An Absence of Light

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 had 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 Bogota 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 Bogota 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 8?? 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.