Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad
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Until now untold, the story of how Saddam Hussein began to amass one of the world’s largest private fortunes began when a private jet took off from London to Baghdad in 1982. During the five-hour flight from London, its solitary passenger, financier Tiny Rowland, spooned beluga caviar into his mouth and sipped vintage Krug champagne. That was his regular diet on a business trip in his Learjet. The delicacies had been sent from Baghdad by Saddam Hussein.
This was no ordinary journey on that summer’s day in 1982, even for the sixty-eight-year-old financier with a fearsome reputation as a predator in the City of London, on Wall Street, and on the stock markets of Europe. Sitting in his hand-tooled tan leather armchair on board his customized jet, feet resting on a $150-a-square-foot carpet, Roland W. Rowland—the name on his gold-embossed business cards—had indeed come a long way from where he had been born in 1917 in a British prison camp in India.
He was the son of a German trader called Fritz Fuhrop. His mother was the daughter of a pillar of the English Raj who had followed her husband into internment. Following their release after the end of World War I, Rowland’s Indian nanny had called him “Tiny.” Even though he would grow to be six feet tall, the nickname stuck. Now it was the only link with his past—those days when he had dug latrines for the British army in World War II and later was a porter at Paddington railway station in London.
Those humble beginnings had fed his determination to join the ranks of the rich and powerful. He sold secondhand cars and refrigerators in postwar London. By the time he was thirty, he was a millionaire. He began to trade in gold in South Africa. His fortune grew. He was hired to “sort out” an ailing company called the London and Rhodesia Mining and Land Corporation—Lonhro. Rowland made it the single most powerful trading company in all Africa. His deals in copper, tin, and other metals made him the darling of Lonhro stockholders.
They did not suspect how Rowland had paid off Lord Duncan Sandys, Winston Churchill’s son-in-law. Using a secret account in the Cayman Islands, Rowland had given the peer $500,000 for helping to buy the largest gold mine in Ghana. When Duncan Sandys became mired in sexual scandal, the prudish Rowland cut him dead—refusing to send “even a bunch of flowers” to his funeral in 1987. No one, however rich and well connected, was allowed to implicate Tiny Rowland. He treasured his image as the quintessential Englishman. Only in the confines of a small circle of right-wing friends did he reveal his anti-Semitism and contempt for the way Britain was being run.
Already a multimillionaire, Tiny Rowland allowed his hatred for socialism to surface during the British crisis with Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) over its determination to challenge the Wilson government over self-rule. Sanctions had been introduced against what Prime Minister Harold Wilson called “this pariah state.” It later emerged that Rowland broke them. But by then Mrs. Thatcher was in Downing Street and the matter was not pursued.
Tiny looked for new fields to conquer. He bought the Observer, a London Sunday newspaper, and tried to use it to support his business interests in Africa. Next he enlisted the notorious Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi to broker a deal with Colonel Gadhafi to buy the Metropole hotel chain for $150 million.
Rowland’s ability to use anybody to further his own interests had earlier led Britain’s then prime minister Ted Heath to castigate him as the “unacceptable face of capitalism.” Tiny Rowland shrugged that off in the same imperious way he dismissed other financiers who came to him with deals. He preferred to work alone, to share his profits with no one—except his Siamese cats. Every day he fed them the same fine caviar that he ate on his Learjet as it headed for Iraq on that June day in 1982. They had curled up at his feet as he worked at his desk preparing his greatest coup yet—hiding Saddam’s fortune.
When Saddam came to power, his pro-West sympathies were welcomed in London and Washington. Their governments, along with those of France and Germany, saw the need to reinforce Iraq’s infrastructure against the looming threat posed by Iran. Baghdad became a vast bazaar. Massive bribes to secure contracts were common. They were siphoned into Saddam’s accounts. More money flowed there for his cut on deals to build superhighways, hospitals, and schools. If anybody suspected, nobody cared.
Saddam’s relationship with Rowland stemmed from the breathtaking theft of the shah of Iran’s personal fortune of $3 billion. In 1979, with the ayatollahs about to seize power in Iran, the shah’s most trusted aides had held secret meetings with the director of the Central Bank of Iraq. Rowland had acted as the go-between, and on his advice, the Shah agreed to transfer his fortune to Baghdad into the Iraqi central bank, beyond the reach of the ayatollahs. Rowland received a “handling fee” of 15 percent.
In a second deal that laid the foundation for Saddam’s fortune, the Iraqi tyrant, then barely a year in power, transferred the money out of the central bank in Iraq to his own numbered accounts with Credit Suisse in Switzerland and a Cayman Island bank. Rowland arranged this, pocketing another handling fee. The deposed, and dying, shah ended up in Washington. He asked the U.S. government to help recover his stolen fortune. His plea fell on deaf ears. The road map in the Middle East had once more changed. Washington was openly backing Iraq against Iran.
All this, and more, the Mossad team had established as they hunted for Saddam’s fortune in the winter of 2004.
I have spoken to intelligence officers in London, Washington, and Tel Aviv who have described other documents that reveal the extent of the secret network Rowland set up.
One Mossad document shows how Rowland used one of his London banks to provide a facility for Iraqi arms dealer Ibsan Barbouti to lodge $500 million of Saddam’s money. From London, Barbouti helped Libya to build a chemical warfare plant. When he suddenly died—widely believed to be a victim of one of Saddam’s hit men—the money was transferred from the London bank to the central bank of Libya.
Another document details how Saddam’s son Uday went to Geneva in 1998 to “iron out some financial problems” with Swiss banks who were part of the money-laundering network Rowland had created.
On the eve of the second Iraqi war, accompanied by Iraq’s finance minister Hikmat Misban al-Azzawi (now in American custody), Saddam’s son Qusay went to Iraq’s central bank with a handwritten letter from his father saying he was authorized to remove $1 billion from the vaults. The money was loaded onto a convoy of trucks. U.S. satellite photographs show the convoy heading for the Syrian border. Later, U.S. troops found $656 million in dollar bills stuffed inside 164 aluminium boxes on the grounds of one of Saddam’s palaces, along with 100 million euros in an armored car.
By the spring of 2004, the search for Saddam’s billions had become the greatest hunt since the post–World War II search for Nazi gold. Mossad, supported by MI6 and the CIA, deployed scores of agents and financial experts to try to discover the vast fortune Rowland’s master plan had enabled Saddam to hide around the world.
A Mossad document, signed by Meir Dagan, names more than seventy banks as being included in Saddam’s money-laundering trail that electronically sped out of Iraq to London, Europe, through Gibraltar, down to South Africa, across the Pacific to Hong Kong, on to Japan, up into Russia, and back down to the Balkans. But the searchers—spies, bankers, and brokers—trying to follow the trail found that Rowland’s built-in safeguards stood the test of time.
“He used surrogates and cutouts, people in the international banking world. Banks in Eastern Europe which serviced the KGB and were used to not asking questions, were also used,” confirmed a Mossad source.
In a memo prepared for the FBI shortly before he died in the World Trade Center attack in September 2001, John P. O’Neill, the FBI executive agent in charge in New York, wrote that Saddam’s money “was almost certainly being laundered through international criminal corporations run by South American drug cartels and the Russian Mafia.” The memo identified Edmund Safra, the billionaire banker who then owned the National Republic Bank in New York, as a “money laundering conduit for the funds.”
Another conduit through which Saddam’s fortune flowed was the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). Based in London, the now dissolved bank provided funds for terrorist groups Saddam already supported. It was closed down after City of London regulators discovered its activities.
MI5 has a fat file on another of the middlemen Rowland used. His name was Cyrus Hashemi. Ostensibly an Arab millionaire playboy who would spend $150,000 on the turn of a card at a Mayfair casino and give doormen Rolex watches for parking his Ferrari, Hashemi allowed his BCCI bank accounts to be used to send Saddam’s money on down the money trail. The MI5 intelligence file on Hashemi also says that he was trying to broker a better deal for his services. On July 16, 1986, he suddenly collapsed at his Belgravia home and was rushed to a private clinic owned by BCCI. Two days later he was dead.
Scotland Yard’s Serious Crimes Squad investigated. They called in forensic pathologist Dr. Ian West. He said, “Hashemi’s death was one of the strangest I have investigated.” West sent tissue samples to Porton Down, Britain’s chemical and biological warfare establishment, for its scientists to decide if Hashemi had been poisoned. The result of their findings remains unknown to this day.
The location of Saddam’s billions may also remain undiscovered in the foreseeable future.
In April 2004, the French lawyer Jacques Verges announced he had been appointed by Saddam’s family as lead counsel for his trial. Verges became famous when he represented the former SS officer Klaus Barbie, who was convicted of “crimes against humanity” in 1987. Since then the attorney has acted for the notorious terrorist Carlos the Jackal, now serving a life sentence in Paris, and still acts as adviser to Slobodan Milosevic, whose trial at the Hague War Crimes Tribunal is now into its fourth year and could last several more years.
Verges has said he expects Saddam’s trial to last even longer. “I will present him as a vanquished hero.” He plans to call President George W. Bush and his father, the former U.S. president, as witnesses, along with Britain’s prime minister Tony Blair and other world leaders. “Arguing why they should appear should take at least a year,” said Verges, in his seventy-eighth year when he took the case. One of the key elements of his defense will be to show “how very important people took their slice of the action for helping Saddam hide his money. They still hold high office. But not after I finish with them.”
Only time will tell if that will lead to the discovery of the tyrant’s fortune. More certain is that by then Mossad will have other tyrants to hunt down.
CHAPTER 20
GOD’S BANKER, WHISTLEBLOWER, AND OSAMA BIN LADEN
On April 22, 2004, on one of those balmy days when Israelis remind themselves that this was why God had chosen their Promised Land, Meir Dagan watched the live transmission on his television in his top-floor office in Mossad headquarters.
The screen showed Mordechai Vanunu, the former nuclear technician who had exposed Israel’s atomic arsenal, finally emerging from incarceration in the high-security prison at Ashkelon in southern Israel. He had served eighteen years. One of Dagan’s predecessors, Shabtai Shavit, had publicly said that given the chance, he would have had Vanunu assassinated. On the television screen protesters opposed to Vanunu’s release were shouting the same demand: “Kill him! Kill him!” Vanunu responded by raising his clenched hands above his head in a boxer’s victory salute. The screams of “Traitor! Traitor!” mingled with the cheers of supporters who had come from all over the world to welcome Vanunu.
There had never been a scene like it, and it was one that Dagan had difficulty understanding. How could a man who had betrayed his country be treated by anyone as a hero? If Vanunu had done it for money, Dagan had said, that he could almost understand and even accept that Vanunu, once a committed Jew, had converted to Christianity. What the Mossad chief could not understand was the motivation that had driven Vanunu to expose Israel’s prime defense system—the two hundred nuclear weapons that made it the now fourth nuclear power in the world.
Dagan had been part of Israel since its creation, he had played his own part in helping it fight for its place among nations. He believed with passionate conviction that no other people had struggled so much, and for so long, to enlighten others about the moral and spiritual imperatives that govern the ways of mankind. In those long nights when he sat alone in his office reading the incoming traffic from his agents all over the world, his principle article of faith and an inexhaustible wellspring from which he drew his strength was that the State of Israel was the single most important thing in his life.
That was why Vanunu’s great betrayal had preoccupied him. During his imprisonment, Vanunu had filled eighty-seven boxes of documents detailing the production of nuclear weapons at Dimona, out in the Negev Desert. They had, of course, been confiscated on the eve of his release. But what he had put out on paper was to Dagan “proof that Vanunu’s knowledge is still enormous, far too extensive to let him leave Israel.”
That had been one of the conditions accompanying his release; others included that he was not to have contact with foreigners, he would have his Internet and phone calls monitored, and that he would not approach within five hundred meters of any border crossing or foreign diplomatic mission. He would also have a team of surveillance officers close to him day and night.
Vanunu had accepted all the restrictions with a shrug. There had been many other shrugs during Dagan’s final effort to understand his mind-set. The night before his release, two Mossad interrogators had questioned Vanunu on camera about why he had betrayed Israel. He had shrugged them off and launched a strong attack on Mossad and how he had been tricked into captivity. He had spoken of his “cruel and barbaric treatment in prison which was organized and approved by Mossad.”
Now, on the television screen, Vanunu was repeating the same allegations to the cheers of his supporters. To Dagan if “this was a man we had brutalized he looked in very good shape.”
As Vanunu was driven away to pray in St. George’s Anglican cathedral in Jerusalem, Meir Dagan turned back to other matters. Vanunu was free. But he would never be out of Mossad’s grasp.
Like millions of others, “Cindy,” the Mossad agent who had played a key role in the capture of Vanunu in 1986, saw the news of his release on television. She knew that to many Israelis she was still a heroine, someone who had used her guile for a classic sexual entrapment. To others, she remained a Mata Hari, a calculating seductress who destroyed the life of an idealist who felt he was driven by the higher cause of world peace.
But Cindy (the code name she operated under for Mossad) had little to say publicly after she saw Vanunu emerge from his prison. “It’s all in the past. I did my job. End of story,” she said (to the author). Just as Vanunu had spent his long years in jail, reliving what he had done and each time concluding “I did the right thing,” so Cindy had undoubtedly also tried to come to terms with what she had done.
Today she lives in an expensive home beside a golf course twenty-five minutes outside Orlando. She looks good for her age, the color of her hair helped by hairdressing skills to hide the effects of the Florida sun. Deeply tanned, she favors loose-fitting casuals to hide the spread of early middle age. Her two daughters are now teenagers who attend an exclusive private school and never, in public at least, speak about their mother’s past. But friends at the golf club where Cindy enjoys taking lunch say she has developed a real fear that Vanunu or one of his supporters will come and harm her.
Vanunu has denied he has any interest in doing so. “For me, she is just someone who happened. I was young and lonely. She was there. I took her on trust,” was how he summed up the fatal mistake that allowed her to entice him to Rome on t
he promise of sex. Instead, he fell into the hands of Mossad.
In 2004, Cindy—who is listed in local Orlando records as Cheryl Hanin Bentov—is a Realtor, working with her husband and her mother, Riki Hanin, who lives nearby. All three are active members of their Jewish community. The Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot claimed that “she left Israel to flee the media and the people who burrowed into her life. This bothered her a lot. She was terrified about journalists who came into her home and asked questions. She felt a need to run. Cheryl wants only one thing: a normal, quiet life. She still has shaky nerves as she tried to bury the past. Even relatives who talked about her found themselves banished from the family. She moves between discretion and paranoia.”
If that is true, then it was a high price to pay for becoming Mossad’s most infamous seductress.
On Meir Dagan’s desk was a report from the New York consulate that there was no need for concern over the much promoted CBS television documentary on the death of Princess Diana. The full role of Mossad was still securely hidden and seemed likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. The documentation (which had enabled part of the story to appear in this book) had been sealed in Mossad’s archives with a printed warning on the box. “Not to be opened without prior written order of Director General.”
Of far more concern to Dagan was another report, this one from the Washington embassy, that once more the Bush administration, like its predecessors, was preparing to block the release of a whistleblower as dangerous to America as Vanunu had been to Israel. He was Jonathan Pollard, who was serving a life sentence in a high-security prison in Bulmer, North Carolina, having been found guilty of being the greatest traitor in the history of the United States. Pollard, unlike Vanunu, had been sentenced to die in jail.