The Justice Game

by Geoffrey Robertson

  At the Turnberry Island Yacht Club, Maurice Sarfati was nicknamed ‘The King of Antigua’. But by the middle of 1988, he had run his kingdom into so much debt that he dared not return. He stayed in Miami, fending off bankruptcy petitions and awaiting another big scam. Gacha needed arms, and at this point Yair Klein came, as his emissary to the Israeli military merchants. In this diaspora of arms dealers and mercenaries and conmen, plans were hatched which would never be proved by direct evidence, but which left their computerised traces in telephone bills, hotel records and airline tickets. These told the Commission that telephone traffic between Sarfati and Vere Jnr was intense throughout August and September 1988. Vere was Antigua’s Minister for National Security, and hence was the boss of Colonel Clyde Walker, commander of the country’s tiny army, equipped fully and for free by the Pentagon. At 3.07 p.m. on 4 October, Walker telephoned the arms dealer Schahar. The next day, he flew from Antigua to Miami. He said he had gone to do some shopping, although the Commission found that he had gone to Schahar’s office, where he placed the order for Galil assault rifles, Uzi sub-machine-guns and 200,000 rounds of ammunition. The weapons were to be shipped from IMI in Israel, ostensibly for the Antiguan army, once payment of $350,000 was received. In due course, the money arrived in Israel, not from Antigua but from Klein’s bank in Panama via Schahar’s account in America.

  The next step for Gacha was to work out how to transfer the weapons from Antigua to Colombia. According to the Commission’s report a breathtaking scheme was envisaged, conceivable only because of Sarfati’s hold over the Antiguan government. Klein’s training school in Colombia had become difficult to conduct in secret, and he desired to move to a more permanent location. Sarfati suggested Antigua, where facilities could be rented from the defence force and the local Minister of National Security could be its patron. So a prospectus was sent to the Antiguan Cabinet for a ‘Security Training School’. It explained that each pupil would be issued with a pistol, rifle and sub-machine-gun, and a daily supply of 110 rounds of ammunition, and would be taught how to ‘forestall the growing wave of corporate exposure to terrorist and criminal activity’ by shooting at mobile targets. The centrepiece of the school would be a ‘speciality shop’ selling guns and ammunition to pupils at the end of their course. The Commission likened this to a pro-shop in a golf club, where the well-trained terrorist would be able to pack his kit full of ammunition for his Galil and Uzi before departing. What the brochure did not explain was that the school would be supported by the Medellin cartel, because it would be training its troops. Klein and Schahar visited the Birds in November 1988 to explain how the project would be good for Antigua. It would of course be good for Gacha, and for any paramilitary organisation which wanted to take advantage of these unique facilities.

  This whole plot may belong in a James Bond movie, or in a drug baron’s wishful hallucination. But Gacha did not take drugs, and he executed any of his followers who did. On 16 November, Schahar, Klein and another Israeli mercenary named Dror flew to Antigua. They were met by Eva, Sarfati’s personal assistant, and driven around the island by Colonel Walker to inspect the army’s land and select an appropriate spot for the school: they were joined by Vere Bird Jnr, and were taken to meet the Prime Minister. Were the Antiguans aware that they were being asked to host a training school which might be used by terrorists? The Commission thought that this should have crossed the military mind of Colonel Walker, and even the mind of Vere Bird Jnr, who was smart enough to have passed his law exams at Gray’s Inn, although both men firmly denied it. It was from Colonel Walker’s office, on 19 November, that their Israeli guests made what was to prove a highly significant four-minute telephone call, which was followed by Rodriguez Gacha sending the money for the weapons to Klein’s account in a Panama bank. It was then transferred to Schahar’s account at the Bank Hapoalim in Miami, and was sent from there to IMI in two tranches: a down-payment in December and a final payment in February 1989, after IMI had informed Sarfati that all the weapons were ready for shipment – to the ‘Quartermaster-General’ of the Antiguan defence force, a name someone had noticed on an old sign in front of the derelict British garrison house at the main town, St John’s.

  The IMI agents in Miami had been selling so much military hardware to South American governments that a large cargo vessel, the Else TH, had to be chartered to deliver it to their armies. It was aboard this vessel that the container was loaded for Antigua, a convenient first stop for a voyage that would take it through the Panama Canal to disgorge more containers of lethal weapons at Bogotá for Colombian government troops. (It is an ironic tribute to the amoral Israeli arms dealers that their customers – the forces of law and the forces of lawlessness – would soon be aiming guns from the same shipment at each other.) The Else TH began its ominous voyage to St John’s harbour on 28 March 1989. The day after it sailed from Haifa, the government of Colombia delivered a diplomatic note to the government of Israel, complaining that some of its nationals – Klein was mentioned by name – were running ‘training schools’ for the Medellin cartel.

  The Colombians had just made an intelligence breakthrough, as the result of the defection to the security services of Gacha’s personal physician, Dr Diego Viafara Salinas. He had served as medical adviser at the training camps, and had a copy of Freddy Gacha’s video of Klein instructing his father’s men in jungle warfare. Nothing stayed secret for long in Colombia, and on 10 April – while the MV Else TH was on the high seas, just two weeks’ sailing time from Antigua – the story of Klein and his terrorist training camps in Colombia was published in El Espectado, the much-bombed Bogotá newspaper hostile to the cartels. There was no time to be lost, and on the same day Klein rushed back to Antigua to meet Vere Bird Jnr. All plans to use the ‘VIP training school’ to launder guns for Gacha now had to be abandoned: Yair Klein’s cover had been blown.

  But the weapons and ammunition were already paid for and on their way. The conspirators worked frantically to salvage the situation, with faxes flying between Sarfati (in Miami) and Klein (in Minister Vere Bird Jnr’s office in Antigua). A boat owned by the Medellin cartel – MV Seapoint – happened to be pottering about Haiti. It was diverted post-haste to St John’s, where Sarfati ordered his shipping agent to transfer to it the container for the ‘Quartermaster-General’ which would be unloaded from the Else TH. By a marvel of synchronised shipping, these two sinister boats – the Else TH and Seapoint – anchored within hours of each other outside St John’s harbour. The Israeli vessel unloaded the container of arms and ammunition. It was left unguarded on the dockside, sitting in the sun for seven hours, in full view of customs and port officials, until the Seapoint sidled in, collected it, and then sailed for a deserted beach in north-west Colombia. There the container was put ashore at nightfall, and another cargo – two and a half tons of cocaine – was taken on board. By May Day 1989, Gacha had his new guns, courtesy of IMI and the government of Antigua. He fired them as follows:

  – 4 July 1989, Medellin. Assassination of Dr Antonio Rolan Betancourt, Governor of Antioquia, and five members of his family.

  –28 July 1989, Medellin. Assassination of Judge Maria Helena Diaz Perez.

  – 16 August 1989, Bogotá. Assassination of Magistrate Dr Carlos Valencia Garcia.

  – 18 August 1989, Medellin. Assassination of Police Colonel Valdemar Franklin Quintero.

  –18 August 1989, Bogotá. Assassination of Liberal Party Presidential Candidate, Dr Luis Carlos Galan.

  – 2 September 1989, Bogotá. Attack on El Espectado newspaper, sixty people injured.

  – 11 September 1989, Medellin. Assassination of Dr Pablo Pelaez Gonzalez, former Mayor of Medellin.

  – 16 October 1989, Bucaramanga. Attack on newspaper Vanguardia Liberal. Two dead and seven injured.

  – 17 October 1989, Medellin. Assassination of Magistrate Dr Jose Hector Jimenez Rodriguez.

  – 1 November 1989, Medellin. Assassination of Magistrate Ms Mariela Espinosa Arango.

 
; – 6 December 1989, Bogotá. Terrorist attack on the building of the Security Administration Department (DAS), seventy killed, several hundred wounded.

  On 16 December, ten days after this mass-murder of their colleagues, the security forces finally located Rodriguez Gacha. His ranch was surrounded and he was blown away with ammunition delivered to the army from the Else TH. In an armoury underneath the ranch they found several dozen of the Uzi sub-machine-guns and 200 of the Galil assault rifles which had been carried as far as Antigua on the same ship. The rest of the weaponry, and what remained of the 200,000 rounds of ammunition, was deployed against the citizens of Colombia over the following years by forces directed by Gacha’s surviving partner, Pablo Escobar.

  It took some months for the Colombian authorities to obtain an explanation from Israel, which alleged that the weapons consignment had been ordered by army commander Clyde Walker and verified by an ‘End User Certificate’ apparently signed by the Minister for National Security, Vere Bird Jnr. This was the allegation which had put them, as the Foreign Minister said on the car-phone, in ‘deep shit’. As far as the government of Antigua was concerned, Bird shit would not stick to the Birds. They soon had a scapegoat – a nineteen-year-old customs clerk, Sean Leitch, who was arrested for signing some shipping documents presented by Sarfati’s agent. On his slim shoulders the nation of Antigua laid its guilt for aiding and abetting the murders of the Colombian judges and journalists, policemen and politicians.

  The above story emerged in the course of the Blom-Cooper Commission. The only facts it had to begin with were those elicited by Colombia and admitted by Israel, namely that the weapons found on Gacha’s ranch had been supplied to Antigua by IMI, in the belief that they were destined for its armed forces, but had been transhipped aboard the Seapoint on the instructions of Maurice Sarfati. He was blamed by everyone else for masterminding the whole affair, and for dragging their names into it without their knowledge. Vere Bird Jnr and Colonel Walker swore they knew absolutely nothing about the arms order: they recalled meeting Yair Klein and receiving the prospectus for his ‘training school’, but said they were opposed to the project and did not in any event know who it was intended to train. Klein himself maintained that he had only been helping cattle ranchers in the Middle Magdelena Valley to protect their herds from rustlers, and that the arms shipment was destined for Panamanian exiles wishing to overthrow General Noriega.

  International law enforcement arrangements are rudimentary when it comes to investigating trans-border criminal conspiracies. This was, after all, an enterprise to put lethal weapons in the hands of criminal assassins, working for a drugs cartel hell-bent on undermining the police and the judiciary of a democratic country. The clues to the people who profited from it could be found in a trail of bank transfers, telephone communications and hotel records, yet there is no developed system for getting at the truth of plots without frontiers, let alone for punishing their progenitors. I quickly discovered that the fabled ‘Interpol’ is useless – a police databank full of outdated data. As for the DEA, the spearhead of America’s ‘war on drugs’, this billion-dollar bureau knew nothing about the arms shipment to Gacha. From America, at least, I had the help of Larry Barcella, an experienced fraud prosecutor, and my Antiguan assistant was Inspector Truehart-Smith – a policeman whose integrity lived up to his name, which is why he had not been promoted. But in Antigua, the trails mostly ran into the sand. The over-arching design had been developed by telephone and fax from five countries simultaneously. They were Colombia, Panama, the United States, Israel, and Antigua, with some meetings and communications taking place in Paris, London, Bermuda, Amsterdam and even in South Korea (where Vere Bird Jnr had been staying at one vital stage, as ‘manager’ of the national team at the Seoul Olympics). The Commission had no legal power to compel testimony by anyone beyond Antigua’s shores. The only power I possessed was not legal at all. It was the power of pity, for the victims of Gacha’s gunmen.

  It was that power alone which broke open what the Commission eventually found was a conspiracy, because it worked on the consciences of two women: Sarfati’s Girl Friday, Eva Van der Wall, and Vere Bird Jnr’s secretary, Ethlyn Thomas. It was their sense – of humanity, I suppose – which caused them to speak out when they might more safely have remained silent, and to testify to the conduct of their former employers. Eva had been recruited by Sarfati while holidaying in the Caribbean, and had enjoyed helping him to help himself to the aid money and the government loans meant to sustain the development of the melon farm. Her task, she said, had been to organise the bribes and favours: such was her importance that she was given a set of keys to the cabinet office. But Eva was genuinely appalled to learn the arms had gone to Gacha, so much so that she volunteered details of the relationship between Sarfati and Bird Jnr. She told of meeting the delegation which arrived to promote the ‘training school’. One of the Israelis had left her his calling card, which she had kept on her return to a new job in Amsterdam. On it was the name of IMI’s agent in Miami, Brigadier-General Pinchas ‘Pini’ Schahar.

  Once that connection was made, the jigsaw slowly fell into place. It was reassuring, at one level, to discover how international arrangements of this kind leave interlocking pieces on hotel records and on telephone company dialling print-outs. For example, Klein’s visits to Antigua did not show up on immigration records, because he had been ushered into ‘the VIP room’ at the airport, and then out through a door which led to the pavement rather than to immigration control. But once Eva had recalled his hotel, it was a simple matter to check the register and to find the dates of his visits, and then to recall the computer entries which proved that his bill had been paid through Schahar’s American Express account. An important investigative bonanza came from telephone records. The Royal Commission had subpoena powers over companies in Antigua, and Cable and Wireless (West Indies) Limited had printouts for every call made on every telephone and fax machine on the island. It scrupulously logged the date, time, duration and cost of each international call made, and listed the number and the country in which that call had been received. I spent weeks foraging through thousands of printed-out pages of calls made over the last few years on the home and office telephones of Vere Bird Jnr, whose explanations did not square with the dates and times and duration of the calls made from his telephone to Sarfati in Miami, or to Klein and his lawyer in Israel. For example, at the very time Sarfati was arranging for the Seapoint to collect the arms container, he was receiving calls and faxes from Bird’s private office at the Ministry. It was not, of course, known what was said, but Bird had denied all contact with Sarfati at this period. Most memorable of all was the four-minute telephone call made by the Israelis from the office of Colonel Clyde Walker, after the army commander had shown them around the island to select sites for their ‘training school’. It was to a clandestine number in Medellin, which the Colombian government confirmed had been used at the time by Rodriguez Gacha for his cartel business.

  The Royal Commission held public hearings in a mission hall rented from the Moravian Church. Its proceedings were broadcast live throughout the day by Antigua radio, and for five hours each evening by the local cable television service. The more it exposed the corruption and incompetence over which he had presided for so long, the angrier Papa Bird became about the behaviour of the tribunal which international pressure had forced him to establish. ‘I’m sick and tired of this Blom-Cooper inquiry,’ he told a British television team – so sick, in fact, that Lord Havers said he was too ill to appear before it. I went to see the Prime Minister and formed the opinion that what must have made him sick was the prospect that Maurice Sarfati would give evidence, to unravel the spider’s web he had managed to weave around the Bird administration. I had managed to make contact with Sarfati, who was hiding in Paris and said he would be willing to testify in London. I was also anxious to take evidence in Israel, where Schahar was now living. There seemed no legal difficulty in the Commission taking evidenc
e abroad: its mandate from the Governor General directed expressly that ‘if the Commission considers it necessary, the Inquiry may take evidence outside the jurisdiction of Antigua’.

  Nothing could have been plainer. This Commission had, under the law of Antigua by which it was established, the power to take evidence abroad, and no judge could, or at least should, stop it so long as the Commissioner believed, as he did, that this was a necessary step to get at the truth of a public scandal. A local judge named Mitchell did stop it, however, after Vere Jnr swore an affidavit that ‘none of my counsel is prepared to travel to Israel, given the politically explosive situation in that country. The atmosphere of political violence also pervades the city of London.’

  Mitchell’s judgment has to be read in full by anyone who wishes to consider my opinion that it was as fundamentally wrong in law as in common sense. It decided that:

  The Commission of Inquiry Act . . . does not, by its words, in clear and unambiguous language, attach significance for Commissions within the jurisdiction to facts and events occurring outside the jurisdiction, as this Blom-Cooper Commission is purporting to do, moreover, it does not empower or authorise this or any other Commission as a matter of law to do so . . . our legislature is under no obligation to protect the interests of persons overseas in Israel or England . . .