Chapter 7

Operation Plumbat

November 15, 1968. At Olen 200 tons of uranium oxide was removed from the silo. It was packed in 200-litre oil drums which were closed with lids held in place by substantial rubber seals. The 560 drums carried nothing to show what they now contained, except for the word PLUMBAT stencilled on each lid at Asmara’s request.

The railway tracks at Olen run beyond the village station and directly into the plant. Eleven covered wagons that had been hired by Ziegler, together with an engine to haul them, were loaded on to the wagons, which were then locked. Two guards, one provided by Ziegler, the other by the Belgian railroad company which owned the wagons, climbed on board. Under their watchful eyes the train set out on its short journey to Antwerp.

While it was on its way Herbert Schulzen turned up unannounced at Ziegler’s office in the heart of Antwerp docks. He was accompanied by a short fat man wearing spectacles and the two of them fussed about last minute details. Ziegler’s manager Marcel Heynen assured them that the arrangements were running like clockwork.

That happy state of affairs continued. Just after four o’clock the next morning the Scheersberg A arrived at Flushing at the mouth of the Schelde, the river which runs from Antwerp to the North Sea. A pilot was waiting to guide the ship the last forty-five miles to the docks. He went on board. In Antwerp, Ziegler’s water clerk Josef Verhulst was woken at home by a telephone call from Flushing, alerting him that the Scheersberg A was on her way. Verhulst calculated that loading the uranium could begin early that afternoon. He dressed and went to his office to make the final preparations.

At 8 am the Scheersberg A arrived at the entrance to Antwerp docks. She still had some way to go to her berth and the river pilot who had guided her up the Schelde was joined by a dock pilot. His task was to negotiate a safe passage through the system of locks that led to the berth. He did not actually steer the ship; that was traditionally the job of the first officer.

The first officer of the Scheersberg A was, according to his seaman’s papers, an Englishman named Tilney. He had been given precious little time to get the feel of the ship but he took her helm nonetheless. The dock pilot stood at his shoulder giving guidance while Captain Barrow watched in silence. There was no time for small talk. Strong gusts of wind were pushing at the Scheersberg A and even with the help of an attendant tug boat, Tilney had difficulty in holding her on course.

Leaving the main harbour channel the Scheersberg A turned left into Royers Lock. She passed safely through both sets of lock gates and then turned sharply to Starboat to approach the entrance to a little canal named Suez. At the entrance to the canal was a lifting bridge with the even more unlikely name of Siberia. Tilney had to line up the Scheersberg A ‘s bows to pass under Siberia bridge but as he edged her forward, nature played a malevolent trick.

A maverick gust of wind caught the ship’s bow and swung it towards the bridge’s bluestone support. It seemed that the Scheersberg A must ram the support, wreck the bridge, and block the canal. But at the last moment the gust died and the Scheersberg A swung away. Even so her starboard hull grazed the bridge. On examination, the damage proved superficial and the port authority accepted Ziegler’s promise that the bill, for a few thousand Belgian francs, would be paid.

The emergency over, the Scheersberg A passed through Suez into the Kattendijk Dock and tied up at berth 42. It was now just after noon. The railway wagons bearing the valuable cargo were already waiting on tracks that ran right to the water’s edge. Also waiting for the Scheersberg A were Ziegler’s water clerk Josef Verhulst, and Herbert Schulzen’s companion, the short fat man wearing spectacles. Both went on board.

It was Verhulst’s job to complete all the formalities that attend the arrival in Antwerp of any ship. He first paid the two pilots their customary gratuity. Then he asked Captain Barrow for a list of the ship’s crew. He passed it on immediately to the harbour police but none of the names on it excited any curiosity.

A 2 pm Ziegler’s stevedores began loading the cargo. The drums of PLUMBAT were hoisted by cranes and lowered into the Scheersberg A‘s two holds. There they were carefully secured with wedges of old timber.

In the early evening, with the job nearly done, Ziegler’s manager Marcel Heynen went on board to make sure that everything had gone smoothly. He noticed the short fat man with spectacles counting the drums as they were loaded. He found Captain Barrow in his cabin: Barrow poured him a glass of Scotch whisky and the two men talked in English about the weather. It looked as though it was going to be fair. Heynen wished Barrow bon voyage an went ashore.

By nightfall loading was complete. Water clerk Verhulst went on to the Scheersberg A to obtain a signature for his records. He needed one of the officers to sign a receipt stating that 208,998.55 kilos of Plumbat (the weight included the metal drums) had been ‘safely received’. First Officer Tilney was willing to sign but only after he had added in ballpoint pen the caveat that the cargo consisted of ‘drums said to contain chemicals.’

At 10 pm the Scheersberg A was ready to sail. A new pilot, Pierre Slaghmeulen, was on board to guide her out of the docks. Verhulst telephoned customs and the police to obtain their clearance. Customs and police officers went to Berth 42 and boarded the ship, but their only interest was in contraband and stowaways. Having found neither, and having received their customary gratuities, they left.

At four minutes past midnight, on Sunday 17 November, the Scheersberg A sailed. Eight hours later she reached Flushing at the mouth of the river, discharged her pilot and set out across a cold forbidding sea.

The uranium had only been allowed to leave Belgium and the boundaries of the European community on the strength of Asmara’s promise that it was going to Italy. For the first week the course of the Scheersberg A did nothing to damn that lie. She sailed southwest down the coast of Belgium, through the Strait of Dover and into the English Channel, the most congested stretch of ocean in the world. For the first two days the little ship battled through rough seas and strong winds that blew from the southeast, sometimes gusting to gale force. But in the early evening of 19 November, as she approached the westernmost tip of France and the Atlantic ocean, her luck changed. The wind moderated then died. For the remaining three days that it took the Scheersberg A to reach the Strait of Gibraltar and the Mediterranean, the seas she sailed were a flat brooding calm.

At around midday on 24 November she reached the point of no return. Having passed the Spanish Balearic islands she should have turned north for Genoa. Instead, she kept going east. On 27 November she passed between Tunisia and Sicily and into the eastern Mediterranean.

The Scheersberg A could not take the uranium directly to Israel without giving the game away. Her arrival would have been routinely reported to Lloyd’s of London which maintains agents at every port and keeps a record of shipping movements. So, in halcyon weather, she headed for the waters between Cyprus and the coast of Turkey – and for a silent rendezvous with an Israeli freighter.

According to an anonymous seaman* who claims to have been on board the Scheersberg A , the rendezvous was set for the early hours of a December morning.

*Time magazine says that one of its sources spoke to the seaman in the Ivory Coast in 1973. (Time, 30 May 1977).

An Israeli freighter, escorted by two gunboats, fiercely armed, approached from the south. The freighter manoeuvred alongside the Scheersberg A until lines thrown between the ships could hold the two together. In the holds of the Scheersberg A – one amid-ships, one forward – the ship’s seven deckhands removed the timber wedges that secured the precious cargo. The 560 metal drums were winched one by one through the ship’s hatches, lifted nhigh above her deck, and swung carefully onto the freighter. On board the Scheersberg A no one spoke; Captain Barrow had ordered complete silence. But once or twice the crew heard a sharp command in Hebrew, coming from the decks of the freighter.

The transfer must have taken about four hours. When it was over the lines were freed and the freighter, now 200 tons heavier, slipped away on a course taking her almost due south, back the way she had come. Her escorts followed. When they had gone, Barrow turned the Scheersberg A northeast, towards the Turkish coast. Sailing at twelve knots, she would have reached the little port of Iskenderum in less than five hours. She arrived there early on 2 December.

The Israeli freighter had a longer voyage. It would have taken her perhaps sixteen hours to reach the Israeli port of Haifa. From then on there was little need for secrecy. The metal drums, labelled innocently PLUMBAT, could have been unloaded quite openly and carried south on the main Tel Aviv road by a small convoy of lorries. By nightfall on 3 December the uranium would have reached its final destination. Dimona.

A few days later, Peter Koerner, at home in Hamburg, got yet another telephone call from Burham Yarisal. He said he wanted Koerner to meet the Scheersberg A in Palermo, Sicily, where she was lying unattended. Koerner was surprised. It was less than a month since he had been discharged on the grounds that Yarisal had sold the ship. ‘Ah well,’ said Yarisal, Tve bought her back.’

On Yarisal’s instructions, Koerner met up with a colleague. The two men collected rail tickets that were waiting for them at the local office of the Hapag-Lloyd travel agency and took the long train ride south to the toe of Italy where they crossed by ferry to Sicily. They arrived in Palermo on 11 December to find they were not the only ones who had been summoned by Yarisal. All the old crew of the Scheersberg A were there – all that is except for Captain Barrow.

There was a new skipper, a Spaniard named Francisco Cousillas. He share the crew’s curiosity about what had happened to the Scheersberg A during the past month. They turned to the ship’s log to find out where she had been since Rotterdam.

The last two pages had been torn out.

Operation Plumbat was so beautifully conceived and executed that it was months before the European authorities even realized that the uranium had gone astray. And, as we shall see, the investigations that were launched did not uncover a sliver of evidence as to where the 200 tons of yellowcake had gone. It was not until almost five years later than Dan Aerbel, in a prison cell in Norway, provided the evidence by blurting out the name of the Scheersberg A.

Aerbel’s role in Plumbat had been to dispose of the evidence – to get rid of the Scheersberg A after her voyage, without leaving any clues that could link the ship to Israel. It was not in theory a difficult task. But, perhaps seduced by the brilliance of its success, Mossad decided to use the Scheersberg A for one further audacious operation before letting her go. This escapade came close to disaster and, as a result, when Aerbel was finally instructed to sell the ship he did son in a panic, scattering documentary evidence.

As with Plumbat, it was Inspector Steinar Ravlo of Norway’s E-Gruppa who got a confession from Aerbel about the second mission for which Mossad used the Scheersberg A. This time, however, it was an enterprising Danish journalist named Ole Schierbeck who really deserved the credits.

Schierbeck had taken a keen interest in the Lillehammer murder ever since learning that one of those arrested, Aerbel, came originally from Denmark. He spent several weeks researching Aerbel’s background, talking to more than one hundred people; and he discovered, among other things, that Aerbel had once owned the Scheersberg A. Schierbeck did not learn about Operation Plumbat because the European authorities, deeply embarrassed by the affair, had deliberately covered up the loss of the uranium. But he did appreciate that there must have been a good reason for a Mossad agent to own a cargo ship. From Lloyd’s Shipping Register in London Schierbeck obtained a list of the Scheersberg A‘s movements for 1968 and 1969. And as he studied the dates and places it contained a sudden chord was struck in the recesses of his memory. He recalled the strange story of Knud Lindholm Pedersen.

In October 1970 Pedersen, a veteran Danish sea captain aged fifty-two, was arrested in England. He had been attempting to land a group of illegal Asian immigrants when his ship, a former German torpedo boat said to have once been used for a pleasure cruise by Hermann Goering, broke down. Pedersen’s boat was towed into Harwich harbour and he was held by police. He appeared in court, was bailed, and promptly fled to Holland. The British police followed him but were powerless to act as Pedersen had not been charged with an extraditable offence. A full account of these events appeared in Schierbeck’s newspaper Politiken.

In March 1971, Schierbeck received an anonymous letter written on stationery headed ‘Hotel International Hamburg.’ The letter complained that the stories Politiken had published about Pedersen were full of errors. Schierbeck had not written the stories, but he called the Hotel International in Hamburg. The phone was answered by Pedersen. He suggested that Schierbeck come to Hamburg to meet him. Schierbeck caught a plane from Copenhagen that evening.

Schierbeck found that the Hotel International was a less than glamorous sailors’ hotel on the Hamburg waterfront. Pedersen was waiting for him and they went up to a dormitory and opened a bottle of whisky. Pedersen proceeded to tell Schierbeck the sordid facts involved in smuggling human beings.

It was already after midnight when Pedersen finished his account. Schierbeck casually asked him what else he had been up to.

‘Do you remember the Cherbourg affair?’ Pedersen asked him. Schierbeck said that he did.

‘That was me.’

Pedersen then told an astonished Schierbeck that he had helped the ‘Israeli secret service’ to plan one of its most extraordinary operations – the ‘liberation’, in December 1969, of five gunboats from the French port of Cherbourg. Pedersen claimed that he had navigated one of the escaping gunboats on its hazardous route out of Cherbourg harbour. He also described the refuelling of the gunboats by a cargo ship, ‘300 sea miles southwest of Lorient’ in the Bay of Biscay. Pedersen coped ably with every question Schierbeck fired at him. He did not ask Schierbeck for money for the story, and by the time he took his leave Schierbeck was convinced that Pedersen had been involved in the operation in some way. Back in Copenhagen, Schierbeck wrote the story as Pedersen told it, and Politiken printed it. Schierbeck was reluctant to believe that in its length and richness of detail Pedersen’s account could be total fabrication, but where truth ended and fantasy took over, he could not decide.

Now, in August 1973, the whole episode came vividly to Schierbeck’s mind. And when he studied the movements of the Scheersberg A, as logged by Lloyd’s, he saw how her course precisely intersected with the route the gunboats must have followed from France to Israel. Schierbeck was certain he had discovered the reason why Mossad’s Dan Aerbel had once owned a ship: the Scheersberg A was surely the refuelling vessel Pedersen had described.

Schierbeck knew it was impossible to check with Pedersen. Nine months after their meeting Pedersen had died in a mysterious accident on board a ship in Copenhagen harbour. Nonetheless, Schierbeck wrote a story for Politiken speculating that the Scheersberg A – and therefore Aerbel – had played a vital role in the ‘liberation’ of the gunboats.

In Norway Inspector Ravlo learned of Schierbeck’s story. He asked Aerbel if it was true. Aerbel said it was, and provided what details he could.

Once again he supplied the final piece of the jigsaw. Looking at the complete picture it is striking how much of a model Operation Plumbat was for the notorious gunboats affair.

Chapter 8

Gunboat Diplomacy