Salahuddin was an American fugitive wanted in the killing of a former Iranian diplomat in Maryland in 1980. Since fleeing to Iran, Salahuddin had become close to some in the Iranian government, particularly to those seen as reformers and moderates.
The hotel's registry, which Levinson's wife has seen, showed him checking out on March 9, 2007.
What happened to him next remains a mystery.
Once the Senate Intelligence Committee saw the emails between Jablonski and Levinson, lawmakers demanded to know more. That touched off an internal CIA investigation, which discovered that the agency's relationship with Levinson had been unusual from the start.
Instead of e-mailing his work product to the CIA, he mailed packages to Jablonski's home in Virgina. His correspondence was primarily with Jablonski's personal email account.
Jablonski said the analysts simply wanted to avoid the CIA's lengthy mail screening process.
"I didn't think twice about it," she said in an interview.
The Illicit Finance Group also didn't follow the typical routine for international travel. Before someone travels abroad for the agency, the top CIA officer in the country normally clears it. That way, if an employee is arrested or creates a diplomatic incident, the agency isn't caught by surprise.
That didn't happen before Levinson's trips, former officials said. He journeyed to Panama, Turkey and Canada and was paid upon his return, people familiar with his travels said. After each trip, he submitted bills and the CIA paid him for the information and reimbursed him for his travel expenses.
Nobody who reviewed the intelligence or reviewed the contract ever flagged this as a potential problem, investigators found.
The whole arrangement was so peculiar that CIA investigators conducting an internal probe would later conclude it was an effort to keep top CIA officials from figuring out that the analysts were running a spying operation. Jablonski adamantly denies that.
The internal investigation renewed some longtime tensions between the CIA's operatives and analysts. The investigators felt the analysts had been running their own amateur spy operation, with disastrous results. Worse, they said the analysts withheld what they knew, allowing senior managers to testify falsely on Capitol Hill.
Investigators blamed Jablonski and fellow analyst Tim Sampson for not coming forward sooner. But the analysts said the evidence had been hiding in plain sight. All the information Levinson provided was uploaded to a shared server for others to see. The invoices had been submitted and paid.
The analysts felt they were being blamed as part of an internal CIA power struggle.
Sampson said he was never aware of Levinson's emails with Jablonski or the Iranian trip.
"I didn't even know he was working on Iran," he said. "As far as I knew he was a Latin America, money-laundering and Russian organized crime guy. I would never have directed him to do that."
Sampson offered to take a polygraph. Jablonski says she has consistently told the truth.
Recently, as the five-year statute of limitations concluded, FBI agents interviewed her again and she told the same story, officials said.
In secret Senate hearings from late 2007 through early 2008, CIA Deputy Director Stephen Kappes acknowledged that the agency had been involved in Levinson's disappearance and conceded that it hadn't been as forthcoming as it should have been, current and former officials said.
Once the internal review was complete, the CIA gave the family a $2.5 million annuity, which provides tax-free income, multiple people briefed on the deal said. Neither side wanted a lawsuit that would air the secret details in public.
U.S. investigators said they believe Iranian authorities, if they have Levinson, must know about his CIA ties. Levinson wasn't trained to resist interrogation. U.S. officials could not imagine him withholding information from Iranian interrogators, who have been accused of the worst types of mental and physical abuses.
In an October 2010 interview with the AP, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran at the time, said his country was willing to help find Levinson. But he appeared to suggest he knew or had suspicions that Levinson was working for the U.S. government.
