Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

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.”

Investigators had found that others who could have helped them follow along the money trail were also mysteriously dead. One was Janos Pasztor, a Wall Street analyst. He had worked for Rowland. He died on October 15, 2000, of a previously undiagnosed cancer. The week before, his doctor had given him a clean bill of health.

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.

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.