Israel

The State of Israel was established in 1948. Its intelligence services are the Mossad (foreign intelligence), Shin Bet (internal security) and military intelligence, Aman, whose signals arm is Unit 8200; a fourth agency under the defense ministry, the Science Liaison Bureau, LAKAM, collected technical information abroad until the Jonathan Pollard case of 1985.¹²

Nuclear Weapons

The chemist Ernst David Bergmann, director of the chemistry division of the Weizmann Institute of Science, chaired the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission from its founding in 1952; the commission sat under the defense ministry and Shimon Peres. France supplied the reactor and the underground reprocessing plant at Dimona after the Suez Crisis of 1956, in which Israel attacked Egypt in concert with France and Britain and was forced by Eisenhower to withdraw. Senior figures of the ruling Mapai Party, among them Levi Eshkol and Pinhas Lavon, opposed the program on grounds of cost. By 1968 Moshe Dayan had moved Dimona into full production without a formal cabinet decision.¹

In the first days of the Yom Kippur War of October 1973 the leadership under Golda Meir and Dayan armed and targeted the arsenal and informed Washington, a step that also served to force an American resupply of the army.¹ In 1986 the Dimona technician Mordecai Vanunu gave photographs of the plant's underground production units to the Sunday Times; they gave American analysts their first extensive evidence of an Israeli capacity for thermonuclear weapons. Vanunu was lured from London to Rome by a woman working for the Mossad, Cindy Hanin Bentov, drugged, and taken to Israel by ship for trial.¹³

What Washington Knew

The CIA's photographic interpreters Arthur C. Lundahl and Dino A. Brugioni saw the first signs of the Dimona reactor on U-2 imagery and had no doubt by the end of 1959 that Israel was pursuing a bomb. John F. Kennedy demanded inspections of Dimona and in 1962 authorized the first sale of American weapons to Israel, Hawk missiles, linked to Israel's consent to inspection visits that Israel controlled. Ambassador Walworth Barbour, in Tel Aviv from 1961 to 1973, ordered his staff after the Six-Day War to stop reporting on nuclear weapons, told an intelligence briefer "Gentlemen, I don't believe a word of it," and after retiring joined the board of the American branch of Bank Leumi. Carl E. Duckett, whose CIA Office of Science and Technology received the intelligence on the program, concluded in 1968 that Israel had three or four bombs; Johnson had the estimate buried. The estimate rested in part on the suspicion that Zalman Mordecai Shapiro of the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation had diverted more than two hundred pounds of enriched uranium to Israel; the Carter White House announced in 1977 that investigations had "failed to reveal" a diversion.¹ During the Six-Day War, on June 8, 1967, Israeli forces attacked the American intelligence ship USS Liberty, and Barbour urged Washington to play the incident down.¹

Intelligence Operations in the United States

James Jesus Angleton ran the CIA's liaison with Israeli intelligence under the cryptonym KK MOUNTAIN, its channel for the text of Nikita Khrushchev's 1956 "secret speech." Richard Helms told his deputies that he believed Israel was "an open pipeline for pumping intelligence to Moscow."⁴⁵ After the Osirak bombing of June 7, 1981, William Casey ordered a review that found Israel had used its KH-11 satellite-sharing arrangement to obtain coverage of western Russia and Moscow.¹

Rafael Eitan, head of LAKAM, recruited Pollard, a Navy intelligence analyst, in October 1981 according to Seymour Hersh, three years earlier than Pollard and the government admitted; material from LAKAM reached Israeli intelligence in such volume that a code name, JUMBO, was added to its markings. Pollard's handler from 1984, the Air Force colonel Aviem Sella, was indicted in the United States in 1987; Israel refused his extradition, promoted him and gave Eitan a senior post at the Israel Chemicals Company. Israel retained Leonard Garment to represent Sella; Garment withdrew, saying he was not sure whether his client was Sella or the Israeli government.¹ Eitan is also the figure alleged to have obtained the PROMIS case-management software from the Justice Department in 1983 and to have had it fitted with a hidden access point; the Justice Department's memoranda record only the delivery of a public-domain version to a "Dr. Ben Orr, a representative of the Government of Israel."⁶⁷

Arms to Iran

Israel sold arms to Iran after the revolution of 1979. Yaacov Nimrodi, military attaché in Tehran from 1955 to 1968, sold the Iranian defense ministry Hawk missiles worth 135.8 million dollars in 1981; with David Kimche and Al Schwimmer he managed the first shipment of the Iran-Contra channel, 96 TOW missiles from Israeli stocks in August 1985.⁸⁹ According to Ari Ben-Menashe, Prime Minister Menachem Begin had a committee formed in the fall of 1980, the Iran-Israel Joint Committee, to supply Iran in its war with Iraq, financed from its own profits through the Ora Group, with funds held at Drexel Burnham; the Justice Department's 1994 review of the PROMIS Software Scandal recorded the broker John A. Belton's description, given without documents, of Ora as "the Israeli half of a multi-billion dollar slush fund."²⁷ Ben-Menashe's account of Israeli participation in the October Surprise was rejected by the House October Surprise Task Force in its report of January 3, 1993, which described his testimony as lacking credibility.²¹⁰

Latin America and Southern Africa

The former Mossad officer Mike Harari was named by José Blandón before the Senate in February 1988 as the head of a network supplying arms to Central America and the Contras from Panama, whose aircraft returned with drugs; the Israeli embassy said he acted "as a private citizen."¹¹ According to Ben-Menashe, the arms company Eagle sold weapons to the Guatemalan military with Harari and Pesach Ben-Or, Alfredo Stroessner's Paraguay served as a conduit for materiel from South Africa to Dimona, and the South African Defense Force signed the mutual wartime agreement SIMWA with the Israel Defense Forces and invested in the nuclear program.²

Maxwell and Vanunu

Robert Maxwell, owner of the Daily Mirror, controlled the Israeli computer company Degem. Hersh alleged in October 1991 that Maxwell and his foreign editor Nicholas Davies had links to Israeli intelligence and that Maxwell had relayed information to the Israeli embassy in London that led to Vanunu's capture; Maxwell called the claim a total invention. He died the following month and was buried on the Mount of Olives in the presence of the president, the prime minister and serving and former intelligence chiefs.¹¹²

Surveillance Technology

Unit 8200 is the recruiting ground of the Israeli private surveillance industry; the founders of the spyware maker NSO Group are its alumni.¹³ In 2015 the former prime minister Ehud Barak arranged an investment of about one million dollars by Jeffrey Epstein in Reporty, later Carbyne, which also had backing from Peter Thiel's Founders Fund.¹⁴ On January 12, 2024, Palantir Technologies announced "a strategic partnership with the Israeli Ministry of Defense to supply Palantir technology to help the country's war effort."¹⁵