Gideon's Spies полностью

Matters had looked very different on that morning in late March 1985 when Ari Ben-Menashe had caught the early-morning British Airways flight from Tel Aviv to London. Eating his kosher airline breakfast, he reflected that life had never been so good. He was not only making “real money,” but had learned a great deal at the elbow of David Kimche as they trawled through the Byzantine world of selling arms to Iran. Along the way, he had also furthered his education in the continuous interplay between Israel’s politicians and its intelligence chiefs. For Ben-Menashe, “compared to my former colleagues, the average arms dealer was a choirboy.” He had identified the problem: the aftereffects of Israel’s Lebanon adventure, from which it had finally withdrawn, battered and demoralized. Anxious to regain prestige, the politicians gave the intelligence community an even freer hand in how it waged pitiless war against the PLO, whom they saw as the cause of all Israel’s problems. The result was a succession of scandals where suspected terrorists and even their families were brutalized and murdered in cold blood. Yitzhak Hofi, the former head of Mossad, had sat on a government commission, set up after intense public pressure, to investigate the brutality. It concluded that intelligence agents had consistently lied to the court about how they obtained confessions: the methods used had too often been gross. The committee had called for “proper procedures” to be followed.

But Ben-Menashe knew the torture had continued: “It was good to be away from such awful matters.” He regarded what he was doing, providing arms for Iranians to kill untold numbers of Iraqis, as “different.” Nor did the plight of the Beirut hostages, the very reason for his wheeling and dealing, unduly concern him. The bottom line was the money he was making. Even with Kimche’s departure, Ben-Menashe still believed the merry-go-round he was riding would only stop when he decided—and he would step off a multimillionaire. By his count, ORA’s business was now worth “hundreds of millions”—most of it being generated through the house in the London suburb from where Nicholas Davies ran ORA’s international operations.

Ben-Menashe knew Davies had continued to amass his own fortune, far in excess of the sixty-five-thousand-pound yearly salary he was paid as foreign editor of the Daily Mirror; Davies’s commission from ORA was almost always as much in a month. Ben-Menashe didn’t mind if the newspaperman took “an extra slice of the cake; it left plenty to go around. It was still champagne time.”

Robert Maxwell dispensed it by the magnum from his office on top of the Mirror building to his guests. When the BA flight landed, Ben-Menashe would be chauffeured to see the tycoon in a limousine Maxwell would have sent, a further sign, Ben-Menashe felt, of the importance in which Maxwell now held him. In the car with him would be Nahum Admoni, Mossad’s director general, traveling on board an El Al flight an hour behind the British Airways jet. Ben-Menashe planned to spend the time waiting at Heathrow Airport for Admoni by reviewing all he had put together on how a powerful press baron had become the most important sayan Mossad had recruited.

Maxwell had volunteered his services at the end of a meeting in Jerusalem with Shimon Peres shortly after Peres had formed a coalition government in 1984. One of Peres’s aides would recall the encounter as “the ego meets the megalomaniac. Peres was haughty and autocratic. But Maxwell just drove on, saying things like ‘I will pour millions into Israel’; ‘I will revitalize the economy.’ He was like a man running for office. He was bombastic, interrupted, went off on tangents and told dirty jokes. Peres sat there smiling his Eskimo smile.”

Recognizing that Maxwell over the years had developed powerful contacts in Eastern Europe, Peres arranged for Maxwell to see Admoni. The meeting took place in the Presidential Suite of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, where Maxwell was staying. Maxwell and Admoni found common ground in their central European backgrounds; Maxwell had been born in Czechoslovakia (which had led Peres to utter one of his few remembered jokes, “He’s the only bouncing Czech I know with money”). Both men shared a burning commitment to Zionism and a belief Israel had a God-given right to survive. They also enjoyed a passion for food and good wine.