Ari Ben-Menashe

Ari Ben-Menashe   (spook, businessman, author)
Born	4 December 1951

Ari Ben-Menashe (born 4 December 1951) is an Iranian-born Israeli-Canadian businessman, security consultant, and author. He was previously an employee of Israel's Military Intelligence Directorate from 1977 to 1987 and an arms dealer. He now lives in Montreal, Canada, and runs an international commodity exporting firm, Traeger Resources and Logistics Inc.

Ben-Menashe first garnered media attention in 1989, when he was arrested in the New York and charged with attempting to sell three military aircraft to Iran, in contravention of the US Arms Export Control Act. He spent almost a year in jail, went to trial and was acquitted; a jury accepted his defence, that he was acting on orders from his superiors in the Israeli government.

October Surprise

In 1990 and 1991, Ari Ben-Menashe said that he had been personally involved in assisting the Republican campaign with its October Surprise of preventing the American hostages from being released before the 1980 election. He also gave Seymour Hersh information about Israel's nuclear program, which was published in Hersh's book "The Samson Option". Ben-Menashe then fled to Australia and, in his application for refugee status, declared himself a victim of persecution of the Israeli and US governments. For his return to the US in May 1991 to testify to Congress, the journalist Robert Parry received a tip from an intelligence source that the US was planning to divert Ben-Menashe to Israel, where Ben-Menashe feared that he would be charged for revealing official secrets. With a delay to Ben-Menashe's flight, congressional investigators were able to extract assurances from the US government.

In December 1991, Ben-Menashe's appeal against a refusal by Australia to grant him refugee status failed. He left Australia and eventually settled in Canada. 1993 he married a Canadian woman and moved to Montreal; three years later he gained Canadian citizenship.

In 1992, Ben-Menashe published a book about his involvement in the Iran–Contra affair and intelligence operations on behalf of Israeli intelligence in "Profits of War: Inside the Secret US–Israeli Arms Network". Rafi Eitan, Israeli spy and Menachem Begin's counter-terrorism advisor, told author Gordon Thomas, who wrote "Gideon's Spies", that Eitan had worked with Ben-Menashe on setting up the US–Israeli network for covertly supplying arms to Iran and had collaborated with Ben-Menashe on using Prosecutor's Management Information System (PROMIS) for espionage. Sent a copy of Ben-Menashe's book, Eitan said he had no criticism of it and added that Ben-Menashe "is telling the truth.... That's why they squashed it."

When Robert McFarlane, President Reagan’s national security adviser, sued the book's publisher Sheridan Square Press (founded by William Schaap and Ellen Ray in New York), for libeling him, Sheridan Square lost its financial backers and was forced to shut down.

Nezar Hindawi

In his 1992 book "Profits of War: Inside the Secret US-Israeli Arms Network", Ari Ben-Menashe wrote that the Hindawi affair was an operation which had been conceived by Israeli intelligence. The organiser of the plot was Rafi Eitan who led Israeli intelligence's anti-terrorist group. The operation was meant to implicate the Syrian embassy in London as involved in terrorism and have all the Syrian diplomats expelled from England. Jordanian Mohammed Radi Abdullah, a paid Israeli agent, offered his cousin Nezar Hindawi $50,000 to place explosives by way of his girlfriend, Ann Marie Murphy, on El Al Flight 016 at Heathrow airport. Radi then introduced Hindawi to a Syrian intelligence officer, who arranged the details of the plot.

Jeffrey Epstein

Ari Ben-Menashe claims that Jeffrey Epstein, an American paedophile and child trafficker who died in prison in 2019, recorded politicians and powerful businessmen having sex with children and provided the photos to Israeli military intelligence for use as blackmail material.

Robert Maxwell

Ari Ben-Menashe claimed that Robert Maxwell, the owner of Mirror Group newspapers in the United Kingdom, was a Mossad agent and that Maxwell had tipped off the Israeli embassy in 1986 about the Israeli nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu after Vanunu and a friend approached the Sunday Mirror and The Sunday Times in London with a story about Israel's nuclear capability. Vanunu was subsequently lured by Mossad from London to Rome, kidnapped, returned to Israel, and sentenced to 18 years in jail. According to Ben-Menashe, the Daily Mirror's foreign editor, Nicholas Davies, worked for the Mossad and was involved in the Vanunu affair. No British newspaper would publish the Maxwell allegations because of his litigiousness reputation. However, Ben-Menashe was used as a key source by Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Seymour Hersh for his book about Israel's nuclear weapons, "The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy", published in Britain in 1991 by Faber and Faber. Hersh included the allegations about Maxwell, Davies, and Vanunu in the book.Davies's former wife, Janet Fielding, also confirmed in the book that she knew Ben-Menashe was an Israeli intelligence operative and that Menashe and Davies were business partners in an arms company, which was involved in the sale of arms for Israel to Iran during the Iran–Iraq War. When Hersh asked Fielding whether she knew Ben-Menashe was an Israeli intelligence operative, she responded, "It wasn't difficult to put two and two together. Do you think I'm bloody stupid? I shut my ears and walked (out of the marriage with Davies.")

On 21 October 1991, two Members of Parliament, Labour MP George Galloway and Conservative MP Rupert Allason (who writes spy novels under the pseudonym Nigel West) agreed to raise the issue in the House of Commons, which enabled newspapers to claim parliamentary privilege and to report the allegations. Davies was subsequently fired from the Daily Mirror for gross misconduct. Maxwell issued a writ for libel against Faber and Faber as well as Hersh and allegedly told Davies that the Mirror editor had threatened to resign if Davies was not fired but that he would get his job back when the dust settled.

Two weeks later, on 5 November 1991, Maxwell fell from his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine. Ben-Menashe claimed that Maxwell had been assassinated by Mossad for trying to blackmail it.

On 12 November 1991, Matthew Evans, the chairman of Faber and Faber, called a press conference in London to say he had evidence that Ben-Menashe was telling the truth about Davies. Evans read out a statement from Hersh, who said he had documentation showing meetings between Davies, unnamed Mossad officers, and "Cindy" (Cheryl Bentov), the woman who lured Vanunu to Rome. Evans and Hersh were later shown to have themselves been the subject of a sting operation by Joe Flynn, Fleet Street's most celebrated con man. Evans had met Flynn in Amsterdam and paid him £1,200 for the forged documents.

 

Related Document

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:The plot to blow up El Al Flight 016	Article	6 April 2019	Marianne Colloms Dick Weindling	Two weeks after Nezar Hindawi's trial, French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac was interviewed on tape by Arnaud de Borchgrave, the editor of the Washington Times. When he was asked about the attempt to blow up the El Al plane Chirac said he had been told by the West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and the Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher that they believe it had been set up by Mossad agents to destabilise Syria's Assad regime.

Many thanks to our Patrons who cover ~2/3 of our hosting bill. Please join them if you can.

References

This page imported content from Wikipedia on 19 February 2021.
Wikipedia is not affiliated with Wikispooks.   Original page source here