Israel's man in Tehran

Conversations with Yaacov Nimrodi, israeli agent, arms dealer and

businessman,
who helped start the Irangate affairs - and ended up tripping over it.

By JENS NAUNTOFTE

The midday sun is baking the city landscape og makes these old citywalls
from Richard Lionheart's time look like a black and white backdrop in a
play out of the Middle Ages. But Yaacov Nimrodi can chase away unwanted
associations swiftly.

He immodestly throws out his hand - "Do you like my view?" - which was
this 180 degree panorama painting on his wall.
But the truth is, we are standing on the terrace of his luxury apartment
with the old Jerusalem at our feet.
The Omar mosque's gold plated cone stands before us like a raised fist;
framed by the Gethsemane garden and the onionshaped church dome in the
distance.

What we can't see from Nimrodi's penthouse on the upper echelons of Hotel
King David, is that there is a general strike all over the arabic sector
of the city and West Bank. Businesses are closed, curtains are pulled out
- the busy merchant stands in the old city are empty; even the exchange
booths at the Damascus gate are closed.

But that hardly makes Yaacov Nimrodi lose sleep at night. Since his
arrival in Jerusalem as a child, 62 years ago, jews and palestinians have
been fighting over the inherent right to the land in Palestine. Nimrodi
is on the winning side, something that permeates his entire compact round
being, as he eagerly points out over the arabian district and confides:
"In 1967, when we conquered east Jerusalem, we should have forcibly
removed the entire arabic population from the city.It could have been
done within a day and Israel would have been rid of the most bitter part
of this conflict. The challenges here in Jerusalem are harder than all
the other territorial disputes in the West Bank and Gaza.

Spies and weapon trades

Yacoov Nimrodi is already a living legend. He was the israeli Mossad's

agent in Tehran during the Cold War in the fifties, where he helped the
Shah build their intelligence organisation. Afterwards, Israel's prime
minister David Ben-Gurion made him his military attach to Tehran and he
personally handled the israeli weapons exports to Iran. This gave way for
Israel to begin buying iranian oil; resulting in a strategic alliance
that benefitted both nations greatly.

But the crown jewel of Nimrodi's work came in the golden 70's, when he as
a private businessman in Tehran sold the Shah's men everything from
weapons to desalination equipment. With the Petrodollars building up in
Iran's treasury, this israeli had gotten himself a straw into the
moneybag and it made him a multi millionaire.

In December 1978, a month before the Shah's fall, the Nimrodi family
packed their bags and along with 34 other jewish associates, left a
Tehran that neither the Shah's army, the CIA or the Mossad could preserve
- in the "peacock-emperor's" hands.
Khomeini stood ready to take power and Tehran had become a wimping kennel
of revolutionary hatred against the Shah, the U.S. and Israel.

Irangate

Because of this it becomes doubly ironic that later in 1985, Nimrodi

would go on to become Israel's middleman in "Irangate". The fiercly
discussed scandal was in reality - a brilliant israeli plan, where Saudi
Arabia played a role as middleman. The idea was that the U.S. and Israel
would sell weapons to the Khomeini regime in hopes of getting both
american hostages in Beirut released aswell as establish a strategic
alliance between Tehran, Jerusalem and Washington.
"It all started in early 1985 with Adnan Khashoggi(saudi arms dealer)
suggesting they try to open the door to Iran. It sounded fantastic. Right
away I liked the proposal", Nimrodi says as he pours a cup of coffee.
"We are of course going to sell our weapons", Nimrodi continues.
He knows what he is talking about. "You see, every fifth israeli worker
is employed in the armament industry and today Israel is the world's
sixth largest weapons exporter. Similar to nations such as France, Israel
is not picky about the recipients of its weapons. The show must go on.
We have built a armament policy which is 20 times bigger than what we
ourselves have use for, so it is logical to export our goods." Nimrodi
has fired up a fat cigar and requests a fresh cup of coffee from his
personal chauffeur and chef, who subserviently commutes with him between
residences in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

The U.S. takes the bait

It is obvious that Nimrodi is interested in the subject: "The israeli

government has never denied that we sold weapons to the iranians", he
remarks with a assuring smile. "The main question here was whether or not
the american government had given their approval for these sales."
Nimrodi apparently knows that Washington gave their stamp of approval,
which is also confirmed in the final report that the U.S. Congress
released in November of last year. "If opening up for trades with Iran
was beneficial in the eyes of president Reagan - so too, would it be
beneficial to Israel.
There are 25 000 jews in Iran. But our endeveours were halted", Nimrodi
proclaims with a sense of pity, unable to to hide that during the initial
stages of the arms trades in Iran in 1985, he knew he had been handed a
golden egg. "We wanted to create connections that would remain until the
day Khomeini died."
Khashoggi, Nimrodi and their israeli colleague, Al Schwimmer, were
actually counting on entering the vast iranian trade market while their
war with Iraq was in full effect so that they would be able to reap what
they sowed the day peace came about. Because then, Iran with their
profits from oil exports would become one of the best markets in the
Middle East.

Oliver North

These days Nimrodi is bitter over the brutal way that the Prime Minister
at the time, Shimon Perez, pushed him and his american colleague,
Schwimmer, aside during the new year of 1986 - and instead let terrorism
adviser Amiram Nir take over control of the continued arms trade with
Iran.
Out of the six shipments containing american made arms which "Irangate"
describes as spanning from the summer of 1985 until the year after in
1986 - Nimrodi, Schwimmer and David Kimche were involved during the 3
first ones. In January of 1986 the second fase had begun and new players
were entering the field. Amiram Nir releaves the director of foreign
affairs, David Kimche, at the same time that Nimrodi and Schwimmer are
releaved of their duties. In similar fashion, back in Washington, Robert
McFarlane who was Reagan's safety advisor, gets releaved and it is John
Poindexter and his assistant, Oliver North, who takes the charge of
directly controlling fase 2 of the Iran affairs, which is characterized
in weapons now being sent by the CIA as opposed to Israel.
This second fase also consisted of 3 separate arms shipments.Yaacov
Nimrodi found that the first fase was structured just right. The fact
that it was himself and Schwimmer who oversaw the shipments gave the
Peres cabinet a case for plausible deniability, as it were, something
which Oliver North and Poindexter made famous during the congressional
hearings last summer. What Nimrodi is saying is that Peres, in case of
being exposed, could essentially write off any knowledge of any private
affairs that people such as Nimrodi and Schwimmer may have had. It is a
coldly calculated trick. It is not a coincidence that Israel has
approximately a thousand active weapons dealers, the majority of which
are former military officers who have licenses to trade arms as private
actors on the international market. According to Nimrodi everything
started going south from the moment PM Peres let his advisor, Amiram Nir,
take the stage on the secret project. At that point the arms trade became
a directly controlled government affair with Peres right at the top.
Nimrodi's argument seems valid. But why would Peres give control of the
operation to Amiram Nir? The answer is a simple one. The arms shipments
to I ran were on the verge of ceasing. Reagan's safety advisor, Robert
McFarlane, had gotten cold feet. The iranians didn't release all the
american hostages located in Beirut - as McFarlane had initially
demanded. He felt deceived by the iranians and recommended all arms
trades with Iran be stopped.

The Contras

But in December 1985, McFarlane is replaced by John Poindexter. This

opened up new possibilities for the iraelis, as the adviser on terrorism,
Amiram Nir, had close contact with his counterpart in Washington; terror
advisor Oliver North. In January of 1986, Nir persuaded Poindexter/North
in continuing new arms trades. Now, the argument was no longer related to
freeing hostages in Beirut. There was, however, a strong consensus on
demanding higher prices from Iran and transfer the surplus to the contra
movement in Central America. Thusly, Irangate morphed into including the
Iran-Contra affair.

The israeli interests were at one point deviating from those of

Washington. Since the year after Khomeini's revolution, Israel had been
selling military spare parts and weaponry to Iran, despite the american
embargo. In January 1986, through linking Washington in on the direct
arms sales to Tehran, Israel was able to maintain an ideal situation in
which it could continue to covertly sell its own armaments to Iran. If
the U.S. could break its own terms their arms embargo on Iran (Operation
Staunch), why should Israel have a bad conscience? That's why Yaacov
Nimrodi fell off the wagon as the cynics in the Tehran-Jerusalem-
Washington triangle continued their covert operations. "Israel's main
role was in creating a connection between the americans and the iranians
but the the people in Reagan's staff, along with Amiram Nir, derailed
this important initiative by mixing it with their contra politics",
Nimrodi says in dissapointment. "The arms trades with Iran would have
yielded political bonuses for us aswell as the americans and it was a
straightforward trade with clear guidelines put in place. It had never
would have had to become revealed." Nimrodi clenches his teeth down hard
on his cigar while his gaze wanders out into the eastern horizon, where
he could glean through his inner vision, his beloved Tehran, 3000km away.

Through the Desert

Yaacov Nimrodi is not, contrary to popular belief, an iranian jew. He

was, however, born in Baghdad in 1926. Merely 10 days after his birth his
family emigrated from Iraq to Palestine. From Baghdad, via Aleppo in
Syria, and through caravan and transport trucks via Beirut and Haifa,
they arrived in Jerusalem. Yaacov Nimrodi's mother is still alive to this
day, still living in Jerusalem at the age of 94, having 75 children,
grandchildren and great grandchildren. That her son would emerge from
deep penury as the son of an immigrant tailor from the lower caste on the
israeli status ladder to become one of Israel's richest men, with friends
in the highest of places, is something she would never even have dared
dream.
Many iraqi jews have done well in Israel but Yaacov Nimrodi has them all
beat. Half a century later, Nimrodi is sitting in his luxury apartment in
Jerusalem, surrounded by great paintings and antiques he has procured
from Tehran. He has a powerful charisma and a well mannered being which
switches from vanity to quick thinking. Nimrodi doesn't take the time to
tell this story to a foreign reporter because he yearns for eager
listeners. He does it first and foremost because he sees the documenting
of his accounts as a confirmation of his worth. The world will know how
important his life has been.
Any eventual misunderstandings regarding his person can also at the same
time conveniently be swept out of the way.
But we constantly meet limitations regarding what he can say due to his
secretive past work practices.

[Picture caption: NIMRODI - "These days I trade only in property and real
estate"]

Arms for the Kurds

The next day in his massive villa in Savyon, a suburb of Tel Aviv, he
pulls me from one glass case display to the next, where medals and gifts
from the Shah and iranian generals is on display along with miniature
models of the weapons he sold them throughout his lifetime. In a small
video library he has copies of the tv programs he has taken part in. "Do
you want to se some of them?", he asks but proceeds to pull me along
further before I can answer, to a shelf where photo albums stand lined
up. One of the albums is particularly interesting. It displays his own
snapshots from the 50's and 60's, when he was a Mossad agent and military
attach, traveling to kurdish locations in north-western Iran. There, he
trained with israeli instructors on handling of guns such as the ones
they supplied to the kurdish "peshmergas" in their battle against the
irani government.

A night in February, 1986, when I interviewed the legendary kurdish

chief, Mustafa Barzani, the so-called Red Mullah in northern Iraq near
Haj Omran, a question he refused to answer was precisely Israel's role.
He wouldn't in any regard comment on the circumstances relating to a
possible israeli involvement in the supply of weapons for his war with
the central government in Baghdad. 17 years later, in Savyon, I see
photos of the same Barzani in the company of Nimrodi and the israeli
instructors. The photo album shows a young Nimrodi in his fourties,
drinking tea with a likewise young Mustafa Barzani somewhere in the
kurdish highlands. Here is the documentation of a secret israeli foreign
policy at work, archived at the aging former agents villa in Savyon.
The White House in Tel Aviv

The villa in Savyon is in and of itself and expression of Nimrodi's

power. It is a smaller copy of the White House in Washington, painted in
a blinding white with entrance columns, a rosegarden , swimmingpool,
tenniscourt and garden areas. When you further hear that Nimrodi also has
a couple of apartments in Manhattan in New York and London, you pretty
much get a good picture of his standard of living - he is a israeli
version of his buddy and multi millionaire, Adnan Khashoggi. But contrary
to "the world's richest man"(at the time), there are no starlets or
blondes in Nimrodi's wake - and he sparingly ever pops the french
champagne. Nimrodi is a jewish familyman who takes care of as many of his
daughters and sons in law that he can at the daily dinner feasts. He has
big plans for a family empire but it would be a israeli one and soon his
son will return from Harvard Business School to take on the position of
CEO in his new venture. Nimrodi has pulled back all his assets to Israel,
where he has bought a primary stockholder status in the 75 year old
company "Hachsharat Hayishuv".
It goes back to the first years of zionism and Jewish Agency is also a
shareholder in the company, which owns vast land plots, hotels, factories
and more.
This is the new image that our former spy and arms dealer wishes to
convey and be identified with.

The widespread coverage of his role in "Irangate" has left his reputation
in the dirt and he is desperate to wash it off. He wants to be a
respectable israeli business matador, dressed in the zionist motherland's
colors of white and blue.

The Mossad Agent

While he is in the middle of sharing is visions for the future, I ask him
fankly how he fared during his training of the Shah's intelligence agency
SAVAK, known for its hands bloody during the years before 1979. The
israeli lashes out with his hand as he seemingly wades off a couple of
flies:
"I didn't train SAVAK. That was not my task. I built the irani military
intelligence from scratch. In that endeavor I had utilized young israeli
instructors who spoke fluent farsi and their iranian students never
realized they were israeli. The iranian chief of intelligence, General
Leutenant Ali Khia, encouraged my government in 1960 to extend my stay
and this is part of why I was made a military attach to Tehran. We sold
alot to Iran. I got the Uzi introduced to the iranian army and over the
years those numbers became enormous. Nimrodi pulls me over to the glass
displays again, where we study models of canons, patrolboats, tanks and
Soltram mortars of 81, 120 and 160mm kalibers. "I saw through contracts
worth many hundreds of millions of dollars. Iran was one of our very best
customers. On a yearly basis, Israel sold for over 500 million dollars
worth of goods to Iran alone, of which about a 20% where weapons. But by
then I had been called back home. I wanted to be general in chief of the
army in occupied West Bank. When that proved impossible I left the
service."
After that the veteran left for Tehran again. His formidable network of
contacts spanned from the Shah at the top to the military intelligence
and his previous work history served him well. He now organized at his
own expense what he had previously done for the israeli government.
"I represented all israeli weapons factories in Iran. They knew my
connections were solid."
What followed were bountyful years where Nimrodi was able to line his
pockets.

The road to Washington

But in the previous year of 1985, the pretext to Irangate starts to form,
long before president Reagan's advisors had come into play. The Iranian
businessman and former SAVAK agent, Manucher Ghorbanifar, was frustrated
over the fact that he could not get a proper conversation started in
regards to doing arms trades with the U.S.- via his secret weapon
channels in Western Europe. Ghorbanifar contacted Adnan Khashoggi and
requested advice. Khashoggi had ambitious plans of his own where he
sought to bring about a peaceful relationship between Saudi Arabia and
Iran.
To this end, Israel could be useful and Khashoggi personally was on good
footing with people such as Shimon Peres, Ariel Sharon and David Kimche.
Khashoggi's cunning plan was to combine Iran's needs for armaments with
Israel's particular connection with Reagan's government. The result would
turn out to be a duet between Tehran and Washington. Ghorbanifar claimed
that surrounding Prime Minister Musavi and head of parliament, Hashemi
Rafsanjani were people who were interested in re-opening connections to
the West. They feared that the Soviet Union, in case of Khomeini's death,
would gain a foothold in Iran.

Weapons don't snitch

Now Khashoggi and Ghorbanifar went to Nimrodi, Schwimmer and Kimche in

Israel and with the blessing of PM Peres, Kimche contacted Robert
McFarlane in Reagan's national security advisory. Here too, they got
bingo because, despite both minister of defence, Caspar Weinberger and
foreign minister George Schultz's defiant opposition, Reagan's personal
advisors went all in with the arms trades. We know that after the Iran-
Contra scandal became evident in November, 1986 - Tehran tried unabatedly
to buy new weapons from the U.S. No one has been in a position to hinder
Iran in obtaining armaments from the West, despite the embargo. Through
the most shady and suspect channels, the weapons flow freely and we
cannot deny the possibility that the may have been additional american
arms sales after November, 1986. But what about the israeli trades with
Tehran? Are they still ongoing?
Yaacov Nimrodi stares at me with cold, brown eyes and gently lifting his
shoulders in a gesture of uncertainty before humming with his cigar in
his mouth.
"How should I know? I have changed profession. These days I trade in
businesses and real estate. If you wanna buy a hotel and can afford it,
we can talk. Iran remains only in my dreams."
What Lord Palmerstone once said about the british empire pertains to
Nimrodi's motherland, aswell; Israel has no permanent friends, only
permanent interests!
Iran is such a permanent interest. What Nimrodi with great professional
devotion created through widespread connections as an unofficial council
in Tehran stands out despite the revolution and governmental changes. As
I drive down the gravel road, Nimrodi stands in the doorway of his
millionaire palace.
If I am gleaning this right from the rear view mirror, his smile is gone.
What remains is a little 62 year old man waiting for the rush of from
when the story hits the public. It is said that you can get high off of
it when it happens.
Jens Nauntofte is a reporter for the radio channel "Orientering"
This winter he published the book "Reagan's last tango - The U.S. Middle
Eastern Policy Under Critical Light" under publisher Vindrose, where he
describes the background for Reagan's Irangate.