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Covert Operations: The Human Factor
Our great grandchildren’s history books will probably list the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the Jonathan Jay Pollard espionage affair, the Middle East peace talks and Washington’s refusal to grant Israel $10 billion worth of loan guarantees as major milestones in U.S.-Israeli relations during the Reagan and Bush administrations. Most likely forgotten, or consigned to the realm of “conspiracy theory,” will be the history of secret policies, covert operations, arms sales and cover-ups that appeared to the public as transitory scandals but, for the men at the top in both countries, may well have been the compelling dynamic of the relationship. In foreign policy, what we saw—and thought we were voting for—was seldom what we got. Washington professed neutrality in the Iran-Iraq war while it cynically armed both sides, contributing to the war’s toll of one million casualties. Israel justified the billions of dollars of U.S. aid it received annually by portraying itself as a strategic asset in the struggle against the Soviet Union—and then it passed the U.S.S.R. sensitive U.S. intelligence! In the face of scandals that would have brought any normal government down, the U.S. and Israeli governments resorted to deniability (an intelligence term for passing the buck) and they withheld incriminating documents on the grounds of “national security.” There is a striking resonance between this arrogant disregard for their electorates and the disregard for peoples’ needs that saw hunger, ill health and joblessness increase in both Israel and the U.S. The covert dimension that so absorbed the Reagan and Bush administrations and the Israeli governments of the past decade had its roots in a longstanding arrangement between Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad and the CIA. The two agencies began working together in the 1950s, and during the 1960s the CIA gave Mossad $10-20 million a year to help it out in the Third World.1 But during the Reagan years, the partnership was moved upstairs to the White House and the State Department and given both a new name, “strategic cooperation,” and official status under a series of agreements.2 After 1982, recalled David Kimche, who, as director of the Israeli foreign ministry, was Israel’s point man for strategic cooperation, the two governments “maintained, I must say, a very, very intimate dialogue on various parts of the world. We used to discuss what one should do in Third World countries, in the Middle East, et, cetera...”3 When it was discussed at all in public, the arrangement was always presented as Israel’s contribution to the Reagan administration’s crusade against communism, especially where Congress had forbidden official U.S. involvement (such as Nicaragua and Angola).4 But it was much more than that. Often, in fact, the covert partnership seemed more like a covert free-for-all, with the erstwhile partners indulging in contradictory sets of operations that seemed to be at odds with their own and each others’ interests. IRAN, CENTRAL AMERICA
The era began with the shipment of billions of dollars of arms to Iran. In an arrangement reached in 1981 by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig, the Reagan administration reviewed and approved Israeli shipments of weapons to Iran, 5 the “terrorist” nation administration officials publicly reviled. According to two Reagan officials, arrangements were worked out during three meetings in December 1980 between David Kimche, then in transition from the number two spot in Mossad and the directorship of the Israeli foreign ministry, and Robert McFarlane, who would serve as an aide to Haig.6 Kimche and McFarlane became the official liaisons in the early days of “strategic cooperation.”7 Later, when McFarlane was the president’s national security adviser, they would coordinate the Iran-contra affair.
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