Pay Any Price: Greed, Power, and Endless War

by James Risen

  The financial transactions between Mike Dick and Mike Asimos would later become the focus of an investigation by the Department of Justice’s inspector general.

  Mike Dick’s derailed trip to Dubai and the intervention by the CIA seemed to shake FBI senior management, which apparently began to realize what a mistake they had made by failing to supervise Mike Dick’s relationship with Rosetta. Dick had promised Asimos that Rosetta would eventually be awarded a contract with the FBI. But now top FBI officials wanted nothing more to do with the strange little company, and rejected the proposed contract. They also wanted nothing more to do with Rosetta’s plan to recruit Haji Bashir Noorzai.

  But Mike Asimos was not willing to give up on Noorzai. Neither was Mike Dick, who met with a friend in the DEA’s Special Operations division about Noorzai. The DEA agreed to work with Rosetta. The Defense Intelligence Agency also got involved, assigning one of its top counternarcotics officials to work with Rosetta on the Noorzai case. What Asimos didn’t yet know was just what the DEA wanted with Noorzai. Were they willing to deal with him as an informant or did they want to arrest him?

  Asimos got his answer in January 2005, during a meeting with Boyd Johnson, a prosecutor from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, according to Patrick Jost, who said he also attended the meeting. Thanks to the evidence compiled from Patrick Hamlette’s investigation, Asimos was told, there was already a sealed criminal indictment against Noorzai in federal court in New York. If Rosetta brought Noorzai to the United States, Noorzai would be arrested.

  Asimos and Mallon had spent months cultivating Noorzai and trying to win his trust. They had told him that they were trying to arrange for him to come to the United States to finalize his new status as a high-level informant. Asimos had also assured Major Babar and other sources close to Noorzai of the same thing.

  In a Rosetta audio recording of a July 2004 meeting with one source close to Noorzai, Asimos told the source, “We make this work and everyone will win. . . . We will have positive results for everyone—not just for the US, but for Afghanistan, for you, for Haji Bashar, for everyone.” Asimos added, “Our job is not to capture Taliban. Our job is not to put people in jail. . . . Our job is to get people to cooperate. . . . That's our only job here.”

  As a show of good faith, Asimos had even promised to arrange for the son of one of Noorzai’s closest friends to receive medical care in the United States, according to Jost.

  During the meeting with the federal prosecutors, Asimos, Mallon, and Jost all protested the plan to arrest Noorzai, Jost said. They argued that he would be more valuable to the government as an informant rather than sitting in prison on drug charges. They gave the prosecutors a detailed written proposal for the operation, and warned that Noorzai’s supporters would be holding hostages who would be killed if anything happened to the drug lord, according to Jost. But the prosecutors were unmoved.

  Despite their disagreements, Asimos and Mallon went ahead with the operation. They sent a series of messages to Major Babar and Noorzai insisting that they had reached an agreement with the government to make Noorzai a valued informant. Noorzai was convinced that if he came to the United States, he would meet Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Asimos and Mallon made certain that Noorzai had no reason to suspect that his trip would end in his arrest. “We have it set up with the US government exactly as discussed with HBN in Dubai and Peshawar,” Mallon wrote in an e-mail to Major Babar. “Tell HBN to be patient and he will not regret it.”

  After months of planning, in April 2005, Asimos traveled to Pakistan to meet Noorzai and then continued with him on a commercial flight to New York. Major Babar traveled with them as well. When they arrived at Kennedy Airport in New York, they were met by DEA agents who escorted Noorzai to a Manhattan hotel for a series of interviews.

  Bush administration officials were so shocked that Asimos and Mallon had actually convinced the Afghan drug lord to come to the United States that top officials still weren’t certain what to do with him. Officials from the CIA and Pentagon got involved and mounted a last-minute campaign to convince the Justice Department and DEA not to arrest Noorzai. The debate continued for two weeks while Noorzai sat in an Embassy Suites hotel room, answering questions from DEA agents.

  Finally, at the end of a lengthy interview, the DEA arrested Noorzai and took him to jail. The next day, federal prosecutors and DEA officials held a press conference announcing that they had arrested a major Afghan heroin trafficker in New York—without explaining how it was that they had found him in the United States.

  Major Babar was also briefly detained but then allowed to leave. When he returned to Pakistan, Babar was interrogated by the ISI about his involvement in the Noorzai case. According to Noorzai’s American lawyer, Ivan Fisher, who interviewed Babar in Pakistan, Babar was tortured by the Pakistani intelligence agency. The fate of the hostages who Jost said were held while Noorzai traveled to the United States is unknown.

  Just after hearing the news of Noorzai’s arrest, Mike Elsner, the Motley Rice lawyer, sent an e-mail to Mike Asimos which showed that he and the other lawyers on the Burnett case had only a vague understanding of what Rosetta had been doing. “Ron just told me that he saw that Col. Norzi [sic] just got arrested trying to get into New York,” Elsner wrote in an April 25, 2005, e-mail. “Any news on that? Can you confirm?” As Joe Rice recalls, “We thought Noorzai was going to come over and help us on our lawsuit.”

  The Noorzai operation was considered a triumph inside the DEA, yet there were still lots of nagging questions about the roles played by Mike Dick and Rosetta in the case.

  Noorzai hired Fisher, a wily old New York defense lawyer, and through an interpreter, Noorzai told him the story of how he had been brought to New York by two men named Mike and Brian, who had promised him safe passage in order to become a secret informant for America. Fisher began to dig deeper, to try to determine whether Mike and Brian were government agents who had made an officially sanctioned promise to the Afghan that he could come to the United States safely.

  Meanwhile, the Justice Department’s inspector general was beginning to try to sort out the FBI’s weird relationship with Rosetta, focusing on the cash transfers between Mike Dick and Mike Asimos. The Rosetta tale, however, was so strange and embarrassing that a lot of the people involved had an incentive to keep the whole thing quiet. But they didn’t count on Patrick Jost’s turning on Rosetta.

  Investigators with the inspector general pressured Jost to talk, and forced him to provide documents under subpoena. He said in interviews that they threatened him with indictment for violating the Neutrality Act and the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. But what they really wanted was evidence against Mike Dick, since the IG’s mission was to investigate abuses inside the FBI and Justice Department. So, in order to get out from under the investigation, Jost agreed to make a taped phone call to Mike Dick to try to get him to admit that he had taken money from Rosetta.

  During the recorded phone call, Mike Dick told Jost that he had loaned money to Rosetta while Asimos and Mallon were in Dubai, an answer that didn’t satisfy the inspector general’s staff, Jost stated in an affidavit in the Noorzai case. In an interview, Dick said that he was later informed that Jost had tape-recorded a phone call with him at the request of the inspector general.

  In his 2013 lawsuit, Dick states that the inspector general’s investigation continued through 2005 and 2006 but that he was informed by the inspector general in 2007 that he had been cleared of criminal misconduct. Yet, the lawsuit adds, the matter was then referred to the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which in 2007 proposed Dick’s dismissal. He then was forced to wage a prolonged legal battle in an effort to keep his job.

  A spokesman for the Justice Department's inspector general said he could not comment on the investigation of Rosetta and its relationship with the FBI—and would not even confirm or deny that the investigation occurred or that there is any report about the inquiry
's findings. Eventually, a federal judge in New York ruled that all evidence about Rosetta’s involvement in the Noorzai operation was inadmissible, and so Rosetta’s role was kept out of Noorzai’s criminal trial. Convicted in 2008, Noorzai was sentenced to life in prison in 2009.

  Finally, not long after the Noorzai operation, Ron Motley had had enough. He cut ties with Mike Asimos. Rosetta, burdened by huge unpaid bills for travel and payments to informants, collapsed. The company’s private investors lost all of their money. The funds that the 9/11 lawyers had spent on Rosetta had produced no smoking gun for the lawsuit. “We never got anything useful from them, Rosetta,” said Motley Rice lawyer Jodi Flowers. “It seemed like an unnecessary distraction from our case. They were going to help the investigation, going to be on the ground to be helpful for the investigation, and I can’t point to anything that we didn’t have to do ourselves.” Added Motley Rice’s Elsner, “When you have someone willing to go into a place like Afghanistan it has an appeal, but over time it wasn’t useful. There were some useful things, but over time, it wasn’t worth the money and effort.”

  In effect, Asimos had hijacked the Motley Rice investigation, some of his critics believe. While he was taking advantage of Motley Rice’s resources, he was doing work for the Pentagon, the FBI, and the DEA—and the 9/11 lawsuit withered.

  Joe Rice was furious that the government, by willingly exploiting Rosetta, had effectively commandeered Motley Rice’s 9/11 lawsuit. “All we got were promises, and they got all our work product,” he says. As Rice recounted with simmering resentment: “How much money are we out on the 9/11 lawsuit and Rosetta? A bunch. A whole bunch. It’s a big number. It would be in your millions type number.” (In 2005, Ron Motley told a reporter that he had already invested $18 million in investigations for the 9/11 lawsuit.)

  The 9/11 lawsuit, Burnett v. Al Baraka, consolidated into In re Terrorist Attacks, was on life support. Some life was breathed back into the case in December 2013, when an appeals court ruled that the 9/11 families could pursue their case against the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, reversing an earlier ruling that dismissed the Saudi government because it had sovereign immunity under U.S. law. But the legal road ahead for Burnett was still long and winding.

  The web of relationships that developed among Motley Rice, Mike Asimos, Rosetta, the Pentagon, the FBI, and the DEA operated completely outside the U.S. government’s normal intelligence-gathering processes. The relationships were so dependent on personal connections that few people in the government have ever had the nerve to go back and try to unravel exactly what happened. It appears that the investigators for the Justice Department’s inspector general, who conducted an inquiry into Rosetta’s relationship with the FBI, were so confounded by the tale that they decided to focus simply on the question of whether a couple of FBI employees got too close to Rosetta.

  Rosetta operated in the purgatory of the intelligence underworld. It was gathering intelligence for the U.S. government but didn’t have a contract, and in fact, was being financed privately by a law firm seeking to gather evidence for a civil lawsuit. It was able to operate because no one in the government knew what to make of it. Since it didn’t have a contract with either the Defense Department or the FBI, it may not have been strictly subject to all of the laws covering federal contractors.

  Certainly, Motley Rice and the private investors in Rosetta were potentially victimized by the scheme, since their money was largely being used to finance Rosetta’s operations. Haji Bashir Noorzai may also have been victimized, since his lawyers were never allowed to pursue his legal claim that he had been promised safe passage to the United States by government agents—Rosetta.

  By working with Rosetta, the government put its imprimatur on foreign intelligence operations that it could not really control. The U.S. intelligence community helped create a rogue elephant.

  While maneuvering around the inspector general’s investigation and the Noorzai criminal trial, Asimos was rewarded by the government with more work in Pakistan and Afghanistan. But in 2006, he returned from Pakistan with a violent illness and was hospitalized with a severe stomach ailment. Asimos suspected that he had been poisoned in Pakistan, possibly by Noorzai’s associates. He spent months recovering.

  In 2013, Mike Dick found himself in more trouble with the FBI. The bureau briefly issued a bulletin to Washington-area law enforcement officials to be on the lookout for Dick, after he allegedly made threats over a dispute about a worker’s compensation claim, according to a May 2013 report by FoxNews.com. The news site reported that officials said that Dick had threatened to come to FBI headquarters, even though he no longer had access to the building. The news site said that the FBI had later withdrawn the alert, which had apparently been made public by mistake. Dick’s lawyer told FoxNews.com that Dick had been the victim of retaliation because he had complained about his treatment after he was injured at a shooting range. He told FoxNews.com that this was just the latest in a series of acts of retaliation that Dick had suffered over the years.

  In his 2013 lawsuit, Dick accuses the FBI of violating his privacy by issuing an alert that contained false and defamatory statements about him, claiming that he was armed, dangerous, and had threatened FBI officials. The suit claims that the incident was just part of a broader pattern of harassment against him by FBI officials. “For several years now, the Bureau has engaged in a protracted effort to drive Plaintiff from its ranks,” Dick’s suit alleges. “Tools of harassment include a seemingly endless ‘administrative investigation’ of Special Agent Dick.”

  In 2013, Ron Motley died, his dream of holding Saudi Arabia accountable for 9/11 in an American court still unfulfilled.

  The ultimate victims of the story of Rosetta were, of course, the 9/11 families. They had signed on to a lawsuit seeking justice against those who had helped murder their loved ones. That lawsuit went nowhere, while Rosetta engaged in its strange forays into the shadow world of intelligence.

  5

  Alarbus

  Charging into downtown Amman, Jordan, in a high-end Audi, I’m riding beside a smooth and elegant Palestinian with a keen eye for the creative movement of money. As he drives through a highway cloverleaf that would do Atlanta proud, blaring into the light of a former Middle Eastern backwater now under siege by bulldozers and five-story construction cranes, filled with half-naked, spherical-shaped gray stone-and-glass towers while small, whitewashed cement boxes line the brooding hills, he’s talking in perfect English, underneath his expensive sunglasses and receding hairline, about the best ways to hide and move cash.

  He advises that buying a resort hotel on the Dead Sea would be a great investment, because hotels are like cash machines. Tourists love the Dead Sea, the hotels have high occupancy rates, and they offer a good stream of revenue in which to hide other cash moving through the hotel’s cash registers and bank accounts, he explains.

  What could be more fitting, I think to myself as we steam through Amman, than to launder money of questionable Middle Eastern provenance by cleansing it through the pockets of a bunch of American tourists floating on their overfed stomachs on the Dead Sea, at the lowest point in the world?

  “Maybe real estate is better.” The Palestinian, thin yet with an air of toughness, is quickly reassessing the economics of hiding and moving money. He is an advocate of and a guide to the dark side of Middle Eastern finance. Flipping houses is a great way to move money, he suggests, particularly in Amman, where real estate is booming.

  In fact, endless American wars have been good business for Amman and many of the Middle East’s other newly gleaming cities. Money from taxpayers in Wichita and Denver and Phoenix gets routed through the Pentagon and CIA and then ends up here, or in Baghdad or Dubai, or Doha or Kabul or Beirut, in the hands of contractors, subcontractors, their local business partners, local sheikhs, local Mukhabarat officers, local oil smugglers, local drug dealers—money that funds construction and real estate speculation in a few choice luxury districts, buildings that
go up thanks to the sweat of imported Filipino and Bangladeshi workers kept on the job by their Saudi and Emirati bosses who confiscate their passports. In Wichita, Denver, and Phoenix, meanwhile, McDonald’s is hiring.

  The Palestinian slows the Audi, quietly passing the lush, walled district reserved for the Jordanian royal family.

  He looks through the windshield into the sunlight and says, in something close to a statement of principle, that life is really all about knowing the right people, and making sure you work with the right people who know the right people. The prime minister? Went to school with him, the Palestinian says. He’s an old friend.

  This is the easiest place in the world to launder money, he adds. Not just Jordan, but Jordan, Lebanon, Syria.

  But you have to know people.

  “I know the right people,” he insists.

  The Palestinian glides the Audi out of Amman, and the highway straightens and the tall towers fall into the rearview mirror. The desert reasserts itself on the road to Jerash, a city of ruins.

  I know a lot of Americans, he adds, now, more cautiously. I work with a lot of Americans, and I have very good relationships with Americans.

  The highway stretches into the country, and he pulls the Audi past low-slung, fading warehouses and storefronts, on the scuffed edge of the urban landscape.

  “Are you interested in art?”

  He has something to sell.

  Another side business. “People I know have an ancient Torah scroll from Iraq that they want to move,” he says.

  He doesn’t disclose how his friends came by this antiquity.