Chapter 10

A Little Help From Panama

With the Scheersberg A safely on course for Lulea, Mossad began its preparations for Cherbourg in earnest.

If France would not give Israel her gunboats Mossad would find someone France was willing to supply them to. Just as in Plumbat, Mossad now turned to its friends.

The first of these was the Israeli businessman Mila Brenner. He was president of Maritime Fruit Carriers, a large international corporation with offices in Tel Aviv and New York. He was well-connected, being married to a niece of Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president; and he had a solid background of service to the nation, having fought as a ship’s commander during the 1948 war and remained in the Israeli Navy until 1954. He had also been given the rank of ‘reserve lieutenant general’ in the Israeli army, a sure sign of official gratitude for services rendered. He had gone into business in 1957 and subsequently acquired other good reasons for feeling loyal to Israel. The prosperity of Maritime Fruit was based in no little part on its contract to ship Israel’s renowned Jaffa oranges.

Brenner’s job for Mossad was to construct the cover that would be needed for the fake switch in the gunboats’ destination. For Plumbat, Mossad had taken advantage of the speed, convenience and informality Liberia offers the modern businessman. Brenner was more familiar with Panama, a country similar to Liberia in the services it can provide. For around £400, a company can be set up in Panama in a mere twelve hours. Brenner felt no inhibitions about his task. He went directly to Arias, Fabrega and Fabrega, one of the longest established and most respectable law firms in Panama.*

*Brenner would have been hard put to find any firm more respectable: its senior partner Hermodio Arias was Panama’s president in 1940 and 1941; his brother Arnulfo was president from 1949 to 1951, and again briefly in 1968.

Brenner asked Arias, Fabrega and Fabrega to set up a Panamian company, not an unusual request, and the formalities were soon under way. Just as in Liberia, instant companies are formed in Panama by proxy, and on 5 November 1969 the respected Senores Roy Carlos Durling, Fernando Cardoze, and Esteban Bernal became the founding officers of a new Panamian company, incorporated under public deed number 2251 issued by notary public number five of the Circuit of Panama. The new company’s name was Starboat.

As it goes about its work, Mossad likes to leave tiny clues to its participation; they are in the nature of private jokes. That sense of humour had led Mossad to mark the original destination of the Plumbat uranium as the Moroccan firm Chimagar, a joke that was only spoiled when Mossad discovered that the ensuing bureaucratic complications would be too great. In this case, the clue lay in the name Starboat.

The French word for a star (the show business kind) is ‘vedette’. The French word for a gunboat (the Cherbourg kind) is also ‘vedette’. The two meanings were elegantly combined to produce the word Starboat. The one nation that should have got the point perhaps was France. But then there was a great deal about the Cherbourg operation that the French did not appreciate until it was far too late.

Despite this tease, it would have been impossible for Mila Brenner to be named in the documents setting up the Starboat company. So Brenner in turn enlisted the help of one of his friends. Once again a lesson was drawn from Plumbat. Israel acquired her uranium by using Germans to buy it from Belgians and to ship it to an Italian in a boat owned by a Turk. Brenner now recruited the help of a Norwegian.

His name was martin Siem. He and Brenner were old friends, and Brenner knew that Siem was privately sympathetic to Israel. More to the point, they had also done business together, and Brenner knew that Siem’s cover would be immaculate. Siem was managing director of the giant Norwegian Aker company, itself part of the Fred Olsen shipping and shipbuilding group, one of the cornerstones of the Norwegian economy. Aker was in the booming but fiercely competitive business of north Sea oil. Many European firms had found themselves shouldered out of the action by hard-bitten oilmen from Texas but Aker had won a solid share of the north Sea market with its bold designs for drilling rigs and production platforms. So it made some kind of sense for Siem to appear to consider purchasing the five idle boats for North Sea work. In Panama, further proceedings were set in motion to confer on Siem ‘full powers for the management of the activities of Starboat’. The company was even provided with an address – albeit only a post office box, number 25078 – in Oslo. Martin Siem himself flew from Norway to France to meet the head of the CMN shipyard, seventy-nine-year-old Felix Amiot.

Amiot was sometimes called the boss of Cherbourg. When he was eighteen he opened his first factory in the Normandy seaport, and proceeded to build not ships but aircraft. He invented a new way of constructing fuselages from metal tubes and when World War One broke out his Amiot 01 fighter was in great demand by the young French Air Force. By 1918 he had two factories employing 1,400 people.

Amiot went into mass production and during the 1930’s the French government ordered his Amiot 143 by the hundred. His reputation reached its zenith with the Amiot 370 which smashed eleven world speed records in 1938 and 1939. In World War Two Amiot’s factories were destroyed.

In 1945, already fifty-one, Amiot changed course. He moved into timber, steel and shipbuilding, changing the name of his company from Chantiers Aeronautiques de Normandie to Constructions Mecaniques de Normandie, or CMN. He built minesweepers and coastguard vessels from wood, and trawlers and other fishing boats from steel. But Amiot’s new success was based above all on his fast, powerful, and highly manoeuvrable patrol boats, equipped with a formidable array of arms. Later these were given the capacity to launch missiles, and it was a version of this type, dubbed the Mivtach, which Israel had ordered.

When Martin Siem met Amiot and told him that he wanted to buy the five remaining gunboats for Aker’s North Sea work, it was not a story that Amiot can easily have swallowed. The gunboats had been designed for the Mediterranean. Although susceptible to sudden storms, the Mediterranean cannot compare with the North Sea, one of the wildest and least hospitable stretches of water in the world, as some oil operators were discovering to their cost. Siem said that the boats would be used to ferry supplies to drilling rigs and production platforms, but this, too, was scarcely credible. With their enormous engines and a top speed of more than forty knots they were ludicrously overpowered for such work, and for anyone to consider paying two million dollars each for supply boats was absurd. As one observer later commented, it was like using a Porsche to pull a cart.

Amiot can be forgiven for not voicing the suspicious he must have felt. The shipbuilding industry is a fluctuating one and in 1969 Amiot faced the very real prospect of having to lay off some of his workforce. Israel meanwhile had paid only a four million dollar deposit on the last five boats and the French government had rejected all Amiot’s pleas to make up the balance of six million dollars still owed. When Siem offered to pay the full purchase price of ten million dollars for the five boats, Amiot was delighted to accept.

Even though the boats were supposedly destined for North Sea oil work, they were still classified as gunboats. And in France all arms sales have to be sanctioned by the government. It was no more difficult to win such approval than it had been to get Euratom’s blessing for the fake uranium deal.

The body charged with vetting arms deals had the imposing title Commission Interministerielle pour l’Etude des Exportations de Materiels de Guerre. It was a committee – CIEEMG for short – composed of members of all the departments and ministries likely to have an interest in such sales. On 12 November Amiot visited his old friend and contact at the Ministry of Defence, General Louis Bonte. Bonte was director of International Affairs in the Ministry’s arms department. He was also deputy chairman of CIEEMG, which was due to consider the gunboat sale at its meeting later that week. Bonte advised Amiot that there were two principal questions that would concern the committee: could Siem pay? And was the deal safe?

The first question was easily answered. Starboat most certainly could pay, and it would do so in cash. In the same way, Yarisal had paid cash for the Scheersberg A and Asmara for the uranium, thereby removing the need for any detailed examination of their backgrounds. One member of CIEEMG did look up Siem in the current edition of an international Who’ Who. The long and impressive entry se4emed to render any further inquiry superfluous.

The second question presented hardly more difficulty. Bonte said that with the publicity, not to say controversy, surrounding the Israeli gunboats, the committee would wish to satisfy itself that Israel had renounced all claim to them. A letter would suffice. In the Plumbat operation it was Asmara, one of the central parties involved, who provided the letter to assuage the anxieties of the bureaucratic mind. The most perfect irony of the Cherbourg affair is that the letter that reassured the French authorities was written by Israel herself.

On learning of the committee’s requirement, Amiot got in touch with Admiral Mordecai Limon at the Israeli Embassy. Amiot explained that France sought a letter from Israel declaring that she had formally abandoned all claim or title to the five remaining gunboats. Limon solemnly obliged. At Amiot’s prompting he dictated precisely the letter that the committee wished to read.

The committee duly met to consider the deal. By most accounts, its approval was a formality.

The ease with which the Paris business had been completed should have left Mossad with a feeling of contentment and an optimistic prognosis for the outcome of the scheme. But Mossad had another things on its mind. On 12 November, the very day that Amiot was conducting final negotiations with General bonte, Mossad was preoccupied with a shattering piece of information. West German detectives had just boarded the Scheersberg A.

Chapter 11

Wonderful, Wonderful Copenhagen