“DANGEROUS LIAISON: THE INSIDE STORY OF THE U.S.-ISRAELI COVERT RELATIONSHIP”
Brian Lamb
Leslie Cockburn, what was the most interesting part of writing this book?
Leslie Cockburn
THE INSIDE STORY OF THE U.S.-ISRAELI COVERT RELATIONSHIP”:
There are a number of things. For example, one particular part which I found most interesting was we talk about Israeli operations in Colombia and some of the Israeli commandos who trained the hit squads of the Medellin cartel. It turns out that they had trained us in Israel as well when they were between trips to Colombia. These were the same people who also trained most of the top commanders in the Guatemalan military and also trained the Contras. They had a firm that was under license to the Israeli Ministry of Defense, and then they’d turn up in the jungles of Puerto Boyac in Colombia. So, we had a lot of adventures, I must say.
JAMES JESUS ANGLETON
You tell a story early in the book — you know, I’ve never heard anyone pronounce his full name so I don’t even know if this is right — James Jesus Angleton — or do they call him Jesus [pronounces Hesus]?
Andrew Cockburn
Although it should be Jesus [Hesus] because that was in recognition of the Mexican half of his family, everyone always pronounced it Jesus.
Brian Lamb
You tell an early story about a monument to him near Yad Vashem, the memorial to the Holocaust. Explain that story.
Andrew Cockburn
Right. Well, if you’re going on the outskirts of Jerusalem on the western side at least, you have Yad Vashem, which is the very moving memorial to the Holocaust. If you take the road past there out of town, you down the hill and you wind through a pretty village and eventually come to what’s called the Jerusalem Forest, which is full of memorial groves, if you like, to people who get honored in this way — war heros or simply people who have been killed in war or people recognized by the state of Israel.
Andrew Cockburn
We were driving through this one day, and the reason we were doing this was we were looking for the memorial grove, memorial forest, to James Jesus Angleton. Angleton was a CIA man, a senior CIA official, very famous for a number of reasons but he was of interest to us because he was the link for many years between the CIA and the Mossad. The Israelis had all said to us, his old intelligence friends had said, “Oh, yes, we love Jim and Jim was a good friend to Israel and we liked Jim a lot. In fact, after he died” — which was in 1987 — “we created a memorial forest for him. It’s out there. I suppose it’s a bit hard to find. You might not want to look for it, but I can tell you that it’s there.” So, we thought we would go and take a look. We drove out, and there were all these nice groves with nice plaques carved in stone to various people, and we can’t find the Angleton memorial.
Andrew Cockburn
Eventually we decided to give up, thinking we had taken the wrong direction or something. We were looking for a place to turn and there is an open space, or it looks like an open space, and we drive up, but it isn’t. It’s basically A GARBAGE DUMP with a few stunted, dying little trees poking up and a plaque actually on plastic screwed to the stone to James Jesus Angleton. So this was the memorial forest. It’s kind of hard to explain, but in a way it was an Israeli joke. It was, “Look, we’re supposed to like you a lot. We’re supposed to owe you a lot, but we don’t owe anyone anything, so here’s what we really think of you,” and it’s A GARBAGE DUMP.
Brian Lamb
Mr. Angleton is dead?
Andrew Cockburn
He is dead but not forgotten.
Brian Lamb
Isn’t there a new book just out about him?
Andrew Cockburn
Yes, but it doesn’t really go into the Israeli side, which is what interests us. Angleton did a number of things. He’s been most written about because he was head of CIA counter-intelligence and got obsessed about a Soviet mole in the CIA. Although that may be the most publicized role he had, he did other things, too, and his most important job really — and this is the role that the agency has always been very keen to obscure. In fact, they prevented one former colleague of his in the agency from writing a book about him because they said, “Oh, my God, if he writes that book, he’ll talk about this particular job,” which was Angleton’s role as a liaison with foreign intelligence services, including the Israelis — particularly the Israelis, in fact. This was an absolutely key role. There’s a lot of bodies buried there. What Angleton was able to do were things the CIA couldn’t do or didn’t want to be seen doing or wanted to do in this country, in which it’s legally precluded from doing. As liaison, Angleton could go to his buddies in foreign intelligence services, and particularly the Israelis, and say, “Help us out.” Angleton was really the point man for the connection that we explain in the book.
Brian Lamb
What would happen if all American aid to Israel was stopped and the Israelis had to shut down their arms business? What would happen to that country?
Leslie Cockburn
It would be a disaster.
Brian Lamb
Why?
Leslie Cockburn
Because the arms business is the engine that drives the economy of Israel. It’s the biggest export. At this point it’s such a huge part of the economy that they have to continue shipping arms, which is one reason why you get a situation where they’re shipping all over the world, and particularly unattractive situations like shipping to South Africa. So it’s all driven by money, by the desperate need to keep this business going. People will say to you, “Well, we had to go into the arms business in a big way because we wanted to become self-sufficient because there’s always the possibility of a next war.” But, in fact, because they’re very military-aid dependent on the U.S., what’s happened is that they’re more and more dependent on American components, on American research and development and hardly self-sufficient.
Andrew Cockburn
There is another element to that which is they have this huge arms industry that they have to keep going and is the major provider of employment in the country, especially of well-paying jobs. Their market, as wars are tailing off around the world, they see as their principal future growth market the Pentagon here. They’re becoming, or trying to be, in fact, more dependent on getting more business out of the U.S. military, which certainly doesn’t make them self-sufficient. If your economy depends on selling stuff to the Pentagon or tending that way, then that makes that connection even greater.
Leslie Cockburn
But there’s also on the intelligence side of things — when I say their need for this military industry is desperate, you have a whole intelligence branch that was set up called LAKAM to get high-tech military technology around the world by any means, and that includes stealing it. So you’ve had a lot of cases over the years of LAKAM operations, including in this country, going around to different companies and getting a hold of the blueprints and carting away boxes to bring back to Tel Aviv, because they have to say ahead of the curve.
Do the Israelis lie to the public?
Leslie Cockburn
In talking about this kind of stuff — covert operations, national security subjects — there is censorship in Israel. So a lot of these things can’t even be discussed. We talk about in the book the Israeli nuclear program and break some ground on this. We talk about the Israeli chain of command, that it takes the prime minister, the head of Mossad and the defense minister to make the decision to push the nuclear button.
Brian Lamb
Is this the nuclear facility at Dimona?
Leslie Cockburn
That’s correct.
Brian Lamb
Is that the only nuclear facility they have?
Leslie Cockburn
It’s an enormous nuclear facility. But what we’ve discovered . . .
Brian Lamb
Did you try to go there?
Leslie Cockburn
Oh, I’ve been to Dimona, yes.
Brian Lamb
Inside?
Leslie Cockburn
No, no, no. That’s very difficult.
Brian Lamb
Where is it?
Leslie Cockburn
It’s down in the Negev. It’s out in the middle of nowhere, and what happens is when you go to Dimona, if you happen to stop the car and take a picture of it or film it or whatever, you’re out of there very quickly. One defense intelligence agency friend of ours said that he had more flat tires in front of Dimona than anywhere else in Israel. But what we also have discovered was that Israel not only has nuclear weapons, but sophisticated tactical nuclear weapons just like we do. Remember the American Army used to have nuclear land mines, for example, all over Germany.
Leslie Cockburn
Well, the Israelis, we’ve discovered, have nuclear land mines seated on the Golan Heights and at one point Ariel Sharon, who is, of course, famous for the invasion of Lebanon and whatnot, went to [Menachem] Begin and said, “Look, you’re busy,” and had a terrible relationship at the time with the chief of Mossad. He wanted to take over sole control of the nuclear button, and Begin, fortunately, said no. But this kind of thing — I mean this is why the Israelis have gone wild for the book and they’ve serialized it in Ma’ariv and written about it in Ha’aretz because they can’t talk about this sort of stuff unless it’s been printed abroad before.
Brian Lamb
Ma’ariv and Ha’aretz are what?
Leslie Cockburn
They’re two very large Israeli papers. Ha’aretz is the kind of New York Times of Israel and Ma’ariv is the conservative paper.
Brian Lamb
You point out in your book that one of the things you did differently with this book is you’ve had a lot of translations of a lot of Hebrew in Israeli newspapers. Why?
Andrew Cockburn
Because there’s an amazing amount of information that appears in Hebrew — the Israelis feel comfortable about this because if it’s in Hebrew it’s like it’s among themselves — that doesn’t get translated into English.
They are very conscious of the feeling that Hebrew is like a code. Not many people outside Israel actually speak it. So if you can say something in Hebrew, it’s almost like saying it in secret. We discovered that, for instance, the Hebrew press in Israel is very, very good, and there are a lot of good journalists. There are very good newspapers. An amazing amount of information that never finds its way into the dispatches of foreign correspondents from Israel, very few of whom actually speak Hebrew, nor does it appear in the English-language Israeli papers like the Jerusalem Post.
Andrew Cockburn
Someone said to us,
“Do you know what the function of the Jerusalem Post is?”
We said, “What?”
He said, “It’s to give the American ambassador a happy breakfast.”
So they’re very conscious of, “Hebrew is for us and English is for everyone else.” We also found with books and also some diaries and documents there was a treasure trove. The Israelis, of course, are good at keeping secrets. It’s not like they spill everything out and they have to have a freedom of information. But there is still a wealth of detail and information and color and a lot of what you need to know to understand the connection we’re talking about in Hebrew.
Brian Lamb
How did you get it translated? Was it expensive?
Andrew Cockburn
Yes, but we thought it was worth the investment.
Brian Lamb
Can you give us an example of something that you learned that was in Hebrew that we never saw in English?
Andrew Cockburn
Sure. The ’67 war, for example. The people’s general view of the 1967 war was all the Arabs sort of ganged up on Israel and may have even attacked Israel and the Israelis fought them off and won the great victory which got them the West Bank that people are arguing about today.
Andrew Cockburn
In fact, let me give you a quick background. Let me put it this way:
We found a book of memoirs written by a guy who was the military aide to the then-prime minister of Israel. It was a guy called Israel Lior. He gives an account in this book which has never been translated into English. It’s available only in Hebrew; in fact, wasn’t even a bestseller there. He gives an account how on June 3, 1967 — two days before the war broke out — he was at the home of the prime minister and they were waiting for the head of Mossad to come back from Washington. The head of Mossad had been sent to Washington to get permission, to get the green light, to launch the war. He explains, “We knew we could win” — he’s explained already in the book — ” The generals were hot to go. They weren’t really scared of the Egyptians or anyone else, but they wanted to go ahead with this and the prime minister had been saying, ‘No, we can’t do it. We can’t attack until we have American permission.'”
Andrew Cockburn
He gives this very vivid description of how Meir Amit, the head of Mossad, comes back into the room at midnight. The high command is sitting around, and this being an Israeli meeting the air is thick with cigarette smoke. Amit walks back in and they say,
“Well, what is it? Is it war or no war? Will they let us go?”
Amit says,
“Well, I’ve been given to understand, the Americans have told me that they will bless us if we crush Nassar, and that’s it.”
They started the war on Monday morning. He’d been to Washington and he’d seen Richard Helms, the head of the CIA, and a very few other very senior officials, also including, certainly, James Jesus Angleton, and they got permission to do it. So that was something that had never been in English. Once you’ve read that, you understand that things are a bit different from the kind of histories you read in English.
SHAUL EISENBERG WEAPONS SMUGGLER
Brian Lamb
Andrew Cockburn, co-author of “Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship,” what’s the premise of your book?
Brian Lamb
Did the Israelis cooperate with you at all on this book?
Andrew Cockburn
Well, we never made an official approach to the Israeli government or Mossad or anything like that, but we managed to get in the end to talk to all the people we wanted to talk to in Israel. We talked to people like, for instance, David Kimche who had a long Mossad career. He eventually rose to be deputy head of Mossad, the Israeli secret intelligence agency — the equivalent of the CIA. I remember a wonderful evening we had in his home, in his study, where he was talking in guarded fashion about his career in intelligence. He then went on to be director general of their foreign ministry.
Andrew Cockburn
But I certainly noticed around the walls of his study where we were sitting, it was like a history of Israeli covert operations because, for instance, on one wall there were the most beautiful wood carvings, African wood sculptures. I said,
“Oh, they’re lovely, David. Where did you get those?”
“Oh, a present from [Sese-Seko] Mobutu in Zaire.”
“Oh, that one’s nice. Where did that come from?” “[Jean-Bedel] Bokassa of the Central African Empire.”
Then on another wall beautiful Persian miniatures. “Where did they come from?” “Oh, a present from the Shah for something we did for him.”
Andrew Cockburn
So, there was this man sitting, this master spook, surrounded by mementos of his career. And so, we talked to him. We spent a lot of time talking — well, there’s a street in Tel Aviv, an avenue called Shaul Hamalekh, which is right across the street from what’s called the Kirya, which is the Ministry of Defense compound. It’s a huge area in the middle of Tel Aviv.
On the other side of Shaul Hamalekh is a row of very fancy high-rises which is basically the headquarters of the Israeli military-industrial complex — I mean, that area is, so you have offices of all the major arms dealers, the offices of the Israeli representatives of the major American defense corporations. You have Mossad headquarters. Just down one side street you have a very beautiful building which is the headquarters of a man called Shaul Eisenberg, which not many people in the outside world know about, but he’s certainly the richest and probably the most powerful man in Israel. He’s the master arms dealer. He’s behind a lot of political campaigns, behind a lot of politicians. Again, very much involved in this secret world of arms deals and covert operations that we talk about as the link with America.
Adonis Diaries 
June 14, 2021 at 5:23 pm
“DANGEROUS LIAISON: THE INSIDE STORY OF THE U.S.-ISRAELI COVERT RELATIONSHIP”
Brian Lamb
Leslie Cockburn, what was the most interesting part of writing this book?
Leslie Cockburn
THE INSIDE STORY OF THE U.S.-ISRAELI COVERT RELATIONSHIP”:
There are a number of things. For example, one particular part which I found most interesting was we talk about Israeli operations in Colombia and some of the Israeli commandos who trained the hit squads of the Medellin cartel. It turns out that they had trained us in Israel as well when they were between trips to Colombia. These were the same people who also trained most of the top commanders in the Guatemalan military and also trained the Contras. They had a firm that was under license to the Israeli Ministry of Defense, and then they’d turn up in the jungles of Puerto Boyac in Colombia. So, we had a lot of adventures, I must say.
JAMES JESUS ANGLETON
You tell a story early in the book — you know, I’ve never heard anyone pronounce his full name so I don’t even know if this is right — James Jesus Angleton — or do they call him Jesus [pronounces Hesus]?
Andrew Cockburn
Although it should be Jesus [Hesus] because that was in recognition of the Mexican half of his family, everyone always pronounced it Jesus.
Brian Lamb
You tell an early story about a monument to him near Yad Vashem, the memorial to the Holocaust. Explain that story.
Andrew Cockburn
Right. Well, if you’re going on the outskirts of Jerusalem on the western side at least, you have Yad Vashem, which is the very moving memorial to the Holocaust. If you take the road past there out of town, you down the hill and you wind through a pretty village and eventually come to what’s called the Jerusalem Forest, which is full of memorial groves, if you like, to people who get honored in this way — war heros or simply people who have been killed in war or people recognized by the state of Israel.
Andrew Cockburn
We were driving through this one day, and the reason we were doing this was we were looking for the memorial grove, memorial forest, to James Jesus Angleton. Angleton was a CIA man, a senior CIA official, very famous for a number of reasons but he was of interest to us because he was the link for many years between the CIA and the Mossad. The Israelis had all said to us, his old intelligence friends had said, “Oh, yes, we love Jim and Jim was a good friend to Israel and we liked Jim a lot. In fact, after he died” — which was in 1987 — “we created a memorial forest for him. It’s out there. I suppose it’s a bit hard to find. You might not want to look for it, but I can tell you that it’s there.” So, we thought we would go and take a look. We drove out, and there were all these nice groves with nice plaques carved in stone to various people, and we can’t find the Angleton memorial.
Andrew Cockburn
Eventually we decided to give up, thinking we had taken the wrong direction or something. We were looking for a place to turn and there is an open space, or it looks like an open space, and we drive up, but it isn’t. It’s basically A GARBAGE DUMP with a few stunted, dying little trees poking up and a plaque actually on plastic screwed to the stone to James Jesus Angleton. So this was the memorial forest. It’s kind of hard to explain, but in a way it was an Israeli joke. It was, “Look, we’re supposed to like you a lot. We’re supposed to owe you a lot, but we don’t owe anyone anything, so here’s what we really think of you,” and it’s A GARBAGE DUMP.
Brian Lamb
Mr. Angleton is dead?
Andrew Cockburn
He is dead but not forgotten.
Brian Lamb
Isn’t there a new book just out about him?
Andrew Cockburn
Yes, but it doesn’t really go into the Israeli side, which is what interests us. Angleton did a number of things. He’s been most written about because he was head of CIA counter-intelligence and got obsessed about a Soviet mole in the CIA. Although that may be the most publicized role he had, he did other things, too, and his most important job really — and this is the role that the agency has always been very keen to obscure. In fact, they prevented one former colleague of his in the agency from writing a book about him because they said, “Oh, my God, if he writes that book, he’ll talk about this particular job,” which was Angleton’s role as a liaison with foreign intelligence services, including the Israelis — particularly the Israelis, in fact. This was an absolutely key role. There’s a lot of bodies buried there. What Angleton was able to do were things the CIA couldn’t do or didn’t want to be seen doing or wanted to do in this country, in which it’s legally precluded from doing. As liaison, Angleton could go to his buddies in foreign intelligence services, and particularly the Israelis, and say, “Help us out.” Angleton was really the point man for the connection that we explain in the book.
Brian Lamb
What would happen if all American aid to Israel was stopped and the Israelis had to shut down their arms business? What would happen to that country?
Leslie Cockburn
It would be a disaster.
Brian Lamb
Why?
Leslie Cockburn
Because the arms business is the engine that drives the economy of Israel. It’s the biggest export. At this point it’s such a huge part of the economy that they have to continue shipping arms, which is one reason why you get a situation where they’re shipping all over the world, and particularly unattractive situations like shipping to South Africa. So it’s all driven by money, by the desperate need to keep this business going. People will say to you, “Well, we had to go into the arms business in a big way because we wanted to become self-sufficient because there’s always the possibility of a next war.” But, in fact, because they’re very military-aid dependent on the U.S., what’s happened is that they’re more and more dependent on American components, on American research and development and hardly self-sufficient.
Andrew Cockburn
There is another element to that which is they have this huge arms industry that they have to keep going and is the major provider of employment in the country, especially of well-paying jobs. Their market, as wars are tailing off around the world, they see as their principal future growth market the Pentagon here. They’re becoming, or trying to be, in fact, more dependent on getting more business out of the U.S. military, which certainly doesn’t make them self-sufficient. If your economy depends on selling stuff to the Pentagon or tending that way, then that makes that connection even greater.
Leslie Cockburn
But there’s also on the intelligence side of things — when I say their need for this military industry is desperate, you have a whole intelligence branch that was set up called LAKAM to get high-tech military technology around the world by any means, and that includes stealing it. So you’ve had a lot of cases over the years of LAKAM operations, including in this country, going around to different companies and getting a hold of the blueprints and carting away boxes to bring back to Tel Aviv, because they have to say ahead of the curve.
Do the Israelis lie to the public?
Leslie Cockburn
In talking about this kind of stuff — covert operations, national security subjects — there is censorship in Israel. So a lot of these things can’t even be discussed. We talk about in the book the Israeli nuclear program and break some ground on this. We talk about the Israeli chain of command, that it takes the prime minister, the head of Mossad and the defense minister to make the decision to push the nuclear button.
Brian Lamb
Is this the nuclear facility at Dimona?
Leslie Cockburn
That’s correct.
Brian Lamb
Is that the only nuclear facility they have?
Leslie Cockburn
It’s an enormous nuclear facility. But what we’ve discovered . . .
Brian Lamb
Did you try to go there?
Leslie Cockburn
Oh, I’ve been to Dimona, yes.
Brian Lamb
Inside?
Leslie Cockburn
No, no, no. That’s very difficult.
Brian Lamb
Where is it?
Leslie Cockburn
It’s down in the Negev. It’s out in the middle of nowhere, and what happens is when you go to Dimona, if you happen to stop the car and take a picture of it or film it or whatever, you’re out of there very quickly. One defense intelligence agency friend of ours said that he had more flat tires in front of Dimona than anywhere else in Israel. But what we also have discovered was that Israel not only has nuclear weapons, but sophisticated tactical nuclear weapons just like we do. Remember the American Army used to have nuclear land mines, for example, all over Germany.
Leslie Cockburn
Well, the Israelis, we’ve discovered, have nuclear land mines seated on the Golan Heights and at one point Ariel Sharon, who is, of course, famous for the invasion of Lebanon and whatnot, went to [Menachem] Begin and said, “Look, you’re busy,” and had a terrible relationship at the time with the chief of Mossad. He wanted to take over sole control of the nuclear button, and Begin, fortunately, said no. But this kind of thing — I mean this is why the Israelis have gone wild for the book and they’ve serialized it in Ma’ariv and written about it in Ha’aretz because they can’t talk about this sort of stuff unless it’s been printed abroad before.
Brian Lamb
Ma’ariv and Ha’aretz are what?
Leslie Cockburn
They’re two very large Israeli papers. Ha’aretz is the kind of New York Times of Israel and Ma’ariv is the conservative paper.
Brian Lamb
You point out in your book that one of the things you did differently with this book is you’ve had a lot of translations of a lot of Hebrew in Israeli newspapers. Why?
Andrew Cockburn
Because there’s an amazing amount of information that appears in Hebrew — the Israelis feel comfortable about this because if it’s in Hebrew it’s like it’s among themselves — that doesn’t get translated into English.
They are very conscious of the feeling that Hebrew is like a code. Not many people outside Israel actually speak it. So if you can say something in Hebrew, it’s almost like saying it in secret. We discovered that, for instance, the Hebrew press in Israel is very, very good, and there are a lot of good journalists. There are very good newspapers. An amazing amount of information that never finds its way into the dispatches of foreign correspondents from Israel, very few of whom actually speak Hebrew, nor does it appear in the English-language Israeli papers like the Jerusalem Post.
Andrew Cockburn
Someone said to us,
“Do you know what the function of the Jerusalem Post is?”
We said, “What?”
He said, “It’s to give the American ambassador a happy breakfast.”
So they’re very conscious of, “Hebrew is for us and English is for everyone else.” We also found with books and also some diaries and documents there was a treasure trove. The Israelis, of course, are good at keeping secrets. It’s not like they spill everything out and they have to have a freedom of information. But there is still a wealth of detail and information and color and a lot of what you need to know to understand the connection we’re talking about in Hebrew.
Brian Lamb
How did you get it translated? Was it expensive?
Andrew Cockburn
Yes, but we thought it was worth the investment.
Brian Lamb
Can you give us an example of something that you learned that was in Hebrew that we never saw in English?
Andrew Cockburn
Sure. The ’67 war, for example. The people’s general view of the 1967 war was all the Arabs sort of ganged up on Israel and may have even attacked Israel and the Israelis fought them off and won the great victory which got them the West Bank that people are arguing about today.
Andrew Cockburn
In fact, let me give you a quick background. Let me put it this way:
We found a book of memoirs written by a guy who was the military aide to the then-prime minister of Israel. It was a guy called Israel Lior. He gives an account in this book which has never been translated into English. It’s available only in Hebrew; in fact, wasn’t even a bestseller there. He gives an account how on June 3, 1967 — two days before the war broke out — he was at the home of the prime minister and they were waiting for the head of Mossad to come back from Washington. The head of Mossad had been sent to Washington to get permission, to get the green light, to launch the war. He explains, “We knew we could win” — he’s explained already in the book — ” The generals were hot to go. They weren’t really scared of the Egyptians or anyone else, but they wanted to go ahead with this and the prime minister had been saying, ‘No, we can’t do it. We can’t attack until we have American permission.'”
Andrew Cockburn
He gives this very vivid description of how Meir Amit, the head of Mossad, comes back into the room at midnight. The high command is sitting around, and this being an Israeli meeting the air is thick with cigarette smoke. Amit walks back in and they say,
“Well, what is it? Is it war or no war? Will they let us go?”
Amit says,
“Well, I’ve been given to understand, the Americans have told me that they will bless us if we crush Nassar, and that’s it.”
They started the war on Monday morning. He’d been to Washington and he’d seen Richard Helms, the head of the CIA, and a very few other very senior officials, also including, certainly, James Jesus Angleton, and they got permission to do it. So that was something that had never been in English. Once you’ve read that, you understand that things are a bit different from the kind of histories you read in English.
SHAUL EISENBERG WEAPONS SMUGGLER
Brian Lamb
Andrew Cockburn, co-author of “Dangerous Liaison: The Inside Story of the U.S.-Israeli Covert Relationship,” what’s the premise of your book?
Brian Lamb
Did the Israelis cooperate with you at all on this book?
Andrew Cockburn
Well, we never made an official approach to the Israeli government or Mossad or anything like that, but we managed to get in the end to talk to all the people we wanted to talk to in Israel. We talked to people like, for instance, David Kimche who had a long Mossad career. He eventually rose to be deputy head of Mossad, the Israeli secret intelligence agency — the equivalent of the CIA. I remember a wonderful evening we had in his home, in his study, where he was talking in guarded fashion about his career in intelligence. He then went on to be director general of their foreign ministry.
Andrew Cockburn
But I certainly noticed around the walls of his study where we were sitting, it was like a history of Israeli covert operations because, for instance, on one wall there were the most beautiful wood carvings, African wood sculptures. I said,
“Oh, they’re lovely, David. Where did you get those?”
“Oh, a present from [Sese-Seko] Mobutu in Zaire.”
“Oh, that one’s nice. Where did that come from?” “[Jean-Bedel] Bokassa of the Central African Empire.”
Then on another wall beautiful Persian miniatures. “Where did they come from?” “Oh, a present from the Shah for something we did for him.”
Andrew Cockburn
So, there was this man sitting, this master spook, surrounded by mementos of his career. And so, we talked to him. We spent a lot of time talking — well, there’s a street in Tel Aviv, an avenue called Shaul Hamalekh, which is right across the street from what’s called the Kirya, which is the Ministry of Defense compound. It’s a huge area in the middle of Tel Aviv.
On the other side of Shaul Hamalekh is a row of very fancy high-rises which is basically the headquarters of the Israeli military-industrial complex — I mean, that area is, so you have offices of all the major arms dealers, the offices of the Israeli representatives of the major American defense corporations. You have Mossad headquarters. Just down one side street you have a very beautiful building which is the headquarters of a man called Shaul Eisenberg, which not many people in the outside world know about, but he’s certainly the richest and probably the most powerful man in Israel. He’s the master arms dealer. He’s behind a lot of political campaigns, behind a lot of politicians. Again, very much involved in this secret world of arms deals and covert operations that we talk about as the link with America.
June 15, 2021 at 11:25 am
Wonderful article. I still have to reply (add a few new information/”intelligence pieces” to the other three comments you sent me. Do you mind that I use a few of your sections in my blog and Fb? I did post many articles on your previous 3 comments and in details and will reiterate them shortly in my replies. Thank you for these detailed comments.
June 15, 2021 at 1:23 pm
Yo Bro,
It’s all about educating the public! Feel free to use what you like!
This type of information has to be “mined” from books!
You won’t get it on the national media!
June 15, 2021 at 11:28 am
wordpress is Not opening new text for me to publish on my “older version” Samsung Chrome, but it opens on my mobile which is Not the suitable medium to write and edit. Eventually, I will copy your comments and publish them after slight editing