An Absence of Light

by David Lindsey

  Raviv was immediately sent to Marseille to replace a case officer whose Arabic language abilities were sorely needed in Israel at this time. All Israeli intelligence agencies, Mossad, Aman, and Shin Bet, strained to prepare for the war with the Arabs that everyone felt was inevitable. Raviv was still in Marseille in June of 1967 when the Six Day War rocked the Middle East.

  Under the direction of Meir Amit, the Mossad policy known as the “peripheral concept” gained even greater favor and momentum. This philosophy was based on the belief that Israel needed to form alliances—sometimes secret ones—with the countries bordering the Arab world. In doing this, the Mossad also sought to form stronger ties with their counterpart agencies in the West In the developing nations such as Africa and Latin America, they established diplomatic relations, proposed a variety of aid programs, and then opened embassies where Mossad agents went to work under diplomatic cover, offering their intelligence expertise to the host country’s counterparts and thereby greatly expanding their own knowledge of that country’s security operations. They also set up permanent Israeli military delegations in some countries. In Western Europe, the Mossad expanded its ties with their foreign security counterparts by joining a secret group called “Kilowatt” which was created to combat international terrorism. At every turn and available opportunity, Israel was increasing its knowledge of foreign intelligence and security operations all over the world.

  In 1969 Raviv participated in a joint mission with Aman that was eventually to determine the shape of his career. After the Six Day War, the French clamped an embargo on munitions, aircraft, and boats that Israel already had bought and paid for, but which France had not yet delivered. The Israelis were in particular need of five missile boats that were part of the embargo, and they could not wait for the slow wheels of diplomacy to free them. Raviv received orders to travel to Normandy where the missile boats were kept in the shipyard at Cherbourg and to use agents to reconnoiter the weak points of the shipyard security so that the Israelis’ naval operatives could plan a repossession.

  On Christmas Eve, Israeli naval officers who had flown into France several weeks earlier and had been briefed by Raviv and his agents, entered the Cherbourg shipyards and sailed the five missile boats through Gibraltar and into the Mediterranean.

  After this Raviv was asked not to return to Marseille, but to drop out of sight He was instructed to go to London, get a job, and not contact the Mossad in any way. A year later, in December of 1970, he was contacted and told to go to Paris. There another three months passed before he was joined by a Mossad commander from Tel Aviv who spent a month with him. He had been chosen for a special kind of mission that was to become a trademark of his career.

  It was a busy time for the Mossad in France. The 1970s would become the decade of terrorist revolutionary groups, the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany, the Japanese Red Army, the Italian Red Brigade, the Basque ETA in Spain, the Action Directe in France, and five different Palestinian organizations. Sooner or later all of them found it necessary to pass through France and stay for various periods of time.

  Raviv’s languages expertise and his preference for working alone were considered indispensable under these circumstances. He had been made a “single,” a rare katsa even by the standards of the innovative Mossad. He ran no agents and operated entirely alone, his existence unknown to other Mossad operatives anywhere. Even though the Mossad had three kidon units—small operational cells within the Metsada department that conducted assassinations and kidnappings everywhere in the world—there was a special need at this time for “veiled” hits, assassinations that appeared to be natural deaths. The targets were three men and a woman in the diplomatic corps of four different embassies who had significant clandestine connections to terrorist organizations. A traditional assassination—even if the Israelis were never linked to the deaths—would cause an uproar and create blowback that could only damage Israeli interests.

  It took Raviv nineteen months to complete his assignment, a duration his superiors considered ideal. His hits were never detected.

  In 1975 Yosef Raviv returned to Mossad headquarters in Tel Aviv. As one of Mossad’s chief experts on terrorism, he spent the next year at the Institute teaching katsas in training and updating Mossad’s training in operational techniques for their European stations. In late 1976 Raviv dropped out of sight.

  In May of 1978 Raviv surfaced in Buenos Aires as Victor Soria, a wealthy Catalonian from Barcelona. Even though Argentina had a long and open history as Nazi sympathizers, both during and after the war, in the latter half of the 1970s the Mossad provided training to the Argentine military’s secret police and shared intelligence with their counterinsurgency operations at various times during Argentina’s “dirty war.” They provided arms as well, and by the opening years of the 1980s Israeli arms sales represented seventeen percent of Argentina’s total arms imports.

  Israel’s Realpoltik, however, had a face it never revealed, and it had a private memory as well as a public one. Although South America is well known as a haven for Nazi war criminals, when most people think of these men they think of prominent Germans like Adolf Eichmann, Klaus Barbie, and Dr. Josef Mengele. But there were others too, scores of nameless lower-ranked German officers as well as those men of the occupation who carried out the Nazi’s atrocious directives, Croatian Ustashi, Romanian Legionnaires, Ukrainian nationalists. These men as well as the Nazis fled to South America to escape the retribution for their crimes, and more of them made new lives in Argentina than in any other country.

  From 1978 through 1981 Victor Soria lived in Argentina and worked with the Argentine secret police. But this was not his sole mission. He lived alone among the eleven million people of Buenos Aires, but he also traveled extensively, sometimes renting a boat and heading up the Paraná, stopping at Rosario or Goya or Corrientes and traveling inland. He traveled to remote ranches in the central Pampas, south to the dusty and barren oil fields of Patagonia, and north into the swamps of the Gran Chaco. Sometimes he crossed the Pilcomayo into General Strossner’s Paraguay, and at other times he crossed the Rio de la Plata to Montevideo, Uruguay. No intelligence agency outside the Mossad has ever been able to obtain the statitics for Soria’s work in Argentina, but by the time Raviv returned to Israel in 1981 he had become a legend in the intelligence world.

  During the rest of 1981 he again taught at the Mossad Institute, but this time he taught methodologies in veiled assassinations to kidon operatives.

  In 1982 Yosef Raviv spent a year at the Mossad station in Mexico City and then, once again, dropped out of sight.

  In early 1984 Yosef Raviv returned to Tel Aviv and resigned from the Mossad. He was fifty years old and had been a Mossad operative for nineteen years.

  Near the end of that year he bought a house in a smart district of Bogota, Colombia, under the name of Panos Kalatis. The house was a large, Spanish-style residence that sat behind a high wall topped with barbed wire and equipped with an electronic security system. It was vastly more expensive than a pensioned-out Mossad officer would have been able to afford on his retirement.

  For the next several years all of what is known about Kalatis is known by way of his associations. He entered a world that was largely a phenomenon of the 1980s, an era made possible by the postwar suspicion of governments who had for thirty years bred a generation of spies and operatives who, in the mid and late 1970s, faced retirement after a lifetime of deception and secrecy. It did not take them long to realize that their skills and contacts were marketable. Many of them became privateers, selling their services to the highest bidders, Third World juntas of the right wing, arms dealers, guerrilla movements, dictatorships, police states, drug cartels, and, even, their own governments who often found their “off the books” status a convenient means of deniability should their activities ever be discovered. The money was phenomenal, and the adrenaline-driving operations were just as good as the old days.

  The difference with Kalatis was that he ha
d never been a team player, and he never became one. Whatever he was doing seemed to be known only to him, and his movements could be charted only by his cohorts in the United States and Latin America, his chosen environments of retirement.

  Between 1985 and 1989 Kalatis was seen with a wide variety of players, many of them having murky reputations in the world of intelligence and espionage: Mike Harari, a Mossad former who became Manuel Noriega’s right-hand man in Panama, a dealer in information, arms (a participant in the Contra affair), drugs, and death; Pessach Ben-Or, a millionaire Israeli arms dealer headquartered in Guatemala who armed that country’s right-wing army and death squads and who also helped arm the Contras; Rob Jarmon, an American rancher in Costa Rica who had close connections with the CIA who used the airfield on Jarmon’s ranch to transport arms to the Contras; Rafael Cesar, a millionaire Mexican lawyer who had ties with the cartels in Colombia; Amiram Nir, Shimon Peres’s adviser on counterterrorism from 1985 to 1988 and a key player in the Iran-Contra affair (after leaving the Peres government, Nir would die mysteriously in November of 1988 when his Cessna T210 crashed in Mexico where reportedly he had been to discuss the “marketing of avocados”); Brod Strasser, a South African industrialist who also owned a home in Bogotá and coffee plantations in Colombia’s Cordillera Oriental; Lee Merriam, an American businessman who was reputed to be the key chemical supplier to the cartels’ processing laboratories.

  The list was long and curious, and it shed no direct light at all on Kalatis himself or on what he was doing during these years. There are no records of business involvements with any of these people; he was known only to have been seen with them.

  He has no visible means of income though he has bank accounts of undetermined amounts in Switzerland and Luxembourg.

  Under the bold-face subtitle Unconfirmed: “It is thought that somewhere around 1989 Kalatis may have bought a second residence in the Houston area. Since that time it has been rumored that he makes irregular trips back and forth between Bogotá and Houston in a private jet, a Desault Falcon which was at one time registered in the name of his pilot, a former Israeli Air Force instructor who is thought to have worked for Kalatis since the mid 1980s.”

  This seemingly trivial bit of information was the last entry. The last piece of paper was a single sheet with twenty-three lines of coded references. And then there was an 8½ × 11 glassine envelope. Graver opened it and took out three photographs. The first was a picture of Yosef Raviv during his last year in the Israeli Defense Forces. He was in uniform and wearing sunglasses. Broad-shouldered with a rakehell smile and a cigarette tucked in the corner of his mouth, he was holding an Uzi as he stood on a hilltop with a barren stretch of rugged desert valley behind him. It was 1962 and he was twenty-six. There was no one in the picture with him.

  The next photograph was stamped simply: “Buenos Aires, 1980.” Raviv was sitting at a sidewalk cafe. He was wearing a sport coat and shirt opened at the neck, and again he was wearing sunglasses. In eighteen years Raviv had acquired the solid frame of a man approaching middle age, though he was distinctly athletic. He looked hard and fit. The photographer had caught him in profile, one forearm resting on the small cafe tabletop, the hand of the other on the handle of a coffee cup which he had just put down or was about to pick up. He was alone and there was a folded newspaper at his elbow.

  The third picture was in color, but it was very grainy. Stamped: “Mexico City, 1982.” Raviv was walking along a residential street on a sidewalk next to a high wall. The second floor of a house with its red tile roof peeped up over the high wall. Raviv was wearing what appeared to be a light linen tropical suit, light shoes, and sunglasses. A bough of cerise bougainvillea was sagging over the top of the wall behind him. One hand—the one next to the whitewashed wall—was in his suit pocket while the other one, holding a cigarette, was in midair leaving his mouth where he had apparently just puffed on the cigarette. A foggy plume of smoke made a blurred spot in front of his face. He was alone and looking directly at the photographer, though Graver assumed the picture had been shot from a clandestine position. Raviv was looking straight into the lens with the considered suspicion of a wolf who had sensed something that his senses could not confirm. Graver laid the three photographs side by side and looked at them again, each in turn, slowly. Then he picked them up, put them back into the glassine envelope, gathered together the pages, straightened them, placed everything back in the folder and closed it.

  Chapter 42

  When Arnette came back into the library, she was carrying two cups of fresh coffee. She was wearing common Vietnamese street clothing, a lemon, loose-fitting silk blouse with high collar and long sleeves and baggy white silk trousers. Without saying a word, she put one cup of coffee in front of Graver and went around to the other side of the table and sat down, placing her own cup on the table in front of her along with the ever present ocher pack of foreign cigarettes. She unhurriedly slipped a cigarette from the pack and lit it, looked at the thick dossier, and then at Graver as she exhaled the smoke.

  “This is becoming a goddamned nightmare,” Graver said, taking a drink of coffee. He needed the caffeine. He needed a jolt of something undeniably simple and immediately apprehensible.

  “I’ll have to say… this is extraordinary,” Arnette said. “And it’s big. There’s no need in pretending it isn’t.

  Graver nodded at the dossier. “You think this guy’s back with the Mossad?”

  “There’s no way of knowing about that,” Arnette said, shaking her head. “There never is.” She reached down to one end of the table and dragged the glass ashtray over in front of her. “We just have to go with the record in the file. Let’s say he’s not. In this case that actually seems to fit With no system behind him he is even more dangerous. An organization—no matter how secret it might be—always has records, someone’s personal diary, something tucked away in a vault for posterity, something to set the record straight someday. People can’t help themselves it seems, most people anyway. But Kalatis isn’t one of those people.” She looked at the folder and shook her head again. “To a guy like that, other people—and organizations—are a liability. On his own he’s not going to leave much of a trail. Most of the time he’s not going to leave one at all.”

  They stared at each other for a moment.

  “You think he killed Tisler and Besom.”

  “I think…” She pondered the question a moment “Yeah”—she began to nod—”yeah, I think you ought to make that assumption.”

  “Christ.” Graver looked away, let his eyes wander around the walls of books.

  “They could have been doing anything, Marcus,” she said. “Those investigations, Probst, Friel, the other one… Seldon… If Dean was fabricating the sources but had good information, then someone—Kalatis—was feeding them the information. Kalatis had inside knowledge, and it served his purposes, somehow, to have them go down. So he gave Dean the cases, and together with Besom and Tisler they made them look like they’d done the investigations.”

  “I don’t see how Besom fit into it,” Graver said and then, without waiting for her to respond, tacked in another direction. “They were doing it for money, a lot of money.”

  “Yeah,” Arnette said, “I think you’re right Money is the whole story here.” She gestured at Graver with the hand holding the cigarette. “I said you should assume Kalatis killed Tisler and Besom… or was responsible for it You can also assume that you’ve probably stumbled onto the outer edges of a damned big operation. The people mentioned in that dossier, all of them are in business to turn hundreds of millions… per deal. They may have half a dozen deals going. Drugs. Arms. Information. Those are the big three. But to make those millions, and at the same time keep themselves in the background, they have to rely on a spider’s web of small-timers. And they will mix as readily with these little guys as they will the money barons or Third World bosses or junta generals. They need them. Like all clever people, they know they can’t be powerful unless they
’re surrounded by weakness.”

  She smoked. With her long braid, laced with silver strands and draped over one shoulder of her lemon silk blouse, with her gypsy complexion and straight, sharp-ridged nose, Arnette Kepner was a creature created by the dappled world of secrecy, every kind of secrecy, personal and professional, individual and governmental, official and unofficial. There was as much of her in the shadow as in the light, and that which was in the light never revealed so much as it implied. Arnette had been a long time in the deception game. It had affected her physiognomy, or the aura that surrounded it.

  “The thing about Kalatis,” she continued, “is that because he’s a loner, there are fewer layers of small-timers between him and the dirty work. He’s close. Just around the corner.” She paused, and her voice assumed a note of calculation. “My advice: get your hands on one of the small-timers. Take them into a room and don’t come out until you have the person above them. Get your hands on that person and do the same thing with them. Two, three ‘interviews’ like that and you’ll be close enough to smell him.”

  Graver sipped the coffee and nodded, watching her. Jesus.

  “What about Dean’s contact at the fountain? What in the hell do you think he’s doing?”

  “Marcus, I told you I thought this guy looked like government, didn’t I?” Arnette said, tapping an ash off her cigarette into the ashtray. “Well, we’re checking into that I’m trying to get wire photos of… relevant… CIA and FBI people.” She was being uncharacteristically evasive. “Luckily, this part of the business is relatively small. I should get something pretty quick.”