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Covert Operations: The Human Factor
It is illegal under international law to recruit a prisoner of war to fight his own country unless the prisoner indicates his willingness in an interview with a neutral party, usually the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). But in the late 1980s U.S. and Israeli intelligence operatives mustered Libyan prisoners of war in Chad into a “contra” force, denying the ICRC access to them. In 1990, when Chadian President Hissein Habre was overthrown, the CIA was forced to hastily evacuate the Libyan contras. No African nation would take them in, so they were brought to the U.S. as immigrants. The State Department promised that their fighting days were over and they would be dispersed around the country. They were. But last winter, when the Bush administration began pressing Libya to extradite suspects in the bombing of Pan Am flight 103, the contras, using the name they had been given in Chad, the Libyan National Salvation Front, held military exercises in Virginia.68 This spring they held a convention in Texas.69 COLOMBIA, PANAMA
Although he is probably not a major Israeli operative on the order of mega-arms dealer Shaul Eisenberg (David Kimche’s current employer), Bruce Rappaport winds like a thread through one of Israel’s most sensational operations—its use of the Caribbean nation of Antigua and Barbuda as a front for an arms sale to the Medellin cocaine cartel. Rappaport got to Antigua first. He owned the land on which Maurice Sarfati, a former Israeli military officer, set up his melon farm. And one of Rappaport’s banks in Antigua made a large loan to Sarfati—which was never repaid.70 Sarfati (who also walked away from a loan guaranteed by OPIC, the U.S. government insurance agency) took it from there, first cultivating government officials and then providing entree to their offices to his compatriot Yair Klein.71 71 Klein’s work in Colombia, where his Israeli-licensed “security” company, Spearhead Ltd., trained the hit squads of the Medellin cocaine cartel in assassination and bombing techniques, was beginning to attract unwelcome attention. In August 1989, a promotional film that Spearhead made of the training exercises in Colombia would fall into the hands of Colombian authorities and, to Israel’s acute embarrassment, it would be aired by television stations around the world. Colombian authorities would lay much of the blame for the 1989 assassination of a leading presidential candidate, a series of massacres, and the bombings of a passenger aircraft and the headquarters of the domestic intelligence agency on Spearhead’s tutelage. In 1988, Klein was in Antigua, looking for a new way to provide arms to his Medellin client, Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha.72 Meanwhile, as draconian laws aimed at combating domestic drug trafficking eroded constitutional guarantees, the U.S. government was providing a hospitable base in Miami to Israeli Brig. General (Res.) Pinchas Shachar. Shachar, according to a British television report, was a Mossad agent and an “undercover representative” of the state-owned Israeli Military Industries (IMI). He was part of a network of Israeli arms dealers in Miami that had been selling Israeli weapons to Latin America since 1982. In 1988 Shacar, Klein and Sarfati convinced Antiguan officials to provide a false front to ship $381,500 worth of rifles and ammunition to Medellin boss Rodriguez Gacha. Gen. Shachar placed the order with IMI. His name, Klein’s and Sarfati’s would all appear on the paperwork for the sale and, when the operation was exposed, Shachar would quickly depart for Israel.73
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