Israel’s tradition of shadowy dealings
BEIRUT: The Colombian arms deal is small-time compared to some of the clandestine activities carried out by Israeli mercenaries and “arms dealers” in Latin America over the past three decades, as well as in Africa, Asia and Iran, currently Israel’s No. 1 enemy.
A year ago, Germany impounded a shipment from Israel of 3,000 rubber caterpillar tracks used on US-made M-113 personnel carriers ostensibly bound for Thailand under a license from the Israeli Defense Ministry. But according to German Customs, the shipment from the Israeli company PAD was seized in Hamburg as it was being transferred to an Iranian vessel for delivery to the Islamic Republic.
PAD’s chairman, Avihai Weinstein, and his brother-in-law Eli Cohen, had been involved in another attempt to smuggle military equipment to Iran in 2000. Cohen was arrested in the US in 1992 in a similar case, but prosecutors could only prove tax evasion. He served six months house arrested. In 1997, he was accused again of selling arms to Iran and was given a three-month suspended sentence. In 1999, he was suspected, but never indicted, of trying to sell tank engines to Iran. Israeli authorities revoked his permit to export military equipment, but that did not appear to stop him operating.
There have been repeated deliveries of military equipment to Iran by “private” Israeli arms dealers since the 1979 Islamic revolution, the biggest being the sale of surface-to-air missiles and other weapons to Iran during the Irangate scandal of the mid-1980s. The profits from the sales under the secret White House operation, designed to secure the release of American hostages held in Lebanon, were diverted to the US-backed Contra rebels fighting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. The disclosure of the plot almost brought down Ronald Reagan’s presidency.
When leading Israeli arms dealer Nahum Manbar was put on trial in Tel Aviv in 1998 on charges of selling materials for making chemical weapons to Iran, his lawyers argued that these deals had been conducted with the full consent of the Defense Ministry, defense manufacturers and Israel’s intelligence agencies. They also claimed that dozens of other such deals with Iran involving Israelis had been conducted, but the court imposed a gagging order that kept these allegations out of the media. Manbar was sentenced to 18 years imprisonment in July 1998.
These were the kind of operations that got the US Central Intelligence Agency in big trouble in the 1970s. Congress reined in the agency, but the vacuum was filled by Israeli “mercenaries” allegedly operating without the sanction of their government and arms dealers, invariably former soldiers with tight connections to the defense establishment, in such countries as Guatemala and Chile. When President Reagan revived the CIA’s paramilitary tradition in the 1980s, he made Israel an indispensable partner in the conflicts he launched against Angola, Libya, Nicaragua and El Salvador.
In 1990, an investigation conducted by authorities in the Caribbean island of Antigua by an eminent British lawyer, Louis-Blom Cooper, unraveled a conspiracy in which former Israeli soldiers shipped large consignments of weapons through the island to Colombian cocaine barons, particularly the notorious Medellin cartel run by the late Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, in the 1980s.
They also provided mercenaries to train the cartels’ paramilitary death squads. According to Blom-Cooper’s report, $324,205 was paid for the weapons in two installments to Israel Military Industries, which is state-owned, through an account belonging to its representative, Brigadier General Pinhas Shachar.
Much of the clandestine operation was run by a retired Israeli colonel, Yair Gal Klein, and his security company, Spearhead Ltd. Klein is probably one of the most active of these Israeli mercenaries. He was one of four Israelis indicted in absentia by Colombian authorities in 1998 for their connections with Gacha.
In 1991, Klein was convicted by an Israeli court of illegally exporting arms to Colombia and was fined $40,000. He was arrested in Sierra Leone in January 1999 for supplying weapons to rebel forces. The Colombians requested his extradition, but as far as is known, Klein managed to wriggle his way out of Sierra Leone. His whereabouts are not known. E.E.
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