Last Thursday afternoon, an urgent call went out from CIA headquarters to the spy agency’s director, John Brennan, who was giving a speech to a graduating class at “The Farm,” the CIA’s training facility near Williamsburg, Va.
An aide warned Brennan that the Associated Press and Washington Post were about to publish a lengthy story revealing that Robert Levinson, a retired FBI agent who had gone missing while “on private business” in Iran years earlier, was actually working for the CIA.
A handful of other national security reporters in Washington had known of Levinson’s CIA connections for years but agreed to sit on it, accepting the CIA’s rationale that publishing the information could endanger the life of Levinson, who was ostensibly pursing an investigation of cigarette smuggling for a private client when he went missing on Iran’s Kish Island in March 2007. Levinson was thought to be in Iranian hands.
On Thursday, the entreaties of lower ranking CIA officials to the reporters -- the AP’s Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman, who had recently left the news agency to join The Washington Post -- not to publish the story had failed. Other high-ranking Obama administration officials, including White House chief of staff Denis McDonough and deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes, as well as FBI Deputy Director Mark Giuliano, made the same argument to the reporters and their editors.
By the time Brennan got the warning from headquarters, however, it was too late to make his own appeal. The story was online.
Levinson’s family also did not want the story published, according to their attorney David McGee, a veteran former federal prosecutor in Florida.
“The family did not authorize them breaking the story,” McGee told Newsweek. “We assumed the AP would actually call and ask for permission. They didn’t call and ask.”
White House spokesman Jay Carney called publishing the story "highly irresponsible.”
The AP said “publishing this article was a difficult decision.”
After years in hostile hands, AP Executive Editor and Senior Vice president Kathleen Carroll said, “It is almost certain that [Levinson's] captors already know about the CIA connection but without knowing exactly who the captors are, it is difficult to know whether publication of Levinson’s CIA mission would make a difference to them. That does not mean there is no risk. But with no more leads to follow, we have concluded that the importance of the story justifies publication.”
On Saturday night, McGee called publication of the story “kind of a relief.”
For years the family had known of Levinson’s work for the CIA, McGee said. After he disappeared, “We searched Bob’s computer and found documents that connected him to the CIA. Those were not conclusive in themselves, but in those documents we found e-mails and addresses. My paralegal hacked the e-mail accounts, and we found day-to-day back-and-forth correspondence with the CIA.”All along the U.S. government had steadfastly denied that Levinson “worked for” the CIA, which was technically correct—he was a contractor. But as the years passed with no breakthrough on his case, the family chafed at suppressing the truth, which they felt was inhibiting the government’s investigation. They began to feel that the CIA was more interested in covering up its connection to Levinson than finding him.
McGee said the documents were turned over to the Senate Intelligence Committee, which summoned CIA officials for an explanation.
“They at first bald-faced lied about it,” said McGee, who spent 17 years investigating organized crime in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Florida. “They said he had no connection with the CIA. Then [the committee] confronted them with the documentation we had, and they went, ‘Oh boy, we have to go back and do an investigation.’ At that point the CIA launched an investigation.”
The CIA concluded that Levinson had been improperly contracted and supervised by an agency intelligence analyst, Anne Jablonski, an expert on Russian organized crime. That had been one of Levinson’s specialities at the FBI when he retired after 20 years in 1998 and went to work as a private investigator. Jablonski had been tasking him with intelligence-gathering assignments, normally the work of the agency’s clandestine operators, although in the past two decades analysts have increasingly worked in the field.
Jablonski and other two other CIA intelligence officials were secretly forced out and seven others disciplined for their roles in the affair, Apuzzo and Goldman reported. Jablonski, who was highly regarded at the agency for her expertise, maintains that she did not send Levinson to Iran on a mission. McGee was scathing on his criticism of the government’s handling of the case, saying its efforts at determining Levinson’s whereabouts and securing his return “ranged from neglect to insufficient to absolute obstruction.”
The FBI has never interviewed “some of the key witnesses” with information on Levinson’s whereabouts and suspected abduction by Iranian agents, he charged.
“An example: the first offer we got to swap Bob came in an email from a guy named Omar,” who sent the offer to several people whose emails were listed in the cell phone Levinson carried when he disappeared.
“The FBI has never interviewed those guys about their contacts with Bob,” McGee said. “Never talked to them.”
In addition, he said, “Bob worked undercover on Iranian issues with a Russian gentleman of some dubious background” who “had been dealing undercover with Iranian nationals on very high-priority issues for the CIA.”
“The guy was perfectly willing to cooperate,” McGee said, and “had great information,” but the FBI at first declined the offer “because he was in Canada.” Only after months of pressure, he said, did the FBI agree to interview him.
“Their efforts have been sporadic,” McGee said of the FBI. “There were times when they had negotiations they felt were going to succeed but they didn’t. They have staffed it poorly.”
“This has been six and a half years,” McGee added. “For years, this was staffed by junior agents. The junior agents were controlled by management. The management limited what they could do, and the agents would tell us this. Off the record they would tell us, ‘We’re frustrated. We can’t do the things we want to do that we think are necessary for this.’”
An FBI spokesman declined to comment. But McGee’s comments rankled a high-ranking former FBI official who was intensely involved in in the Levinson affair.
“We worked it hard and we wanted so bad to bring him home,” this official told Newsweek on condition of anonymity to discuss the case, parts of which remain classified. It “would have been our finest accomplishment!”
This story has been corrected to reflect that Mark Giuliano is the FBI's deputy director.