The Great War for Civilisation (155 page)

THUS FEEL THE PALESTINIANS. Scarcely a month after my conversation with John Hurst, I was in Bethlehem in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where Lockheed Martin of Florida and the Federal Laboratories of Pennsylvania had made quite a contribution to life in the local municipality. Or—in the case of Lockheed—death. I found that pieces of Hellfire missile were stored in sacks in the civil defence headquarters as evidence of eighteen-year-old Osama Khorabi's violent death. The Hellfire had exploded in his living room, killing him instantly, less than two months earlier. The missile engine, fuel pipe and shreds of the wiring system had been sorted into plastic bags by ambulance-drivers and paramedics, alongside shrapnel from dozens of U.S.-made fuses for shells fired by Israeli tanks into Beit Jalla, in the attack on the Palestinian Christian village that Jim Hurst said he hadn't heard about. The Palestinians could read the evidence of the weapons' American origin but were unable to identify the actual missiles and shells that were used. “We are humanitarian workers,” one of the ambulance-drivers said to me one rainy Saturday morning as I trawled through a bag of iron missile parts and shrapnel in his Bethlehem office. “We are not scientists.”

The use of American armaments against Arabs by Israel has been one of the most provocative sources of anger in the Middle East, and the narrative of their use is almost as important as the political conflict between Israel and its enemies. For it is one thing to know that Washington claims to be a “neutral partner” in Middle East peace negotiations while supporting one side—Israel—in all its demands; it is quite another when the armaments Israel employs to enforce its will—weapons that kill and tear apart Arabs—carry the engraved evidence of their manufacture in the United States. Even the CS gas cartridges fired by Israelis at Palestinians in Bethlehem are American-made. Palestinians claimed—with good reason—that the gas has caused serious breathing difficulties among children after the rounds were fired at stone-throwing children near Rachel's tomb. The cartridges and gas canisters are labelled “Federal Laboratories, Saltsburg, Pennsylvania 15681” and are stated on the metal to be “long range projectiles 150 yards.” The rounds, according to the U.S. manufacturers' instructions I read on the side, contain “tear gas which is highly irritating to eyes, nose, skin and respiratory system . . . If exposed, do not rub eyes, seek medical assistance immediately.”
¹⁶³

Throughout early 2001, Israeli tank crews routinely aimed shells at Beit Jalla when Palestinian gunmen fired Kalashnikov rifles—yes, the invention of cheerful eighty-one-year-old Hero of Socialist Labour Mikhail Kalashnikov—from the village of Beit Jalla at the neighbouring Jewish settlement of Gilo, and most of these tank rounds carried U.S. fuses. All were coded: “FUZE P18D M549AC0914H014 014” (in some cases the last digit read “5”). One of these shells killed Dr. Harald Fischer, a German citizen living in Beit Jalla, in November 2000.

The engine of the Lockheed Hellfire missile that struck Osama Khorabi's home in February 2001 carried the coding “189 761334987 DMW90E003007” and its “Lot” number—the batch of missiles from which it came—was 481. On a small steel tube at the top of the missile engine was written the code “12903 9225158 MFR-5S443.” A small, heavy, cylindrical dome which appears to come from the same projectile was labelled “Battery Thermal” and carried the code “P/N 10217556 E-W62, Lot No. EPH-2111, Date of MFR [manufacture] 08776, MFG Code 81855.” The codes are followed by the initials “U.S.” Other missile parts include damaged fragments of a hinged fin and a mass of wiring. The missile attack, according to the Israelis, was a “pre-emptive strike” against the village, although Mr. Khorabi was no militant and his only ambition was to join the Beit Jalla theatre project. The Israelis used Apache helicopters to fire their missiles into Beit Jalla on at least six occasions—including the one on which Mr. Khorabi was killed—and the Apaches are made by Lockheed at their massive arms plant at Orlando, Florida, home of the Hellfire I and II missiles. U.S. manufacturers routinely refuse to accept any blame for the bloody consequences of their weapons' use. I found that the Pennsylvania gas cartridges used by the Israelis in Bethlehem actually carried an official disclaimer. “Federal Laboratories,” it said on the cartridge, “will assume no responsibility for the misuse of this device.”

The world arms market, immoral and deceitful and murderous as it is, is nonetheless a beast that clamours for both publicity and secrecy. It needs to sell just as much as it needs to conceal, to make its billions from the Arabs while at the same time avoiding any mention of the blood and brains that will be splashed upon the sand as a result. The French arms conglomerates Giat and Dassault, along with Lockheed Martin, all have local headquarters in gleaming office blocks in Abu Dhabi. And the middlemen—the Arabs and Israelis and Germans and Americans and Britons who negotiate between manufacturers and buyers—also have a strange inclination to court the press, to reveal their more sinister characteristics, to boast of their ruthlessness, of their necessity in an immoral world. I sometimes think they want to use journalists as confessionals.

Perhaps for this reason, I have spent years, collectively, investigating the ways in which we—the Americans, the Europeans (including the Russians), the “West” in the most generous definition of the word—have produced the instruments of death for those who live in the Middle East. Never once did we reflect upon how Arab Muslims might respond to this extraordinary, wicked trade in arms, how they might attempt to revenge themselves upon us—not in their own lands but in ours. During the Lebanese civil war, I tried hard to connect the victim with the killer, sometimes travelling across Beirut to seek out the sniper or the gunner who had blown a man or woman to pieces. Once, in East Beirut, I confronted the Christian Phalangist militiaman who, I am sure, fired the mortar shell that killed a young woman in a West Beirut street. He refused to talk to me. So I searched for the arms-dealers who made these killings possible. More than anything, I sought to confront the arms-makers with the total and inescapable proof that their particular weapon had slaughtered the innocent. It was a journey that was to take me tens of thousands of kilometres over ten years—to the Gulf, Iran, Palestine, Israel, to Germany, Austria and to the United States. It was a woeful, depressing assignment, for the more I learned, the more profoundly hopeless did the Middle East's tragedy appear to be. To have venal Western nations peddling their lethal products to the Muslim world and Israel was one thing; to watch those same Middle East nations pleading and whining and squandering their wealth to purchase those same weapons, quite another.

One cold late winter's day in 1987, as Iran's terrible war with Iraq was entering its final, most apocalyptic stage, I arrived at the railway station at Cologne in Germany to meet a dealer who knew far too much about that most costly of Middle East conflicts. He was a plump, bespectacled arms-merchant who had many times acted as a conduit between the U.S. government and Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. He sat in his office with a broad smile, insisting that he must remain anonymous lest I wished to be responsible for his assassination. So was it true, I asked him, that he had given the CIA's intelligence on the Iranian army to the Iraqi government? He laughed—so long, so deeply, perhaps for more than thirty seconds—before he admitted all. “Mr. Fisk, I will tell you this. At the very beginning of the war, in September of 1980, I was invited to go to the Pentagon. And there I was handed the very latest U.S. satellite photographs of the Iranian front lines. You could see everything on the pictures. There were the Iranian gun emplacements in Abadan and behind Khorramshahr, the lines of trenches on the eastern side of the Karun River, the tank revetments—thousands of them—all the way up the Iranian side of the border towards Kurdistan. No army could want more than this. And I travelled with these maps from Washington by air to Frankfurt and from Frankfurt on Iraqi Airways straight to Baghdad. The Iraqis were very grateful—
very
grateful!”

The Germans seem to have a penchant for playing these treacherous games. For months in the mid- to late Eighties, I investigated the Middle East arms trade and often I found myself back in that place of Europe's dark past, trailing through snow-covered valleys in Germany's great trains, my bag stuffed with notebooks and files containing Iran's entire weapons procurement demands for 1987, 1988 and beyond—into uncounted years of warfare against Iraq that would be foreshortened in just twelve months” time.

In the frost of 1987, one of these long trains carries me into Königswinter, a chauffeur with a well-heated limousine waiting for me at the station to take me to the
Schloss
in which the “Spider of Bonn” helps to change the military map of the Middle East. Gerhard Mertins smokes long, fat Cuban cigars and looks like an arms-dealer, a part that is played to perfection because it is real. There are no doubts, no lack of confidence, no moral ambiguities as he walks into the study of his Königswinter office, the snow falling heavily and comfortably outside the window. “I love this kind of weather, don't you?” he asks, brushing the flakes from his jacket.

The telephone rings and Herr Mertins speaks intently into the receiver. “We have to know the needs of your generals,” he says impatiently. Then he replaces the receiver with an indulgent chuckle. He makes a great appearance of being candid. “That was the Greek Cypriot army. They are interested in new anti-aircraft guns and mines for their harbours. Mark my words, something is cooking in the island of Cyprus.” He laughs again, a man-in-the-know, unshocked by the iniquities of war. When I ask Herr Mertins to whom he sells guns, he almost coughs at the indignity I have cast upon him. “I think, if you will forgive me, that this is a very naive question.”

He puffs heavily on his cigar and then moves his arm forward and uses it to describe an elliptical, almost aerobatic circle in front of him. “Let me tell you frankly, I am on the Arab horse. Why not? You know, I have principles. I do not do this for profit. Yes, things are said about me—in Mexico, the paper
Excelsior
said I was a Nazi, an SS man, a friend of Klaus Barbie, the ‘Butcher of Lyon.' I have never met this man. But they felt they had to deport me from Mexico.” Herr Mertins maintains offices in Jeddah and Riyadh—he needs no visa to travel to Saudi Arabia—and he shows me a snapshot of himself standing next to long-robed Gulf sheikhs. He mourns the old Beirut, the city destroyed in the civil war that is still scissoring Lebanon to pieces, with the special melancholy of the rich. “I have such fond memories of the Lucullus restaurant. It is destroyed? That is too bad. A beautiful city, so sad.” Beirut was destroyed by weapons—by bombs and mines and artillery fire and fighter-bombers and bullets—but no hint of this damages Herr Mertins's memories.

He is warming to his theme. “I never in my life made business just to make profit. We have a lot of problems just at the moment—they think I am like Adnan Kashoggi.” Iran-Contra dogs the weapons-dealers of Europe, unfairly so in their eyes because America's arms entanglement with Iran was comparatively trivial, a small-scale business deal handled without professional advice or discretion, using dubious Iranian middlemen who real arms suppliers would never invite to their offices, let alone to their homes. The distinction between arms-dealer and middleman is not an easy one to make. In some cases—where the dealer's own country imposes strict rules on weapons exports—the dealer becomes a middleman, passing on procurement lists to dealers in other nations with less scrupulous codes of arms-exporting conduct. When other nationals are brought in as financiers, the system becomes more complicated. When Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North was setting up his arms-for-hostages deal with the Iranians, for example, the middleman was Manucher Ghorbanifar, playing the official role of “Iranian intermediary,” who arranged Robert McFarlane's secret visit to Tehran in May 1986. Adnan Kashoggi, a Saudi, was the financier whose cash set the arms transfer into motion. The dealer (and supplier) was in this case the U.S. government—or Colonel North, depending on your point of view.

Dealers like to be close to their national government and Herr Mertins is no different. German cabinet ministers play on his private tennis courts and U.S. customs agents in Bonn refer to him, not entirely sympathetically, as the “Spider of Bonn.” In his immaculate works canteen, Mertins is greeted with affection by his employees—a true Andrew Undershaft, although he does not like the comparison—and he is immensely proud of his family, especially his new American daughter-in-law. “Mr. Fisk, you should take tea as it should be taken,” he announces at a family lunch in the company canteen. “With rum.” He sips for a long time at his
apéritif
. “Why do people say these stupid things about me? You know I have read all the books: the Talmud, the Bible, the Koran . . .” Later he asks rhetorically: “You know the trouble with Germany today? It has lost its nationalist sentiments.” I cringe.

Back in 1965, Herr Mertins sprang a surprise on several nations after the outbreak of the India–Pakistan war. The Americans embargoed arms supplies, although John Kenneth Galbraith, the former U.S. ambassador to India, later claimed that American weapons shipments had “caused the war.” Herr Mertins is still proud of his role in the affair. He had acted as middleman for the export of ninety American F-86 jet fighters to Pakistan under the guise of sending them to Iran. “We put Iranian transfers on the wings and they flew over Tehran in an air display and I was standing next to the Western ambassadors and I said: ‘See, these are the planes you claimed I had sent to Pakistan.' But then the planes flew back to their Iranian air base and we changed their markings back to Pakistan again.” Herr Mertins slaps his right fist into his left hand. “You see? A case of pure German plastic science.”