Chapter 9

The Good Ship Sofa…

For most of 1989 the Scheersberg A had plied for hire like any normal cargo ship. Yarisal, having previously turned down the offer of the shipbrokers Bolten to find him cargoes, now asked the firm to do so after all. Bolten in turn overcame its earlier unease about Yarisal, and agreed. But the life of the Scheersberg A was not without complications.

On her very first voyage out of Palermo under captain Cousillas, the Scheersberg A ran into a storm, the consequence of which did much to justify Peter Koerner’s misgivings about the condition of the ship. In the violent movement, several of the bolts that held the engine’s cylinder block sheered. Koerner had to carry out emergency repairs to hold the block until the ship could reach port and the bolts could be renewed.

There was a second emergency, in February, when she was on her way past Turkey – Yarisal’s main base of operations – to the Roumanian port of Galatz on the Black Sea. In the Dardanelles, the narrow straits which divide the Mediterranean from the Black Sea – and also, it is said, Europe from Asia – the Scheersberg Aran aground. She strained several of her hull plates as a result and when she got to Rotterdam on 27 March she was put into dry dock for repairs.

The work was straightforward enough, but the incident did pose peculiar problems for the people behind the Scheersberg A. The work was to be carried out by a Rotterdam firm under the supervision of Germanisher Lloyd. As Biscayne Traders was a foreign company, lloyd’s needed the name of a local broker who would accept responsibility for the bill. The difficulty for Biscayne Traders was that it did not have a broker in Rotterdam. To secure the service of one would mean providing references, and that was not in Biscayne Traders’ style.

The problem was neatly solved. Biscayne Traders managed to find someone in a broker’s office who would forward the bill. Lloyd’s were supplied with the name of the Rotterdam brokers Intermar – without that firm knowing its name was being used. The work was finished on 21 April and the bill was dispatched to the ‘Captain and owners of the MV Scheersberg A, c/o Intermar NV, Willemskade 14, Rotterdam.’ The amount owing, charged in Dutch guilders, was equivalent to £520, and it was duly paid. To this day Intermar insists that it has never heard of, let alone had any dealings with, either the Biscayne Traders Shipping Corporation or the man who was registered as its president, Burham Yarisal.

These incidents apart, the Scheersberg A sailed a conventional course. On leaving Rotterdam she embarked on her longest voyage of this period. She called first at the British north Sea port of this period. She called first at the British North Sea port of Felixstowe to pick up a sailing yacht. With the yacht lashed to the top of her main deck she crossed the Atlantic to Boston, battling through several storms on the way. After unloading the yacht the Scheersberg A turned north, passing around Nova Scotia to reach the Canadian port of Newcastle in Miramichi Bay, New Brunswick. By the end of May she was back in Antwerp. She spent much of the summer in the Mediterranean, with the occasional diversion to Belgium and Holland, and one visit to a polish port with the impossible name of Szczecin.

In early October the Scheersberg A was in the North Sea calling briefly at Antwerp again, and then putting in at Hamburg. There Captain Cousillas took on board a cargo that was bound for southern Spain and North Africa. The ship left Hamburg on 7 October.

It was now that Mossad decided the time had come to take closer control of the Scheersberg A. It is possible that Yarisal simply wanted to be rid of the ship; or perhaps the arrangement with him was proving rather expensive. Whatever the reason, Mossad could be forgiven if it was now feeling very confident. Almost a year had passed since the successful conclusion of Operation Plumbat. In all that time Euratom had come nowhere near tracing the uranium and ‘the loss’ had not even been made public. There was also the encouraging fact that the Scheersberg A had not been molested, though she had spent a good part of 1969 within easy reach of Europe’s police forces.

In this favourable climate the first step was for one of Mossad’s people to take over the affairs of Biscayne Traders Shipping Corporation. Dan Aerbel seemed the ideal candidate.

He had lived in Israel for eighteen months in the early 1960’s but before and since then he had had no open links with the country. He had a Danish passport, and a range of names – they included Ert, Ertz and Erteschik – that he used in different circumstances. He had also been building his cove as an ambitious businessman who dealt increasingly in exports. For him now to purchase a ship was a perfectly logical step.

On the ‘need to know’ principle Aerbel was, at first, told nothing of the Scheersberg A‘s role in Operation Plumbat. Indeed, at this juncture he was not told about the ship at all – only that he was to become the president of a Liberian shipping corporation. For Aerbel it was a painless process. On 16 October a nominee, who gave his name as Kurt Gellert, went before the notary public of Zurich to testify that Aerbel was ‘entitled to sign on behalf of Biscayne Traders Shipping Corporation in all respects.’

The next day the Scheersberg A arrived in the North African port of Tunis. There Captain Cousillas received the startling news that once again the ship was to be sold. He was told little else. He gathered that the new owner was a Fane and he also understood that the ship was to be renamed. Even this, however, was a matter of some confusion because the radio message conveying the information had been broken during transmission. It should have read: ‘So far as I know they don’t have a name for it yet.’ But it had been interrupted during the second word – ‘So fa…’

Captain Cousillas was told that the new owner wanted the Scheersberg A – or the Sofa, as the crew were now calling her – to go to the Swedish port of Lulea. It would mean a three week journey that would take the Scheersberg A to the very top of the Gulf of Bothnia between Sweden and Finland, within 100 miles of the Arctic Circle. Lulea is an important port for iron and timber but any business would have to be conducted briskly as the harbour usually freezes over at the end of November. At first light on 29 October the Scheersberg A left Tunis to start her long voyage north.

Chapter 10

A Little Help From Panama