Ora Group

The Ora Group exists in the record almost entirely through Ari Ben-Menashe. In his account, the Israeli Joint Committee that ran the arms channel to Iran after 1980 needed "a flagship to hold the slush fund" that was accumulating from a covert procurement office on John Street in New York City, which shipped American electronics under end-user certificates for Israel and diverted them to Iran. "When the Joint Committee was trying to decide what to call this mother company, the name 'Ora' came to my mind," he writes; the name means light in Hebrew, and was that of a woman in his Tel Aviv office. "Thus was born the Ora Group, which was to handle billions of dollars in the next few years." Israel's arms companies "were all run under our mother company, Ora"; Bank Melli of Iran would issue a letter of credit on behalf of one of them, guaranteed through the foreign transfers department of the National Westminster Bank in London; where Israel sold American weapons on the Americans' behalf, the money went to a CIA account at the International Bank of Luxembourg, and when funds were needed for Yitzhak Shamir's Likud, "Maxwell's companies were used to bring the money out again" to accounts in Luxembourg and Geneva.¹

London

The Daily Mirror's foreign editor Nicholas Davies "was called in only if we needed to use our 'London office,'" Ben-Menashe writes; when a request came from the Iranians, Davies "would call dealers or the supplier and introduce himself as a representative of the Ora Group, an Israeli company based in London," as in a 1983 sale of 4,000 TOW missiles. Rupert Allason's parliamentary motion of 1991 named the company as Ora Limited, incorporated at 41 Becmead Avenue and 1 Trafalgar Avenue, London; Ben-Menashe's book uses only "the Ora Group." A 1985 deal for the Contras brokered through GeoMiliTech, the Washington company of General John Singlaub and Barbara Studley, is itemized in the book at 3,242,000 dollars paid to Ora, against 5 million dollars that he says the company's own books showed received from the American side.¹

PROMIS

Ben-Menashe writes that he saw a cable to the Joint Committee from the United States requesting "a 600,000 dollar transfer from the Israeli slush fund" to Earl Brian's Hadron, to be forwarded to Leonard Garment's firm Dickstein Shapiro "to be used to get one of the Inslaw lawyers, Leigh Ratiner, off the case." The special counsel Nicholas J. Bua wrote that "we see no reason to reopen our investigation because of this implausible claim"; the bankruptcy court had found INSLAW's related charge that the firm was pressured to abandon it "built upon supposition, suspicion and uncorroborated hearsay." A second witness, the Canadian former stockbroker John A. Belton, told the Justice Department's 1994 reviewers, without producing documents, that "ORA is allegedly the Israeli half of a multi-billion dollar slush fund made up of Israeli and U.S. funds" used to finance arms sales to Iraq, and that "Trans World Arms in Montreal and ORA" had sold PROMIS to a nuclear facility in New Mexico in 1983; the reviewers found him "unbelievable."¹²