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Several of TIME'S sources have identified a former Asmara purchasing agent and stockholder named Herbert Schul-zen as the Asmara connection. Last week Schulzen, now an executive for Kolloid Chemie, a West German dye-making firm, told TIME he could not comment because "secret service agencies" were involved. He added: "When I read in the papers that for nine years various governments have kept the disappearance of the uranium a secret, I cannot as a private individual comment on what is taking place at a [higher] political level."
Asmara at first had ordered the uranium for a third party, a Casablanca pharmaceutical-supply company named Chimagar; like Asmara, it had never bought uranium before. "Laughable," said one of the company's executives last week when told that the firm—which specializes in processing seaweed—had been named as a recipient of the uranium. Indeed, Chimagar was not a good cover. Morocco is not a member of the Common Market, and no nuclear material can be shipped outside the Community without a special permit.
Thus, in August 1968, the uranium contract was amended. Asmara and the Société Générale informed the Common Market that the ore would be shipped to SAICA, a paint company in Milan that also had never been known to use uranium. SAICA was to mix the uranium with an unspecified substance included in the shipment, then return it to Asmara in the same 560 drums. "They chose us merely to get the uranium out of Antwerp into the Mediterranean," said null chairman, Francesco Ser-torio, last week; he claims he wondered about the deal at the time. Nevertheless, Sertorio says he received an advance payment from Asmara Chemie of $12,000 for buying equipment to mix and handle the uranium. Apparently Asmara knew that the Scheersberg A, with its barrels of uranium innocently marked "plumbat" (a lead derivative), would never dock in Italy. A few days after the Scheersberg A sailed from Antwerp, Asmara called SAIGA to say the ship was mysteriously lost and told the paint company to keep the $12,000.
The history of the Scheersberg A's ownership is almost equally mysterious. Less than two months before its fateful sailing from Antwerp, the ship—then known simply as the Scheersberg—was purchased from a Hamburg shipping broker, August Bolten, by a company that was little more than a post office address in Monrovia, Liberia: the Biscayne Traders Shipping Corp., which was incorporated on Aug. 20, 1968, about the time that Asmara Chemie's final contract for purchase of the uranium was completed. Biscayne took title to the Scheersberg A—for $287,000—on Sept. 27, 1968. The company, which was dissolved in 1971, was almost certainly a front for the Mossad. For more than a year, corporate documents prove, Bis-cayne's president was Dan Ert, 40, who admitted in 1973 that he was an Israeli intelligence agent.