About Daniel Levin
From Daniel’s website: The son of a diplomat, Daniel Levin spent his early years in the Middle East and in Africa and then trained as a lawyer.
Currently a board member of the Liechtenstein Foundation for State Governance, he has, for the past twenty years, worked with governments and development institutions worldwide, focusing on economic development and political reform through financial literacy, political inclusion, and constitutional initiatives.
He is also engaged in track 3 diplomacy and mediation efforts in war zones. Levin’s first book, Nothing but a Circus: Misadventures among the Powerful, was published in Germany, Japan, Russia, and the UK. Proof of Life is his first book to be published in the United States. He lives outside New York City.
Proof of Life: Twenty Days on the Hunt for a Missing Person in the Middle East
Daniel Levin was in his New York office when he got a call from an acquaintance with an urgent, cryptic request to meet in Paris. A young man had gone missing in Syria. No government, embassy, or intelligence agency would help. Could he? Would he? So begins a suspenseful, shocking, and at times brutal true story of one man’s search to find a missing person in Syria over twenty tense days. Levin, a lawyer turned armed-conflict negotiator, chases leads throughout the Middle East, meeting with powerful sheikhs, drug lords, and sex traffickers in his pursuit of the truth.
In Proof of Life, Levin dives deep into the shadows—an underground industry of war where everything is for sale, including arms, drugs, and even people. He offers a fascinating study of how people use leverage to get what they want from one another and of a place where no one does a favor without wanting something in return, whether it’s immediately or years down the road.
A fast-paced thriller wrapped in a memoir, Proof of Life is a cinematic must-read by an author with access to a world that usually remains hidden.
In “ Proof of Life,” Daniel Levin offers readers a cheeky bargain: Trust the story he relates, and he, in turn, will introduce you to the dark powers that have caused Syria to descend into the blood bath from which, after 10 years of fighting, it has yet to escape. The story goes like this: At an unspecified date in 2014, in a part of Syria controlled by ISIS and Al Qaeda, a blond, 27-year-old man disappeared.
You can Google in vain for news of such a person; according to Levin, journalists covering the region at the time never found out about this disappearance, though he knew about it right away because a well-connected friend of the disappeared person’s family summoned Levin to a restaurant in Paris, recounted the story and pronounced himself at wit’s end. The family friend pleaded with Levin to take action. Levin obliged but with a heavy heart. Such searches, he knew, usually lead the searchers through a long interval of anguish only to culminate in tragedy.
Levin, a New York-based lawyer who has worked on government reform and economic development for a European charitable foundation, says that the search did indeed harrow him: “The sensory overload triggered by adrenaline and fear was exhausting.” As he made his inquiries, he writes, “I felt like I was holding a hand grenade that was missing the pin and would detonate as soon as I dropped it out of the sweaty palm of my hand — killing not only me but also all those around me.”
To this day, apparently, Levin is worried. About what? He doesn’t say. For security reasons, he says, he has disguised or elided the identities of many of the people in his book, including the missing blond-haired man, the family friend, and the various Middle Eastern marchers who helped him with his search. Levin’s visits with these minor pashas make up the core of “ Proof of Life.” Self-admiring, rich and amoral, they exemplify his idea of the kind of people driving Syria’s never-ending war.
Levin’s search forces him to take up the path such men tread. Luckily, he shares their appreciation for the finer things in life. After loup de mer with the family friend in Paris (“this place has the best fish in town,” the friend says), Levin makes off to the Kempinski hotel in Istanbul (a “gorgeous, former Ottoman imperial palace on the Bosporus”). Here he is greeted by a waiter who brings honey (“straight off the honeycomb”) and dates to a table overlooking the strait. His dining companion, an intelligence operative in the employ of the emir of Qatar, makes some inquiries and arranges for Levin to meet with a powerful Lebanese sheikh (code name: “the Sheikh”) in Beirut. In Beirut there is tea, another round of elaborate Middle Eastern hospitality and deep indifference to the lost man. Over many pages, the Sheikh philosophizes in his grand but vapid way. Exhausted, Levin jets off to Amman. And so on.
In this book, now and then, certain phrases require careful parsing. On the opening page, Levin promises a “search for a missing person in Syria.” But do these words mean that the search must take place in Syria? They do not. In this case, the closest the searcher comes to Syria is the Four Seasons in Amman.
I like bargains as much as the next person. I am keen to understand more about the dark powers in Syria. And I’m willing to believe that, from the vantage of the Four Seasons in Amman, the war in Syria could seem a game presided over by profiteers, in which everyone is on drugs and whose leaders only feign belief in God and might even dress in a diamond-studded T-shirt, as the villain in this book, a Syrian dope trafficker, does.
I suspect that if Levin had conducted at least some of his search inside Syria, reality sooner or later would have forced him to toss his game theory away. A day or so inside the country would have shown him that, there, God remains alive and well. If he had stayed a bit longer, he would have seen that on neither side of the war do the combatants require drugs or, for that matter, money in order to kill one another. Under such conditions, a search for a missing person would have tried his nerves even more than the pashas in Beirut and Amman did, but had it yielded a book, it probably would not feel, as this one does, like a novel dashed off at the hotel bar between business meetings.