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.
They arrived in Mexico City on November 28. Waiting at the airport was a man who would never be identified. The three of them traveled on to Uruapan, arriving there in the afternoon. Nir then chartered a T 210 Cessna from the small Aerotaxis de Uruapan.
Once more Nir behaved with strange inconsistency. He rented the aircraft in the name of “Patrick Weber,” using a credit card in that name to pay the charges, and arranged with a pilot to fly them to the Nucal processing plant in two days’ time. In the local hotel where they shared a room, Nir registered under his own name. The man who had accompanied them from Mexico disappeared as mysteriously as he had appeared.
On November 30, Nir and Stanton turned up at the small Uruapan airport, this time with another man. On the passenger manifest he was listed as Pedro Espionoza Huntado. Whom he worked for would remain yet another mystery. Another would be why, when they came to enter their own names on the manifest, both Nir and Stanton used their real identities. If the pilot noticed the discrepancy between the name Nir had given to charter the Cessna, it passed without comment.
The plane took off in good flying conditions. On board were the pilot, a copilot, and their three passengers. One hundred miles into the flight, the Cessna suddenly developed engine trouble and moments later crashed, killing Nir and the pilot. Stanton was seriously injured, the copilot and Huntado less so. By the time the first rescuer, Pedro Cruchet, arrived on the scene, Huntado had disappeared—another of those figures never to be seen again. How exactly Cruchet came to be first on the scene was yet another twist. He claimed to work for Nucal—but the company’s plant was a considerable distance away. He could not explain why he had been so close to the crash site. Asked by police to prove his identity, he pleaded he had lost his ID at a bullfight. It turned out Cruchet was an Argentinian living in Mexico illegally. By the time that had been established he, too, had vanished. At the crash site, Cruchet had recovered and identified Nir’s body, and he had accompanied Stanton to the hospital. He was with her when a local reporter called seeking further details.
