Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

by James Risen

  Seel reported Asimos’s arrival at the INC’s compound to his superiors at U.S. Central Command, and asked them if they could confirm that he had been sent by the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Seel says he does not recall what response, if any, he received.

  Francis Brooke also decided he had to check out the mysterious man’s story directly with Washington. Asimos had told Brooke that he could call Bucci in Rumsfeld’s office to confirm that he was there on behalf of the OSD, Brooke recalled. But Brooke had his own contacts at the highest reaches of the Pentagon, and so he called a top aide to Paul Wolfowitz. “I said there’s this guy who is here saying he is from DOD, and he claims that Steve Bucci is the guy to talk to about him,” recalled Brooke. Wolfowitz’s aide agreed to check into the story.

  “I called back a day later, and Wolfowitz’s staffer said to me nobody knows who he is. Nobody here knows him,” Brooke remembers. “I tracked down Asimos and told him nobody at the Pentagon knows him,” Brooke continued. “I confronted him and said, you don’t work for OSD, get out. And he left in about five minutes.”

  Brooke said that Asimos walked out of Chalabi’s compound without a car or even a ride; he said Asimos simply disappeared, and Brooke never heard from him again. The next day, Brooke says he got another call from Wolfowitz’s aide, who said that the INC should detain Asimos. “We didn’t have any way to arrest people,” recalls Brooke. “Plus, Asimos was already gone.” To Brooke and others in the INC, Asimos remained an enduring mystery. Brooke’s phone call set off alarms with his Pentagon contact, who tracked Asimos’s connection back to Bucci. Bucci says that he freely admitted to making arrangements for Asimos’s trip into Iraq on a military flight. That earned Bucci a verbal reprimand and clear instructions never to do anything like that again.

  After he was kicked out of the INC’s compound in Baghdad, Asimos made his way back to northern Iraq, and from there contacted Motley Rice. In an April 25, 2003, e-mail to the other investigators working for Motley Rice, Asimos said that he had “made it to Bagdad for a couple of days with the INC, but got recalled to the north quickly again.” He added that he hoped to be able to leave Iraq within the next two or three weeks, because “my role in the Iraqi reconstruction” is looking “less likely, as key guy who wanted me to work for him is no longer involved.” He said that he now expected he could turn his attention to the 9/11 lawsuit. “I think that’s what the people at OSD want.”

  Bucci insists that Asimos was not in Iraq on assignment from the OSD, and could not speak to what exactly Asimos was telling people or why. But Bucci said that if his friend was saying such things to keep himself safe, then that would be fine. “[Asimos] is very, very talented at trying to stay alive, and the environments he was operating in require some degree of verbal manipulation skills. I was an intel collector . . . and you get paid to tell people they’re your friend . . . when you don’t really care whether they’re your friend or not. So in the intel gathering business, the fact that he is a good liar perhaps is not necessarily a character flaw. It’s called a skill. I never got the impression that Mike ever lied to me about any of the things he was doing or had done. The fact that we’re very good friends is unfailingly true. If people took that to mean that I was his handler, that wasn’t true.”

  In June 2003, just a few weeks after Asimos returned from Iraq, Motley Rice and other lawyers involved in the 9/11 lawsuit backed the creation of a new company, Rosetta Research and Consulting LLC, to handle the investigative work for the 9/11 lawsuit. Joe Rice recalls that the company was Mike Asimos’s idea. He told the Motley Rice lawyers that the Bush administration would not contract with them, so Asimos proposed the creation of a separate business that would be able to get contracts while also conducting the investigation for the lawsuit. Harry Huge was named chairman of Rosetta, but the partners who would run Rosetta would be Asimos and Patrick Jost, another Motley Rice investigator.

  Creating a separate company to handle the investigation seemed to have several advantages in addition to the potential for government contracts. It could enable Motley Rice to attract outside investors to help finance the investigation, and also provide Motley Rice with an opportunity to capitalize on the massive database of information it had been collecting by selling it to commercial customers through Rosetta.

  Most of the database was made up of documents from terrorism-related criminal investigations in Germany and Spain. Harry Huge had traveled to Germany and Spain to meet with prosecutors handling those cases, which were directly related to the 9/11 attacks. In Germany, Huge said he befriended Walter Hemberger, the chief prosecutor in the German criminal investigation into al Qaeda’s Hamburg cell, which had included lead hijacker Mohamed Atta. Hemberger agreed to give Huge and Motley Rice all of the documents that the German police had obtained in the case. He even agreed to name Huge as a co-prosecutor, which gave Huge and Motley Rice access to any document or piece of evidence that the Germans had collected. In Spain, Huge struck a similar deal with Baltasar Garzón, the Spanish magistrate overseeing the trial of members of the Spanish al Qaeda cell accused of providing support for the 9/11 hijackers.

  Motley Rice’s headquarters was soon flooded with documents from Germany and Spain—material that the Germans and Spanish had refused to give to the U.S. government, at least partly out of anger with the Bush administration for its unilateral approach in the war on terror. The law firm began to construct a huge database, which would turn out to be the most valuable asset Motley Rice ever got out of the 9/11 case.

  In reality, Motley Rice never provided much oversight of Rosetta, and it quickly became the vehicle through which Mike Asimos ran his operations, seemingly for both Motley Rice and the U.S. government. In a 2004 internal Rosetta memo, Asimos made it clear that at that time, he was doing much of his work for the government, even though investigative work for the 9/11 lawsuit was supposed to be Rosetta’s primary mission. Asimos wrote that 65 percent of his time and effort was then being spent working for the government—even though Rosetta did not have any government contracts. He wrote that he was supporting “USG efforts to combat terrorism financing” while acquiring documents and recruiting key witnesses for the government.

  Although Rosetta was not receiving any payment for the work it was doing for the government, and was surviving on funds from Motley Rice and other investors, the evidence suggests that it wasn’t simply sharing information collected in the course of its investigations for the 9/11 lawsuit: in some instances U.S. officials appear to have played an active role in helping to define its collection objectives.

  Asimos shared with other investigators what he called his “KIL list,” or “key insider list,” which was a catalog of purportedly high-value individuals that the group would seek to contact. By 2004, the list had about twenty-five names and was dominated by Afghans, including many suspected of having ties to the Taliban and the Afghan drug trade. In a series of interviews, Patrick Jost recounted attending small meetings in hotel rooms at the Sofitel Hotel in downtown Washington, where he said that Asimos met with Defense Department officials to discuss who should be placed on the list. (One of the Pentagon officials whom Jost said he saw in one of these meetings, Douglas Feith, denied ever having attended such a meeting.) One of the Afghans on the KIL list was Haji Bashir Noorzai, a drug trafficker who eventually became the focus of Rosetta’s work.

  Sometime in 2004, Mike Asimos’s shadowy and mysterious relationship with the Defense Department appears to have begun to wane, at least temporarily. To be sure, Asimos seems to have continued to have connections with some Defense officials, especially at the Defense Intelligence Agency. But soon he found a new governmental minder and protector—at the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  Mike Dick looked like a cop. A stocky man with an open face and a short, square frame, he appeared to be the kind of guy who could have spent his career pulling drivers over on the New Jersey Turnpike. But Mike Dick was also ambitious, and so he made it to the FBI.

  B
ut in a series of interviews over several years (and underscored by a 2013 lawsuit he filed against the Justice Department and the FBI), it became clear that Mike Dick never felt appreciated by his superiors in the bureau. After joining the FBI in 1996, he took on dangerous assignments in Pakistan after 9/11, and says he was involved in the investigation of the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. He was also a reserve army officer and had been detailed to Special Operations. Yet he never seemed to be the guy who got the recognition he thought he was due. He appeared frustrated that there didn’t seem to be any way that he could break through the bureaucracy and become a star.

  He hoped that would change when he was transferred to the bureau’s Terrorist Financing Operations Section (TFOS) at FBI headquarters in Washington. TFOS was the geek squad of the FBI, the unit set up in the wake of the 9/11 attacks to track al Qaeda’s money. In the frantic days after 9/11, Dennis Lormel, a quiet, even-tempered senior FBI agent and an expert in forensic financial investigations, had, almost as an afterthought, been put in charge of the financial side of PENTTBOM, the FBI’s code name for the 9/11 investigation. His group immediately produced results. Top FBI officials were initially counting on the bureau’s field offices, particularly in New York and Boston, to take charge, but Lormel’s small financial crimes group quickly pieced together a mosaic of the hijackers’ lives and started asking the field offices to follow up on its leads, rather than the other way around—much to the irritation of the special agents in charge of the field offices. Eventually, Lormel was able to piece together a comprehensive understanding of the plot told through the paper trail of the $400,000 that supported the nineteen hijackers.

  Lormel’s success convinced FBI top management to make his unit permanent, and so TFOS was created in April 2002 with Lormel as its first section chief. Just as Ron Motley was gearing up his massive lawsuit charging the Saudis with financing 9/11, Dennis Lormel was becoming the nation’s top cop on terrorism finance.

  Lormel retired from the FBI in 2003 and went into private business in the Washington area. He recalled that after he left the FBI, he was approached by Mike Asimos, who was beginning to hunt for new government mentors. Asimos was hoping that Lormel could open doors for him at TFOS, which seemed like the perfect home for Rosetta, now that the Pentagon’s support and interest appeared to be fading.

  Asimos told Lormel that Rosetta was using “special means” to acquire documents from all over the world, and that the company would like to sell the information to the FBI, Lormel recalled. Lormel was suspicious of what Asimos meant by “special means” and said later that he was also suspicious because he couldn’t figure out who was really behind Rosetta. He said he told Asimos he couldn’t help him.

  Lormel thought that was the end of it. But Asimos made another run at the FBI, and eventually found a willing partner in Mike Dick.

  Dick was friends with Brian Mallon, whom Dick had known when they both had worked in Newark. Dick was intrigued by Rosetta. Asimos made it clear to Dick that he was willing to share Rosetta’s information with TFOS for free—and without a contract, at least at first. Asimos also seemed willing to conduct operations for the FBI, and Dick thought that was an offer too good to turn down.

  With what he later claimed was the approval of his supervisors at TFOS, as well as the legal blessings of an FBI lawyer, Mike Dick launched a secret relationship with Rosetta. Without a contract and without a formal agreement with the FBI, Rosetta became, in effect, an investigative arm of the FBI. In a sworn affidavit in a later court case, Patrick Jost said that Mike Dick, Mike Asimos, and Brian Mallon had “all told me that Rosetta had been designated as an FBI undercover operation.” In the process, Mike Dick became either Mike Asimos’s handler—or his stooge.

  By the spring of 2004, the FBI and Rosetta were working so closely that Mike Dick was given his own Rosetta e-mail address. He was regularly receiving information from Asimos and Mallon while tasking them to gather more data for the FBI. In his 2013 lawsuit against the Justice Department and the FBI, Mike Dick offers his own explanation about his involvement with Rosetta. His lawsuit states that Dick “was assigned to secure information from the Motley Rice Law Firm, which represented the families of the 9-11 victims, who were pursuing a civil law suit against high ranking Saudi Arabian officials and bankers. . . . Dick was to collect information from the Motley Firm, but was not to disclose any information from the Bureau. Dick scrupulously followed this policy. The flow of information was one way from the families’ attorneys to the Bureau.”

  In his suit, Dick also explains the benefits to the FBI of using Rosetta. Motley Rice’s private investigators, the suit says, “pursued investigative leads outside the United States, without being subject to the limitations” imposed on federal law enforcement or the military.

  Many of Rosetta’s internal reports written by Asimos and Mallon were addressed to Mike Dick, who went by the Rosetta code name of GM, or “Go Mike,” according to internal Rosetta e-mails and other documents.

  “Received the attached docs from S12,” Asimos wrote (referring to a source’s code name) in a September 17, 2004, e-mail to Mike Dick and others. “He obtained from ISI [Pakistan’s spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate]. These docs contain photos/ID info of numerous terror financiers who worked for a fraudulent charity in Peshawar. ISI facilitated their departure from PAK [Peshawar] immediately after 9/11. You guys need to run these names. If not in any USG databases, they need to be added immed.”

  Soon an FBI analyst was involved in the Rosetta-FBI relationship as well, searching FBI databases, sometimes doing records checks on people that Asimos was meeting or trying to recruit as informants, according to Jost and Rosetta’s internal documents. While Rosetta was being funded with millions of dollars by Motley Rice and other private investors, the evidence suggests that Rosetta was conducting some of its work on behalf of Mike Dick and the FBI, rather than just for the 9/11 lawsuit.

  According to Jost, Asimos often sought to convince Ron Motley and the Motley Rice lawyers that the informants he was recruiting around the world would be of use to the Burnett lawsuit. But Jost said he believes that Asimos was often just trying to mollify Motley while he conducted operations that were primarily geared to the government.

  Jost complained that Asimos was dismissive of investigations that would only be of benefit to Motley Rice and the 9/11 lawsuit. On one occasion Jost recounted, he had been offered an invitation to a wedding that was to be attended by Khalid bin Mahfouz, who was of great interest to the Motley Rice lawyers handling the 9/11 lawsuit. Jost had hoped that the social event would present an opportunity to talk with bin Mahfouz and perhaps network with some of his closest associates, but Asimos was unwilling to have Rosetta cover his expenses for the trip. Jost said he believes Asimos didn’t want to pursue the lead because it held no interest for the government.

  An Afghan official in London became one of Rosetta’s most important sources. While he was serving at the Afghan embassy in London, the diplomat was given the Rosetta code name of “S-1” in many of Rosetta’s internal documents. In a series of interviews, Jost said that Rosetta had paid the diplomat huge amounts on a regular basis for his information and assistance, including helping Asimos to obtain visas and other documents to get in and out of Afghanistan. In an affidavit Jost later gave a defense lawyer in a criminal case in New York (involving the Afghan drug lord brought to the United States by Rosetta), Jost said that he told the Justice Department’s inspector general about the financial payments made by Rosetta to S-1, whom he described as “an Afghan diplomat serving in London.” In addition, a source directly involved with Rosetta said that, in one instance, he personally delivered cash to the Afghan in London who was codenamed S-1 by Rosetta.

  While Asimos may have been operating under the direction of officials at the Pentagon and FBI, it does not appear that they provided any more supervision than did Motley Rice. With little direction, Rosetta seems to have cast a wide, hapha
zard, and sometimes costly net for sources of information. Inevitably, that sometimes led to dead ends and strange encounters.

  Afghan exiles living in London who were friends of S-1 started working for Rosetta, earning code names of their own. In order to keep their primary source happy, Patrick Jost recalled, he was tasked with finding British lawyers to assist with the immigration problems of some of S-1’s Afghan friends living in London. S-1 “often asked Rosetta to help Afghans in London—legal problems, asylum petitions, needing jobs, and so on,” Jost later wrote in a memorandum. “Doing this was also always a priority, as he had to be kept happy.”

  Before long, word apparently circulated among exiles about the money that might be available from Rosetta. One Afghan living in Sweden who knew S-1 was “willing to cooperate with Rosetta for financial gain,” according to a Rosetta memo from Mallon to Asimos and Dick. S-1 claimed the source had information about the potential sale of 5 kilograms of uranium in Kabul, and could also help Rosetta find Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader who had been in hiding in Pakistan since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan. S-1 also claimed that the source had only recently immigrated to Sweden from Quetta, Pakistan. “S-1 stated that he recently met an Afghan in Sweden with valuable information,” Mallon wrote in a May 2004 Rosetta report sent to both Asimos and Mike Dick. “According to S-1 this individual’s family is in the immediate circle of MULLAH OMAR. S-1 believes that this individual could locate OMAR for the USA in exchange for the reward of $25,000,000. . . . S-1 stated that he has information regarding the potential sale of approximately 5 Kilograms of URANIUM in Kabul.” Yet after traveling to Gothenburg, Sweden, to interview the man, Mallon reported back that the new contact was a father of four and an unemployed Swedish citizen collecting government assistance who walked with the aid of crutches and who said he wanted to work with Rosetta to earn money for a back operation.