Profits of War. Ari Ben-Menashe. 1992.

Would it give you a warm fuzzy feeling to know that Israel, in the 1980s, used bribery, extortion, and even multiple assassinations to try to stop the U.S.-backed transfer of chemical weapons to Iraq? And they almost succeeded, until the CIA arranged a coup in Paraguay, where the chemical weapons being sold to Iraq were manufactured, and a short-lived ban on U.S. imports of Chilean fruit, threatening to destroy the Chilean economy.

Maybe you heard that the U.S., in the 1980s, supplied Iraq with weapons of mass destruction? Maybe you heard about how the U.S., in the 1980s, shipped missiles to Iran (there were congressional hearings about this). Maybe you've even heard that the Reagan campaign, in 1980, arranged to have the release of the hostages in Iran delayed to ensure Jimmy Carter's defeat.

According to this book, everything I thought I knew about arms sales to Iran and Iraq during the 1980s is just the tip of the mushroom cloud.

Is selling weapons to your own enemy hypocrisy? Or does selling arms to two nations at war with each other, one your enemy, the other your ally, suggest incompetence, corruption, or bad planning? Or how can the U.S., whose ally was Saddam Hussein, work together with Israel, whose enemy was Saddam Hussein and whose ally was thus the Ayatollah Khomeineh, thier enemy's enemy, to sell arms to Iran?

1. Arming countries at war with one another, even if, at any given point, one of them is your ally and the other is not, serves to make everybody else weaker. Let the Middle East pay you for the means to tear itself to shreds, then march in and plant a flag on their oil fields.

2. There is more money to be made, the more weapons you sell.

3. Precisely because it is forbidden to sell arms to your nation's enemy, you can double, triple, quadruple the price. An embargo doesn't stop a transaction, it raises the market value of the commodity. Illegal sales of narcotics, weapons, and oil: that's where the smart money is at the turn of the millennium.

4. Profiteers with government connections will make the most money from transactions outlawed by said government, while enjoying the most protection from the law. Who passes the laws controls the market.

5. If national security is sufficiently profitable, profit will override security in future policy decisions. This is why the Bush administration would rather fund a kazillion-dollar missile defense system than stock the less-profitable but infinitely more urgent smallpox vaccine.

This is an exhilarating and sickening memoir of a zealot turned profiteer turned turncoat, and I hope it is all fiction. Among the many thugs, luminaries, diplomats, and revolutionaries who make guest appearances are George H. W. Bush, Alfredo Stroessner, and Abimael Guzman. Being a spook is an exciting and potentially lucrative career, but don't neglect planning your exit strategy.