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Covert Operations: The Human Factor
In March 1989, Israel dispatched the Medellin’s guns on a ship, escorted by Captain Philip Earon, subsequently the deputy mayor of Eilat.74 The arms would be discovered in January 1990, buried on a farm belonging to Gacha’s son, with papers and serial numbers identifying Israel as the source. Already fending off charges that it had sanctioned, or assigned, the Spearhead training team to Columbia, Israel insisted that Antigua had ordered the weapons fair and square.75 Although, after intense international pressure, it put Klein on trial and handed him a token conviction, Israel insists to this day that its security maestros were training Colombian ranchers.76 Klein, depending on which story you believe, was paid in cocaine delivered to him in Israel77 or in narco-dollars delivered in the U.S. and subsequently transported to Israel by a network of Orthodox Jews specializing in laundering.78 Meanwhile, under the guise of the domestic “war on drugs” authorities have begun seizing property “suspected” of being connected with drug trafficking without due process. U.S. citizens caught with cocaine for personal use are charged with felonies. Drug dealing began exacting a fearful toll from the already deprived inner cities, where it was one of the few good jobs available to youth. By opposing gun control laws, the Reagan and Bush administrations made sure the young dealers had access to the same automatic weapons they marketed so freely abroad. And the very government that promulgated the get-tough-on-drugs laws appears to have helped supply the local market. Washington’s tolerance—if it is only that—for Israel’s mingling of military contracting and narcotrafficking goes back to 1982, to the early days of strategic cooperation, when Mike Harari, an Israeli intelligence officer who served as a close aide to Panamanian strongman Gen. Manuel Noriega, ran a contra support network that combined the resources of Mossad, the CIA and the Medellin cartel.79 A senior source at the Israeli defense ministry’s export sales office (SIBAT) told an Israeli newspaper that “interests related to the drug cartel” financed $40 million worth of weapons Israeli arms dealers sold to the contras. Both the Israeli and U.S. governments were “well aware” of the sales and the Israeli defense ministry had “tactily authorized them,” said the paper.80 Hoping for good will from the contras’ patrons in Washington, the cartels were also making direct contributions to guerrilla leaders. Some contended they had protection for their deliveries to the U.S. SUP>81 When the Bush administration invaded Panama in December 1989, Harari was allowed to slip away to Israel. 82 Gen. Noriega had planned to use his cooperation with the Harari network as part of his defense when he stood trial on drug-trafficking charges in a federal court in Miami. But, conveniently for Israel and the Bush administration, the judge did not allow the defense to introduce “political” arguments. Noriega was convicted in April 1992. WHAT OF THE FUTURE? The Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) Israel signed with the Reagan administration in 1988 was designed to institutionalize the privileged “strategic” relationship beyond the reach of an unfriendly successor administration.83 But in March 1992, with the Soviet Union dead less than half a year, the MOA’s permanence was put to the test. Someone in the administration with a great deal of information told the Wall Street Journal about a report that Sherman Funk, the State Department’s inspector general, was preparing that would detail Israel’s unauthorized re-export of weapons containing U.S. technology to third countries to which the sale of U.S. arms was embargoed by law.84 And the Washington Times reported that Israel had transferred technology for the Patriot missile to China.85 The news—and Israel’s rejoinder that the leaks were a “slander” and a “smear campaign” designed to weaken Israel’s position86—had all the makings of a full-blown crisis in relations. Yet, in April, when a U.S. inspection team returned from Israel saying it could find no evidence of a Patriot transfer, the State Department declared the matter closed, ignoring reports that two Chinese officials—stationed in Syria and the Netherlands—had confirmed the transfer to U.S. diplomats.87 And when a heavily censored version of the inspector general’s report was issued singling out Israel for “a systematic and growing pattern of unauthorized transfers by the recipient dating back to about 1983,”88 the State Department spokeswoman dismissed the blockbuster, saying there were “many differences of opinion” about the report in the State Department.89 There was undoubtedly more than one reason for her discretion. The State Department would not want to risk alienating Israel, perhaps giving it an excuse to back out of the Middle East peace talks. The U.S. elections were approaching and the administration had already badly roiled Israel’s supporters with its refusal to grant Israel $10 billion in loan guarantees without an Israeli commitment to freeze construction of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories.
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