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Covert Operations: The Human Factor
Maxwell’s mysterious death at sea last November makes it unlikely that his role in the Vanunu affair will ever be fully known. The snarled and looted business empire Maxwell left behind makes it unlikely that his sudden spurt of investment in Israel in the mid-1980s, most notably in the newspaper Ma’ariv and Scitex, a printing equipment firm, will ever be tied definitively to arms profits or money laundering. However, the foreign editor of Maxwell’s Daily Mirror, Nicholas Davies, was fired last fall after he falsely denied the claim in “The Samson Option” that he had been a member of Ari Ben-Menashe’s Ora Group, involved with dealing arms to Iran. Davies was caught out when a rival paper published a picture of him meeting with an Ohio arms dealer.55 IRAQ
Along with its furtive early commitment to arming of Iran, the Reagan administration made sure that Iraq did not go begging for the implements of destruction. It began a program of arming Iraq through third countries that was a mirror image of the arms sales to Iran. In this case the administration was forced to notify Congress about a 1986 unauthorized transfer to Iraq of U.S.-made bombs by Saudi Arabia after an angry State Department insisted on alerting congressional leaders.56 Congress is not known to have taken any action on the notification and, evidently, the Iran-contra hearings did not act as a deterrent to either the administration or Saudi Arabia (whose efforts on behalf of the contras were extensively discussed under the figleaf sobriquet “country number two”). After the war against Iraq, Saudi Arabia again transferred U.S.-made equipment—this time to Syria and Bangladesh—with the apparent blessing of the Bush administration. Saudi Arabia—and the State Department—called the transfers “inadvertent.”57 But, a New York Times editorial noted acidly, “recurrent fits of inadvertence require explanation.”58 President Bush might soon be pressed to explain some stealth diplomacy he reportedly undertook as vice president that could hardly have been inadvertent. Last June the Washington Jewish Week reported that, according to a source congressional investigators considered credible, Bush “made as many as four clandestine trips to Damascus, starting in early 1986” to negotiate the release of the U.S. hostages held in Lebanon with Syrian officials. The Syrians wanted better relations with Washington, said the paper, and “Bush offered the possibility of arms and other considerations.” But the vice president was concerned about the timing of the hostages’ release. He showed a desire to put off the actual transaction” until the spring of 1988, just as he was launching his presidential bid. But the Syrians said no dice, according to the Washington Jewish Week. After observing the havoc caused in the U.S. by the Iran-contra revelations, “the Syrians were said to have grasped the amount of leverage they now had over Bush with their knowledge of his clandestine initiatives.”59 In a July 21 story that closely paralleled the Washington Jewish Week’s but did not report the allegations about Bush, the San Francisco Examiner reported that the Senate intelligence committee was investigating allegations that the Reagan administration spurned officers of freedom for the hostages in Lebanon. Both papers quoted Robert Ladd, a former Nixon aide with admitted ties to the CIA, who said he acted as an intermediary in another Syrian attempt to extricate the hostages but that the offers he relayed died after they were referred to Oliver North and CIA officials who were subsequently connected to the Iran-contra affair. “I knew the CIA was just slow-rolling it,” a Pentagon official told the Washington Jewish Week.
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