Chapter 11

Wonderful, Wonderful Copenhagen

Of the various inquiries launched into the disappearance of the Plumbat uranium, by far the most energetic was that carried out by the BKA (Bundeskriminalamt), West Germany’s equivalent to the FBI. Even so it was almost a year before they found the Scheersberg A. They did so by questioning the August Bolten company in Hamburg, where they learned that peter Koerner was the ship’s engineer. The BKA doggedly tracked down Koerner’s fiancée who told them when the Scheersberg A was next due in German waters. As the ship was en route from Tunis to Lulea, she said, it would be passing through the Kiel Canal on its way from the North Sea to the Baltic.

When the Scheersberg A entered the Kiel Canal on 11 November 1969, BKA agents boarded her. Their mission was to find out where the Scheersberg A had sailed to the previous November. None of the crew could help them, of course, and the ship’s log was useless because the two vital pages were missing. Still, the agents asked Captain Cousillas a great many questions. They refused to reveal what their investigation was about, telling him only that it was ‘top secret’. When they disembarked from the Scheersberg A they left Cousillas a puzzled and worried man.

Cousillas requested a local shipping agent to pass a message to Biscayne Traders. In it, the captain reported what the BKA had asked questions about. Cousillas said he knew nothing about the matter, nor would the BKA explain, and he added: ‘Something is very wrong.’

The message to Biscayne Traders reached Mossad very quickly indeed, and caused much alarm. It was far too late to withdraw the Scheersberg A from the Cherbourg operation. She was already approaching Lulea where a special crew was being mustered. There was no time to find a replacement ship. The only possible course was to stick to the plan, and then get rid of the Scheersberg A immediately the operation was over.

That same day Dan Aerbel, then in Copenhagen, received an urgent message. He was told that ‘his’ company owned a small cargo vessel which would have to be sold as soon as Mossad gave the word. Aerbel was to put in hand immediately all the paperwork to allow the Scheersberg A to be disposed of at a moment’s notice.

These orders posed Aerbel quite a problem. Even a Liberian company cannot dispose of its assets on the say-so of one director. Such a momentous decision would have to be ratified by other directors – and Biscayne Traders did not have any. Aerbel needed help, and fast. He called a friend in Copenhagen who he was certain could provide it.

Torben Hviid lives on the edge of the law; at times has been over it. He is a jovial, friendly man, good-looking, with sparkling blue eyes, and an engaging apparent naivete. He has a talent for devising ingenious schemes to make money. While they have usually done so, they have also brought him some hefty fines and the occasional spell in prison.

There was, for example, the ‘7-9-13’ club that he opened in Copenhagen. Hviid said it was a social club for Danish old age pensioners, but the Danish authorities disagreed. They said it was a club for gambling, an activity strictly controlled in Denmark, and they took Hviid to court. One old age pensioner testified he had lost about £1,400 playing Hviid’s slot machines. Hviid was fined the equivalent of £4,500.

His next scheme also concerned gambling. In the Tivoli gardens, the elegant pleasure park in the centre of Copenhagen, there are banks of gambling machines that use, and pay out, tokens costing twenty-five ore, about three pence. Hviid made his own tokens and sold them to the punters for a penny. The machine operators took Hviid to court and were amazed to discover there was nothing in Danish law to stop him. Hviid offered a sporting compromise: he said he would buy his own tokens back from the operators for a halfpenny each. The operators refused, preferring to dump them by the sack load into the Baltic Sea. In all, Hviid sold fifteen million tokens – and drove a Rolls Royce around Copenhagen on the profits – before the operators installed photoelectric cells to distinguish the fake tokens from their own.

Hviid’s next venture was less amusing. He dreamt up a loan sharking which cist some of his customers a true interest rate of 400 per cent. Hviid was prosecuted and sent to prison for a year.

In the late 1960’s Hviid’s business was next. In 1967 Denmark legalized pornography and he joined the rush to publish hardcore magazines. Denmark was soon saturated with them and Hviid looked for export markets. The nearest was Germany, the only catch being that pornography was still illegal there. It proved so easy to smuggle magazines into Germany that Hviid’s liking for publicity got the better of him. He allowed a Danish newspaper to photograph him as he drove across the border in a car full of magazines and was arrested by the German police on his very next trip. After a brief stay in Hamburg jail, he made another smuggling aqttempt and was arrested again. This time he was in prison for four months.

Aerbel had known Hviid since they were at school together in Denmark. They also had both sold furniture for the same firm in 1961. Aerbel enjoyed Hviid’s somewhat roguish company, and usually looked him up whenever he was in Copenhagen. On the other hand, Hviid’s criminal record, and his bravade, made him a totally unsuitable candidate for office in Biscayne Traders. His involvement could excite police interest in the company, and in Aerbel, which was the last thing Mossad wanted. Yet Aerbel did not hesitate to approach Hviid. On 12 November Hviid assumed the mantle of company secretary to Biscayne Traders Shipping Corporation. That afternoon he went before the notary public of Copenhagen and certified that there had been a special meeting of the company’s board of directors and that Aerbel – using the name ‘Dan Ert’ – was entitled to ‘sign all papers concerning the sale of the vessel Scheersberg A.’

Having helped Aerbel with his little legal problem, Hviid now felt it reasonable to ask Aerbel for a reciprocal favour. Chastened by his two spells in a German prison, Hviid had decided that printed pornography was a mug’s game. He turned to the real thing. He had already opened one club, the ‘Intime’, which staged live sex shows. Now he wanted to start a second club, named ‘Love In’, to meet the needs of people in search of sexual relief. Beneath his club for old age pensioners he had separate premises available which had already been equipped with booths where hostesses could take clients for a massage, or more. Only a few legal formalities remained before the club could open. Aerbel agreed to help.

So, just three days after Hviid became the nominal secretary of Mossad’s shipping company, Mossad’s eager agent served as the legal witness that allowed ‘Love In’ to go into business. Aerbel seems to have got the better of the deals. In return for his services he was allowed into the club for free and, in Hviid’s words, he became a ‘very regular customer.’

Two days after these legal proceedings had been completed in Copenhagen, the Scheersberg A reached the Swedish port of Lulea. It is a picturesque town, set among birch forests and shimmering inlets on the coast of Swedish Lappland, with the Finnish border only fifty miles away. But Captain Cousillas gave little thought to the scenery. Having made this marathon journey at the behest of the Scheersberg A’s new owner, he had now received the rather disconcerting news that the entire ship’s complement – captain, officers and crew – were to be laid off.

Cousillas of course had not been on the Scheersberg A in Rotterdam a year before, the last time this had occurred. Chief Engineer Peter Koerner had. There was much that was strange about that previous episode, Koerner began to reflect, and much that was puzzling now. The new crew had started to arrive in Lulea and Koerner noticed that they were mostly Icelanders and Danes. Koerner wondered why anyone should do to the trouble and cost of bringing them to Lulea – especially as Yarisal or the new owners would be landed with some hefty travelling expenses for the old crew to get home.

Captain Cousillas could add little by way of explanation. He and Koerner went into town together to pick up their tickets for the next plane to Stockholm, the first leg of their respective journeys home. That night Cousillas took Koerner and the ship’s three other officers for a farewell meal in the large and stately dining room of Lulea’s comfortingly traditional Stadshotell. Cousillas told his guests that the new owner of the ship was at least picking up the tab.

On 22 November the Scheersberg A, which had taken on a new captain and crew, but which had not been renamed the Sofa or anything else, sailed out of Lulea and headed south.

Chapter 12

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