At the behest of a former NBC producer Ira Silverman, Levinson told American fugitive David Belfield, who now lives in Iran and is known as Dawud Salahuddin, he had embarrassing financial information about one of the most powerful figures in Iran.
Silverman, who profiled Salahuddin for The New Yorker in 2002 speculated he might be left in place in Iran as a spy for the west.
If such explosive material were tied to Salahuddin and leaked inside or outside the country the fugitive for murder might find himself without a refuge.
Silverman had requested an urgent meeting with Salahuddin for Levinson. Salahuddin said Silverman had introduced him to Levinson through phone calls and emails a few years ago. “I told them to put off until after the US surge in Iraq was completed,” Salahuddin said. “But Silverman and Levinson pushed for the meeting and that’s why we met in March.”
Though Salahuddin is a terrorist and murderer, he has been a very credible source since he and I met in Istanbul in 1995 and he confessed for the first time to his role in a political assassination in Washington. Salahuddin has also assisted the United States in preventing an attack on U.S. troops and President Clinton in Bosnia and an Al Qaeda attack on the U.S embassy in Albania in the late 90’s.
The two met on Kish Island, a seedy resort from the Shah’s days off the coast of Iran across the Gulf from Dubai where Americans like Levinson do not need a visa. Salahuddin was not impressed with what Levinson brought: “I don’t think there ever was any material though Levinson knew some general information and he knows the language so its easy for him to make something appear big when its only him talking and his hands are empty. As I said earlier even the cigarette smuggling conversation was smoke, no meat and potatoes. And if they think I would get booted out of here, again they were off base and out of context.”
They met for six hours. Salahuddin, who is a tall African American apparently caused the manager of the hotel to call local authorities because the manager though it odd he was meeting with another American. That resulted in Salahuddin’s arrest by local authorities. They notified the national authorities in Tehran and Levinson was picked up on March 8 and taken to Tehran where he has been ever since.
Why a former veteran FBI agent would allegedly bring this material to a man who has been a fugitive for murder in the United States since 1980 is a puzzle. One reason may be that Salahuddin speaks to many international reporters and it may be that he and Silverman wanted his curious form of street credibility as value added to information that Silverman and Levinson believed was important to get out.
The story of how and why Levinson, a veteran retired FBI agent ended up in the hands of the Iranian Revolutionary government gets stranger with each passing day. Salahuddin was not impressed with what Levinson was trying to sell. One question that Salahuddin had was Silverman and Levinson using this material to get the Iranian government to through Belfield out of Iran. In his 2002 New Yorker article, Silverman speculated at what an enormous catch the fugitive would be for US law enforcement authorities to bring him in. Levinson was one of Silverman’s most important FBI sources prior to his retirement according to Brian Ross who worked with Silverman at NBC. In an email Salahuddin sent me on Thursday he wrote:
“I don’t think there ever was any material: Though Levinson knew some general information and he knows the language so it’s easy for him to make something appear big when it’s only him talking and his hands are empty. As I said earlier, even the cigarette smuggling conversation was smoke, no meat and potatoes. And if they think I would get booted out of here, again they were off base and out of context.”
Several weeks ago Salahuddin, who works as an editor in Iran, sent me an email saying he might file a story with us on what was really behind the Levinson case and how the 59-year-old private investigator was not really missing. What Salahuddin never mentioned in his emails was that he had met with Levinson on Kish Island just prior to Levinson’s disappearance on March 8. Salahuddin also did not mention that he had been arrested that day by local authorities on Kish and held overnight before being released and traveling back to Tehran. Salahuddin suspects that when the national authorities in Iran figured out who he was meeting with on Kish they moved in and grabbed Levinson.
Last Saturday morning my phone rang at home very early. It was Salahuddin. We had a long and friendly conversation in which he never mentioned the Levinson issue. We discussed everything from race to American politics. The banality of a conversation with a terrorist did not strike me as odd because Salahuddin longs for basic information from home. I went upstairs after the conversation, and my wife Susan, often a more alert reporter than I, likes to find buried but important items in The Washington Post. That morning she found a crucial item. She asked me who I was speaking to for so long. I told her it was Salahuddin. She then handed me a Robin Wright piece from last Saturday’s paper. I picked up the convoluted story and put it down. She immediately chastised me for not reading through to the last graph. Here at last was the news in Ms. Wright’s story: Salahuddin had met with Levinson on Kish on the day both men were arrested.
I quickly sent an email to Salahuddin essentially telling him I needed the details and needed them now. It took several days to get a coherent story out of him. I quickly read a trove of better stories that moved last weekend on the kidnapping, lead by coverage in the Financial Times, which has excellent reporters in Washington and Tehran.
Dawud sent me back a series of emails confessing he did meet Levinson and was the reason Levinson came to Iran. At first Salahuddin insisted Levinson was working a big Russian cigarette smuggling case in Iran. This proved to not be likely since Levinson’s client, Bishop International, faxed us to say Levinson had only done such work for them in South America and the former Soviet Union. I pressed Salahuddin who admitted that, in fact, there was much more to the meetings. He emailed me this on Thursday describing the information Levinson was offering:
“As in all such operations that part got real fuzzy..it was not fully prepared..assets well hidden..hard to pierce the veil…yada, yada, yada. Though before, the lure seemed to be much more a package in place. The cigarette thing got fuzzy too and there was nothing of detail but most of the conversation was about that. I have not discussed any of this locally but I will be doing so in a few days time. Had actually been pushing for [Levinson’s] release but that will take a minute now though I think it will happen because they know it plays well. Mistaken to think anyone is going to frighten Ali Khamenei into anything…”
Salahuddin was not optimistic about Levinson being released soon. He emailed this on April 20:
“The guy over here [Levinson] is trade bait so he will be okay and besides, folks over here are not torturing the way they used to and especially a guy of that color, nationality and even age. He is I believe well taken care of but do not expect him to be released for free–unless of course there is a delegation of say a Ray McGovern, a Ramsey Clarke or a guy like the one in Plains Ga. to come and get him.”
Salahuddin said that he believes the information Levinson allegedly brought to him may be suspect. When I informed him NSNS had the name of the former Iranian official targeted in the material, Salahuddin emailed me:
“You realize that if you put that in print you will create immediate and enormous difficulty for me, as already persons are looking at me cross-eyed and this is a time of strong national unity and despite everything I am not part of the nation–in the nation state sense of the word and this is a nationalist thing with religion serving to bolster that and not the other way around. Please do take that into account.”
The reason we are not publishing the name is that no one has been able to figure out who Levinson and Silverman are really working for. At first the Iranians suspected Israeli intelligence might be involved but the actions of Levinson were so amateurish that some high-level Iranian officials have spoken to each other about the material being designed to do internal political damage, according to US intelligence officials who have access to eavesdropping intelligence.
Salahuddin doubts this assessment. It puzzles many reporters that the award-winning and well-known veteran television producer, Ira Silverman, who brought Levinson and Salahuddin together, remains silent. Silverman not been talking to the press much about his role in this affair, but people who know him are very concerned about his actions. You see Levinson was Silverman’s source for scores of major scoops when he and Brian Ross worked together at NBC. I knew Ira and we would talk from time to time. But in 1995 when Carl Shoffler, the late and famous former DC Police detective, came to my wife Susan and asked if I would meet with him on a cold February night, I thought it was strange. I wasn’t speaking with Shoffler because he had an unfortunate habit of giving stories you were working on to other reporters. We met at a Hot Shoppes in Maryland where he was working as the Prince Georges County Fire Marshall. He then told me that a murderer that he had been following in the late 1970’s, when he was covering the Islamic unrest in Washington, had contacted him by phone from Iran numerous times. He urged me to get a major outlet to work with the National Security News Service and go interview him. It sounded like a great story.
I started the process by calling Jim Grady. I asked him for an autographed copy of his amazing novel Six Days of The Condor. You see Salahuddin had dressed up as a mailman to kill his prey in the Bethesda suburbs, a scenario borrowed from Grady’s book.
I first offered the piece to Richard Bonin at 60 Minutes. Bonin, I would later learn never blue sheeted the story. I then turned to a producer we worked with all the time, Don Thrasher at ABC’s 20-20. Thrasher convinced his correspondent, Tom Jarriel, and 20-20 Executive Producer Victor Neufeld to do the story. That is when strange things began to happen. Salahuddin suggested the interview be done in Moscow. Arrangements were made but just before we left I got an angry call from Salahuddin. It seems the Russian domestic spy service had taped a conversation between a disgruntled ABC employee in Moscow and a FBI agent assigned to our Embassy discussing how the FBI would bring in the fugitive when he stopped in transit to Moscow in Frankfurt.
I was furious and confronted Shoffler. I did not have a high comfort level with Carl because of his closeness to an ex-CIA man named Jack Platt. Platt was also a friend of Silverman. I informed ABC that any more leaks to Shoffler or his friends about our plans to interview Salahuddin would end the ABC exclusive. Shoffler was furious at me for cutting him out. But I was determined I was not going to be used as bait.
After Moscow was cancelled I set up another meeting that was, ironically, on Kish Island, a seedy resort off of Iran and a quick flight from Dubai. Thrasher promised me he would hire no fixers to smooth out landing procedure in Dubai. When we arrived at the airport on a Saturday we were greeted with several Mercedes and a fixer who was reporting back to both the Iranians and the local CIA guys. Over drinks at the Sheraton I told my friends from ABC we would never see Kish Island this trip. My fears were confirmed the next day back at the Dubai airport as we were not allowed to Board the Kish Air flight by the Iranian Revolutionary guards that run the airline. Our fixer waited with us for hours at the fabulous Dubai Airport. Our cameraman’s luggage was eaten by a baggage machine as the humiliation continued until the only Kish flight departed that day. That’s when our fixer informed us our visa had expired and we could not stay in Dubai but he would arrange tickets for us back to London at a price.
I called William Corson, a high level intelligence operative for our government, at his home in Potomac, Maryland and told him the problem. He asked for the name of the fixer. I spelled it for him. He told me to hold on. Ten minutes later he came back on the line with all I needed. I cornered the fixer and told him that unless he had a visa and accommodations for us at the Hyatt in twenty minutes that I would inform the Iranians he was on the CIA payroll with the name of the local contract agent he reported to. Our problems instantly cleared up. We spent weeks in Dubai negotiating with Iranian officials who wanted $25,000 to go interview Dawud. I told them no. Without telling the ABC team, I set a series of codes with Dawud Salahuddin via fax. The plan was another meeting a few months away. When Salahuddin was able to meet again he would fax my wife at home the message: “ANGEL IS ON THE MOVE.”
Don Thrasher and I checked into the Hyatt in Istanbul and headed for the bar. An hour later a tall thin African American man greeted us. At dinner that night in an atrium restaurant in the hotel, the FBI man assigned to our embassy walked right by us and did not recognize the fugitive we were dining with. It seems the President of Turkey was hosting a dinner at the same hotel.
In a suite in the hotel Salahuddin gave us a remarkable interview and confession. Coincidently there were a number of terrorist attacks blamed on Islamic fundamentalists while he was there. We shot B Roll at a mosque along the waterfront in Istanbul. I carried the videotapes out and when we returned Shoffler and others were interviewed for the story. While we were putting it together Dawud called me. He said that another American Islamic – Issa Abdullah – who had been with him in Iran for a while was back at Howard University and would be worth interviewing. I called the University and learned Abdullah was fighting with the Muslims in Bosnia. Dawud said this was very disturbing. I asked why. He said, “because Issa was Hezbollah and had been present at the Beirut Airport when hundreds of Marines were killed in a Hezbollah truck bombing.” President Clinton was scheduled to visit our troops in Bosnia within a few days of the conversation with Dawud. I called Shoffler who told me that Abdullah is a very radical Muslim who once tried to break into Air Force One.
I called the Secret Service and left messages about what seemed to be a threat and no one called back. William Corson called friends he had at the White House and on the Friday before the President was scheduled to leave for Bosnia, two members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, an FBI and Secret Service Agent, came to interview me. After that long meeting things happened quickly. Defense Secretary William Perry videotaped a warning to the US troops about Abdullah. Clinton’s visit, as well as public exposure of the troops with him, were cut back from what had been planned.
Salahuddin provided Shoffler information on narcotics cases of mutual interest to Iran and the United States until Shoffler’s unexpected death in the Summer of 1996. His death was a horrible shock to Salahuddin, who had problems with depression. Things got more depressing after I broke the news to Dawud that the man who recruited him to kill had also been on the CIA payroll at the time Dawud carried out the murder. Over the years Dawud kept in steady contact. I arranged for reporters to see him and he provided information to me for stories from time to time. He called me once to warn me our embassy in Albania was going to be hit by Al Qaeda and I passed on his warning to the Joint Terrorism Task Force.
In early September of 2001 I missed a call from Salahuddin. In a message he said he had a “big surprise for me.” A few days latter the 9/11 attacks took place. Needless to say I was contacted by the Joint Terrorism Task Force who wanted to reach Salahuddin. He had fought in Afghanistan around bin Laden. But as it turned out he had nothing to do with the attacks. The surprise message he left concerned his role as the Doctor in the critical acclaimed film “The Road To Kandahar.”
It was in 2002 that Ira Silverman’s profile of Salahuddin ran in The New Yorker. Because there were numerous omissions and mistakess in the piece I called the magazine and Silverman, but neither returned my calls at the time. Not speaking to the press seems to be habit. The question is why?
