Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

CHAPTER 8 ORA AND THE MONSTER

The cavernous lobby of the Palestine-Meridian Hotel in Baghdad was crowded as usual on that last Friday in April 1988, and the mood was cheerful. Iraq had just won a decisive battle against Iran in the Gulf of Basra and the consensus was that their war was finally drawing to an end after seven bloody years.

One reason for impending Iraqi victory could be attributed to the foreigners who sat in the lobby in their well-tailored blazers and trousers with uniformly knife-edge creases, the permanent smiles of successful salesmen on their faces. They were arms dealers, there to sell their latest weapons, though they rarely used the word, preferring more neutral expressions: “optimum interface,” “control systems,” “growth capability.” Between them, the salesmen represented the arms industries of Europe, the Soviet Union, the United States, and China. The common language of their trade was English, which they spoke in a variety of dialects.

Their Iraqi hosts needed no translation: what they were being offered was a range of bombs, torpedoes, mines, and other destructive gadgetry. The brochures being passed around showed helicopters with cartoonish names — Sea Knight, Chinook, Sea Stallion. One chopper, “Big Mother,” could carry a small bridge; another, “the Incredible Machine,” could airlift a platoon of troops. Leaflets showed guns that could fire two thousand rounds a minute or hit a moving target in pitch-black darkness with a computer-chip sight. Every and any kind of weapon was for sale.

Their hosts spoke an esoteric jargon the salesmen also understood: “twenty on the day,” “thirty at half-and-half minus one”: twenty million dollars on day of delivery, or thirty million dollars for a consignment, payable half down, the balance on the day before the weapons were shipped. All payments would be made in U.S. dollars, still the preferred currency in this closed world.

Watching over this ever-shifting bazaar of dealers and clients meeting over mint tea were officers from the Da’lrat Al-Mukhabarat Al-Amah, Iraq’s main intelligence organization, controlled by Sabba’a, Saddam Hussein’s almost as fearsome half-brother.

Some of the arms dealers had been in the hotel lobby on a very different day seven years before when their stunned hosts had told them that Israel, an enemy even more hated than Iran, had struck a powerful blow against Iraq’s military machine.

Since the formation of the Jewish state, a formal state of war had existed between Israel and Iraq. Israel had felt confident its forces could win a conventional war. But in 1977, Mossad discovered the French government, which had provided Israel with its own nuclear capability, had also given Iraq a reactor and “technical assistance.” The facility was Al-Tuweitha, north of Baghdad.

The Israeli air force began planning how to bomb the site before it became “hot” with the uranium rods in the reactor core. To destroy it then would cause widespread death and pollution and turn Baghdad and a sizable area of Iraq into an irradiated desert — and earn Israel global condemnation.

For these reasons, Yitzhak Hofi, then Mossad’s chief, opposed the raid, arguing an air strike would anyway result in a heavy death toll among the French technicians and would isolate European countries Israel was trying to reassure of its peaceful intentions. Bombing the reactor would also effectively end the delicate maneuvering to persuade Egypt to sign a peace treaty.

He found himself presiding over a divided house. Several of his department chiefs argued that there was no alternative but to neutralize the reactor. Saddam was a ruthless enemy; once he had a nuclear weapon, he would not hesitate to use it against Israel. And since when had Israel worried unduly about winning friends in Europe? America was all that mattered, and the whisper from Washington was that taking out the reactor would result in no more than a slap on the wrist from the administration.

Hofi tried a different tack. He suggested the United States should bring diplomatic pressure to bear on France to stop the export of the reactor. Washington received a curt rebuff from Paris. Israel then chose a more direct route. Hofi despatched a team of katsas to raid the French plant at La Seyne-sur-Mer, near Toulon, where the core for the Iraqi reactor was being built. The core was destroyed by an organization no one had ever heard of previously — the “French Ecological Group.” Hofi had personally chosen the name.

While the French began to build a new core, the Iraqis sent Yahya Al-Meshad, a member of its Atomic Energy Commission, to Paris to arrange the shipment of nuclear fuel to Baghdad. Hofi sent a kidon team to assassinate him. While the others patrolled the surrounding streets, two of them used a passkey to enter Al-Meshad’s bedroom. They cut his throat and stabbed him through the heart. The room was ransacked to look like robbery. A prostitute in an adjoining room told police she had serviced the scientist hours before his death. Later, entertaining another client, she had heard “unusual movement” in Al-Meshad’s room. Hours after she reported this to the police, she was killed in a hit-and-run incident. The car was never found. The kidon team caught an El Al flight back to Tel Aviv.

Despite this further blow Iraq, aided by France, continued with its bid to become a nuclear power. In Tel Aviv, the Israeli air force continued its own preparations while intelligence chiefs wrangled with Hofi over his continued objections. The Mossad chief found a challenge from an unexpected quarter. His deputy, Nahum Admoni, argued destroying the reactor was not essential but would teach “any other Arabs with big ideas a lesson.”

By October 1980, the debate preoccupied every cabinet meeting Menachem Begin chaired. Familiar arguments were revisited. Increasingly, Hofi became a lone voice against the attack. Nevertheless he struggled on, producing well-written position papers, knowing he was writing his own professional obituary.

Admoni increasingly made no secret of his contempt for Hofi’s position. The two men, who had been close friends, became cold colleagues. Nevertheless, it took a further six months of bitter conflict between the embattled Mossad chief and his senior staff before the general staff approved the attack on March 15, 1981.

The attack was a tactical masterpiece. Eight F-16 fighter-bombers, escorted by six F-15 fighter-interceptors, flew at sand-dune level across Jordan before streaking toward Iraq. They reached the target at the planned moment, 5:34 P.M. local time, minutes after the French construction staff had left. The death toll was nine. The nuclear plant was reduced to rubble. The aircraft returned unharmed. Hofi’s career in Mossad was over. Admoni replaced him.

Now, on that April morning in 1988, the arms dealers in the lobby who, seven years before, had commiserated with their shocked hosts on the Israeli attack — before selling Iraq improved radar systems — would have been stunned to know that in the hotel a Mossad agent was quietly noting their names and what they were selling.

Earlier that Friday, business in the lobby had been briefly interrupted by the arrival of Sabba’a Al-Tikriti, the head of Iraqi secret police, accompanied by his own Praetorian phalanx of bodyguards. Saddam Hussein’s half brother strode to the elevator, on his way to a rooftop suite. Waiting there was the tall, buxom prostitute specially flown in from Paris for his pleasure. It was highly paid, high-risk work. Some of the previous whores had simply disappeared after Sabba’a had finished with them.

The security chief left in midafternoon. Shortly afterward, from a suite adjoining the prostitute’s, emerged a tall young man dressed in a blue cotton jacket and chinos. He was good-looking in a slightly effete way, with a nervous habit of stroking his mustache or rubbing his face that somehow increased his vulnerability.

His name was Farzad Bazoft. In the details on the hotel registration form — a copy of which had been routinely sent to Sabba’a’s ministry — Bazoft had described himself as the “chief foreign correspondent” for The Observer, the London-based Sunday national newspaper. The description was inaccurate: only the newspaper’s staff reporters on overseas assignments were allowed to call themselves “foreign correspondents.” Bazoft was a freelance journalist who, for the past year, had contributed to The Observer several stories with Middle Eastern themes. Bazoft had admitted to reporters from other news organizations who were also on this trip to Baghdad that he always passed himself off as The Observer’s chief foreign correspondent on trips to cities like Baghdad because it ensured he had the best available hotel room. The harmless fiction was seen as another example of his endearing boyishness.

Unknown to his newspaper colleagues, there was an altogether darker side to Bazoft’s personality, one that could possibly jeopardize them if they were ever suspected of being involved in the real reason he was in Baghdad. Bazoft was a Mossad spy.

He had been recruited after he had arrived in London three years before from Tehran, where his increasingly outspoken views on the Khomeini regime had put his life in danger. Like many before him, Bazoft found London alien and English people reserved. He had tried to find a role for himself in the Iranian community in exile, and for a while his considerable knowledge of the current political structure in Tehran made him a welcome guest at their dinner tables. But the sight of the same familiar faces soon palled for the ambitious and restless young man.

Bazoft began to look around for more excitement than dissecting a piece of news from Tehran. He began to establish contacts with Iran’s enemy, Iraq. In the mid-1980s there were a large number of Iraqis in London, welcome visitors because Britain saw Iraq not only as a substantial importer of its goods, but also as a nation which, under Saddam Hussein, would subdue the threatening Islamic fundamentalism of the Khomeini regime.

Bazoft found himself “singing for my supper” at Iraqi parties. His new hosts were more relaxed and ready “to let down their hair” than Iranians. In turn they were captivated by his gentle manners and endless witticisms about the ayatollahs of Tehran.

At one party had been an Iraqi businessman, Abu Al-Hibid. He had listened to Bazoft — once more, slightly tipsy by the end of the evening — endlessly proclaiming his abiding ambition to be a reporter and how his heroes were Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who had brought down President Nixon. Bazoft told Abu Al-Hibid he would die happy if he could topple the Ayatollah Khomeini. By now Bazoft was contributing articles to a small-circulation Iranian newspaper for exiles in Britain.

Abu Al-Hibid was the alias for an Iraqi-born katsa. In his next report to Tel Aviv, he included a note about Bazoft, his present work, and his aspirations. There was nothing unusual about doing that; hundreds of names every week were forwarded, each to find its place in Mossad’s data bank.

But Nahum Admoni was running Mossad and eager to develop his contacts in Iraq. The London katsa was instructed to cultivate Bazoft. Over leisurely dinners, Bazoft complained to Al-Hibid that his editor was not making full use of his potential. His host suggested he should try to break into mainstream English journalism. There should be an opening for a reporter with good linguistic skills and knowledge of Iran. Al-Hibid suggested the BBC would be a starting point.

Within the broadcasting organization were several sayanim whose tasks included monitoring forthcoming programs on Israel and keeping an eye on persons recruited for the BBC’s Arab-language service. Whether any sayan had a direct role in the employment of Bazoft will never be known for certain, but soon after meeting Al-Hibid, he was hired by the BBC for a research assignment. He did well. Other work followed. Desk editors found they could trust Bazoft to make sense of the intrigues of Tehran.

In Tel Aviv, Admoni decided it was time to make the next move. With Irangate’s revelations gathering pace in the United States, the Mossad chief deliberately decided to expose the role in the burgeoning scandal of Yakov Nimrodi, a former Aman operative. He had been a member of the consortium David Kimche had created and had used his own intelligence background to keep Mossad out of what was happening. A wily, fast-talking man, Nimrodi had, as the arms-for-hostages deal began, driven U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz to comment that “Israel’s agenda is not the same as ours and an intelligence relationship with Israel concerning Iran might not be one upon which we could fully rely.”

When Kimche had pulled out of the consortium, Nimrodi had remained for a while longer. But, as the reverberations from Washington grew louder and more embarrassing for Israel, the former Aman operative had disappeared back into the woodwork. Admoni, smarting at the way Nimrodi had treated Mossad, had other plans: he would publicly embarrass Nimrodi and at the same time give Bazoft a career boost that would enable him to better serve Mossad.

Al-Hibid fed sufficient details to the reporter for Bazoft to realize this could be his big break. He took the story to The Observer. It was published with references to “a mysterious Israeli, Nimrodi, being implicated in Irangate.” Soon Bazoft was a regular contributor to The Observer. Finally, a coveted prize for someone who was not on staff, he was given a desk of his own. It meant he would no longer have to pay his own telephone costs to track down a story from home and he would be able to charge entertainment expenses. But Bazoft would still only be paid for what appeared in the paper. It was an incentive for him to find more stories and to push hard for any trip to the Middle East. On those occasions, he would be living on full expenses and, like all reporters, would be able to manipulate them to give him extra cash above what he had spent and could genuinely reclaim. A shortage of money had always been a problem for Bazoft, something he was careful to hide from his Observer colleagues. Certainly none suspected that the reporter who spent hours talking in Farsi on the phone to his contacts was a convicted thief. Bazoft had spent eighteen months in jail after raiding a building society. Passing sentence, the judge had ordered Bazoft should be deported after he was released. Bazoft appealed on the reasonable grounds he would be executed if sent back to Iran. Though the appeal was rejected, he was granted “exceptional leave” to remain in Britain indefinitely. The grounds for such an unusual step have remained locked in a Home Office vault.

Whether Mossad, having spotted Bazoft’s potential, used one of its well-placed sayanim in Whitehall to facilitate matters has remained an unresolved question. But the possibility cannot be discounted.

After Bazoft was released from prison, he began to suffer bouts of depression, which he treated with homeopathic medicines. This background had been unearthed by the Mossad katsa. Later an English writer, Rupert Alison, a conservative member of Parliament and a recognized expert on intelligence recruiting methods, would say a personality like Bazoft’s made him a prime target for Mossad.

A year after they had first met, Al-Hibid had recruited Bazoft. How and where this was done has remained unknown. The extra money would have certainly been a consideration for Bazoft, still short of cash. And, for someone who so often viewed life through a dramatic prism, the prospect of living out another of his dreams — to be a spy in the tradition of another foreign correspondent he admired, Philby, who had also once worked for The Observer, as a cover for his work as a Soviet spy — could also have been a factor.

More certain, Bazoft began to carve a small reputation for himself; what he lacked in writing style, he made up with solid research. Everything he unearthed in Iran was passed over to the London katsa. As well as stories for The Observer, Bazoft was also being given assignments by Independent Television News and Mirror Group Newspapers. At the time the foreign editor of the Daily Mirror was Nicholas Davies. In his safari-style suit, Davies might have stepped out of the pages of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. He had a reporter’s gift for gossip and an ability to hold his drink, and was always ready to buy his round. His north-of-England accent had all but gone: colleagues said he had spent hours perfecting the dulcet tone he now used. Women found appealing his easy good manners and the commanding way he could order dinner and select a good bottle of wine. They loved his been-there-done-that mentality, the way he spoke of faraway places as if they were part of his private fief. Late at night over another drink, he would hint at adventures that cynics said was simply Nick romancing.

Not for a moment did anyone — his colleagues at the Mirror, his wide circle of friends outside the newspaper world, even his wife, Janet, an Australian-born actress who had starred in the highly successful BBC television series Doctor Who—know that Nahum Admoni had authorized Davies should be recruited.

Davies would always insist that even if he had “been approached,” he had never served as a Mossad agent and that his presence in the hotel lobby on that April Friday afternoon was purely as a journalist watching the arms dealers going about their work. He could not later recall what he and Bazoft had spoken about while in the lobby, but said, “I imagine it was about what was going on.” He refused to elaborate, a position he would steadfastly maintain.

The pair had traveled to Iraq with a small group of other journalists (among them the author of this book on assignment for the Press Association, Britain’s national wire service). On the flight from London, Davies had regaled the party with ribald stories about Robert Maxwell, who had finally bought Mirror Newspapers. He called him “a sexual monster with a voracious appetite for seducing secretaries on his staff.” He made it very clear he was close to Maxwell, though: “Captain Bob is sheer hell to be with, he knows I know too much to sack me.” Davies’s claim that he personally was fireproof because of what he knew about the tycoon was dismissed by his listeners as hyperbole.

On the flight, Farzad Bazoft was quiet, saying little to the others, confining himself to talking to the flight attendants in Farsi. At Baghdad Airport his language skills helped to ease the translation difficulties with the Iraqi “minders” assigned to the party. In a stage whisper, Davies said they were really security agents. “The dozy buggers wouldn’t recognize a spy if he was pointed out,” Davies said prophetically.

At the Palestine-Meridian, the man from the Mirror informed his traveling companions he was only there because he was “bloody bored with London.” But he made it clear he had no intention of following the official itinerary, which included a visit to the Basra battlefield, where the Iraqi army was eager to display the spoils of war after its victory over the Iranian forces. Bazoft said he didn’t think the trip south to the gulf would interest his newspaper.

That April Friday evening in 1988, having spent hours in the hotel lobby watching the arms dealers come and go, and sharing several conversations with Davies, Farzad Bazoft ate alone in the hotel coffee shop. He declined an invitation to join other reporters from London, saying he had to “think through my schedule.” During the meal he was called to take a telephone call in the lobby. He returned a few minutes later looking pensive. Having ordered dessert, he abruptly left the table, ignoring ribald jokes from some of the reporters that he had a girl stashed away.

He did not return until the next day. He appeared even more tense, saying to, among others, Kim Fletcher — a freelance journalist then working for the Daily Mail—that “it’s all right for you lot; you’re British born and bred. I’m an Iranian. That makes me different.” Fletcher was not alone among the English reporters who wondered if this was “Bazoft banging on again about how hard it was to have a background like his.”

Bazoft spent most of the day pacing the hotel lobby or in his suite. Twice he left the hotel for short periods. In the lobby he had several conversations with Nicholas Davies, who later said that Bazoft was “like anyone on a story, wondering if he would get what he wanted.” For his part, the Mirror foreign editor announced he would not be writing anything, “because there is nothing here to interest Captain Bob.”

Late that afternoon, Bazoft once more left the hotel. As usual he was followed by an Iraqi minder. But when Bazoft reappeared, he was alone. Reporters heard Bazoft tell Davies he wasn’t “going to be followed around like a bitch in heat.”

Davies’s laughter, however, did little to lighten Bazoft’s mood. Once more he went to his suite. When he next appeared in the lobby, he told several reporters that he would not be returning to London with them. “Something’s come up,” he said in the mysterious voice he liked to use at times.

“It would have to be a good story to keep me here,” Fletcher said.

Hours later Bazoft left the hotel. It would be the last any of his companions would see of him until he appeared on a video distributed worldwide by the Iraqi regime seven weeks after his arrest, having confessed to being a Mossad spy.

During that time, Bazoft was on a Mossad mission that would have taxed the skills of a trained katsa. He had been ordered to try to discover how advanced were Gerald Bull’s plans to provide Iraq with a supergun. That the journalist was given such a task was a clear indicator of how far his controllers were prepared to exploit him. Mossad had also taken its own steps to ensure that, if Bazoft was caught, it would appear he was working for a London-based company, Defence Systems Limited (DSL). When Bazoft was arrested close to one of the supergun test sites, the Iraqi agents also found he had in his possession a number of documents indicating that Bazoft had made several calls from the hotel to the offices of DSL. The company has denied all knowledge of Bazoft, or having any contact with Mossad.

On the videotape, Bazoft’s eyes at times stared vacantly, before suddenly blinking rapidly and darting around the room, with its pleasant backdrop of a curtain patterned with flowing tendrils. He looked like a person who believed he was powerless to avoid his annihilation.

Mossad’s psychologists in Tel Aviv studied every frame. For them the stages of Bazoft’s disintegration followed the same pattern Israeli interrogators had noticed when they extracted confessions from a captured terrorist. First Bazoft would have experienced disbelief, an instinctive denial that what was happening was actually happening to him. Then would have come an overwhelmingly sudden and shattering realization: It was happening to him. At that stage, the helpless reporter may have experienced two other reactions: paralyzing fright and a compulsion to talk. This would have been the time he made his confession on the video that he was a Mossad agent.

His monotonous tone suggested he had experienced bouts of exogenous depression while in captivity, a result of being removed from familiar surroundings and having his normal lifestyle totally disrupted. He would have felt continuously tired, and what sleep he was permitted would have left him unrefreshed. That would be when self-accusation had been at its most destructive, and his sense of hopelessness maximized. Self-accusation would have gripped him. Like the prisoner in Kafka’s The Trial, he would have felt “stupid” over the way he had behaved and put others at risk.

On the video, Bazoft’s eyes showed signs he had been drugged. Mossad’s pharmacologists found it impossible to decide what drugs had been used.

Nahum Admoni knew that such an abject confession as the video contained was the prelude to Bazoft’s execution. The Mossad chief ordered his psychological warfare specialists to launch a campaign to deflect embarrassing questions about the service’s involvement with Bazoft.

Members of Parliament in Britain soon publicly criticized The Observer for sending Bazoft to Iraq. At the same time, trusted reporters were fed stories that Saddam Hussein was viewing videos of every stage of Bazoft’s interrogation. It may well have been true. More certain, it was an excuse to remind the world that torture and murder were instruments of state policy in Iraq. Bazoft was hanged in Baghdad in March 1990. His last reported words on the gallows were: “I am not an Israeli spy.”

In London, Nicholas Davies read the report on the execution on a Reuters message that came to the Daily Mirror foreign desk. As instructed about all stories emanating from the Middle East he judged to be important, Davies took the report up to the office of Robert Maxwell.

Since 1974, the publisher had been the most powerful sayan in Britain. Davies would remember: “Bob read the report without comment,” but could not recall “in all honesty” what he had felt about Bazoft’s death.

In Tel Aviv, among those who read about the execution was one of the most colorful characters to have served Israel’s spymasters, Ari Ben-Menashe. Until then he had never known of the existence of Bazoft. But typically, that did not stop the mercurial Ben-Menashe feeling a sense of grief that “another good man had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.” It was emotional judgments like that which had made the darkly handsome, quick-witted Ben-Menashe such an unlikely candidate for a key position in the Israeli intelligence community. Yet, for ten years, 1977–87, he had held a sensitive post in the External Relations Department (ERD) of the Israel Defense Forces, one of the most powerful and secret organizations in the intelligence community.

ERD had been created in 1974 by then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. Smarting over the way Israel had been completely surprised by the Syrian-Egyptian onslaught in the Yom Kippur War, he had decided the only way to avert such an intelligence failure occurring again was to have a watchdog to monitor other intelligence services and, at the same time, conduct its own intelligence gathering.

Four branches had been created to operate under the ERD umbrella. The most important was SIM; it provided “special assistance” for the growing number of “liberation movements” in Iran, Iraq, and, to a lesser extent, Syria and Saudi Arabia. The second branch, RESH, handled relationships with friendly intelligence networks. Top of those was the South African Bureau of State Security. Mossad had a similar unit called TEVEL, which also had close links with the Republic’s intelligence community. The relationship between RESH and TEVEL was often tense because of the inevitable overlapping.

A third ERD department, Foreign Liaison, dealt with Israeli military attachés and other IDF personnel working overseas. The department also monitored the activities of foreign military attachés in Israel. That brought further conflict, this time with Shin Bet, who until then had the sole prerogative to report on such activities. The fourth arm of ERD was called Intelligence Twelve. Set up to liaise with Mossad, this unit had further soured relations with the men on the upper floor of their building on King Saul Boulevard. They felt overall that ERD would diminish their power.

Ben-Menashe had been attached to RESH, with a specific responsibility for the Iranian “account.” He arrived at a time when Israel was about to lose its most powerful ally in the region. For over a quarter of a century, the shah of Iran had worked diligently behind the scenes to persuade Israel’s Arab neighbors to end their hostility toward the Jewish state. He was still making limited headway, notably with King Hussein of Jordan, when the shah’s own Peacock Throne was swept away by Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic fundamentalist revolution in February 1979. Khomeini promptly handed over the Israeli embassy building in Tehran to the PLO. Equally swiftly, Israel turned to helping the Kurds wage guerrilla war against the new regime. At the same time, Israel continued to supply arms to Tehran for them to use against Iraq. The “kill both sides” policy that David Kimche and others in Mossad advocated was well and truly in force.

Ben-Menashe soon found himself involved in David Kimche’s grand design to trade hostages for arms with Iran. Both men traveled together to Washington, where Ben-Menashe claimed he prowled the wide corridors of the White House, met President Reagan, and was on first-name terms with his senior aides.

Charming, and with a devil-may-care attitude, Ben-Menashe was a popular figure at Israeli intelligence community parties, where senior politicians could swap stories with the spymasters to mutual benefit. Few could tell a tale better than Ben-Menashe. By the time Kimche was starting the hostages-for-arms deal, Ben-Menashe had been appointed Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir’s “personal consultant” on intelligence, having told Shamir he knew where “all the bodies were buried.” Kimche decided it made Ben-Menashe the ideal choice to work with the one intelligence officer he admired above all others, Rafi Eitan. With the full approval of the prime minister, Ben-Menashe was released from all other duties to work with Eitan. The two men moved to New York in March 1981. Their purpose, Ben-Menashe would recall, was straightforward: “Our friends in Tehran were desperate to have sophisticated electronic equipment for their air force and air and ground defenses. Israel, of course, wanted to help them as much as possible in their war against Iraq.”

Traveling on British passports, always a favorite of Mossad, they set up a company in New York’s financial district. They quickly recruited a team of fifty brokers who scoured the U.S. electronics industry for suitable equipment. All sales were accompanied by end-user certificates that stated the equipment was to be used only in Israel. Ben-Menashe would recall: “We had packs of certificates which we would fill out and send to Tel Aviv to keep on file in case anyone ever bothered to check.”

The equipment was flown to Tel Aviv. There, without going through customs, it was transferred onto aircraft chartered from Guinness Peat in Ireland and flown to Tehran. Guinness Peat, a well-regarded aircharter company, was an obvious choice. The idea of using Irish pilots had also been Rafi Eitan’s. He had maintained what he called his “Irish connections. When it comes to a deal, the Irish understand the rules. The only one which matters is to pay on the day.”

As the volume of the New York operation increased, it became necessary to have a central holding company to process the billions of dollars involved in the purchasing and selling-on of arms. The name chosen for the company was ORA, “light” in Hebrew.

In March 1983, Ben-Menashe was told by Rafi Eitan to recruit Nicholas Davies into ORA. How the old spymaster had heard of Davies was almost certainly through Mossad; in turn the service would have been told about Davies by Bazoft, who had done freelance journalist work for the Mirror foreign editor. Later that month, Ben-Menashe and Davies met in the lobby of London’s Churchill Hotel. By the time they left, Ben-Menashe knew that Davies was “our man.” The next day they lunched at Davies’s home. Present was Davies’s wife, Janet. Ben-Menashe quickly formed the impression that the sophisticated, smooth-talking Davies was afraid of losing her. “That was good. It made him vulnerable.”

Davies’s role as a consultant to ORA was finally settled over a meeting at the Dan Acadia Hotel on the beachfront north of Tel Aviv. Ben-Menashe remembered: “We agreed he would be our London conduit for arms, our contact man for various Iranian and other deals. His home address would be used on ORA stationery and during the day his direct office phone number—822-3530—would be used by our Iranian contacts.”

In return, Davies would receive fees commensurate with his newfound role as a key player in the arms-for-Iran operation. In all, he would receive $1.5 million, deposited in bank accounts in Grand Cayman, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Part of the money went to settle his divorce. Janet received a single payment of $50,000. Davies cleared all his bank debts and bought a four-story house. It became ORA’s European headquarters, its phone number—231-0015—another contact for the arms dealers who now had become part of the journalist’s life. Through his position as foreign editor, Davies began to visit the United States, Europe, Iran, and Iraq.

Ben-Menashe noted approvingly that “on his travels he introduced himself as a representative of the ORA Group. He would set up a meeting, usually for a weekend, and he would fly to the city concerned, arrange for the number of weapons to be supplied and how payment was to be made.”

In 1987, Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani received a cable from ORA concerning the sale to Iran of four thousand TOW missiles at a cost of $13,800 each. The cable concluded with the confirmation that “Nicholas Davies is a representative of ORA Limited, with the authority to sign contracts.”

It was a champagne time for Ari Ben-Menashe, Nicholas Davies, and the powerful figure who loomed ever larger in the background of unfolding events, Robert Maxwell. But none suspected for a moment the grim truth of the Hollywood cliché Davies liked to quote, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”