and that there was no connection to Iran, numerous U.S. officials said.
But in October 2007, emails uncovered between Levinson and CIA analyst Anne Jablonski revealed the agency had been involved with his mission to Iran. CIA managers said their own employees had lied to them, and assigned its internal security team to investigate. That inquiry quickly determined that the agency was responsible for Levinson while he was in Iran, a former official familiar with the review said.
The Justice Department investigated possible criminal charges against Jablonski and another CIA officer. However, charges were never pursued, in part because a criminal case could have revealed the story behind Levinson’s disappearance, current and former officials said. The officials spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the sensitive case.
Jablonski and two others were forced out.
Officially, the investigation remains open.
Asked about Levinson Friday in Israel, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said he has raised the question of the contractor’s whereabouts with Iranian officials, but he declined to describe those discussions. “We will continue to try to seek his release and return to the United States,” Kerry said.
At least two lawmakers in Congress said they would seek more information on Levinson’s case from the government. Others, however, criticized The Associated Press report as potentially putting Levinson’s life in danger or slowing his release.
“We now need to make sure that everyone, jointly in the government, is working to make sure that he comes home,” said Rep. Ted Deutch, D-Fla., a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee who represents the district where Levinson’s family lives. “There is a father and husband who is the longest-held American hostage, and we all need to work together to make sure that he comes home safely. This is an issue that should matter to everyone in this country.”
Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., a senior member of the House Intelligence Committee, said he would “be seeking an update as soon as possible on the Robert Levinson case from the intelligence community, and hope there may be a new window opening in which we can get answers from Iran.”
The AP first confirmed Levinson’s CIA ties in 2010 and continued investigating. It agreed three times to delay publishing the story because the government said it was pursuing promising leads to get him home.
The AP is reporting the story now because, nearly seven years after his disappearance, those leads have repeatedly come up empty. The government has not received any sign of life since photos and a video in late 2010 and early 2011. Top U.S. officials, meanwhile, say his captors almost certainly already know about his CIA association.
Carney called the AP report “highly irresponsible.”
The New York Times said Friday that it also had known for years about the former agent’s CIA ties, since a lawyer for the family gave a reporter access to Levinson’s files and emails, but had withheld the information to avoid jeopardizing his safety or the efforts to free him. After the AP disclosure, the Levinson family said it had no objection to the Times’ publishing the information.
AN INVESTIGATIVE YEN
In many ways, the story that emerges from Levinson’s files and dozens of interviews is that of an unusual spy, an aging but still passionate investigator searching for a way to keep his hand in the game.
Levinson joined the FBI’s New York Field Office in 1978 after spending six years with the Drug Enforcement Administration. He was an expert on the New York mob’s five families. Eventually he moved to the Miami office, where he tracked Russian organized-crime figures and developed a reputation for developing sources.
Levinson might have stayed at the FBI for his entire career, but he retired in 1998 because he needed money. He and his wife, Christine, had seven children, and there were college bills to pay.
After retiring, Levinson worked for several large investigative firms and then ran his own business from his home in Coral Springs, Fla. But he badly wanted a way back into government, and his close friend Jablonski helped him out.
In 2006, Jablonski worked for a CIA unit called the Illicit Finance Group that produced reports on subjects like money-laundering and international corruption. In the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the CIA expanded greatly, hiring hundreds of outside contractors.
Levinson was thrilled when Jablonski told him in mid-2006 that he had been approved for a consulting contract.
Levinson knew his way around some parts of the world, but he knew nothing about the one country that his bosses at Langley were most interested in: Iran.
The path that took him there began with another friend, Ira Silverman, a retired NBC investigative producer. Levinson had been one of the newsman’s sources for law-enforcement tips, but now Silverman had a tip for the investigator. He could connect him with someone who might prove to be a source in Iran, Dawud Salahuddin, an American who had fled there in 1980 after assassinating a former aide to the Shah of Iran in Bethesda, Md.
Silverman had met Salahuddin in 2002 when he went to Tehran to profile him for The New Yorker magazine.The fugitive viewed many Iranian officials as corrupt, and Silverman believed he might be willing to share information. He particularly disdained a former Iranian president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, privately claiming he had stolen millions in oil revenue and secretly invested it in Canadian real estate and other assets. Silverman introduced the two men by phone.
Levinson went to Toronto to try to track Rafsanjani’s money. While there, he also met with a Lithuanian-born businessman, Boris Birshtein, who in time would connect him with some Iranian operatives.
In February 2007, he sent an email that would later loom large over the question of what the CIA knew about his Iran trip. It was sent to Jablonski with the subject line, “Urgent Note for Mr. Tim,” a reference to the head of the Illicit Finance Group, Timothy Sampson.
Levinson wrote that he was going to Dubai to work on several non-CIA cases, including one involving cigarette smuggling, and hoped to meet someone there “or on an island nearby” who claimed to know about money laundering by Iranian officials.
Meanwhile, Silverman was helping to arrange Levinson’s meeting with Salahuddin at the Maryam Hotel on the island of Kish, a short flight from Dubai.
A few days later, Salahuddin said the authorities had taken Levinson to Tehran for questioning.
YEARS OF SEARCHING
Whether Levinson is still alive is unknown. But his family and friends, and eventually, the U.S. government, have spent years trying to find him.
Initially, McGee, Silverman and a retired FBI agent, Larry Sweeney, mounted their own search. They were put in touch with a former weapons dealer named Sarkis Soghanalian, known in his prime as “the Merchant of Death.”
Soghanalian, who wanted to get back into the weapons trade, claimed people he knew could help negotiate Levinson’s release and said government approval for some weapons deals would speed the process. He fed the family hopeful stories of sightings of the former agent in refugee camps controlled by the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, and once he announced that Levinson’s release was imminent.
By mid-2008, after Levinson’s CIA connection had been revealed, the FBI was fully engaged in the hunt. At that time, two FBI agents met at a Paris hotel with a powerful new player who became secretly involved in the effort: Oleg Deripaska, one of Russia’s wealthiest businessmen.
Deripaska headed an international mining and metals empire with business ties to Iran.
His involvement came with a price. The State Department had refused Deripaska a visa because of allegations linking him to organized crime - accusations he has denied. But Birshtein, the Toronto businessman, had approached the FBI with a plan: He would persuade Deripaska to join the search and, if they succeeded, both would get visas as rewards.
Deripaska said he would put up millions to fund the venture, but he insisted that his role be kept secret. However, word that big money was in play made its way to Iran. Suddenly, a man with family connections to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, insisted that he could engineer Levinson’s release for a hefty price.
FBI officials were so confident about the plan that they told Christine Levinson to stay by the phone for a call from her husband. It never came.
A few months later, in November 2010, an email with the video of Robert Levinson attached was sent to Silverman and others. It was followed a few months later by another email with the picture showing him dressed as a prisoner.Around the same time, top FBI officials met with their Iranian counterparts for secret talks about Levinson. Like all the earlier leads, the talks quickly fizzled.
Iranian negotiators kept saying that a radical splinter group had kidnapped Levinson and that they were carrying out raids to find him. FBI officials feared the story was a setup to allow the Iranians to take Levinson to a remote place and kill him as part of a “raid” to set him free.
Even as the relationship between the U.S. and Iran has thawed with the recent election of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and a temporary deal that freezes parts of the country’s nuclear program, there has been no progress on securing Levinson or information about his fate.
“We don’t know where he is, who he is,” Rouhani told CNN in September during the United Nations General Assembly. “He is an American who has disappeared. We have no news of him.”
U.S. intelligence officials suspect Iran did indeed snatch Levinson but they can’t prove it. Officials surmise that only a professional intelligence service such as Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and National Security could have taken Levinson and thwarted American efforts to find him for so many years.
U.S. intelligence officials acknowledge it’s very possible Levinson, who was in poor health, died under questioning at some point. They said there is no upside for the Iranians to admit he died in their custody.Information for this article was contributed by Lara Jakes and Matt Apuzzo of The Associated Press; by Barry Meier of The New York Times; and by Adam Goldman of The Washington Post.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 12/14/2013