Ari Ben-Menashe on the Capture of Mordecai Vanunu

Selections by Peter Myers, September 15, 2001; update November 21, 2015. My comments are shown {thus}.

Write to me at contact.html.

You are at http://mailstar.net/vanunu.html.

Ben-Menashe was a former Israeli intelligence officer.

The Sydney Morning Herald, & The (Melbourne) Age, as well as Australia's spy agency ASIO, played a part in the capture of Vanunu. The Sydney Morning Herald alerted ASIO, which alerted ASIS, which alerted Mossad.

The BBC produced a TV documentary about Vanunu's capture, and Israel's secret nuclear weapons program, titled "Israel's Secret Weapon".

Transcript, BBC World Service, 29 June 2003, Part 1: http://electronicIntifada.net/v2/article1665.shtml.

Part 2 of the transcript is at http://electronicIntifada.net/v2/article1667.shtml.

(1) Mordecai Vanunu - caught by a Honey Trap

(2) Mossad posing as "Palestinian Terrorists"; and a special flight to Tehran of Israeli air-force pilots disguised as civilians.

(3) Gordon Thomas, writer of political thrillers - a disinformation agent?

(4) Israeli Recruiter of Convicted Spy Pollard Reemerged on American Soil

(5) Robert Fisk on Vanunu's importance

(6) Gordon Thomas discloses Mossad's role in the "Monica Lewinsky" scandal

(7) Daniel Halper: Israelis tried to blackmail Bill Clinton with Lewinsky tapes to force spy release

(1) Mordecai Vanunu - caught by a Honey Trap

Mordecai Vanunu was lured by a "honey trap", after which he was jailed (in Israel) for 18 years (11 solitary); and he never even got the honey.

Ari Ben-Menashe, Profits of War: The Sensational Story of the World-Wide Arms Conspiracy, Allen & Unwin, Sydney 1992.

{p. 200} ... My only experience with it was the so-called "Vanunu affair" in 1986.

Mordecai Vanunu was a former cab driver who had been talking his head off to a church group in Sydney, Australia's red-light district, King's Cross, claiming that he had worked as a technician at a nuclear facility near Dimona, Israel.

When the Israeli intelligence community got wind of this, they immediately checked into Vanunu's background and found it was true. Born in Morocco to a rightwing Jewish family that had migrated to Israel in the early 1960s, he had grown up in Beersheba before being drafted. He was stationed in Dimona and trained as a technician. After his military service, he stayed on. While a civilian, he also started studying philosophy at the University of the Negev in Beersheba and began sympathizing with the Palestinian cause. He aligned himself with North African Jews who had migrated to Israel and told his pals how horrified he was that Israel had so much nuclear firepower. From his work he had a very good idea what Israel had.

Deciding he had had enough of life in Israel, he sold his Beersheba apartment, left his job and the university, and took off with a knapsack on his back. He headed for Thailand and Nepal, where he converted to Buddhism. He stayed free at Buddhist monasteries, although in his knapsack he had a lot of cash from the sale of his apartment. He also had something far more valuable - photographs and undeveloped film of the inside of the Israeli nuclear facility.

In their checks on Vanunu, Israeli intelligence found out that while in Nepal he had contacted the Soviet Embassy in Katmandu and, in the name of socialism, communism, and world peace, offered them the photographs. He was actually flown to Moscow from Nepal with copies, having left the originals in the monastery. He met with the KGB, handed over the photos, and was then debriefed. Although he had been given vague promises by the person who met him in Nepal, all Vanunu got out of his liaison with the Soviets was a ticket back to Katmandu.

After that trip he lost confidence in the Soviet system. Confused and feeling betrayed, he picked up his knapsack from the monastery and flew to Australia, having arranged a visa while he was in Israel. He hung around until his visa ran out and, now

{p. 201} short of money, decided to stay on illegally. He found a place to live in King's Cross, where he joined a church prayer group.

Vanunu found many among the flock who were keen to hear him preach about the evils of nuclear power. He even brought out some of his top-secret photos and handed them around the prayer group. Encouraged by the wide-eyed response, he converted from Buddhism to Christianity and found a job as a part-time taxi driver.

Among the faithful in the prayer group was a Colombian, Oscar Guerrero. A freelance journalist, he had fallen on hard times and had taken up house painting and listening to Bible readings. When Guerrero saw the photographs, he told Vanunu that the two of them could spread "the word" by getting the photographs published - for a fee.

First, Guerrero approached the Sydney Morning Herald, but the photographs were rejected on the grounds that Guerrero seemed a suspicious character. However, his approach was passed on to the internal intelligence service, the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, then to the external service, the Australian Security Intelligence Service, which mentioned it to Israel. Now Tel Aviv realized it had a problem. And, there were no easy answers.

Guerrero tried The Age newspaper in Melbourne, not realizing it was in the same group as the Sydney Morning Herald. Rejected again, he decided to try the London papers. He put together all the money he had, borrowed from Vanunu's dwindling reserves, and bought himself a ticket for Heathrow Airport. In an astonishing stroke of bad luck, one of the newspaper executives he approached was none other than my associate, full-blown Israeli agent Nicholas Davies, foreign editor of the Daily Mirror.

Davies stalled him by telling him that the newspaper needed to bring in an expert to check out his claims. He then called me in Israel, and I sought advice from my superiors. Prime Minister Peres issued an order that Vanunu be stopped at any price and the traitor brought back to Israel. Although the intelligence community suggested that the uproar would eventually die down, Peres raged that he wanted him caught and brought back to be taught a lesson.

The same evening I flew to London. The next afternoon, posing

{p. 202} as a journalist who was an expert on nuclear and military issues, I met with Guerrero and Nick Davies. I insisted I needed copies of the photos before the newspaper could decide whether it was going to buy the story. Guerrero handed over three samples. "Look at them," he said. "If you think they're good, I'll give you the lot."

That same evening the pictures were sent to Israel. The word came back that they were real and that I had to try to discredit Vanunu and his friend. Meanwhile Nick Davies, as ordered by his publisher Robert Maxwell, put together the framework of a disinformation story, to be used later with copies of the photographs, declaring that the Sunday Mirror had looked into the pictures and the men trying to sell them and that it was all a con job. To back up the story, Vanunu's wanderings were detailed.

It was at that point that we discovered that Guerrero had already struck a deal with the Sunday Times on an earlier trip to London. The Times was planning to fly Vanunu to London, interview him at length, and publish his story in detail. The arrangement was that after the story had been printed, Vanunu would get £250,000 advance on a book about Israel's nuclear capability that he would write with one of the newspaper's staff. Guerrero's cut would be 10 percent. He had approached the Mirror because he believed he was being cut out of the Sunday Times deal.

Vanunu flew to London and was put up in various hotel rooms. We realized at this stage that the story could not be stopped, although the Sunday Times was still a long way from printing anything. I contacted my superiors, and Prime Minister Peres himself decided to throw the full weight of Mossad at Vanunu.

The Mossad station chief in London tipped off MI-5 that Israel had a security problem - on British soil. The British intelligence agency agreed to try to help Israel track down Vanunu but warned the Israelis not to do anything that was likely to cause a political or diplomatic incident on British soil. Sunday Times journalists were followed, but none led their "shadows" to Vanunu's hotel.

Finally Nick Davies telephoned a journalist friend, the editor of a Sunday paper, and actually found out the name of the hotel where Vanunu was staying. Davies passed it on to me, and I relayed it to my superiors in Israel. Now, with Mossad fully aware of Vanunu's whereabouts, a plan was put into action, but without

{p. 203} the knowledge of Mossad Director Nachum Admoni. The manner in which Vanunu was kidnapped has been well documented, except for one fascinating aspect - the true identity of the beautiful siren who lured him to his fate.

Vanunu met "Cindy Hanin Bentov" one evening while walking through Leicester Square. They started chatting, and she suggested they go to a pub for a drink. She met him two or three times in between the interviews he was giving to the Sunday Times, and during one of their dates she told him about an apartment she had in Rome. She invited him to come with her for a visit. The offer was too tempting to refuse.

Vanunu told the Sunday Times he was going away for a long weekend. When he arrived at the Rome apartment, three Mossad agents were waiting. He was grabbed, given a knockout injection and pushed into a large crate. Then the crate was taken to an Israeli ship and loaded on as diplomatic cargo, which meant the authorities could not inspect the container.

Once the ship was on its way, he was brought out of the crate, handcuffed, and taken to a guarded cabin. As soon as the vessel arrived in Ashdod in Israel, a colonel in the police presented him with a formal arrest warrant on security grounds. Even though an Israeli Air Force 707 could have flown Vanunu from Britain's Stansted Airport to Tel Aviv, Mossad had been asked by MI-5 not to kidnap him on British soil because this would have embarrassed Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. When Vanunu did not show up in London after his weekend away with Cindy, the Sunday Times decided to run with what it had, along with the photos, on October 5, 1986. The Sunday Mirror already had run its disinformation piece, but it did not have much effect.

The Vanunu revelations in the Sunday Times caused a world outcry - and there was more to follow when he was brought to court and everyone asked how he had been taken back to Israel. He was able to give the world a clue, even though he had been held in solitary confinement. On one of his trips to court in a police van, he pressed the palm of his hand against the van's window On it, he had written the number of the flight on which he had flown to Rome.

Certain members of the intelligence community approached

{p. 204} Deputy Prime Minister Shamir, concerned that Peres might be using the Vanunu affair to blow open the Iran-Israel-Maxwell operations. Shamir wanted Vanunu killed, but it was too late. Vanunu was sentenced behind closed doors to 18 years in jail for espionage and treason. The Sunday Times was happy because it got its story without having to pay a penny. And I heard all the fine details from "Cindy," with whom, it happened, I had worked at an earlier period.

The Vanunu affair in no way prepared me for what I was to learn from the two scientists who briefed me and the files I read in the Prime Minister's Office in preparation for my secret mission. Together, they gave me an overview of the history and scope of Israel's nuclear program. A summary of what I was able to digest follows. I do not present this without a great deal of thought. I do it because I feel it's best for the world to know all it can about secret weapons of mass destruction in every country.

The father of Israel's nuclear program in the mid- 1950s was the then young Shimon Peres, who was director general of the Ministry of Defense under David Ben-Gurion, the state's first prime minister and defense minister. Peres believed that if Israel was to survive, it had to have a deterrent against the Arab countries, and the ultimate deterrent would be nuclear weapons. With this in mind, Peres flew to France in 1956 for a meeting with President Charles de Gaulle. His mission: to get a nuclear reactor for Israel.

De Gaulle, a good friend of Ben-Gurion's from their days in exile during World War II, quickly authorized the sale to Israel of a weapons-grade nuclear reactor with the technology for the development of a nuclear bomb.'

Israel's first nuclear reactor was set up on the Mediterranean coast in Nahal Sorek in the Yavne area. It was used for research with enriched uranium, which was imported from France. The idea was to see if a nuclear project could be handled with Israeli know-how - and the aid of Jewish scientists brought in from the U.S.

' Ironically, in the mid-1970s the French were to sell a reactor to Israel's enemy, Iraq.

{p. 205} After the initial research yielded positive results, Minister Without Portfolio Yisrael Galili, a leftwing powerbroker who directed the intelligence and security services, took upon himself with Ben-Gurion's blessing the cabinet-level supervision of the program. After tasting success in Yavne, within six to eight months he pushed through another nuclear plant in the Negev Desert near Dimona, some 40 miles northeast of Beersheba.

In a memorable speech after the groundbreaking for the supersecret Dimona nuclear plant, the usually subdued Galili stood up in a Mapai Party meeting and, with his chest proudly pushed out, declared, "The third temple is being built!"

This astonished other cabinet members, who at the time did not know what he was talking about. Galili continued by saying that the revival of Israel as a moral leader of the world was at hand and dared any of Israel's neighbors to attack.

Although the French had not given Israel the know-how, they realized Israel would create its own nuclear program and possibly achieve significant technological advances. Hence, the initial agreement that Tel Aviv would share information with Paris.

The prototype of a crude atomic device comparable to the Nagasaki bomb was developed by the early 1960s, and the first test was conducted in a joint Israeli-French operation in the Pacific off New Caledonia in 1963. With a French naval ship doing the monitoring, the relatively low-yield bomb was dropped from a French Air Force plane. The Americans and British thought it was a French test.

After the successful drop, Mapai Party leaders were so ecstatic that Finance Minister Pinchas Sapir announced at a convention that Israel's military power was equal to that of France.

The sharing of Israeli know-how, French equipment, and French money continued until the outbreak of the 1967 war, when the French accused Israel of starting the conflict. Israel didn't see it that way. It saw Egyptian President Nasser starting tensions by blocking the Tiran Straits, the waterway to the Israeli port of Eilat, for his own internal political reasons and to position himself better in the Arab world.

{end of text}

Political dissidents should never respond to emails offering pornography (eg "see my photo") or sex - never click on the links they provide. Intelligence agencies may be using them to lure and trap dissidents (e.g. for possession of child pornography, or sex with a minor). They'd rather discredit you that way, than prosecute you for revealing some inconvenient truth.

(2) Ari Ben-Menashe on Mossad posing as "Palestinian Terrorists"

More from Ari Ben-Menashe, Profits of War: The Sensational Story of the World-Wide Arms Conspiracy, Allen & Unwin, Sydney 1992.

Ben Menashe explains that during the Iran-Iraq war, the US and the USSR supplied Iraq with weapons, while Israel secretly supplied Iran (largely with Soviet-made weapons left over from other conflicts around the world), despite official US bans. On account of the bans and the secrecy, Israel was able to charge Iran a high price, and make quite a profit; this profit went into the "Iran Contra" slush funds.

{p. 44} AT 12:30 P.M. on January 16, 1979, four helicopters had lifted off from the grounds of Tehran's Niavaran Palace, their rotors sweeping aside the snow. There was nothing to indicate to a would-be assassin which aircraft carried His Imperial Majesty Mohammad Reza Pahlavi Aryamehr, Shahanshah of Iran, King of Kings, Shadow of the Almighty, Center of the Universe.

The Shah's departure from Iran would bring about a tumultuous upheaval in the Middle East. It would also lead to a new threat to the existence of Israel, and ultimately bring my country into fierce conflict with the United States.

{p. 45} Oil production had come to a standstill. Scores of freighters lay idle in the Persian Gulf, waiting for customs of ficials to return to work. Moscow had sent an aircraft to pick up 70 Soviet oil researchers and their families. Arnericans and other foreign nationals crammed onto U.S. Air Force planes. Iran was out of control; for each fanatical white-shrouded protester the troops had shot down, another had sprung up to fill the gap.

As their Imperial Majesties walked toward their silver and blue Boeing 707, two officers spontaneously turned to face each other, holding up a copy of the Koran for them to pass under. Then, as the street mobs shouted with joy and smashed the statues erected in his honor, the King of Kings, a small parcel of Iranian soil tucked in his pocket, took the controls of the aircraft and flew off into the sunless sky. The Shah's rule was over.

Israel decided to act fast to protect its interests. On board one of the last flights that El Al made into Tehran before the airport was closed were 48 Israeli aircrews, all wearing civilian clothes.

A few days later, with the full cooperation of the commander of the Iranian Air Force - who was later executed - 48 F-14 jets were flown out of Iran to an air force base in northern Sinai. (They were later sold by Israel to the Taiwanese.) As proof of the Carter administration's blindness, the U.S. had delivered these planes to the Shah in September 1978, even before the U.S. Air Force was supplied with its own. The Shah, whose regime was crumbling around him, had paid through the nose for them. The U.S. was relieved that the F14s had not fallen into the "wrong hands." The Israelis had corrected the situation.

{The following begins with some quotes from later in the book, to introduce the background to the Iran-Iraq war.}

{p. 172} While publicly mouthing words of peace, Peres had privately agreed to participate in the American double-game of arming both the Iranians and the Iraqis.

{p. 126} From March 1981 to the end of 1987 Iran spent the incredible sum of more than $82 billion on equipment sent from the United States, Israel, Europe, South America (especially Brazil and Argentina), and South Africa. The Iranians gratefully received it all - old tanks, aircraft (including old French Mirages from Argentina), TOWs, electronics, radar systems, small arms, artillery, Hawk air-to-ground missiles, Chinese Silkworm missiles, North Korean Scud missiles, Katusha shells captured in Lebanon by Israel, cannons - hundreds of thousands of tons of weaponry, whether it came straight from the factory or was the remnant of some long-dead war. Vast profits were made by the middlemen.

Iran, maintaining an army of approximately 800,000 men, faced a formidable Iraqi military force which was adding to its already well-equipped arsenal from the Soviet Union and France. Iraq was soaking up sophisticated weapons - MiG fighters, SU fighters, and French Mirage 2000s. Like the Iranians, they too were spending a fortune. As arms suppliers, the Western world and the Soviet Union could rub their hands together in glee.

As someone has pointed out, if a question had been put to a computer about what needed to be done to: 1) get the Arabs off Israel's back; 2) part the Arabs from their money; 3) keep the Iranians contained - and part them from their money; 4) keep the oil flowing; 5) make sure the world recycled its old military equipment; 6) keep the Soviets happy; and 7) make a lot of arms dealers and defense contractors rich, it could not have come up with a better solution than the Iraq-Iran war.

{p. 68} It would be in Israel's interest to flood Iran with military equipment, but we had to be cautious. Much of the material we had was American, and if that went to Tehran without the release of the hostages and Carter's okay, there could be serious repurcussions in the U.S. Congress with its Democratic majority.

{p. 91} ... the U.S. embargo against Iran covered even commercial engines. The embargo had not been lifted, but now, to boost the airline, the Iranians were not only looking for spare parts for the old fleet but hoping to buy British Tristars.

I added up the bill. The grand total was one billion dollars, give or take a million. Israel's profit - 50 percent. The slush fund looked like it was going to do very well.

The Iranians screwed up their faces at the price. They knew Israel was ripping them off. But they had little choice.

{p. 120} In February 1987 a "contribution" was made to the West Australian Labor Party by our U.S. counterparts in the CIA. In gratitude for the use of Australian soil for the transfer of arms to Iran, Richard Babayan, a contract operative for the CIA, received a check for $6 million U.S. from Earl Brian, who was acting on behalf of Hadron, a CIA "cut-out." Babayan traveled to Perth and stayed at the home of Yosef Goldberg, an Australian businessman of Israeli origin who was well connected to Israeli intelligence and to the local Labor Party headed by Brian Burke, then premier of Western Australia. Babayan handed the check to Goldberg, who in turn gave it to Alan Bond in his role as the guardian of the John Curtin Foundation funds. This money was passed on by one of Robert Maxwell's companies in Australia to be held by the Pergamon Press Trust Fund in Moscow. Babayan later corroborated the details of this operation in a sworn affidavit.

Despite the high costs involved, profits were still made on the sales to Iran. At various times the fund reached peaks of more than $1 billion. At its height it stood at $1.8 billion, with money constantly coming in and going out - a huge turnover that would have made a successful conventional enterprise very envious. The Likud leaders running the government intended to use the money for three main purposes.

The first was to finance activities of Yitzhak Shamir's faction of the Likud Party. Between 1984 and 1989 no less than $160 million was funneled to Shamir's faction, handled by the deputy minister in the Prime Minister's Office, Ehud Ulmart, who was very close to the prime minister. Other funds were contributed to the whole Likud Party, especially to its 1984 and 1988 election campaigns. That amount totaled about $90 million.

Second, the slush fund helped finance the intelligence community's "black" operations around the world. These included funding Israeli-controlled "Palestinian terrorists" who would commit crimes in the name of the Palestinian revolution but were actually pulling them off, usually unwittingly, as part of the Israeli propaganda machine.

A key player in some of these operations was the former Jorda-

{p. 121} nian Army Col. Mohammed Radi Abdullah, the man who was with Pearson and Davies when I made our approach to Davies. Today in his early 50s, Radi was decorated by King Hussein of Jordan for his bravery in the 1967 Middle East war. However, his family fell out with the king because they were not willing to participate in the mass slaughter of Palestinians by the Jordanian Army in 1970. The family emigrated to London. The colonel married a woman related to Saddam Hussein and went about setting up a number of companies, including shipping offices in Cyprus and Sicily.

Radi became known as a businessman who championed Arab and Palestinian causes in Europe. But he missed his homeland and the days when he was lauded as a hero. He fell to the ways of the West, started drinking heavily and spent a fortune on gambling and women.

In the mid-1970s, to recoup his losses, Radi went to work for Pearson, who was supplying intelligence information to Israel. With Radi's unwitting help, Pearson began to acquire intelligence about Palestinian organizations in Europe. The way he did it was by selling arms to those organizations. An arms dealer named John Knight, who ran a company called Dynavest Limited, located at 8 Waterloo Place, London SW1, and another dealer who operated out of Sidem International Limited, Appleby House, 40 St. James' Place, St. James' Street, London SW1, acquired arms from Yugoslavia. They would sell them to Radi, who would in turn sell them to the Palestinian terrorist, Abu Nidal, and other Palestinian groups. Radi was unaware of Pearson's Israeli connection, as were the others involved.

While it may seem curious that Pearson, a man working with Mossad, was encouraging a Jordanian to sell weapons to Israel's enemies, it was actually all part of a very cunning plot. In doing business with these groups, Radi learned what they were going to use their weapons for and unsuspectingly passed the information on to Pearson. Pearson, in turn, passed on to Mossad the intelligence about the movements of the groups and the number of weapons they had.

Based on Radi's unwitting tips, over a two-month period 14 or 15 Palestinians were wiped out. Word went out among the

{p. 122} Palestinian groups that Radi was working for Israeli intelligence and, fearing for his life, he took a trip to Baghdad and presented his case to Abu Nidal himself. Abu Nidal believed his story that he had been used - which he had - and put the word out that Radi was "clean." The blame was placed on Yasser Arafat's group - Palestinian factions at that time were warring among themselves.

Radi went back to his drinking and womanizing, and the money he made selling arms for Pearson all drained away. At that very vulnerable point, in 1978, Pearson stepped in again and offered Radi a 200,000 loan. This time, Pearson made it quite clear to him that the money was coming from an Israeli source. The desperate Radi accepted the loan and was recruited to work for an antiterrorist group in Israel run by Rafi Eitan.

The group's methods were rather unconventional, one could say heinous, but it had operated successfully for years. An example is the case of the "Palestinian" attack on the cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985. That was, in fact, an Israeli "black" propaganda operation to show what a deadly, cutthroat bunch the Palestinians were.

The operation worked like this: Eitan passed instructions to Radi that it was time for the Palestinians to make an attack and do something cruel, though no specifics were laid out. Radi passed orders on to Abu'l Abbas, who, to follow such orders, was receiving millions from Israeli intelligence officers posing as Sicilian dons. Abbas then gathered a team to attack the cruise ship. The team was told to make it bad, to show the world what lay in store for other unsuspecting citizens if Palestinian demands were not met. As the world knows, the group picked on an elderly American Jewish man in a wheelchair, killed him, and threw his body overboard. They made their point. But for Israel it was the best kind of anti-Palestinian propaganda.

In 1986, Radi was involved in another slush-fund black operation - the well-documented attempt to blow up an El Al plane. Or at least what was publicly perceived to be an attempt. In fact, it was a cold, calculated plan conceived by Rafi Eitan to discredit the Syrians. At a secret meeting in Paris, Eitan told Radi that he wanted to implicate the Syrian Embassy in London in terrorism and have all the Syrian diplomats thrown out of Eng-

{p. 123} land. Radi had a 35-year-old cousin, Nezar Hindawi, living in London, who had two things going for him - he was friendly with the Syrian Air Force intelligence attache in London; and he had a problem with an Irish girlfriend who told him she was pregnant.

Radi went to his cousin and offered him $50,000. At the same time he told Hindawi that he wanted him to do some work on behalf of Palestine that would also rid him of his troublesome girlfriend.

"This money I'm offering you," Radi told Hindawi, "is from our Syrian brothers on behalf of the Palestinians. We want to blow up a Zionist plane. All you have to do is make sure the girl gets onto an El Al plane with explosives in her bag."

Radi arranged for his cousin to meet the Syrian intelligence officer, and Hindawi later came away with the clear impression that what he was doing was for the Arab cause. In accordance with his briefing, Hindawi told his 32-year-old girlfriend, Ann-Marie Murphy, a chambermaid at the Hilton Hotel on Park Lane, that he loved her and wanted to marry her. He was eager to introduce her, his future bride, to his old Palestinian parents who lived in an Arab village in Israel. He told her to go and visit them and receive their blessing. Then, when she arrived back in England, they would get married. Overjoyed, she agreed to go, not realizing that the address he gave her in Israel was bogus.

As far as Hindawi knew, the woman was going to be sacrificed. All he had to do was tell her that he wanted her to take a bag of gifts to his parents. But because he didn't want to risk her being stopped for having too much carry-on luggage, he would arrange for a "friend" who worked at the airport to pass her the bag when she entered the El Al departure lounge. She would pass through the regular Heathrow security checks and then be given the package containing the bomb.

Hindawi had been told that a Palestinian cleaner would pass the deadly package to Ann-Marie. In mid-April 1986, he kissed her goodbye and watched her walk through passport control to what he expected would be her death, along with that of all the other 400-plus passengers on board the El Al jumbo jet.

In the El Al departure lounge, an Israeli security man dressed in casual clothes - the "Palestinian cleaner" - passed the girl the parcel. She took it. But within seconds she was asked to submit to

{p. 124} a search. The security people, who were in on Rafi Eitan's plan, could not afford any accidents. When the bag was opened, plastic explosives were found in a false bottom.

Ann-Marie was rushed off to be interrogated by British security. Sobbing, she told the story of the rat of a boyfriend. Police arrested Hindawi at the London Visitors Hotel, between Notting Hill and Earl's Court, after his brother convinced him to give himself up. He spilled the beans and told them that a Syrian intelligence officer had asked him to carry out the task. But Radi was not implicated. He was under MI-5 protection. As a result, Margaret Thatcher closed down the Syrian Embassy in London. Rafi Eitan had had his way, Hindawi was jailed for 45 years, and Ann-Marie went home to Ireland where she gave birth to a daughter.

These were the kinds of black operations our slush fund was financing.

The third and last main purpose for the slush-fund money was to finance the housing projects in the West Bank and Gaza Strip for Jewish settlers who had been taking over Palestinian land there. Since many members of the U.S. Congress saw these housing projects as a provocation that would impede peace in the Middle East, a lot of U.S. aid to Israel prohibited the use of the money for building in the West Bank. As part of the coalition, the Labor Party, keen to participate in a peace conference, was also against a government project for West Bank housing.

The answer, as far as Likud was concerned, was to draw on the slush fund. Tens of millions of dollars were used in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to help build the foundations for new Jewish settlements and to buy the land from the Arabs. Although much land was simply confiscated and more taken through condemnation for government purposes, many Arabs, forbidden by the PLO to sell land to the Jews in the West Bank, nevertheless did so at inflated prices, even though they were putting their lives at risk should they be caught.

What they did was sell to various foreign Jewish front companies that were actually financed by the Joint Committee. Many West Bank Arabs became wealthy selling their land, taking the

{p. 125} money and emigrating to other countries. As far as Likud was concerned, it was money well spent, because it was encouraging the Arabs to emigrate, while leaving land for the Jews to move onto. Their houses would also be subsidized by the slush fund.

{Now to the South-American twist: the "Contra" connection}

{p. 104} The blowing of the John Street operation was exactly the kind of thing the Israelis had been worried about from the start of the arms sales in 1981. We were well aware that if there were a mistake and the whole trade were exposed, the U.S. could turn around and point the finger at Israel, bringing world condemnation. Whenever U.S. officials were caught red-handed doing something illegal, they usually lied like crazy and accused everyone else. None of us could forget Watergate. And this was bigger than Watergate.

We took two precautions. The first involved Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, who had been appointed to that position earlier in 1981. He was a great supporter of the weapons sales to Iran, and he decided to try to lobby the U.S. government into reaching strategic agreements with Israel. As it turned out, the two American officials used in lobbying for these agreements were CIA Director William Casey's deputy, Robert Gates, and Robert McFarlane, who at that point was on the National Security Council.

Sharon had been a prominent general but was thrown out of the military in 1970 as the result of an interview he gave to Playboy magazine criticizing then-Prime Minister Golda Meir. He came back on the scene in the 1973 war when, as a reserves general, he saved the day on the Egyptian front. He stayed on in the military for a few more years, until the Labor Party decided not to appoint him chief of the general staff. Disgruntled, Sharon then left the military altogether. However, he still had political ambitions. In the 1977 election he ran for the Knesset as head of a political party called Shlom Zion (Peace to Zion). As soon as his party won two seats in the Knesset, he joined the Likud Party coalition, and became minister for agriculture. In 1981 he had been elevated to the position of defense minister.

But in the interim, between 1975 and 1977, Sharon was a private citizen who was trying to build a fortune dealing in arms in Central America. He had a network of people working with him there, one being the disgraced Mossad agent Mike Harari,

{p. 105} who had just left Israel because of his failure in the "Moroccan Waiter Affair," where the wrong man was shot dead in Lillehammer, Norway, during an attempted hit on Ahmed Salame, a Palestinian who had been involved in the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. Harari was a close associate of Panama's military intelligence chief, Manuel Noriega.

Sharon's network had been able to provide military equipment from Israel to various Central American countries, including El Salvador, Guatemala, Panama, Costa Rica, and even Mexico. This was never official Israeli government policy, and it was frowned upon by the cabinet itself, but Sharon was too wild a goose for anybody to handle. So Sharon's private network bought their weapons from Israeli government factories and got their export licenses from the Israeli government. Gates had developed a professional interest in the arms network that Sharon and his former intelligence cowboys were operating in Central America. By 1981, Sharon and Harari were running what Harari described as more of a CIA network than an Israeli operation - and were filling their private bank accounts at the same time.

It was in 1981 that they started supplying a secret army in Central America, the contras, who were trying to destabilize and eventually bring about the downfall of the Sandinista government of Nicaragua, which had come to power in 1979. The contras did not have any money - Congress was not then willing to fund them - and desperately needed cash to buy their arms.

Sharon, with all his power, could not force the prime minister or the leaders of the Israeli intelligence community to pay for weapons from the slush fund that had grown out of the Iran arms sales. So, with the backing of Gates and the CIA, some members of the group created their own fund. They did this, according to Harari, by transporting cocaine from South America to the United States via Central America. A major player was Manuel Noriega, who had known George Bush since he had been the CIA chief in the mid-1970s. Hundreds of tons of cocaine poured into the United States, and another handy slush fund was created.

Because of the close relationship between Gates and Sharon and the special relationship between Robert McFarlane and Rafi Eitan, the strategic U.S./Israeli agreement sought by Sharon was reached. The signing of the strategic agreement by Sharon and the

{p. 106} U.S. was made public, but the contents were kept secret and are still not available through any Freedom of Information Act requests.

However, one part of it was that any U.S. arms sold to Israel involving technology that was 20 years old or more could be resold at the discretion of the Israeli government. The agreement was very loosely worded - it could be interpreted to mean that Israel was allowed to resell brand-new American weapons as long as the technology behind them was at least 20 years old.

This was our first ploy to overcome American denials, if any. If Israel were discovered to be selling arms to the Iranians, we would simply brandish the agreement the Americans had signed ... with its gaping loophole.

Our second protection involved the money from the arms sales - when letters of credit or cash were paid to us to purchase U.S. arms, we simply and quite blatantly ran the sums through U.S. banks.

A letter of credit from the Iranian government would be issued to an Israeli "front" company by a European-based Iranian company through the London or Paris branch of Iran's Bank Melli. It would be endorsed by the National Westminster Bank in England, and we would then ask for it to be transferred to an American bank. Favorites were the Chicago-Tokyo Bank in Chicago, the Chemical Bank in New York, Bank One in Ohio, and the Valley National Bank of Arizona. Then the banks would have to explain these letters of credit, in U.S. dollars, to the U.S. Treasury if they were to accept them. According to U.S. Treasury regulations, letters of credit for sums in excess of $10,000 had to be approved by Treasury.

Since the sales were a U.S.-sanctioned operation, the CIA would have to ensure that Treasury issued an acceptance. Once the letter of credit was approved, it was moved back again to Europe. Except for the John Street operations in 1981-82, this was to be the way almost all the American-supplied arms sales to Iran were handled from late 1981 until late 1987.

The Soviet shootdown in July 1981 of the Argentinean cargo aircraft carrying weapons to Tehran convinced us that we needed

{p. 107} a smokescreen to conceal the movement of the massive amounts of weapons we were shipping.

The smokescreen involved the Israelis making deals with a number of private arms brokers and businesspeople throughout Europe. Their companies would be used as a cover for our own operations. The dealers would purchase equipment from around the world and sell it on our behalf to the Iranians. The money would come to us from Iran, and we would open letters of credit to the dealers - after we had raked off our profit.

{p. 350} Other attempts to sabotage this book were less gentle. The writers who worked with me in Australia received a number of death threats. One American publisher with whom I thought I had a deal to publish the book in the U.S. was apparently intimi-

{p. 351} dated and backed out. A British publisher with whom I did have a deal, refused, at the last minute, to publish the book. Fortunately, Sheridan Square Press in New York and Allen & Unwin in Sydney remained impervious to intimidation. ...

Today, I am a man alone. ...

Looking back, I can say that the 1980s were a mean decade perverted in their lack of humanity. It would be too easy to say simply that I regret my role - though I am deeply sorry for the human suffering of the Iranians and Iraqis. I also regret that Israel continued to develop its capacity for nuclear destruction and that we were unable to bring about peace with the Palestinians.

But I do not regret that my experience allowed me to see firsthand how secret intelligence agencies increasingly dominate the

{p. 352} foreign policy of nations like the United States and Israel. Whereas once intelligence was supposed to inform leaders and guide them in making policy decisions, today covert intelligence operations and foreign policy are too often inseparable, one and the same. The tools of secret slush fund money, covert operations, and disinformation have been used on such a grand scale that they have changed the nature of the entire political process. A handful of people never elected by anyone are now able to manipulate politics.

And my former colleagues, the international arms merchants, with whom I had so many dealings, are not out of business, not by a long shot. If there isn't a big war going on at any given time, there are always a number of small wars. The events in Eastern Europe - in Yugoslavia and in the former Soviet republlcs - continue to generate profits for them. As I sit here I imagine them around their tables, waiting for the next big one, just like Iran and Iraq. Perhaps India and Pakistan. Plenty of cannon fodder to he equipped, a balanced enough conflict to last a long time, no one in the West to care who gets killed - a real goldmine.

I am a humbler man today than I was in the 1970s when I joined Israeli intelligence. I've learned the hard way that everyone makes mistakes, some of them so big that they are irrevocable. I've also changed my view of Israel and the Jewish people. When I was young, I shared with many Israelis a deep nationalistic feeling - the self-righteous and arrogant belief that we were rlght and everyone else was wrong, that it was more important for Jews and Israel to survive than others, that we were - as the Bible says - the chosen people.

I still believe that Jews are chosen. But no longer can I accept the premise on which the Iranian arms deals were based: "Better that their boys die than ours."

People are people. We are all chosen.

{endquote}

To stop the flow of technology to Iraq, Mossad employed Palestinians who did not realise they were working for it. Ben-Menashe describes how:

{p. 287} In the following weeks, eight German scientists ... who were travelling back and foth to Iraq were eliminated. Also killed were two Pakistani scientists, who happened to be in Europe. Then another German was killed in a bad car "accident" outside Munich while on a visit. ... In Britain, four Iraqi businessmen died. Three Egyptians and a Frenchman followed - a total of 19.

All were eliminated in late 1988. Four Mossad hit squads were

{p. 288} assigned to carry out the executions. The squads were something of a novelty - they were all made up of Palestinians. Unwitting, they thought they were carrying out the killings for a Sicilian don, who was actually someone working for Mossad.

{endquote}

Ari Ben-Menashe on how Mossad & the CIA used Bugged Computers to spy: the Promis Program.

At the time of Vanunu's capture, I believe, the SMH & the Age were owned by Hollinger Corporation, run by Conrad Black & his Jewish (Zionist) wife Barbara Amiel. The company owned the Jerusalem Post among other papers.

To my knowledge, the involvement of the SMH, the Age, ASIS & ASIO in the capture of Mordecai Vanunu has never been reported in the Australian media.

Nor has it been raised in Parliament.

If anyone has evidence to the contrary, please let me know: contact.html.

The lesson is that not all news is "News". "Necessary Illusions" must be maintained, as Noam Chomsky put it.

Former Mossad agent Victor Ostrovsky reveals Mossad's strategies - By Way of Deception: ostrovsky.html.

Amazon is "bundling" Ari Ben Menashe's book Profits of War in a "special offer" with Gideon's Spies by Gordon Thomas, who I believe is a Mossad "public relations" officer whose job is to neutralize Ari Ben-Menashe's impact:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1879823012/qid=1042224059/sr=2-1/t/102-2638412-1520111?v=glance&s=books.

(3) Gordon Thomas, writer of political thrillers - a disinformation agent?

At Gordon Thomas' site http://www.gordonthomas.ie/104.html one reads

{start} DATE :- 21/05/02 BUSH: THE IGNORED WARNING THAT WILL COME TO HAUNT HIM (By Gordon Thomas)

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon authorised the leak of sensitive documents which reveal America's spy agencies were warned about a terrorist strike weeks before September 11. ... {end}

Gordon Thomas' own website carries the following description of him, at http://www.gordonthomas.ie/about.html

{start} ABOUT GORDON THOMAS

"THOMAS is the author of fifty-three books. Total sales exceed 45 million copies. Several were Main Selections for Book of the Month Club, the Literary Guild Book and the Readers Digest Book Club. ... Seven of his books are major motion pictures. ..."

{end}

WARNING! Real conspiracy analysts find it hard to get published - if an author's sales are in the millions, and Hollywood makes films out of his books ... then he's not an OUTSIDER ...

Thomas is an INSIDER pretending to be an Outsider.

I downloaded the material below from Thomas' website some time ago, I think in connection with his book Seeds of Fire, but did not save the URL (I've since learned a lesson).

Seeds of Fire includes "revelations" about the Promis software that Ari Ben Menashe had made years earlier. In effect, Thomas is repackaging that material.

He quotes Ari Ben Menashe & Victor Ostrovsky as if he & they are best of mates. Yet their books were real bombshells, and their lives were probably at risk. Ben Menashe, for example, revealed the role of the Sydney Morning Herald in the capture of Mordecai Vanunu: try finding that in any media source.

What Thomas is doing is implying that Menashe & Ostrovsky are still Zionists & Insiders & mates with Mossad ... further that you don't need to read their books because Thomas himself will give it all to you.

This is DIS-INFORMATION.

The file of Thomas I downloaded, dealing with Bin Laden & Iraq, was quite big. I have selected the following bits of it where Thomas repeatedly says things like, "a Mossad source told me".

Whereas Menashe & Ostrovsky report their PAST dealings with Mossad, Thomas here speaks of his CURRENT Mossad sources:

{start}

Of MI6 operations in the Far East. How China secretly contravened sanctions against Saddam to re-arm Iraq with nuclear weapons. Iraq now has a capability to produce long-range nuclear missiles. ...

Five days before disaster struck New York and Washington, Mossad - Israel's prime intelligence service - sent a "Red Alert" to CIA director George Tenet. It told him that Mossad gave "high credibility to bin-Laden's public threat two weeks before that he intended to launch a "spectacular strike" against the United States Both bin-Laden's threat and Mossad's confirmation that it was credible were ignored by Tenet's analysts. ...

Tenet wanted to play "Mr Nice Guy as far as the Arabs went". ... bin-Laden learned from his CIA tutors the essentials of any terrorist operation. ...

"Looking back, it seems that everything he did in the past was a grim rehearsal for this week in New York," said Ari Ben-Menashe a former national security adviser for the Israeli government.

... when he had helped drive out the Soviet occupiers he turned against the United States, vilifying it for its "hamburger and Coca Cola values." ... With his estimated $300 million personal fortune from his family's road-construction company - its has built many of the super highways in the Middle East and Africa ...

The terrorists could have gotten themselves jobs as airport cleaners, toilet attendants ... bin-Laden's men would have taken careful note of aircraft movements," said a senior Israeli intelligence source. "Certainly no one would have noticed them. They would have kept to themselves. Spoken well of America, their employers, perhaps even said they would like to become American citizens," Rafi Eitan, a former director of operations for Mossad told me.

... But Mossad was sufficiently alarmed that five days before the massive destruction on the massive eastern seaboard of America occurred, it sent a "Red Alert" warning to the CIA that Osama bin-Laden was about to strike again against United States interests - this time at the very heart of America. Hours after the destruction of the Twin Towers and a wing of the Pentagon, CIA sources admitted that "perhaps the warning was not specific enough for us to take appropriate action."

... In Tel Aviv, a senior analyst, close to Mossad's director-general Efraim Halevy, told me that "part of the problem is the old one of the Americans thinking they know best. They think putting up more satellites and pouring in electronic surveillance equipment is the answer.

... Mossad sources I have spoken to say that bombing his bases is not going to work. Its own strategists have proposed an international snatch team could positioned either in Israel or the Gulf to Israel - ready to fly into an area where bin-Laden is known to be.

... A Mossad source told me: "We would be on to bin-Laden before he and his men even knew we were overhead". Part of a HALO-based operation would include Galaxy aircraft dropping canisters filled with equipment. The 1,000 pound canisters would home in homing devices planted by Mossad agents.

"The capability is all there", an Israeli senior intelligence officer told me. "The team would strike at night, when bin-Laden is on the move between his bases. Once we have him, our helicopters could drop in and fly him and the team out to Pakistan. From there he could be flown to the United States". Almost certain any such plan would falter at the first hurdle: who would lead the team?

"Even if we agreed with the idea, we would expect to run it our way", a CIA source told me.

... Victor Ostrovsky, a former Mossad field officer, says southern Spain "given its easy access from North Africa, has become a real concern to Israel. ...

"Arms dealers regularly broker deals in Marbella to sell weapons shipped from the Balkans and then sold on to Hamas and other terrorist groups in the Middle East," claims Ari ben-Menashe, a former adviser on counter terrorism to the Israeli government.

... During the past summer, Mossad has maintained a two-man team in the resort. "Their purpose is to monitor the activities of arms dealers who regularly broker deals in Marbella to sell weapons from the Balkans. These are then sold to Hamas and other terror groups in the Middle East," claims Ari Ben-Menashe, a former adviser on counter terrorism to the Israeli government. But the Mossad katsa in Algiers City

... Victor Ostrovsky, a former Mossad katsa, says: "That part of Spain, given its easy access from North Africa, has exacerbated Israel's concern with the influx of arms dealers and their Russian Mafiya associates." Whatever the reason, Mossad alerted its main European headquarters in Amsterdam. ...

****** Mossad believe now that "probably no more than twenty" men were involved in the planning and execution of Apocalypse America. Eight of them - two to each aircraft - were trained to take over the controls after the killing the hijacked crew. ...

... Mossad, Israel's prime intelligence service, has now added extra agents to its London station to keep watch on these fanatics....

Osama bin Laden is the most wanted terrorist in the world ...

{end}

Note how Thomas endorses the idea that Bin Laden & Iraq are the enemy - along with China.

These ideas are quite foreign to the books of Ben Menashe, and Ostrovsky: ostrovsky.html.

Thomas, then, is COUNTERING them, NEUTRALISING them.

Even so, his books contain tidbits, revelations - to give him credibility. But he is not to be trusted. Thomas attributes the blame for 9-11 to the CIA and China, and portrays Mossad as the good guys whose warning was ignored.

George Tenet had been trying to negotiate some sort of peace in the Middle East. Whilst it would have been the Barak kind, it's far preferable to the Sharon kind. Mossad is pro-Sharon; therefore Thomas is tarnishing the "peace" faction and letting Mossad off the hook.

From the back cover of Gideon's Spies: the Secred History of the Mossad, by Gordon Thomas, Macmillan, London 1999:

{quote}

In the secret world of spies and covert operations, no other intelligenceservice continues to be surrounded by myth and mystery as does Israel's Mossad. Gideon's Spies reveals for the first time that all too often the truth exceeds the fantasies.

Here are the inside stories of how Robert Maxwell became Mossad's most important link in the arms-for-hostages scandal, Irangate; how Mossad undercut the CIA's position as the Vatican's prime intelligence source by revealing to Pope John Paul the truth behind the failed attempt on his life in May 1981; and how Mossad has successfully maintained an agent in the Clinton White House, enabling Israel to call the shots in the ongoing Middle East peace process.

And here, for the very first time, is the until now secret story of Mossad's involvement in the deaths of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed.

The legendary spymasters of Israel tell in their own words what it was like to be directly involved in some of the most audacious operations that have included the kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann, the murder of Yasser Arafat's chief aide, the theft of vital nuclear material from a Pittsburgh plant and the smuggling of a MiG aircraft out of Iraq.

For almost three years Gordon Thomas has interviewed Mossad's leaders, planners and field agents: a cross-section of a service that has never before allowed such access. They did so because Mossad wanted the truth told at last. But this is no public relations exercise as Gideon's Spies tells too of tragic blunders and ruthless infighting in an organization riven with strife.

Woven together with a narrative pace which rivals the very best thrillers, Gideon's Spies reveals the controversial truth behind Israel's secret weapon.

{endquote}

(4) Israeli Recruiter of Convicted Spy Pollard Reemerged on American Soil

NO LONGER AT http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20030710-051335-8380r.htm

but is at http://www.upi.com/Archives/2003/07/10/Pollard-recruiter-resurfaces-in-US/9001057809600/

By Richard Sale UPI Intelligence Correspondent

{Ari Ben-Menashe provides a lot of information about Rafi Eitan, in his book}

The Israeli recruiter of convicted spy Jonathan Pollard has reemerged on American soil and is being scrutinized by the FBI, according to well-placed intelligence and law enforcement sources.

According to former senior Pentagon officials, Pollard was recruited in the fall of 1981 by Rafael "Rafi" Eitan, also known as "Rafi the stinker."

Eitan, a long-time clandestine operator who participated in Israel's kidnapping in Argentina of former Nazi official Adolf Eichmann and other highly sensitive operations, was then a close ally of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, these sources said.

Eitan was also director of the Office of Special Tasks, called LAKEM, a group in the Israeli Defense Ministry that had (and still has) a special mandate to penetrate classified U.S. defense programs and obtain top-secret technologies. It is especially interested in data relating to Tel Aviv's nuclear programs.

In 1981, the group consisted of scientific attaches or officials who reported directly to the Israeli Defense Ministry, the sources said. Sharon was Israeli defense minister at the time.

The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, also said that Pollard, who began to work for the U.S. Navy in 1979, had first offered to spy for Israel in 1980, but that no action was taken by Israel until the fall of 1981.

At that time, the United States and Israel had a program of naval exchange visits to update each other on intelligence matters. In Israel, the program involved inviting an American official to an Israeli official's home for dinner.

To everyone's astonishment, Eitan put in an appearance at Pollard's dinner, and the recruitment was accomplished that night, former senior Pentagon and U.S. intelligence officials said.

The recruitment occurred just a month after Sharon had had a run-in with the White House. According to former participants who attended the meeting, in Sept. 1981, Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Sharon came to Washington to present a far-reaching and extensive U.S.-Israeli plan for strategic cooperation. Begin turned the proceeding over to Sharon who went on to outline a set-up that involved joint use of air and naval bases, the positioning of U.S. military equipment, and joint military planning for contingencies in the region.

But the centerpiece of the program was to be the U.S. financing of a KH-11 satellite downlink for Israel to be located at Tel Aviv. Sharon was especially stubborn about the downlink issue, according to former senior U.S. intelligence officials. He wanted Israel to have its own dedicated KH-11 downlink, which included encrypted signals that the United States couldn't read. In other words, the United States would supply its own intelligence means but be unable to have access to what the Israelis were taking from it.

According to one former Reagan administration insider, with close knowledge of the meetings, White House advisor Richard Allen told Sharon there would be no downlink, incensing Sharon who said that the U.S.-Israeli strategic relationship was all "band aids and mustard plasters" and the relationship didn't constitute a true strategic alliance. Soon after Sharon returned to Israel, the operation to recruit Pollard began in the Office for Special Tasks, led by Eitan.

Eitan has now reemerged.

According to federal law enforcement officials, Eitan has, for the last year or so, been traveling to the United States on an Israeli passport, but using an alias.

These sources told United Press International that Eitan lands at Columbus, Ohio, and then moves about the Midwest, to cities such an Indianapolis.

Eitan has been seen and photographed in the company of "known dealers who belong to a ring dealing in the drug ecstasy," one federal law enforcement official said.

He added: "The FBI is looking for evidence that Eitan is, or has been engaging, in questionable activities related to this ring."

The FBI probe is continuing, this official said.

When Pollard and his wife, Ann, were arrested in the fall of 1985, the Israeli government claimed that Pollard had been spying for only 14 months and that it had no official knowledge of his recruitment and that Pollard's activities were part of a "rogue" operation, according to former senior U.S. intelligence officials.

But very senior former Pentagon officials said the operation was sanctioned and that from the outset, Israeli leadership, at the highest level, decided on a full-scale cover up.

An extremely senior former Pentagon official said: "Top Israelis including Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Shamir, all knew that Israel had a high-level spy inside the U.S. military establishment. They knew Israel was getting weekly summaries of NSA intercepts, KH-11 photos and other highly restricted U.S. communications data."

In Israel, Sharon, who had resigned as defense minister after the massacre of Palestinians by pro-Israeli Lebanese Christian forces at Sabra and Shatila in the wake of Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, became Israeli Minister of Trade and Industry in 1984.

Following the scandal he took care to look after the men who had helped him, according to former Israeli and U.S. intelligence officials.

Pollard's handler in the United States, Aviem Sella, was the Israeli Air Force's top expert in nuclear targeting and delivery of airborne nuclear weapons, these sources said.

When Pollard was arrested, Sella fled to Israel, but was soon promoted to Brig. Gen. in Israel's Air Force. His specific command involved Tel Aviv's nuclear weapons air arm at the Tel Nof air base. This raised such an outcry of protest in the United States that Sella was quietly moved to the Israeli Defense Force Defense College. His prestige in ribbons, Sella saw his career in the Israeli air force had entered a dead end, and he retired.

Eitan did much better. He returned to Israel and was promoted to a senior position with the largest state-owned business enterprise in Israel: the Israel Chemicals Company, following Sharon's recommendation, according to senior former U.S. intelligence officials.

The promotion involved a quid pro quo, former federal law enforcement officials said. "It's generally agreed that Eitan was to take the brunt of blame for the whole mess," said one former official who was close to confidential details of the case. "In return for his silence, Sharon would make sure he got a good job."

According to one former Pentagon official, Eitan told an Israeli newspaper in 1987 that all of his actions had been undertaken with the knowledge of his Israeli superiors but within a day had withdrawn the statement as not having come from him. "Of course it came from him," the former Pentagon official said.

{endquote}

(5) Robert Fisk on Vanunu's importance

The Man Who Knew Too Much

Robert Fisk

The Independent

http://www.counterpunch.org/fisk03262004.html

... But the real problem that Vanunu represents is that he will remind the world at a critically important moment in the history of the Middle East that Israel is a nuclear power and that its warheads stand ready to be fired from the Negev desert. He will also remind the world that the Americans, despite battering their way into Iraq to destroy Saddam Hussein's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, continue to give their political, moral and economic support to a country that has secretly amassed a treasure trove of weapons of mass destruction.

How can President Bush remain silent on Israel's nuclear power when he has not only illegally invaded an Arab state for allegedly harbouring nuclear weapons and condemned Iran for the same ambitions, but also praised--along with Tony Blair's government--Colonel Gaddafi of Libya for abandoning his nuclear pretensions? If the Arab states are being "defanged"--always supposing they had any real fangs in the first place--why should Israel not be "de-nuclearised"? Why can't the United States apply the same standards to Israel as it does to the Arabs? Or why, for that matter, can't Israel apply the same standards to itself that it demands of its Arab enemies?

This is the debate that the Israeli and the American governments wish to stifle. In the United States, where any discussion of the Israeli-American relationship that deviates from the benign is routinely condemned as subversive or "anti-Semitic", discussion of Israel's nuclear power is not something that Washington will want to hear on the Sunday talk shows. Vanunu, it should be said at once, is well aware of all this, of his own importance--infinitely greater than it was when he was a mere junior technician at Dimona--and of the role that tens of thousands of anti- nuclear campaigners expect him to play in the world.

(6) Gordon Thomas discloses Mossad's role in the "Monica Lewinsky" scandal

Monica Lewinsky may have been a Mossad agent. It appears that Mossad's information on the affair was leaked to the media, to block Clinton's attempts to impose a Peace Settlement on Israel.

The Mossad-Likud blackmailing of Clinton is an example of the clash between two conspiracies: the Socialist one (of Clinton and the EU) and the Tory-Zionist one promoting the current war in Iraq.

Gordon Thomas, Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad, Macmillan, London, 1999.

{p. 92} Only the incumbent Mossad memune knew how long Mega had been in place.

The committee members did, however, know that the FBI's counterintelligence division finally believed that the lack of action against Mossad was due to the power of the Jewish lobby in Washington, and the reluctance of successive administrations to confront it. Once more that lobby could be called upon to dampen the firestorm building since Mega had first been discovered by the FBI. On February 16, 1997, the National Security Agency (NSA) had provided the FBI with an intercept of a late-night telephone conversation from the Israeli embassy between a Mossad intelligence officer identified only as Dov, and his superior in Tel Aviv, whose name had not been revealed during the short conversation.

Dov had asked "for guidance" as to whether he "should go to Mega" for a copy of a letter written by Warren Christopher, then secretary of state, to PLO chairman Yasser Arafat. The letter contained a set of assurances given to Arafat by Christopher on January 16 about the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the West Bank city of Hebron. Dov was instructed by the voice in Tel Aviv "to forget the letter. This is not something we use Mega for."

The brief conversation had been the first clue the FBI had of the importance of Mega. ...

{p. 93} In March 1997, on receipt of information from Mossad's katsa in Washington, Yatom took action. He send a yahalomin team to Washington to follow-up on the katsa's report that President Clinton was repeatedly indulging in phone-sex calls with a a former White House

{p. 94} aide, Monica Lewinsky. He was making the calls from the oval Office to her apartment in the Watergate complex. Knowing that the White House was totally protected by electronic counter-measures, the yahalomin team focused on Lewinsky's apartment. They began to intercept explicit phone calls from the president to Lewinsky. The recordings were couriered by diplomatic bag to Tel Aviv.

On March 27, Clinton once more invited Lewinsky to the Oval Office and revealed he believed a foreign embassy was taping their conversations. He did not give her any more details, but shortly afterwards the affair ended.

In Tel Aviv, Mossad's strategies pondered how to use the highly embarrassing taped conversations; they were the stuff of blackmail - though no one suggested any attempt should be made to blackmail the president of the United States. Some, however, saw the recordings as a potent weapon to be used if Israel found itself with its back to the wall in the Middle East and unable to count on Clinton's support.

There was common consensus that the FBI must also be aware of the conversations between Clinton and Lewinsky. Some strategists urged Yatom to use "the back-door channel" with Washington and let the FBI know Mossad was aware of the president's phone calls: it would be a not-very-subtle way of telling the agency to back off in their continuing hunt for Mega. Other analysts urged a wait- and-see policy, arguing that the information would remain explosive whenever it was released. That view prevailed.

In September 1998, the Starr report was published and Yatom had left offfice. The report contained a short reference to Clinton warning Lewinsky back in March 1997 that his phone was being bugged by a foreign embassy. Starr had not pursued the matter when Lewinsky had given her testimony before the grand jury about her affair with Clinton. However, the FBI could only have seen the revelations as further evidence of their inability to unmask Mega.

According to at least one well-placed Israeli intelligence source, Rafi Eitan had received a phone call from Yatom reinforcing the need to stay well clear of the United States for the foreseeable future.

{endquote}

(7) Daniel Halper: Israelis tried to blackmail Bill Clinton with Lewinsky tapes to force spy release

Daniel Halper in Clinton Inc. : The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine, discusses Gordon Thomas' allegations.

http://www.theblaze.com/blog/2014/07/21/claim-israelis-tried-to-blackmail-bill-clinton-with-lewinsky-tapes-for-release-of-spy/

He says that Kenneth Starr, the prosecuting attorney investigating Bill Clinton's case, suspected foreign blackmail of Clinton.

Claim: Israelis tried to blackmail Bill Clinton with Lewinsky tapes to force spy release

Jul. 21, 2014 11:23pm

Benjamin Weingarten

Featured Book

Title: Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine

Author: Daniel Halper

In October 1998 in a bid to gain the release of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, an Israeli team led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened to blackmail President Bill Clinton with tapes of Clinton and then-intern Monica Lewinsky. When Clinton brought IsraelÕs request for PollardÕs release to CIA Director George Tenet, Tenet threatened to resign on the spot should Clinton cave and release Pollard. Clinton ultimately declined the Israeli request, though he would consider it once again before the end of his term.

U.S. President Bill Clinton, right, shakes hands with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu upon arriving at the Prime MinisterÕs office in Jerusalem Sunday Dec 13 1998. (Image Source: J Scott Applewhite / Associated Press)

This bombshell claim comes from Daniel HalperÕs new book on the ClintonsÕ rise back to power, ÒClinton, Inc.,Ó in a section based on the authorÕs review of the so-called ÒMonica Files,Ó to which Halper obtained exclusive access.

The hundreds of pages of documents comprising the ÒMonica FilesÓ detail numerous sordid allegations about President Clinton, Hillary Clinton and Monica Lewinsky as compiled by LewinskyÕs associates including Òinvestigators, attorneys, and other Lewinsky advisors in the event that she might be involved in legal action against the president.Ó

Here is how Halper describes the meeting between the Israelis and President Clinton that October, which took place during a set of high-profile negotiations on the Middle East with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat at the Wye Plantation near Wye River, Maryland:

{quote}

At one point, Netanyahu reportedly pulled Clinton aside to press for a pet cause for the Israelis­the release of Jonathan Pollard, an American spy for Israel who was sitting in prison. Netanyahu pressed Clinton to release Pollard, which in itself was not an unusual request. But the Israelis present at Wye River had a new tactic for their negotiations­theyÕd overheard Clinton and Monica and had it on tape. Not wanting to directly threaten the powerful American president, a crucial Israeli ally, Clinton was told that the Israeli government had thrown the tapes away. But the very mention of them was enough to constitute a form of blackmail. And, according to information provided by a CIA source, a stricken Clinton appeared to buckle.

Intelligence officials in the United States or Israel will of course not confirm on the record the extent or substance of Israeli eavesdroppingÉIn 2000 the conservative magazine Insight, after a one-year investigation by a team of reporters, claimed that the Israeli government had Òpenetrated four White House telephone lines and was able to relay real-time conversations on those lines from a remote site outside the White House directly to Israel for listening and recording.Ó At the time, an Israeli spokesman responded to the Associated Press, which confirmed that an FBI investigation was under way, that the claim was Òoutrageous.Ó

{endquote}

While naturally U.S. and Israeli officials would not confirm HalperÕs account, the author writes:

{quote}

there is ample evidence to support the Lewinsky story about an Israeli-U.S. confrontation. On November 11, 1998, for example, The New York Times reported that Netanyahu and Clinton had indeed discussed PollardÕs release at Wye. And that the Israelis had told the president something that opened up the possibility of PollardÕs release, something Clinton had explicitly ruled out during the first six years of his presidency. A White House spokesman told a reporter for the Times simply that Clinton was Ònewly impressed by the force of Mr. NetanyahuÕs arguments.Ó

{endquote}

The notion that Clinton was being spied on is further consistent with ClintonÕs own insecurities as detailed in Independent Counsel Kenneth StarrÕs investigative report on the president. As Halper notes:

ÒAt the time, Lewinsky told prosecutors that Clinton suggested that Òthey knew their calls were being monitored all along, and the phone sex was just a put-on.Ó That is all the Starr Report offersÉbut Monica and her team knew more. They found evidence that the British, Russians and Israelis all had scooped up the microwaves off the top of the White House. Offering some additional support, Boris Yeltsin, the former president, wrote in his memoir that Russian intelligence had picked up on ClintonÕs Òpredilection for beautiful young women.Ó

Halper concludes the story writing:

{quote}

So impressed was Clinton that he brought the notion to the attention of CIA director George Tenet. Tenet, according to a number of news reports, vowed to resign on the spot if the administration acceded to the request. Faced with widespread outrage from his national security team, Clinton dropped the idea. He did, however, reconsider it one more time before leaving office.

{endquote}

As recently as this past March there were rumors that the U.S. was considering releasing Pollard as part of negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians.

Pollard, a civilian intelligence analyst for the U.S. Navy, was arrested in 1985 and subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment for passing along thousands of classified documents to his Israeli handlers. PollardÕs lifetime sentence has generated much controversy, as it represents the heaviest penalty for any spy to pass information to one of AmericaÕs allies.

Former CIA Director James Woolsey has intimated that U.S. refusal to release Pollard, a Jew, may stem in part from anti-Semitism.

A New York Post article published in 1999 drawing on a book titled ÒGideonÕs Spies Ñ The Secret History of Mossad,Ó recounts a similar plot by Israel to blackmail Bill Clinton with Lewinsky tapes, for a related but different end. The post article read:

{quote}

ISRAEL blackmailed President Clinton with phone-tapped tapes of his steamy sex talks with Monica Lewinsky, a blockbuster new book charges.

The price Clinton paid for the silence of the Mossad spy agency was calling off an FBI hunt for a top-level Israeli mole allegedly installed at the White House.

Éauthor [George] Thomas says Danny Yatom, Mossad inspector general, succeeded in tapping LewinskyÕs phone and amassed some 30 hours of sexually explicit conversations between the president and Lewinsky.

Thomas says Tel Aviv used the tapes to stop the probe of an operative code-named ÒMEGA,Ó who was, and could still be, deep within the White House.

ÉIsraelÕs Committee for Central Intelligence, meeting in emergency session, decided to play dirty by exploiting MonicaÕs steamy chats as a way of protecting their White House Òasset,Ó Thomas said.

{endquote}

Halper argues in his book that the allegations in ÒThe Monica FilesÓ may be used by Òreporters and Republican operatives­as part of what might be dubbed the [death by a] Òthousand cutsÓ operationÓ in connection with a Hillary Clinton presidential bid in 2016.

{end}

Israeli Spies: 'Mega Was Not An Agent; Mega Was the Boss' by Jeffrey Steinberg, from the Aug. 31, 2001 issue of Executive Intelligence Review: http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2001/2833mega_spy.html

Who's Who in `Mega', by Scott Thompson, from the Nov. 16, 2001 issue of Executive Intelligence Review: http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2001/2844mega_bios.html

The 'Mega-maniacs' Steering Sharon's Mideast War Drive, by Scott Thompson and Jeffrey Steinberg, from the Nov. 16, 2001 issue of Executive Intelligence Review: http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2001/2844mega_sharon.html

Roland Perry on the role of Lord Victor Rothschild in Israel's bomb: perry.html.

Abri Ben-Menashe on the bugged Promis software: bugs.html

Victor Ostrovsky on Mossad: ostrovsky.html

To buy Ari Ben-Menashe's books second-hand: http://dogbert.abebooks.com/abe/BookSearch?an=ari+ben+menashe



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