Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

by James Risen

  As for Heilbrun’s account that he had spoken to Bucci about Asimos on a dozen or so occasions, Bucci said, “I don’t have any remembrance of that. I’m not denying it, but I don’t have any recollection of it. I mean if somebody did call, I think I probably would’ve said, ‘Yeah, he’s doing good stuff.’ I hadn’t gotten any negative feedback from any of the intel people. . . . So if somebody had called me from the Senate and said, ‘Is he one of the good guys? Is he trying to do something positive?’ I probably said yes. But I don’t recall the conversations, and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have said ‘Yeah, he’s working for us,’ like he’s on the payroll and we’re giving him his marching orders.”

  Analysts from the Defense Intelligence Agency also flew from Washington to Charleston to review the document database the law firm was constructing at Motley Rice’s headquarters. In a December 2003 e-mail to Motley Rice lawyers, Asimos wrote that he had just gotten off the phone with Capt. Art Jones, assistant to DIA director Vice Adm. Lowell Jacoby, who told him that the DIA wanted to “get moving aggressively on working with us, including formalizing the channels for share of information, analysis, and field operations.” DIA officials have since confirmed that analysts met with Motley Rice in Charleston to review its collection of documents.

  When asked whether it was common practice for the DIA to encourage American citizens to participate in collecting raw intelligence on behalf of the agency, Bucci explained, “DIA lives and dies on voluntary interactions. . . . Additionally, America had just been attacked and lost 3,000 people, and we were about to invade two countries, and pursue an international enemy. There was a lot of, ‘Let’s get help wherever we can’ going on.”

  Indeed, Ron Motley was willing to share information with the Defense Department—up to a point. “I think Ron just cared about winning the lawsuit,” Ansar Rahel said. “I think Ron took pride in helping. Wolfowitz wrote a letter to Ron and the families thanking them. Every time he met the families, Motley would talk about how he was cooperating with the government.”

  The January 23, 2003, letter from Wolfowitz was addressed to the 9/11 families, in care of Ron Motley. “You have responded to President Bush’s call for assistance in this national effort that is the Global War on Terrorism,” the letter said. “In the midst of your loss, or perhaps because of it, you have never lost the focus that this Nation is at war. Your decision to share the large volume of data, including papers, computer disks, record books and other documents without any request for a quid pro quo is laudable and greatly assisted our analysts.”

  According to numerous sources familiar with the matter, Motley was open to providing information to the Bush administration but always hoped that the government would reciprocate, perhaps by giving Motley Rice access to classified intelligence reports on Saudi involvement in terrorist finance. The Bush administration, however, never returned the favor. That suggests that Pentagon officials merely accepted the information from Motley Rice and viewed it as nothing more than the voluntary, patriotic contributions of American citizens.

  Of course, there is nothing wrong with the 9/11 families’ volunteering to share information with the government. But extensive interviews, internal reports, e-mails, recordings, and other materials raise questions that have never been fully resolved over whether Asimos was pursuing sources, investigations, and operations that had as much or more to do with the interests and demands of the United States government than with the needs of the 9/11 families and Motley Rice. His work as reflected in internal reports and communications strongly suggests that some of the research that Asimos was conducting was being guided by the interests of government officials involved in the ongoing war on terror. This wasn’t a mere volunteering of civic-minded citizens. The bedeviling question is whether it was, in effect, a hijacking by the government.

  For example, while working for Motley Rice, Asimos lured an Afghan drug lord with ties to the Taliban to the United States, where he was arrested and jailed. It was an operation that, in the end, had nothing to do with the 9/11 lawsuit. Whether Mike Asimos was actually doing the bidding of the government during the period in which he was working for Motley Rice threatened to become a major public issue in the federal trial of the Afghan drug lord. A federal judge eventually ruled the issue inadmissible, and the question was never resolved in public.

  After being introduced to Mike Asimos by another Charleston lawyer, Ron Motley was sold, and soon began to refer to him by a code name—“the Traveler.” Motley seemed convinced that he had found his most daring investigator, a man who could take on the Saudis. No one at Motley Rice seems to have asked too many probing questions about Asimos’s background or where he had really come from.

  At first, Motley Rice lawyers were so dazzled by Asimos that they did not mind that he seemed to have secretive government connections. When he told Motley Rice lawyers that he would need sophisticated communications gear to operate in the field, he impressed them by showing up with several communications experts of unknown origin. Joe Rice said that the first time he was introduced to Asimos, he had arrived with a handful of “men in suits” carrying high-end communications gear. “I didn’t ask who the other guys were,” Rice said. “They had encryption machines and untraceable cell phones and other gear. It had enough credibility. We gave them $50 to $100,000.”

  Asimos decided to begin his investigative efforts in Afghanistan rather than the country that was the focus of the lawsuit, Saudi Arabia. Ron Motley and the other lawyers at Motley Rice did not object. They offered little direction or supervision for Asimos.

  At first, Asimos worked with Ansar Rahel, who had been hired by Motley Rice to help with the Burnett case, Rahel said. He had grown up in the United States, but his father had been press secretary to the last king of Afghanistan, Mohamed Zahir Shah, who at the time of 9/11 was living in exile in Rome. Rahel was hired by Motley Rice in 2002 when Ron Motley was still casting about trying to figure out how to investigate 9/11 and the Saudis.

  Rahel said that he helped Asimos to make contacts with prominent Afghans in Kabul, just as the new Hamid Karzai government was taking control. Afghanistan seemed suited to Asimos, Rahel believes, because he was far from any supervision by Motley Rice. But he still had Motley Rice’s extravagant financial backing. “I’m not sure anybody else knew exactly what he was doing, and that’s the way he liked it,” Rahel said. “In Afghanistan, there were these huge spaces where no one had any real information about what was going on, and he would exploit that.”

  One foreign correspondent who reported from Afghanistan recalled having first met Asimos through Brian Mallon, a former Immigration and Naturalization Service agent from New Jersey who was then working in Afghanistan for a new mobile phone company. Mallon joined up with Asimos and became his trusted right-hand man in the field. The correspondent recalls that the two men became fixtures in the Mustafa Hotel, a notorious Kabul hangout for contractors, reporters, and other drifting expatriates who had washed up in postinvasion Kabul. It was often difficult for other people there to figure out what Asimos and Mallon were really doing there. In short, they fit right in at the Mustafa.

  Asimos returned to the United States after acquiring the Taliban registry of al Qaeda foreign fighters authorized to carry weapons in the country, which he considered to be an invaluable discovery. The document included names and photographs of al Qaeda foreign fighters who had been in Afghanistan. Although it was not clear what connection the document could have to the 9/11 lawsuit, Asimos saw it as a major coup. He met with the Motley Rice lawyers at the Willard Hotel in Washington, carefully showed them the document, and then told them that the Pentagon wanted it.

  Harry Huge, one of Motley’s co-counsels, and Chip Robertson, a Missouri lawyer and former aide to Attorney General John Ashcroft who had also joined the lawsuit, agreed to go with Asimos to meet with Bucci to discuss the document. Huge was reluctant to meet Bucci inside the Pentagon because he feared that once they were inside the building with the do
cument, they would never see it again. He wasn’t sure whether the al Qaeda weapons registry would ever be of any value to the 9/11 lawsuit, but he also didn’t want it to disappear without a trace into the Defense Department.

  Instead, they met at the Ritz-Carlton in nearby Pentagon City. They agreed to give Bucci the document as long as they could keep a copy. Huge and Chip Robertson then met privately with Judge James Robertson, the federal judge then overseeing the 9/11 lawsuit, and explained their encounter with the Pentagon. They told the judge that they wanted to be able to have a copy of the document admitted as evidence since they had given the original to the Pentagon. Huge and Chip Robertson agreed to place the copy of the document in an envelope, and then they both licked the envelope before sealing it; that way, they both had DNA proof linking them to the document. Judge Robertson, now retired, said in an interview that he remembers meeting with Harry Huge and Chip Robertson to discuss the special handling of a document in the 9/11 case but that he doesn’t recall the specific details.

  The weapons registry document never proved particularly significant in the 9/11 lawsuit, but the episode shows how the lawyers involved in the 9/11 case were initially willing to go along with Asimos and his strange relationship with the Pentagon.

  After the Bush administration launched the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Asimos informed his colleagues working on the Burnett case that the Pentagon was calling him back to duty. As always, he was suggestive but vague on what kind of work the Defense Department would have him doing.

  Late one night, soon after the invasion, Asimos called Specter staffer Mark Heilbrun to ask for help, saying that “OSD” (the Office of the Secretary of Defense) secretly wanted him in Iraq but could not get him into the country through normal channels, Heilbrun said. According to Heilbrun, “[Asimos] said he was going to get a stash of documents. Somehow Wolfowitz wanted him to get documents from Iraq.”

  Asimos told Heilbrun that he needed Senator Specter’s assistance to arrange his off-the-books mission, advising Heilbrun to confirm the arrangement with Bucci in Donald Rumsfeld’s office. Asimos gave him Bucci’s cell phone number, and Heilbrun called to ask if the Pentagon needed Specter’s help in getting Asimos into Iraq. According to Heilbrun, Bucci said yes.

  Heilbrun did not understand why the OSD could not get Asimos into the country via military transport. Nevertheless, he was willing to help, and arranged for Specter to call Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage for assistance. Heilbrun said that Armitage told Specter (who died in 2012) that he should talk to Marc Grossman, then the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, who might be able to help Asimos cross the Turkish border into Iraq. Heilbrun said that he contacted Grossman. He, too, agreed to help.

  In the end, Bucci says he is certain that his own, separate efforts helped Asimos to get into the country, because he ultimately made the arrangements to reserve his friend an open seat on a military flight into Kurdistan—an action that would later earn Bucci trouble back in Washington. He says that he has no recollection of Heilbrun’s calling him about Asimos’s traveling to Baghdad, but does remember Asimos’s calling on his own behalf to ask for assistance. “Right after we did the invasion into Iraq, Mike called me and said, ‘It would be very helpful to get into Kurdistan. . . . Is there any way you can help me do that?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, I’ll ask around and see.’”

  Bucci did not seem to know with certainty what Asimos intended to do in Iraq but said, “I believed he was still working for [Motley Rice], but also believed he was providing useful info to our folks.” So Bucci made his phone calls. As Bucci recounted in an interview, “I basically vouched for him—that he was doing legitimate stuff, that the information he was gathering had been of use to our intel people in the past and that he was a legitimate guy, and they put him on an airplane and got him into country.”

  After he arrived in Kurdish-controlled territory in northern Iraq in April 2003, Asimos contacted a small element of a ragtag force created by the Iraqi National Congress (INC), the Iraqi exile group headed by Ahmed Chalabi, the controversial Iraqi exile who many in Washington hoped would run a post-Saddam government in Iraq.

  Chalabi sought to deploy the small force he had assembled to help him ride triumphantly into Baghdad. On the eve of the invasion, he gathered his force of about seven hundred in Kurdish-controlled territory in northern Iraq. But Chalabi lacked the formal backing of the U.S. military, which meant his force did not have transportation or logistical support and could not get into the action. Through a secret process that caught most senior Bush administration officials by surprise, Chalabi managed to win the Pentagon’s approval for an airlift of his force from Kurdistan to a captured airbase in southern Iraq, near Nasiriyah. He then drove with them to Baghdad and quickly set up shop at the Baghdad Hunting Club.

  The airlift of Chalabi’s force led to a bitter round of finger-pointing in Washington, where some senior officials saw it as a brazen attempt by the administration to quickly move Chalabi into a position of power. It was as if Wolfowitz—possibly working with Dick Cheney and a few other administration hardliners—was trying to launch a sudden coup, taking advantage of the chaos of war to make Chalabi the leader before anyone else could fill the vacuum.

  As a result, Chalabi’s actions were being closely scrutinized in Washington, which made the sudden appearance of Mike Asimos, a former army officer and supposedly an investigator for the Charleston law firm of Motley Rice, all the more mysterious.

  While Chalabi and his main force were flown to Nasiriyah, he left about one third of his group behind in northern Iraq. Asimos managed to find them in Kurdistan. He introduced himself to Nabeel Musawi, an INC political officer who had been left in charge when Chalabi went ahead with the larger group. Asimos told Musawi that he had been sent by the Pentagon to help the INC, and Musawi said he was welcome to join them as they drove south to join Chalabi and the rest of the INC in Baghdad. They finally arrived in Baghdad in mid-April, just a day or two after Chalabi had arrived from the south.

  When they showed up at the Baghdad Hunting Club, with Asimos riding shotgun in an INC truck, Chalabi’s senior aides were immediately suspicious. Asimos appeared with long hair, a pistol strapped to his thigh, and the type of bulletproof vest worn by journalists in war zones. Zaab Sethna, one of Chalabi’s key advisors, asked Musawi about the stranger. “He told me this is Mike, he’s from the Pentagon, and he has been really helpful,” Sethna recalled. Asimos introduced himself to Francis Brooke, an American who was a longtime spokesman for Chalabi, and told him that he was a former Special Forces officer who had been sent by the Office of the Secretary of Defense to help the INC.

  Brooke recalled that Asimos was carrying a lot of cash with him—approximately $25,000—and that he had what appeared to be official travel orders from the Defense Department. “He said he was from OSD, and was there to lend us a hand,” said Brooke. “He said he was a high-level emissary, but he was always vague. I wanted to throw him out right away. He didn’t smell right.”

  In an April 2003 e-mail he wrote from Iraq, Asimos told other investigators working with Motley Rice back in the United States that he had identified “a couple of things here that would really benefit the boyz back in CS [Charleston] but getting cut loose to pursue them has been a challenge. Have some folks back in DC working to get me solo so I can exploit.” In the e-mail, he asked Patrick Jost, “if you are aware of any specific things/records/dox/individuals i should be looking for here pls advise.”

  Asimos indicated to Chalabi’s aides that he was interested in gaining access to the documents that Chalabi’s group had already started to collect from Iraqi government ministries, particularly the headquarters of the Iraqi intelligence service. Chalabi had used his militia force to move more swiftly than the U.S. military or the CIA to track down the files of Saddam Hussein’s regime, and was starting to build his own library of secret Iraqi intelligence files. “Asimos was interested in the documents, he wanted to see what we were getting,”
recalled Brooke.

  While it is not clear what Asimos was looking for in the documents, neoconservatives in the Bush administration, including both Cheney and Wolfowitz, were eager at the time to find evidence of a purported connection between Saddam Hussein’s regime and the 9/11 attacks. They had sought to justify the invasion of Iraq by suggesting such a connection, and so it is possible that they were eager to gain access to Chalabi’s cache of captured Iraqi documents to find evidence that would vindicate their decision to invade. Ultimately, such evidence proved illusory.

  But no one from the Pentagon had ever bothered to tell anyone at the INC that Asimos was coming. In fact, the U.S. Central Command, the military command in charge of the invasion of Iraq, already had a liaison officer assigned to the INC. Col. Ted Seel, an army officer who was the official liaison between Chalabi’s group and the U.S. military in Iraq, was surprised and confused by Asimos’s appearance as well. “He was very flamboyant, he was larger than life,” recalled Seel. “He came across as very flashy, and like he was playing a role. He told me that he was there because OSD sent him,” he added. “But he also said he was there representing the law firm, and that there were people he needed to interview in Baghdad for the lawsuit. He said he was there both for OSD and the law firm, so I wasn’t sure who Asimos was really working for.”