Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

To ensure this, Kimche assembled a colorful cast of characters to initiate the operation. There was Adnan Khashoggi, the Saudi petrobillionaire, with a habit of eating caviar by the pound and an eye for the current cover girls; Manacher Thorbanifer, a former agent in the shah’s notorious SAVAK secret service who still behaved like a spy, calling meetings for the middle of the night. There was the equally mysterious Yakov Nimrodi, who had run agents for Aman and had once been Israel’s military attaché in Iran during the shah’s regime. He was invariably accompanied by Al Schwimmer, the closemouthed founder of Israel Aircraft Industries.

Khashoggi brokered a deal that was to be a precursor for all that followed. He would head a consortium that would indemnify the United States if Iran failed to live up to its obligations, and would similarly protect Iran if the arms were not acceptable as specified. For these guarantees the consortium would receive a 10 percent fee from the purchase of all the arms with cash provided by the United States. In return it would also act as a buffer to ensure that plausible deniability would remain intact for both the Iranian and U.S. governments if anything went wrong. Everyone understood that the consortium would essentially be working outside any political control and would first and foremost be driven by the profit motive.

In late August 1985, the first planeload of arms landed in Tehran from Israel. On September 14, a U.S. hostage, the Reverend Benjamin Weir, was freed in Beirut. As the pace quickened, still more raffish players joined the consortium, including Miles Copeland, a former CIA officer who, on the eve of the shah falling from power in what was soon to be renamed the Islamic Republic of Iran, had sent CIA agents into Tehran souks distributing hundred-dollar bills to anyone who dared shout “Long live the shah!” Other shadowy figures also became involved, such as a former Special Air Services officer who ran a company in London that had once provided nonspecific services to Mossad. Meanwhile, the policymakers in Israel and Washington looked the other way. All that mattered was that the operation had taken off under the noses of an unsuspecting world—at least for the moment.

In all, Iran would receive 128 U.S. tanks; two hundred thousand Katysha rockets captured in south Lebanon; ten thousand tons of artillery shells of all calibers; three thousand air-to-air missiles; four thousand rifles; and close to fifty million rounds of ammunition.

From Marama Air Force Base in Arizona, over four thousand TOW missiles were airlifted to Guatemala to begin their long journey to Tel Aviv. From Poland and Bulgaria, eight thousand Sam-7 surface-to-air missiles were shipped, together with one hundred thousand AK-47s. China provided hundreds of Silkworm sea-to-sea missiles, armored cars, and amphibious personnel carriers. Sweden provided 105-mm artillery shells, Belgium air-to-air missiles.

The weapons were shipped with certificates showing Israel was the end user. From IDF military bases in the Negev Desert, the consortium arranged for chartered transport aircraft to fly the weapons to Iran. The consortium received a “handling fee” for each consignment, Iran paying the money out of funds in Swiss bank accounts. The sum eventually totaled $7 million. Israel received no financial reward—only the satisfaction of witnessing Iran improve its capability to kill more Iraqis in the long-drawn-out war between both countries. For David Kimche it was a further example of the “divide and rule” policy he strongly advocated.

Nevertheless, his well-honed instincts told him that what had started as “a sweet operation” was now in danger of running out of control. In his view: “The wrong men now had too much power in the consortium.”

In creating it, he had again demonstrated Israel’s realpolitik: Israel had been ready to help the United States because it recognized it could not survive without Washington’s support in other areas. It was also a way to demonstrate that Israel could perform decisively on the world stage and keep matters secret.

But the longer the arms-for-hostages operation continued, Kimche sensed, the greater was the chance of discovery. In December 1985, he told the consortium that he could no longer remain involved in its activities—using the old saw of being overworked at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The consortium thanked him for his help, gave him a farewell dinner in a Tel Aviv hotel, and told him that he was being replaced as the Israeli link by Amiram Nir, who was Peres’s gung ho adviser on terrorism. That was the moment, Kimche would later admit, when the arms-for-hostages deal was firmly on the fast track to self-destruction. If anyone could derail it, then Nir was the man. A former journalist, Nir had shown the alarming trait of regarding real-life intelligence as being part of the same world occupied by the James Bond thrillers he so liked. He shared that fatal weakness with men in Mossad who had also decided that journalists could also serve their purpose.

In April 1999, David Kimche showed he had not lost his skills to correctly read the current political situation in the Middle East. Yasser Arafat, the man he had once plotted to murder, “because he was my blood enemy, certain that his demise would be a great victory for Israel,” had now, in Kimche’s view, become “Israel’s best hope for long-term peace. Mr. Arafat is still hardly my idea of a perfect neighbor, but he is the only Palestine leader capable of making concessions to Israel while retaining power and domestic support.”

Kimche believed he had found common ground with Arafat. He was convinced the PLO leader had finally come to recognize what Kimche had seen a quarter of a century earlier, “the real threat Islamic fundamentalism posed for the new millennium.”

Sitting in his small study looking out over the garden he had seen come to fruition, Kimche was able to deliver a balanced judgment. “I cannot forgive my old enemy for endorsing the murder of my countrymen decades ago. But it would also be unforgivable to deny Arafat—and the Israelis—the chance to end the bloodshed once and for all.”

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.