Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

Pan Am’s attorney, Gregory Buhler, subpoenaed the FBI, CIA, FAA, DEA, NSC, and NSA to reveal what they knew, but, he later claimed, “the government quashed the subpoenas on grounds of national security.”

Neither the Frontline program makers, Yuval Aviv, nor Joel Bainerman had been able to provide satisfactory answers to troubling questions. If there was a cover-up to COREA’s activities, how high did it extend within the CIA? Who had authorized it? Had that person or persons ordered the removal of embarrassing data from within McKee’s suitcase? Why had the German BKA police agency tipped off the COREA unit? Was it purely by chance? Or had it been motivated by a decision that the activities of COREA had become unacceptably dangerous for others in the CIA? And just what were the “national security grounds” that had led to Pan Am’s attorney receiving a blanket refusal for his subpoenas?

Over the years, these questions have surfaced within the closed ranks of various intelligence agencies, and the answers have been kept closely guarded—not least the truth about a final mystery. Why had Mossad sent a London-based katsa north to Lockerbie within hours of the downing of Pan Am 103?

So far the service has kept to itself all it knows about the destruction of the flight. There are sources, who ask not to be named because their lives would be endangered, who claim that Mossad is holding on to its knowledge as a trump card should Washington increase its pressure for Mossad to cease its intelligence activities within the United States.

More certain, there was another episode that could turn out equally as embarrassing to the U.S. intelligence community. It concerned the death of Amiram Nir, the man with a taste for James Bond thrillers who had replaced David Kimche as Israel’s point man in Irangate.

Amiram Nir was ideally suited to be Prime Minister Shimon Peres’s antiterrorism adviser. Exploitive, inquisitive, acquisitive, manipulative, and ruthless, Nir had a raffish charm, a lack of self-restraint, an ability to ridicule, to take imaginative leaps, to break the rules to work against a background of blending fact and fiction. He had been a journalist.

His previous knowledge of intelligence sprang from his work as a reporter with Israeli television, and then from working for the country’s largest daily newspaper, Yediot Aharonot; it was owned by the Moses dynasty, into which he had married. The publishing empire was everything Robert Maxwell’s had never been: the epitome of respectability and securely financed; it treated its employees on the old adage of a fair day’s pay for a hard day’s work. Nir’s marriage not only had made him the husband of one of the wealthiest women in Israel, but had also provided him with ready access to the higher echelons of the country’s political hierarchy.

Nevertheless, there was astonishment when he became one of the most important members of Israel’s intelligence community in 1984, when Peres appointed him to the ultrasensitive post of his adviser on combating terrorism.

Nir was thirty-four years old, and the only hands-on experience he had had of intelligence work was a short IDF course. Even among his friends, the general consensus was he needed more than rugged good looks for his new job.

Mossad’s chief, Nahum Admoni, was the first to react to Nir’s appointment: he changed the structure of the Committee of the Heads of Services to exclude Nir from its deliberations. Unperturbed, Nir spent the first weeks in the job speed-reading everything he could lay his hands on. He quickly came to focus on the arms-to-Iran operation that was still ongoing. Sensing a chance to prove himself, Nir persuaded Peres he should take over the role David Kimche had relinquished. With the indefatigable Ari Ben-Menashe as his mentor, Nir found himself also working with Oliver North.

Soon the two men were hand in glove, wheeling and dealing across the globe. Along their travels they created a plan to bring the arms-for-hostages deal to a stunningly successful conclusion. They would fly to Tehran and meet the Iranian leadership and negotiate the release of the hostages.

On May 25, 1986, posing as technicians employed by Aer Lingus, the Irish national airline, Nir and North flew from Tel Aviv to Tehran on an Israeli aircraft painted with Aer Lingus’s distinctive shamrock logo. On board were ninety-seven TOW guided missiles and a pallet of Hawk missile spare parts. Nir was traveling on a false U.S. passport. It had been provided by North.

North, ever the evangelizing Christian, had somehow persuaded President Reagan to inscribe a Bible to be presented to Ayatollah Rafsanjani, a devout Muslim. He had also brought a chocolate cake and sets of Colt pistols for their hosts. It was all reminiscent of the days when traders had bartered for land with the Indians on Manhattan.

The first Mossad knew of the mission was when the aircraft entered Iranian airspace. Nahum Admoni’s reaction was described as “incandescent rage.”

Luckily the Iranians simply ordered the visitors out and used the mission to score a massive propaganda coup against the United States. Reagan was furious. In Tel Aviv, Admoni cursed Nir as “a cowboy.” Nevertheless, Nir managed to remain in government service for another ten months, until the sniping from within the intelligence community calling for his removal had grown to a relentless fusillade. In those months the cases of Hindawi, Vanunu, and Sowan crossed his desk, but any contributions he offered on how matters should be handled were icily rejected by Mossad.

No longer welcome in Washington and isolated in Tel Aviv, Amiram Nir resigned as the prime minister’s counterterrorism adviser in March 1987. By then his marriage was in trouble, and his circle of friends had shrunk. Ari Ben-Menashe remained one of Nir’s few remaining links with his past. Early in 1988 Nir left Israel to live in London.

Then he set up house with a pretty, raven-haired Canadian, Adriana Stanton, a twenty-five-year-old who claimed to be a secretary from Toronto, whom Nir had met on his travels. Several Mossad officers believed she was connected to the CIA, one of the women it used for entrapment operations. In London, Nir acted as the European representative of a Mexican avocado purchasing company, Nucal de Mexico, based in Uruapan. The company controlled a third of the country’s avocado export market.

But it was not avocados that brought Ari Ben-Menashe to Nir’s door on a rainy November night in 1988. He wanted to know exactly what Nir intended to reveal when he was a major witness in Oliver North’s forthcoming trial over his role in the Iran-Contra scandal. Nir made it clear his testimony would be highly embarrassing not only for the Reagan administration, but also to Israel. He intended to show how easy it had been to sidestep all the usual checks and balances to run illegal operations that would also implicate a number of countries, including South Africa and Chile. He added he was planning a book that he believed would make him the greatest whistle-blower in the history of the State of Israel. Ari Ben-Menashe arranged to meet Nir after he had made another visit to Nucal in Mexico. In the meantime, his visitor cautioned Nir to be “careful of that woman!” after Adriana Stanton had left them alone. Ben-Menashe refused to reveal what had prompted the warning except to say, in his all-too-often mysterious manner: “I know her from before and, though Nir didn’t know it, Adriana Stanton wasn’t her real name.”

On November 27, 1988, Nir and Stanton traveled together to Madrid under false names. He called himself “Patrick Weber,” the identity he had last assumed on his ill-fated trip to Tehran. Stanton was listed on the Iberia passenger manifest as “Esther Arriya.” Why they had chosen aliases for the flight tickets when they both traveled on their real passports—Israeli and Canadian—would never be explained. Another mystery was why they took a flight first to Madrid when there were several scheduled direct ones to Mexico City. Was Nir trying to impress his lover with how easy it was to fool most people most of the time? Or was there already a nagging fear at the back of his mind after Ari Ben-Menashe’s visit? Like so much else of what followed, those questions were to remain unanswered.