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Why I'm Involved In Counterterrorism Now
Dr Joseph O'Brien, highly decorated Special Agent, formerly of the FBI, New York Times, Best Selling Author of Boss of Bosses, the man that took down the mob, the New York Mafia in the 1980s, a PhD in criminal justice, dissertation in Islamic terrorism, the guy you don't want f*** with.
Let me to introduce myself. My name is Joe O'Brien. I'm a native New Yorker currently living in South Florida. I spent nearly 20 years as an FBI agent, mainly working spy cases, foreign counterintelligence cases, working alongside with the CIA, and also during that time, I worked mafia cases with a colleague and mentor by name of agent Robert Levinson.
Levinson and I shared awards for having successfully developed made members of the nova costa commonly known as the American mob. Together, Bob and I locked up a lot of wise guys over the years. In 1987 I was honored as the recipient of the United States Attorney General's Distinguished Service Award, the highest honor bestowed upon a law enforcement officer in the nation, in 1991 I wrote a book about it, New York Times bestselling book entitled “Boss of Bosses, the father of the Godfather the FBI, and Paul Castellano”.
After leaving the FBI, Bob and I stayed in touch and became private investigators. I was in New York City, and Bob was in Florida. We had a couple of clients in common. Then in 2007 we met for lunch at a Manhattan restaurant. He told me he was going on a mission. I instinctively knew that the mission was for the CIA. I asked him if he needed any backup, he could have used it, but quote, It wasn't in the budget. Bob was being sent to Iran to recruit an American assassin who had been Wanted by the FBI for murder for over three decades. I never saw Bob Livingston again, except in hostage videos on TV wearing an orange style prison jumpsuit and begging for the United States government to help him.
A few months after Bob's capture in Iran, some of Bob's friends received emails, ostensibly from Levinson, but the FBI mistakenly dismissed it as fake and virtually ignored email. It wasn't until three years later, those people, the same people, received the second email from the same email address only, this one contained the above mentioned hostage videos by sending Levinson to Iran on such a dangerous mission, a mission for which he was unprepared and untrained, that agency risked my friend's life. I could have just as easily been with him when the FBI dismissed the hostage takers message as fake. The FBI essentially signed Bob's death warrant in 2020 the FBI and CIA summoned the Levinson family, consisting of his beloved wife, Christine, and their seven adult children, to the nation's capital, the officials told Levinson's family they believe Bob was deceased, although they offered no proof, did not have his remains and had no reasonable expectation of ever repatriating those remains. The FBI case remains open to this day, despite obstruction and actual veil threats from the FBI to CIA, I have been working tirelessly to find out what really happened to former Special Agent Robert Levinson. In the process, I developed informants of my own in Iran, and through scholarly research, I earned a PhD in criminal justice. My dissertation is on Islamic terrorism. It's published in the Library of Congress in Washington, DC.
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Robert Levinson, SA, James Murphy, ASAC Joseph O'Brien, SA
Joe's Friend and Partner In The FBI, Special Agent Robert "Bob" Levinson
​In the process of trying to find Bob, I developed high level assets in place in Iran, similar to how Bob and I developed mob informants back in the day, recognizing my talent for informant development, similar how they recognized such skill in Bob Levinson that combined With my known patriotism for this country and the FBI lacking any real actionable human intelligence coming out of Iran. It was not hard for our intelligence community, consisting the FBI and CIA, to con me into accepting their tasking back. It was January 2023 they requested that I try to obtain information vital to our national security. So important was that information that the State Department Rewards for Justice program, whose main mission is to combat international terrorism, offered $15 million for such information and their government website, I was fortunate enough to find an Iranian national who was an expert in the field of interest, who provided all the sensitive information that the FBI and CENTCOM, that's Central Command, out of Tampa, Florida Department of Defense, could ever want after those agency varied sources information.
I requested that they nominate my sources for a reward consistent with the Rewards for Justice program, but without explanation, the intelligence community refused to pay. I appealed directly to the State Department's Reward for Justice program, documenting my case that my sources were entitled to.
The rewards were advertised by that agency, after accepting my information, for which my sources risked their lives to provide, ignored me for over a year in my old agencies, the FBI, the CIA, basically did not have my back when I attempted to send my Iranian confidential sources a few $1,000 a small payment, just a fraction of the millions that The United States government owes them the US Treasury Department, Office of foreign asset control OFAC, effectively froze all of my bank accounts for violating economic extinctions imposed on Iran by the United States.
Such action adversely affected not only my business, but my personal life, and damaged my credit. It was rather upsetting, and quite frankly, I am generally not the kind of guy that one wants to piss off. I no longer recognize the FBI and the CIA is the great agencies they once were.
They've been politicized, I'm able to work with them. They displayed utter incompetence and lack of honesty in their handling of the Levinson case, the national security information and, more recently, the attempted voluntary surrender of two FBI Most Wanted cyber criminals. In fact, rather than capturing the two hackers who have been trying, unsuccessfully, through me, to surrender since 2019 actually, the two fugitives probably have more in common with the FBI and CIA than I do these days. The reason I stated is the Islamic Republican Guard, IRGC and the FBI and CIA together conspired to interfere with the last two presidential elections, to the benefit of the Democratic Party and to the Republicans detriment, ultimately, to the country's detriment.
This is a fact, and I am not a conspiracy theorist. Unfortunately, when taken into custody by Iranian authorities and deprived of his due process, ultimately his liberty and his life, Bob was unable to fight back, as he got no help from the government, after serving his government for 33 years. I'm in a different position, I finally got so fed up with the State Department's procrastination and incompetence and dealing with the FBI and the CIA, I filed a major civil lawsuit in the US District Court, Southern District of Florida, West Palm beach on February 23 2023.
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