"..... Since moving to Spain, some thirty years earlier, Kassar had become one of the world’s most prolific arms dealers. Although he owned an import-export company that conducted legitimate business, he had also developed a reputation as a trafficker willing to funnel munitions to rogue states and armed groups in defiance of international sanctions and embargoes. He has been accused of many transgressions: fuelling conflicts in the Balkans and Somalia, procuring components of Chinese anti-ship cruise missiles for Iran, supplying the Iraqi Army on the eve of the U.S. invasion in 2003, and using a private jet to spirit a billion dollars out of Iraq and into Lebanon for Saddam Hussein. A 2003 United Nations report branded him an “international embargo buster.” In 2006, when Iraq’s new government released its list of most-wanted criminals, Kassar was No. 26. (He was “one of the main sources of financial and logistics support” for the insurgency, an Iraqi official said.)....
Kassar liked to playfully deny the charges against him, saying that he had never dealt drugs (“I don’t even smoke cigarettes!”), and claiming that he had long since retired from the arms trade. But, along with Persian carpets and silk flowers, the grand salon was decorated with framed photographs that showed him posing with Saddam Hussein’s son Uday, and with his longtime friend Abu Abbas, the former head of the Palestine Liberation Front, who was responsible for hijacking the Italian cruise ship the Achille Lauro, in 1985. “How do I know who’s good and who’s bad?” Kassar would say of his associates. “The bad people for you may be the good people for me.”
........ Over the years, Kassar had developed powerful links with various governments and their intelligence services, whose agents often intersect with the underworld. The result was a degree of impunity. “He was a protected person, in some respects, by virtue of his relationships,” Wyman said. These connections, coupled with strong legal counsel, had allowed Kassar to avoid significant jail time. In the Arab world, he was known as the Peacock. In Europe, the press called him the Prince of Marbella........
Kassar was born in 1945 and grew up in the town of Nebek, outside Damascus. He has described himself as “a peasant, the son of a peasant,” but his father was a diplomat, who served as Syria’s Ambassador to Canada and India. Monzer studied law, but never practiced, and by 1970 his Interpol record had begun, with an arrest, for theft, in Trieste. “After the ’67 war, there were a lot of very wealthy, very capable, usually well-educated Lebanese, Jordanians, and Syrians who went out to earn a lot of money any way they could,” Sam Wyman told me. “The weapons industry and the drug industry were very lucrative. There was terrorism going on. There was almost a subculture.”.......
By the early nineteen-eighties, when Kassar settled in Marbella, the town had become a Riviera for the Arab élite. Wealthy Arabs from Lebanon and the Gulf States were constructing extravagant villas there; many of King Ibn al-Saud’s children built houses in the area. Prince Salman erected a mosque in Marbella, and arrived for Friday prayers in a Rolls-Royce with a gold grille and door handles. Adnan Khashoggi, the wealthy Saudi arms dealer, docked his massive yacht, Nabila, in the harbor, and was known for his elaborate parties and his private DC-8—a life style that he claimed cost him a quarter of a million dollars a day.
Marbella had also begun to attract a criminal element. “There were Arabs, there were Dutch, there were Brits,” Soiles told me. Loosely policed, and a short boat ride from Africa, the town became a smuggler’s haven. In Soiles’s view, the Spanish authorities simply “weren’t ready for that type of criminality.”
Khashoggi, who was an occasional rival of Kassar’s, once defended lavish living as an imperative of the arms trade, observing, “Flowers and light attract nightingales and butterflies.”...
In 1989, Tomkins says, Kassar asked him to set up a phony arms company in an office in Amsterdam, and contact a potential buyer with a list of items for sale. The buyers worked for Israeli intelligence. Kassar predicted that they would be interested in only one of the products on the list: ammunition for a type of Russian tank that the Israeli-backed Lebanese Christians had recently captured from Syria. Kassar didn’t tell Tomkins about the operation’s ultimate purpose, relaying only the next step: rent an office, make this phone call. But it gradually emerged that Kassar planned to lure two Mossad agents to the Amsterdam office, where they would be ambushed by hit men from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. (Kassar had long-standing ties with several Palestinian terror groups; a U.S. congressional report once referred to him as “the Banker of the PLO.”)......
“Kassar kept walking in, sort of waving a flag, saying, ‘I’m a secret agent, I can provide a lot of information to the U.S. government,’ ” Vincent Cannistraro, a former C.I.A. official, told me. “He wasn’t looking for money—he was looking for cover.” The agency did not take him up on his offers, Cannistraro maintains, but other governments did occasionally enlist Kassar. It has been widely reported that, in the eighties, he assisted the French in securing the release of several hostages held in Lebanon. Some also suggested that he aided in the 1994 capture, by French intelligence, of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, the Venezuelan terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal. Kassar denied any role in that operation, telling a reporter, “I would not have sold him for all the money in the world.”....." (more, here)
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