Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

by Gordon Thomas

  However, not everyone in Mossad shared the hope that the “land for peace” formula—a Palestinian homeland in exchange for no more fighting—would work. Islamic fundamentalism was on the march, and Israel’s neighbors, Jordan, Egypt, and Syria, were being buffeted by the extremist forces of Iran. For the Tehran mullahs, Israel remained a pariah state. Within Mossad, and indeed, for many Israelis, the prospect of a lasting peace with the PLO was an unrealistic dream. Zionist Israel had little wish to accommodate itself with Arabs: everything about their religion and culture was seen by Zionists as inferior to their own beliefs and history; they could not accept that the Oslo accord guaranteed the future of their Promised Land and that both races would live together, if not always happily, at least with respect for each other.

  All this was carefully weighed by Shabtai Shavit as he considered the question of whether to publicize Iraq’s arsenal. In the end, he decided to keep the information secret so as not to disturb the wave of optimism outside Israel that had followed the Washington accord. Besides, if things went wrong, the information about Iraq’s stockpile of deadly poison could still be made public. The image of a ruthless Saddam poised to have one of his agents place a canister of anthrax in the New York subway, or a terrorist dispersing the Ebola virus into the air-conditioning system of a fully-laden Boeing 747, so that each passenger became a biological time bomb who could spread the virus to thousands of people before the truth was discovered, were scenarios perfectly suited for Mossad’s experts in psychological warfare to exploit whenever the time came to fan public opinion against Iraq.

  Two other incidents, the facts of which had been hidden by Mossad, could also cause massive damage and embarrassment to the United States.

  On a December evening in 1988, Pan American Airways Flight 103 from London to New York exploded in the air over Lockerbie in Scotland. Within hours, staff at LAP were working the phones to their media contacts, urging them to publicize that here was “incontrovertible proof” that Libya, through its intelligence service, Jamahirya, was culpable. (The author of this book received a call making such a claim from a LAP source hours after the disaster.) Sanctions were swiftly imposed by the West against the Gadhafi regime. The United States and Britain issued indictments against two Libyans, charging them with the destruction of the Pan Am flight. Gadhafi refused to hand over the men for trial.

  LAP next accused Syria and Iran of being coplotters in the Lockerbie disaster. The case against the Damascus regime turned on no more than its well-known support for state-sponsored terrorism. With Iran, the accusation was more specific: Pan Am 103 had been destroyed as an act of revenge for the shooting down on July 3, 1988, by the USS Vincennes of an Iranian passenger plane in the Persian Gulf, killing 290 people. It had been a tragic error for which the United States had apologized.

  LAP then named the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine as having conspired to destroy the airline. None of the journalists who widely published this story stopped to think why Libya, accused as the original perpetrator, would have needed to call for help from Syria or Iran, let along a Palestinian group.

  According to one British intelligence source, “LAP was on a roll. Lockerbie was the perfect opportunity to remind the world that there existed the terror network that LAP always liked to promote. Lockerbie didn’t need that. In fact putting in too many names in the pot was actually counterproductive. We knew only the Libyans were responsible.” However, there were facts that did not make Pan Am 103 such an open-and-shut case.

  The loss of the airliner had occurred at the time when George Bush was president-elect and his transition team in Washington was updating itself on the current Middle East situation so Bush could “hit the ground running” when he entered the Oval Office.

  Bush had been CIA director in 1976-77, a period when Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had largely dictated Washington’s pro-Israeli policy. While Bush publicly maintained Reagan’s glad-handing toward Israel, his years at the helm of the CIA had convinced him that Reagan had been “too dewy-eyed about Israel.” Waiting to become president, Bush needed no reminding how, in 1986, the United States had been forced to cancel a $1.9 billion arms deal with Jordan when the Jewish lobby in Congress had intervened. Bush had told his transition team that as president he would not tolerate interference in the right of “God-fearing Americans to do business with whom and where they wished.” This attitude would play its part in the destruction of Pan Am 103.

  On board the aircraft as it left London on that December night in 1988 were eight members of the U.S. intelligence community returning from duty in the Middle East. Four of them were CIA field officers, led by Matthew Gannon. Also on board were U.S. Army major Charles McKee and his small team of experts in hostage rescue. They had been in the Middle East to explore the possibility of freeing the Western hostages still held in Beirut. Though the Lockerbie disaster investigation was under the jurisdiction of a Scottish team, CIA agents were on the scene when McKee’s still closed and miraculously intact suitcase was located. It was taken away from the scene for a short time by a man believed to be a CIA officer, though he would never be positively identified. Later the suitcase was returned to the Scottish investigation team, who logged its contents under “empty.”

  No one queried what had happened to McKee’s belongings, let alone why he had been traveling with an empty suitcase. But at the time, no one suspected that the CIA officer might have removed from the suitcase data that explained why Pan Am 103 had been destroyed. Gannon’s luggage was never accounted for—giving rise to the belief that the actual bomb had been placed in his suitcase. No satisfactory explanation would ever emerge as to how or why a CIA officer was carrying a bomb in his suitcase.

  The PBS investigative television program Frontline subsequently claimed to have solved the cause of the disaster. Pan Am 103 had begun its journey in Frankfurt, where U.S.-bound passengers from the Middle East transferred on to Flight 103. Among them were Gannon and his CIA team, who had traveled on an Air Malta flight to make the connection. Their baggage was similar to thousands of suitcases that passed through the hands of Frankfurt baggage handlers every day. One of them was in the pay of terrorists. Somewhere in the airport baggage bays the handler had concealed a suitcase already containing the bomb. His instruction was to spot a matching suitcase coming off a connecting flight, and substitute his suitcase, and then let it continue on into the hold of Pan Am 103. It was a plausible theory—but only one of many advanced to explain the bombing.

  Understandably desperate to show the destruction of Pan Am 103 had been an act of terrorism for which it could not be culpable, the airline’s insurers hired a New York firm of private investigators called Interfor. The company had been founded in 1979 by an Israeli, Yuval Aviv, who had immigrated to the United States the previous year. Aviv claimed to be a former desk officer with Mossad—a claim the service would deny. Nevertheless, Aviv had satisfied the insurers he had the right connections to unearth the truth.

  When they received his report, they could only have been stunned. Aviv had concluded that the attack had been planned and executed “by a rogue CIA group, based in Germany, who were providing protection to a drug operation which transported drugs from the Middle East to the U.S. via Frankfurt. The CIA did nothing to break up the operation because the traffickers were also helping them send weapons to Iran as part of the arms-for-hostages negotiations. The method of drug smuggling was quite simple. One person would check a piece of luggage on the flight, and an accomplice working in the baggage area would switch it with a piece of identical luggage containing the narcotics. On the fatal night, a Syrian terrorist, aware of how the drug operation worked, had switched a suitcase with one containing the bomb. His reason was to kill the U.S. intelligence operatives whom Syria had discovered would join the flight.”

  Aviv’s report claimed McKee had learned about the “CIA rogue team,” which had worked under the code name of COREA, and that its members also had close ties to another o
f those mysterious figures who had found his niche on the fringes of the intelligence world. Monzer Al-Kassar had built a reputation as an arms dealer in Europe, including supplying Colonel Oliver North with weapons for him to pass on to the Nicaraguan Contras in 1985-86. Al-Kassar also had links to the Abu Nidal organization, and his family connections were equally dubious. Ali Issa Duba, head of Syrian intelligence, was his brother-in-law, and Al-Kassar’s wife was a relative of the Syrian president. Aviv’s report claimed Al-Kassar had found in COREA a ready partner for the drug-smuggling operation. This had been going on for several months before the destruction of Pam Am 103. The report farther claimed McKee had discovered the scam while pursuing his own contacts in the Middle East underworld in an attempt to find a way to rescue the Beirut hostages. Aviv stated in his report that “McKee planned to bring back to the U.S. proof of the rogue intelligence team’s connection to Al-Kassar.”

  In 1994, Joel Bainerman, the publisher of an Israeli intelligence report and whose analyses have also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Christian Science Monitor, and Britain’s Financial Times, wrote: “Twenty-four hours before the flight, Mossad tipped off the German BKA that there could be a plan to plant a bomb on flight 103. The BKA passed on their tip to the COREA CIA team working out of Frankfurt who said they would take care of everything.”

  Pan Am’s attorney, Gregory Buhler, subpoenaed the FBI, CIA, FAA, DEA, NSC, and NSA to reveal what they knew, but, he later claimed, “the government quashed the subpoenas on grounds of national security.”

  Neither the Frontline program makers, Yuval Aviv, nor Joel Bainerman had been able to provide satisfactory answers to troubling questions. If there was a cover-up to COREA’s activities, how high did it extend within the CIA? Who had authorized it? Had that person or persons ordered the removal of embarrassing data from within McKee’s suitcase? Why had the German BKA police agency tipped off the COREA unit? Was it purely by chance? Or had it been motivated by a decision that the activities of COREA had become unacceptably dangerous for others in the CIA? And just what were the “national security grounds” that had led to Pan Am’s attorney receiving a blanket refusal for his subpoenas?

  Over the years, these questions have surfaced within the closed ranks of various intelligence agencies, and the answers have been kept closely guarded—not least the truth about a final mystery. Why had Mossad sent a London-based katsa north to Lockerbie within hours of the downing of Pan Am 103?

  So far the service has kept to itself all it knows about the destruction of the flight. There are sources, who ask not to be named because their lives would be endangered, who claim that Mossad is holding on to its knowledge as a trump card should Washington increase its pressure for Mossad to cease its intelligence activities within the United States.

  More certain, there was another episode that could turn out equally as embarrassing to the U.S. intelligence community. It concerned the death of Amiram Nir, the man with a taste for James Bond thrillers who had replaced David Kimche as Israel’s point man in Irangate.

  Amiram Nir was ideally suited to be Prime Minister Shimon Peres’s antiterrorism adviser. Exploitive, inquisitive, acquisitive, manipulative, and ruthless, Nir had a raffish charm, a lack of self-restraint, an ability to ridicule, to take imaginative leaps, to break the rules to work against a background of blending fact and fiction. He had been a journalist.

  His previous knowledge of intelligence sprang from his work as a reporter with Israeli television, and then from working for the country’s largest daily newspaper, Yediot Aharonot; it was owned by the Moses dynasty, into which he had married. The publishing empire was everything Robert Maxwell’s had never been: the epitome of respectability and securely financed; it treated its employees on the old adage of a fair day’s pay for a hard day’s work. Nir’s marriage not only had made him the husband of one of the wealthiest women in Israel, but had also provided him with ready access to the higher echelons of the country’s political hierarchy.

  Nevertheless, there was astonishment when he became one of the most important members of Israel’s intelligence community in 1984, when Peres appointed him to the ultrasensitive post of his adviser on combating terrorism.

  Nir was thirty-four years old, and the only hands-on experience he had had of intelligence work was a short IDF course. Even among his friends, the general consensus was he needed more than rugged good looks for his new job.

  Mossad’s chief, Nahum Admoni, was the first to react to Nir’s appointment: he changed the structure of the Committee of the Heads of Services to exclude Nir from its deliberations. Unperturbed, Nir spent the first weeks in the job speed-reading everything he could lay his hands on. He quickly came to focus on the arms-to-Iran operation that was still ongoing. Sensing a chance to prove himself, Nir persuaded Peres he should take over the role David Kimche had relinquished. With the indefatigable Ari Ben-Menashe as his mentor, Nir found himself also working with Oliver North.

  Soon the two men were hand in glove, wheeling and dealing across the globe. Along their travels they created a plan to bring the arms-for-hostages deal to a stunningly successful conclusion. They would fly to Tehran and meet the Iranian leadership and negotiate the release of the hostages.

  On May 25, 1986, posing as technicians employed by Aer Lingus, the Irish national airline, Nir and North flew from Tel Aviv to Tehran on an Israeli aircraft painted with Aer Lingus’s distinctive shamrock logo. On board were ninety-seven TOW guided missiles and a pallet of Hawk missile spare parts. Nir was traveling on a false U.S. passport. It had been provided by North.

  North, ever the evangelizing Christian, had somehow persuaded President Reagan to inscribe a Bible to be presented to Ayatollah Rafsanjani, a devout Muslim. He had also brought a chocolate cake and sets of Colt pistols for their hosts. It was all reminiscent of the days when traders had bartered for land with the Indians on Manhattan.

  The first Mossad knew of the mission was when the aircraft entered Iranian airspace. Nahum Admoni’s reaction was described as “incandescent rage.”

  Luckily the Iranians simply ordered the visitors out and used the mission to score a massive propaganda coup against the United States. Reagan was furious. In Tel Aviv, Admoni cursed Nir as “a cowboy.” Nevertheless, Nir managed to remain in government service for another ten months, until the sniping from within the intelligence community calling for his removal had grown to a relentless fusillade. In those months the cases of Hindawi, Vanunu, and Sowan crossed his desk, but any contributions he offered on how matters should be handled were icily rejected by Mossad.

  No longer welcome in Washington and isolated in Tel Aviv, Amiram Nir resigned as the prime minister’s counterterrorism adviser in March 1987. By then his marriage was in trouble, and his circle of friends had shrunk. Ari Ben-Menashe remained one of Nir’s few remaining links with his past. Early in 1988 Nir left Israel to live in London.

  Then he set up house with a pretty, raven-haired Canadian, Adriana Stanton, a twenty-five-year-old who claimed to be a secretary from Toronto, whom Nir had met on his travels. Several Mossad officers believed she was connected to the CIA, one of the women it used for entrapment operations. In London, Nir acted as the European representative of a Mexican avocado purchasing company, Nucal de Mexico, based in Uruapan. The company controlled a third of the country’s avocado export market.

  But it was not avocados that brought Ari Ben-Menashe to Nir’s door on a rainy November night in 1988. He wanted to know exactly what Nir intended to reveal when he was a major witness in Oliver North’s forthcoming trial over his role in the Iran-Contra scandal. Nir made it clear his testimony would be highly embarrassing not only for the Reagan administration, but also to Israel. He intended to show how easy it had been to sidestep all the usual checks and balances to run illegal operations that would also implicate a number of countries, including South Africa and Chile. He added he was planning a book that he believed would make him the greatest whistle-blower in the history of the Stat
e of Israel. Ari Ben-Menashe arranged to meet Nir after he had made another visit to Nucal in Mexico. In the meantime, his visitor cautioned Nir to be “careful of that woman!” after Adriana Stanton had left them alone. Ben-Menashe refused to reveal what had prompted the warning except to say, in his all-too-often mysterious manner: “I know her from before and, though Nir didn’t know it, Adriana Stanton wasn’t her real name.”

  On November 27, 1988, Nir and Stanton traveled together to Madrid under false names. He called himself “Patrick Weber,” the identity he had last assumed on his ill-fated trip to Tehran. Stanton was listed on the Iberia passenger manifest as “Esther Arriya.” Why they had chosen aliases for the flight tickets when they both traveled on their real passports—Israeli and Canadian—would never be explained. Another mystery was why they took a flight first to Madrid when there were several scheduled direct ones to Mexico City. Was Nir trying to impress his lover with how easy it was to fool most people most of the time? Or was there already a nagging fear at the back of his mind after Ari Ben-Menashe’s visit? Like so much else of what followed, those questions were to remain unanswered.

  They arrived in Mexico City on November 28. Waiting at the airport was a man who would never be identified. The three of them traveled on to Uruapan, arriving there in the afternoon. Nir then chartered a T 210 Cessna from the small Aerotaxis de Uruapan.

  Once more Nir behaved with strange inconsistency. He rented the aircraft in the name of “Patrick Weber,” using a credit card in that name to pay the charges, and arranged with a pilot to fly them to the Nucal processing plant in two days’ time. In the local hotel where they shared a room, Nir registered under his own name. The man who had accompanied them from Mexico disappeared as mysteriously as he had appeared.

  On November 30, Nir and Stanton turned up at the small Uruapan airport, this time with another man. On the passenger manifest he was listed as Pedro Espionoza Huntado. Whom he worked for would remain yet another mystery. Another would be why, when they came to enter their own names on the manifest, both Nir and Stanton used their real identities. If the pilot noticed the discrepancy between the name Nir had given to charter the Cessna, it passed without comment.