Pay Any Price (17 page)

Dick praised Rosetta's work in bringing the source and his information on the Islamic Development Bank to the FBI, according to Rosetta's internal e-mails:

 

Hey guys . . . Just got off the phone with you . . . fantastic work!!! The home run he gave us concerned details as to the IDB's Management team (unofficial IDB operations of course) that controlled/distributed Saudi money going to the “Al-Aqsa Fund.” He gave us the full names of three Saudi nationals that the USG had no knowledge of. . . . He was also able to give us enough clues to locate these guys living inside Jordan . . . where two of them are currently . . . still passing money to Hamas and others. . . . I'm in the process of passing this via official USG channels to our Israeli friends.

 

In some cases, Asimos was open with Motley Rice about the degree to which he was cooperating with the government. In the case of the source with information about the Islamic Development Bank, Asimos sent an e-mail to Ron Motley and other lawyers involved in the
Burnett
case laying out the source's schedule with the government investigators: “He will fly into Dulles where he will be met by Federal Agents,” Asimos wrote in 2004. “They will take him to the Doubletree Inn in Tyson's Corner.” The source's “interactions with the USG will be COMPLETELY non-threatening. In fact, he will be treated like a valuable asset to the USG. I hope he conducts himself appropriately (i.e., doesn't get drunk before noon, doesn't whine and complain incessantly). He will be very busy for a week in DC, then come to Charleston. At that point, he's completely yours. . . . Rosetta is responsible for paying [the source's] travel, lodging, out-of-pockets, monthly stipend, etc. during his entire stay in the US.”

 

In other instances, however, Asimos seemed to be working solely for the FBI. In November 2004, Mike Dick asked Rosetta for help in locating three United Nations personnel who had been taken hostage in Afghanistan. “Received a request from GM to query Rosetta sources regarding the recent hostage situation in Afghanistan (3 UN employees kidnapped),” Brian Mallon wrote in a November 2004 internal Rosetta report. Mallon contacted one of Rosetta's Afghan sources in London, tasking him to reach out to contacts in his native country and see if the hostages could be located. The source, referred to as S-12 in Mallon's report to Asimos, made a round of calls, reporting back the next day that a friend of a friend knew the kidnappers. Mallon requested that S-12 pinpoint the location of the hostages.

In this case, Rosetta was forced to halt its activities after the U.S. ambassador in Kabul queried FBI headquarters about the firm's involvement. The reaction at FBI headquarters was swift: Dick had recruited Rosetta for the mission without getting prior approval from his superiors. FBI management reined him in, and issued Dick a harsh verbal reprimand. “GM [Rosetta's code name for Dick] believed that Rosetta would be asked to assist SEAL Team 6 on the ground in Afghanistan to assist in locating the hostages,” Mallon wrote in his internal Rosetta report. “GM stated that the USAMB [U.S. ambassador] in Kabul heard about the situation prior to FBI Executives and it was presently causing a problem. GM feared being pulled off the Rosetta Project. . . . GM suffered a severe verbal reprimand. . . . GM opined that the people in Afghanistan [U.S. officials in Kabul] were not familiar with Rosetta and didn't want to deal with a private outfit.”

Dick told Mallon that he had been ordered to hand off the hostage operation to an agent from the FBI's military liaison unit. Yet even after that episode, Rosetta continued to serve the government, according to interviews as well as Rosetta's internal reports and other communications.

Soon, Asimos became fixated on recruiting one potential informant in particular—Afghan drug lord Haji Bashir Noorzai.

 

In 2000, Patrick Hamlette, a young agent in the New York office of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), received an anonymous letter in the mail revealing the existence of a heroin trafficking network in the New York area that had its roots in Afghanistan. The letter triggered a five-year investigation that would eventually lead to the arrest of Haji Bashir Noorzai, the drug lord at the Afghan end of the network. Yet Hamlette's years of quiet legwork leading to the DEA's breakthrough in the case were overshadowed by the drama at the end, when Mike Asimos and Brian Mallon from Rosetta lured Noorzai to the United States in one of the most surreal operations in the DEA's history.

While Hamlette gradually built his case against Noorzai, there were plenty of other people throughout the U.S. government who were also interested in the Afghan, and not just because he was an infamous narcotics trafficker in opium-rich southern Afghanistan. Noorzai was a wealthy tribal leader from Kandahar Province, the same region that produced the Taliban. He had three wives and thirteen children and was living in Quetta, Pakistan, at the time of the 9/11 attacks. Under the Taliban regime, Noorzai had been a major figure in the Afghan heroin trade, controlling huge poppy fields while providing financial backing for the Taliban.

The U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan that toppled the Taliban upended the Afghan drug business, and Noorzai was smart enough to realize that he had to try to reach some kind of arrangement with the country's new American occupiers. In the 1990s, he had agreed to try to help the CIA track down Stinger missiles that the Americans had originally provided to the Afghan resistance; after 9/11, he thought he could renew his relationship with the CIA.

In November 2001, he met with men he later described as American military officials at Spin Boldak, near the Afghan-Pakistani border. Noorzai was taken to Kandahar where he was detained and questioned for six days by the Americans about Taliban officials and operations. He agreed to work with the military and CIA, and was released. In January 2002, he handed over fifteen truckloads of weapons, including about four hundred antiaircraft missiles that had been hidden by the Taliban inside his tribe's territory.

Noorzai also offered to act as an intermediary between Taliban leaders and the Americans, and helped to persuade the Taliban's former foreign minister, Wakil Ahmad Mutawakil—the son of the mullah in Noorzai's hometown of Maiwand—to meet with the Americans.

But there was growing confusion within the U.S. government about what to do with Noorzai, confusion that would last right up until his 2005 arrest. Even as he was cutting deals with the U.S. military and CIA in Afghanistan, a counterterrorism team at CIA headquarters wanted to place him on a list to be targeted and captured or killed. The headquarters team was finally stopped from taking action against him because of his new relationship with CIA case officers on the ground.

Attitudes about Noorzai within the U.S. government kept shifting over the next few years as American priorities in Afghanistan kept changing. In the immediate aftermath of the invasion, the Bush administration ignored the Afghan drug trade, which flourished as U.S. military and intelligence officials dealt openly with drug traffickers who offered information about the Taliban or al Qaeda. At the time, Noorzai's value as an informant trumped other considerations.

Mike Asimos included Noorzai on his KIL list, and Patrick Jost said that he believed that Asimos was told to target Noorzai by the Defense Department or the FBI, who were mostly interested in his connections to Mullah Omar. But Mike Dick insisted in an interview that Asimos came up with the KIL list on his own. Mike Elsner, a Motley Rice lawyer assigned to the
Burnett
case, said that he thought Asimos was trying to bring Noorzai to the United States as a witness in the 9/11 case. Nonetheless, interviews with sources as well as Rosetta e-mails and documents indicate that the Noorzai operation was conducted in cooperation with and at the behest of U.S. government officials.

As Asimos developed his network of Afghan sources, built around S-1, the Afghan diplomat in London, he was introduced to a Major Babar, a well-connected former Pakistani ISI officer. Asimos told Major Babar that if he cooperated with Rosetta, he could be included in a significant business opportunity in the United States, according to Rosetta's audio recordings of their meetings. The audio recordings of the secret meetings in Pakistan among Asimos, Mallon, and Babar are revealing, showing the extent to which Rosetta depended on and perhaps manipulated Babar in order to deliver Noorzai. Babar's value as a source for Asimos and Rosetta was that he could communicate directly with Noorzai. The Afghan drug lord had gone into hiding from the Americans after one of his partners was killed in a raid, which made him suspect that he was being hunted. So Asimos relied on Babar to pass messages and arrange meetings with Noorzai.

Asimos had an initial phone conversation with Noorzai arranged by intermediaries in July 2004. In his summary of the conversation, Asimos reported back to colleagues, including Mike Dick, that he had informed Noorzai (referred to as HBN) that “Rosetta was potentially in a position to intermediate HBN's surrender to the USG, perhaps even brokering a deal if HBN would agree to cooperate with Rosetta's project and also agree to fully cooperate with USG officials.” According to Asimos, “HBN reiterated . . . that he would hold Rosetta responsible for his security during any meetings and he expressed some concern that he not be arrested as part of any Rosetta meeting and interview.” Asimos reassured Noorzai, telling him “that Rosetta was not interested in arresting HBN and that no such activity would occur as part of any HBN-Rosetta dialogue.”

With Babar's help, Asimos and Mallon arranged a meeting in the fall with Noorzai in Dubai, where Noorzai felt safe. Mike Dick was scheduled to join them there and negotiate a deal in which Noorzai would become a full-fledged informant. Asimos and Dick planned to arrange for Noorzai to come to the United States for secret debriefings with analysts from the FBI and Pentagon.

For Mike Dick, getting directly involved in an off-the-books overseas operation with Rosetta was worth the bureaucratic risk. In interviews, Dick said that Noorzai claimed to have current information about Mullah Omar's location.

Mike Dick and another FBI official were preparing to leave for Dubai in October 2004 when the CIA stepped in and blocked them. Officially, Michele Sison, the U.S. ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, denied the FBI agents “country clearance”—the ambassadorial permission that every U.S. government official is supposed to obtain from the local ambassador when traveling overseas. But in reality, she barred them at the request of CIA officials, who had, at the last minute, discovered what Rosetta was doing with Noorzai and were furious. While Noorzai was not a fully paid-up asset of the CIA, agency officials did not want Rosetta and the FBI getting in the middle of their Afghan operations.

But Asimos still needed Mike Dick's help. While in Dubai, Asimos had run up huge expenses to arrange the meeting with Noorzai, and he needed an immediate cash infusion. Mike Dick was unable to convince his supervisors at the FBI to cover Rosetta's Dubai bills; Rosetta didn't even have a contract with the bureau. So Dick withdrew approximately $10,000 from his personal savings and wired it to Asimos in Dubai. Asimos repaid him after he returned to the United States. “Mike and Brian were in Dubai, meeting Noorzai, and the FBI was supposed to send guys over there,” Mike Dick recalled in an interview. “Motley was paying for it. And he cut them off, and decided it wasn't worth it to him anymore. And Mike said we need $30,000 for expenses and the whole Noorzai entourage and security. I couldn't get the FBI to agree to give them the money. The FBI said drop it. I got pissed. So I gave them $10,000 of my own money. They then paid me back.”

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.”