Sleeping With The Devil Read Online Free PDF
Author: Robert Baer
Like
espionage, the oil and arms business is run on a strict need-to-know basis: Give up only what
you have to.
“What I’ll tell you is this,” Yuri went on. “I intend to wrap up my
offer in a nice, neat package. I’m talking about PMU-300s. Tomorrow I could put my hand on
twenty TELs and a hundred pencils. You open the door in Damascus, and I’ll convince the Syrians
this is a deal they can’t refuse.”
Now things were starting to get interesting. In the arms lingo, a TEL
is a transporter-erector-launcher, and a pencil is a missile, but this wasn’t just any TEL. The
PMU-300 is a sophisticated Russian mobile surface-to-air missile system. I wasn’t surprised
Yuri was offering it for sale - he sold Russian arms for a living. What did surprise me was
that he was pitching it here in Israel. Technically, Syria and Israel are at war. Syria’s
possession of PMU-300s would upset the balance of force between the two countries. I couldn’t
imagine Israel would be pleased to find out that sophisticated arms were being sold to its
archenemy on its own soil, one sunny morning halfway between Tel Aviv and the Lebanese border.
Then again, money helps disguise a lot of unpleasant truths.
I wasn’t going to buy illegal Iraqi oil, and I wasn’t going to buy arms
for Syria, but I was closing in on the answer to a question I’d had for a long time. If Yuri
was prepared to sell PMU-300s from a luxury resort hotel in Caesarea, armed with an
international cell phone and a fat Rolodex, what else could he sell? And to whom? You don’t
need to be ex-CIA to know that globalization isn’t just about Diesel jeans, Sony PlayStations,
and Mercedeses. What I intended to find out was exactly how globalized the shady side of the
arms business had become.
In all my years in the CIA, I saw very few borders you couldn’t get
arms through, around, or over. [text omitted]Through the 1990s, arms were coming across the Amu
Darya, the river that separates ex-Soviet Central Asia from Afghanistan, in raft loads. A few
Stinger surface-to-air missiles found their way into the former Soviet Union. One errant
Soviet-designed missile even made it to Mambasa, Kenya, where it misfired trying to bring down
an Arkia Israeli Airlines passenger jet in late November 2002.
Western Europe hasn’t been immune, either. On September 2, 2001, two
young North African immigrants decided they’d had enough of France, or at least French
authority. Armed to the teeth, they launched a military assault on the Beziers municipal
office. After gunning down a mayor’s aide with a Kalashnikov assault rifle as he sat in a car,
they fired a rocket from a Russian-made launcher at an empty police car, which exploded in
flames. They tried to do the same to a second police car - this one with four gendarmes inside
- but the grenade turned out to be a dud. The police were left shaking their heads. Buying
military munitions on the black market, it seemed, was easier than buying dope. Ten years ago
an enterprising French criminal would have been lucky to put his hands on an unregistered
handgun, and it would have cost a fortune. Today he could buy a Kalashnikov for five hundred
dollars in one of Paris’s ghetto suburbs, or a rocket launcher and grenade for three hundred.
Don’t forget: France has one of the most restrictive gun laws in the world.
Still, there had always been exceptions, borders that even the Yuris of
the world couldn’t violate. Listening to him now, I wondered if that was still the case.
Facts in the arms business aren’t easy to come by. Arms dealers run a
closed shop. They don’t talk to journalists or researchers, put out a trade journal, or
register with the chamber of commerce. To find out what’s going on, you almost have to enlist
an arms dealer - recruit him as an agent to take a look where you can’t. During the first half
of my career, the CIA put
espionage, the oil and arms business is run on a strict need-to-know basis: Give up only what
you have to.
“What I’ll tell you is this,” Yuri went on. “I intend to wrap up my
offer in a nice, neat package. I’m talking about PMU-300s. Tomorrow I could put my hand on
twenty TELs and a hundred pencils. You open the door in Damascus, and I’ll convince the Syrians
this is a deal they can’t refuse.”
Now things were starting to get interesting. In the arms lingo, a TEL
is a transporter-erector-launcher, and a pencil is a missile, but this wasn’t just any TEL. The
PMU-300 is a sophisticated Russian mobile surface-to-air missile system. I wasn’t surprised
Yuri was offering it for sale - he sold Russian arms for a living. What did surprise me was
that he was pitching it here in Israel. Technically, Syria and Israel are at war. Syria’s
possession of PMU-300s would upset the balance of force between the two countries. I couldn’t
imagine Israel would be pleased to find out that sophisticated arms were being sold to its
archenemy on its own soil, one sunny morning halfway between Tel Aviv and the Lebanese border.
Then again, money helps disguise a lot of unpleasant truths.
I wasn’t going to buy illegal Iraqi oil, and I wasn’t going to buy arms
for Syria, but I was closing in on the answer to a question I’d had for a long time. If Yuri
was prepared to sell PMU-300s from a luxury resort hotel in Caesarea, armed with an
international cell phone and a fat Rolodex, what else could he sell? And to whom? You don’t
need to be ex-CIA to know that globalization isn’t just about Diesel jeans, Sony PlayStations,
and Mercedeses. What I intended to find out was exactly how globalized the shady side of the
arms business had become.
In all my years in the CIA, I saw very few borders you couldn’t get
arms through, around, or over. [text omitted]Through the 1990s, arms were coming across the Amu
Darya, the river that separates ex-Soviet Central Asia from Afghanistan, in raft loads. A few
Stinger surface-to-air missiles found their way into the former Soviet Union. One errant
Soviet-designed missile even made it to Mambasa, Kenya, where it misfired trying to bring down
an Arkia Israeli Airlines passenger jet in late November 2002.
Western Europe hasn’t been immune, either. On September 2, 2001, two
young North African immigrants decided they’d had enough of France, or at least French
authority. Armed to the teeth, they launched a military assault on the Beziers municipal
office. After gunning down a mayor’s aide with a Kalashnikov assault rifle as he sat in a car,
they fired a rocket from a Russian-made launcher at an empty police car, which exploded in
flames. They tried to do the same to a second police car - this one with four gendarmes inside
- but the grenade turned out to be a dud. The police were left shaking their heads. Buying
military munitions on the black market, it seemed, was easier than buying dope. Ten years ago
an enterprising French criminal would have been lucky to put his hands on an unregistered
handgun, and it would have cost a fortune. Today he could buy a Kalashnikov for five hundred
dollars in one of Paris’s ghetto suburbs, or a rocket launcher and grenade for three hundred.
Don’t forget: France has one of the most restrictive gun laws in the world.
Still, there had always been exceptions, borders that even the Yuris of
the world couldn’t violate. Listening to him now, I wondered if that was still the case.
Facts in the arms business aren’t easy to come by. Arms dealers run a
closed shop. They don’t talk to journalists or researchers, put out a trade journal, or
register with the chamber of commerce. To find out what’s going on, you almost have to enlist
an arms dealer - recruit him as an agent to take a look where you can’t. During the first half
of my career, the CIA put