“I soon knew that the Vatican would help Solidarity. I calculated they would do so through Solidarity’s Brussels office, a kind of unofficial embassy. A Polish Jew, Jerzy Milewski, good on knocking on doors, was the main fund-raiser.”
Boris Solomatin, the KGB rezident (station chief) in Rome, would confirm. “We knew all about the secret alliance between the CIA and the Vatican to support Solidarity.” Less certain is Solomatin’s claim that the KGB had “an important spy in the Vatican.” Yet the claim cannot be totally dismissed. The papal nuncio in Ireland, the late Archbishop Gaetano Alibrandi, said in an interview (with the author) following the attempt on the pope’s life in May 1981: “The Soviets appeared to have inside information as to the Holy See’s position on foreign affairs.”
On that April evening in 1983, late though the hour was, the pope’s then senior secretary Stanislaw Dzwisz and Marcinkus were waiting to be briefed. Marcinkus had recently been promoted by Pope John Paul to become governor of Vatican City. He was also now in charge of security for all the pontiff’s foreign trips.
The pope’s former English-language secretary, Monsignor John Magee, now bishop of Clones in Ireland, provided a rare insight into Poggi. “He was imbued with well-founded confidence in his own abilities, his mission in life and his relationship with God.”
Settled in Dzwisz’s office in the papal secretariat in the Apostolic Palace, Poggi told them that the outgoing United States ambassador to Poland, the soft-spoken Francis J. Meehan, had revealed that the Reagan administration was going to arrange the transfer of $200 million to support Solidarity. The news came at the end of Poggi’s twenty-third visit to Warsaw in the past two years. Each time he had stayed with Cardinal Josef Glemp, primate of All Poland, availing himself of the lead-lined room and speaking in Latin. It made no difference. Mossad, Israel’s secret intelligence service, had carried out a major coup only two months before Poggi was briefing Marcinkus and Dzwisz.
It had been set up by Nahum Admoni, the spymaster who had dined with Poggi in Paris and discussed church affairs. Then Mossad’s director of operations, Rafi Eitan, had smooth-talked the U.S. Department of Justice and the developer of the software it prized above all else in its electronic arsenal to part with a copy. The software was Promis.
Down the years Bill Hamilton, the president of Inslaw, would say of Rafi Eitan and the cool way he stole Promis: “Rafi fooled me. And he fooled a lot of others.” Eitan, now in his seventies, admitted (to the author in 2004): “It was quite a coup. Yes, quite a coup.”
The Israelis deconstructed Promis and inserted a trapdoor in the software. Dr. Jerzy Milewski, the hardworking Polish Jew responsible for Solidarity’s fund-raising, was persuaded by Eitan on a visit to Brussels to accept the doctored software “as a gift from Israel.” Mossad had become the first intelligence service to penetrate the heart and soul of Solidarity.
Born and bred in Cicero—the Chicago suburb that was also the birthplace of Al Capone—Paul Marcinkus had acquired many of the gangster’s mannerisms, evident in the way he would terrorize a teller in the Vatican Bank or threaten a bishop. Marcinkus also rejoiced in being on what he once claimed was “Moscow’s Top Ten list of targets. Next to the pope, I am the man they most want to knock off.” But for the Vatican’s banker he had some unusual clients: the casino at Monte Carlo, the Beretta firearms company, and a Canadian company that made oral contraceptives. From the day he took over as the bank’s president, Marcinkus had increased its investments beyond all expectations. By 1983, on the night he listened to Poggi, the overall bank deposits were worth tens of billions of dollars. Marcinkus had once boasted to Monsignor John Magee, “It is a real gravy train.”
The arrival of the CIA as a client was welcomed by Marcinkus, hosting Casey and Brenneke for dinner in the Villa Sritch, where the banker had a three-bedroom apartment. Served by handsome young Romans—youths Marcinkus was known to refer to as “my bodyguards”—the tall, heavyset archbishop learned how the Vatican Bank would act as a conduit for the $200 million for Solidarity. Later, as he and his dinner guests played a round of golf at the Aquastina—Rome’s most exclusive golf club, which had gifted Marcinkus a membership—the final details were settled.
The money would leave America from a number of banks, the Bank of America and Citibank among them. Brenneke had devised special codes for all his transactions. These changed on a regular basis. No transactions remained in any of his accounts for more than seventy-two hours. The money for Solidarity would enter the Vatican Bank from the Banco de Panama (the Panamanian national bank), the Standard Bank of South Africa, and Coutts, the Queen’s bankers, in London. The money would then be rerouted to Bank Lambert in Brussels. The system was what Brenneke called “SOP”—standard operating procedure. In part, it was designed to deal with what Casey had called “a tricky little problem.”
Solidarity was concerned that if it became known it was receiving substantial financial aid from Washington, it could lead the Jaruzelski regime to crack down on the movement—even perhaps arrest its leaders. But that secrecy would later lead to a very public clash between one of President Reagan’s key advisers, Professor Richard Pipes, and President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Pipes was said to have alleged that he knew well that large sums of money had been transferred to Solidarity through several accounts operated by the CIA. There were reports Pipes had challenged Brzezinski that the money had never reached Solidarity—where did it go? It was a question Brzezinski did not answer then, and has not since.
At best, only a small portion of foreign money—which was urgently needed by Solidarity to pay its members a token weekly wage while on strike—was ever received by the Brussels headquarters of Solidarnosc. Elizabeth Wasiutynski, whose parents had served in the NSZ, part of the Polish resistance, became head of Solidarnosc in Brussels. She insisted that money for Solidarnosc came from the AFL-CIO, international trade union organizations, and the National Endowment for Democracy. Further sums came later through an organization called the Stanton Group in the United States. It was donated on behalf of American taxpayers.
“We received no more than two hundred thousand dollars annually. There was no large or even small amount of money I’m aware of funded to the Solidarnosc leadership from the CIA. Nor is there an echo of any such activity since Poland’s independence in 1989. I think the CIA is taking credit for something it did not do,” she said. “Had the CIA indeed been involved, we would have had some sort of more fertile ground in Washington.”
Sources at the Bank Lambert in Brussels insist it had no record of such a large payment coming into its coffers from the Vatican Bank. So where did it go? Enter now, not for the first time, one of the undisputed grand villains of financial chicanery—Robert Maxwell.
The Israeli-doctored Promis software had been sold to General Wojciech Jaruzelski, Poland’s Communist ruler, by Maxwell. It was to be used—and was—against Solidarity and anyone who supported Poland’s then fledgling democratic opposition. But during his global sales drive for Promis, Maxwell had, in 1985—when the money transfer to help Solidarity had already taken place—sold Promis to Belgium’s counterespionage service, the Sûreté de l’Etat. It gave Mossad a window into Belgium’s intelligence operations—including financial operations by Semion Yukovich Mogilevich.
At that time, still operating from his base in Budapest, Hungary, Mogilevich was rapidly establishing himself as a specialist in major financial crime in preparation for stepping into the post-Communist financial world. By 1985, he had offices in Geneva, Nigeria, and the Cayman Islands. He also held an Israeli passport, which Maxwell had arranged. Mogilevich had been introduced by Maxwell to a Swiss banker who ran an investment brokerage in Geneva, and had regular business dealings with the Vatican Bank and Bank Lambert.
Marcinkus already was deeply ensnared in massive financial scams involving the bank, which had led Pope John Paul to agree to reimburse those swindled by Marcinkus’s activities.
In one of the more remarkable documents publicly issued by any bank, the Vatican stated in May 1984 that “international banks will get back approximately two-thirds of the 600 million dollars they had loaned to the Vatican Bank. Of that some 250 million dollars will be paid by June 30, 1984. This payment is being made by the Vatican on the basis of non-culpability but in recognition of a moral involvement.”
By then, Marcinkus was a virtual prisoner inside the Vatican, not daring to step outside its walls for fear of arrest. A mounting number of criminal charges awaited his appearance in court. But Marcinkus still went to his office every weekday to “supervise”—the word the Vatican used—the daily affairs of the bank.
Somewhere in that tangled web—the CIA, Marcinkus money laundering, Polish intelligence, Mossad, and Maxwell—lay the answer to that question asked publicly by the distinguished Richard Pipes. Where did the $200 million for Solidarity go? The answer turned out to be staggeringly simple. Using Promis, the money had been intercepted by Mossad to finance its own black operations.
In the past, the intelligence service had used its doctored version of the software to access foreign bank accounts held by Israeli millionaires that they hoped had been discreetly transferred out of a country strapped for cash. Mossad had not only seized the sums, but had also summoned the hapless millionaires to a meeting. They were told that they would be levied a “fine” for their breach of the country’s strict currency regulations. To refuse would mean a trial and certain imprisonment. “They all paid,” Rafi Eitan said (to the author) with undisguised satisfaction.
In March 2004, William Hamilton, president of Inslaw, told the author that using Promis would “make it a relatively simple operation for Mossad to have stolen the money.”
A copy of the software had also ended up in the hands of Osama bin Laden. It had been stolen by Richard Hanssen, a senior FBI computer specialist who was a longtime key spy in the bureau. He is now serving a life sentence for espionage. By then the KGB had sold it to bin Laden for a reported $2 million.
By the spring of 2004, Mossad had continued its hunt for bin Laden. Along the way Meir Dagan had acquired, through his field agents and analysts, a striking psychological profile of bin Laden that probably no other intelligence service could equal. It included how the world’s most wanted man ran al-Qaeda.
If it was a multinational, bin Laden would be its chief executive. There is a board: the close group of terrorists who have been with him from the foundation of al-Qaeda. It has, just like any corporation, divisions: one for finance, another for forward planning, a third for recruiting. There is even one division that handles the making and distribution of his audio- and videotapes. Al-Qaeda’s sole reason for existing is to launch global holy war.
No other organization in living memory has changed the world as completely as al-Qaeda did when on September 11, 2001, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center came crashing down and one side of the Pentagon burst into flames. Thousands of men, women, and children lost their lives in the most deadly terrorist attack on American soil. Never in its history had the mainland United States been the target of such a massive attack. The surprise bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan was the only precedent in living memory—and that had been an assault against a distant military base on a Pacific island.
“The carnage of September 11 was deliberately aimed at civilians and struck at the principal symbols of American hegemony, commercial and financial power, military supremacy and political power. It was a seismic event with incalculable consequences. It exposed the fragility of the United States empire, exploded the myth of its invincibility, and called into question all the certainties and beliefs that had ensured the triumph of American civilisation in the twentieth century. Many correctly feared it was only the first of many atrocities,” wrote Professor Gilles Kepel of the respected Institute for Political Studies in Paris.
Since then, the world has watched numbed at the destruction in Bali and Istanbul, and the massacre in Madrid. The result has been a continual witnessing of the agony of the victims and their families, precipitate drops in stock markets, the threat of bankruptcy of several airlines, and a general upheaval in the world’s economy.
Those are the inescapable truths about a fanatic who knows almost nothing about Western culture, Western thought, or Western ways. He is a man of the Word, and, as history shows, absolute adherents to the text—Hitler and Stalin being two examples—seldom have any imagination, or it is warped beyond comprehension.
Bin Laden is a slave to literal interpretations: the normal intellectual extrapolations upon which much European thinking depends is far beyond his power. For instance, in one of his rambling speeches, he once said he was certain that “a few attacks will see American states secede from the U.S.”
“We must look with total revulsion at the way he has made al-Qaeda a brand name for terror. He has ensured that neither his death, nor a refutation of violence on his part—never likely—will halt Islamic terrorism. Instead, he will continue to release a toxin of poison on our world,” said Dr. Ariel Merari, director of terrorist studies at the Jaffee Center in Tel Aviv.
Bin Laden has resurrected his claim for the restoration into Arab hands of Andalusia, whose civilization marked the high point of Islamic pride. He has began to rekindle across the Muslim world a reminder of that golden era in 1200, for instance, when the Spanish city of Córdoba had nine hundred public baths, and seventy libraries whose shelves were filled with the finest writings in the Muslim world. It had the finest doctors, the greatest restaurants, and, it is said, the most beautiful women. The Madrid bombing massacre has more to do with this dream than with the presence, and now withdrawal, of Spanish troops in Iraq. That is why al-Qaeda terrorists—having been efficiently located by Spanish security hiding in an apartment block in a Madrid suburb—blew themselves up even after the election of Jose Zapatero as the country’s new prime minister in March 2004.
The nearest parallel in history of using violence to reclaim ancient lands was the Nazi dream of Aryan reclamation of those parts of Europe that had Germanic roots. The distinguished commentator Janet Daley has written that “the Wagnerian German romantic mythology of expulsion from homelands leading to a sacred Teutonic mission of rebirth has an uncannily similar ring to the new Islamic claims of Muslim displacement and injustice.”
As bin Laden sat in his cave in the Tora Bora Mountains on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, he was driven by the dream of creating a great caliphate that would stretch from Asia to southern Spain and beyond.
“That is the very real danger of this man. To try and achieve his aim, he will kill and slaughter on a scale that even the Mongols, Genghis Khan, the Crusaders, the Nazis, and the pogroms of Russia would pause to blink over,” said Dr. Merari.
It is now estimated by the CIA that over $100 million has been spent in these past two years on satellite tracking and the use of state-of-the-art electronic tracking equipment to locate bin Laden.
Unlike Saddam Hussein, bin Laden has vowed he will die a “martyr’s death” rather than face capture. His body is festooned with hand grenades, making him a pin pull away from eternity. At night he sleeps on a mat surrounded by explosives.
Al-Qaeda operatives—its suicide bombers who die on missions—do so knowing that the organization’s Pensions Department will take care of their families. No one knows where or when the organization meets. It has no offices. Its turnover is measured by the number of deaths it achieves, the buildings it destroys. Its assets—the explosives and cash that keep it running—are hidden from even the most prying satellite camera.
Bin Laden’s own personal assets—once estimated at £20 million from his share in the family construction business—were frozen in 2001. But he has managed to keep al-Qaeda fully funded from donations from Saudi Arabian princes, oil sheikhs, and wealthy Muslims in Asia.
“Bin Laden is the glue between terror groups that have little in common with each other but are united in a common hatred of the West,”
said a U.S. State Department analyst in Washington.
In 2003, perhaps sensing the net was closing on him, bin Laden appointed “twenty regional commanders” to run al-Qaeda operations. There have been persistent reports that their funding reaches them through the diplomatic bags of rogue states like Iran and, until recently, Libya. In Britain, MI5 has spent months trying to track money earmarked for al-Qaeda.
“So far we have had only our suspicions confirmed, but no hard evidence,” said an MI5 source (to the author).
Whether he lives or dies is of little concern to bin Laden. To his millions of followers in the Muslim world he is a folk hero: the Saudi Arabian multimillionaire who feeds the poor, encourages their children to dance before him, and knows the verses of the Koran better than any Islamic preacher. To them all he is a living prophet come to cleanse the world of what he calls “Western decadence.” With his high cheekbones, narrow face, and gold-fringed robe, he is the classic mountain warrior of the tribesmen who now hide him. His distinct pepper-and-salt beard and sharp, penetrating eyes are the most recognizable image on earth. But his smile is only for his followers, who see him as a hell-storming advocate, living a personal life of such frugality that even they find it hard to match. He is also a man steeped in personal violence, having once driven a captured tank over Russian prisoners in the Afghan war.
Ironically, in those days he was armed by the CIA, who gave him an arsenal of Stingers. When he had helped drive out the Soviet occupiers, he turned against America and its “hamburger and Coca-Cola values.” He takes pride in being its most sought-after enemy. Everywhere he goes, so do his bodyguards: some fifty heavily bearded, taciturn figures. Every man is hand-picked. Each is ready to die for him. Little is known about his private life: his four wives remain at home in Jeddah in Islamic purdah.
Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad Page 50