Epstein Secrets

henever it thought that the national interest demanded it. As a soldier in the 1948 war, I took part in the great offensive to open the way to the Negev, which had been cut off by the Egyptian army. This was done in violation of the cease-fire arranged by the UN. We used a simple ruse for putting th

s usual: an anti-PLO terrorist outfit had tried to assassinate the Israeli ambassador in London. When Prime Minister Menachem Begin was told by his Mossad chief that the assassins were enemies of the PLO, Begin famously answered: "For me, they are all PLO!" As a matter of fact, Arafat had kept the ce

told their allies that they needed cheap nuclear energy for seawater EFTA00712602 desalination, and that they planned to use the water to make the Negev Desert fertile. The German government was also left in the dark at first -- with Strauss being the likely exception. The CSU politician was appare

an incident in the early 1960s, when Strauss drove up to the Israeli mission in Cologne in a sedan car and handed an object wrapped in a coat to a Mossad liaison officer, saying it was "for the boys in Tel Aviv." It was a new model of an armor-piercing grenade. Arms cooperation was a delicate issue u

iving a tractor. I woke up early and accompanied him into the fields of wheat, barley or rye. We also made a series of trips 130 miles south into the Negev to a moshav called Patish. It had been set up by newly arrived Moroccan Jews. Since they didn’t have the equipment or know-how to cultivate all their

r, Hafez al-Assad, a few months earlier. Yet these three dedicated men — Gili, who was by training a lawyer; Shlomo, an academic; and Danny, a former Mossad chief — had just been through dozens of hours of intricately detailed talks with each of Arafat’s top negotiators at Camp David, not to mention the d

cross the Jordan River, in a town called Karameh. From early 1968, they had been launching hit- and-run raids, not just on the West Bank but into the Negev. Eshkol’s cabinet was initially divided on whether to attack his base in Jordan, in both an act of retaliation and a signal to King Hussein that if h

ne of it, however, could alter the reply I got from Ahrahle a couple of hours later. “We decided to send Zvika,” he said. Zvika Zamir was the head of Mossad, and he would be going only as an observer. Any operation against the terrorists would still be in the hands of German units. The German police’s bu

found themselves in a similar situation, mentioned as possible chiefs of staff but never chosen: Arik and Ezer Weizman. I saw Arik on his farm in the Negev. He was obviously enjoying his extraordinary political rehabilitation since the Lebanon war. His expanding girth was settled into a sofa in the livin

diplomacy in the hopes of reducing one of the obvious risks in such an attack: a conflict with Jordan, which we’d have to overfly to reach Iraq. The Mossad had a unit called 7evel, a kind of shadow foreign ministry for states with which we had no formal relations but with which, in both side’s interests,

rrowest of margins, might determine the outcome. After the 1996 election, I’d learned of cases where Peres volunteers outside polling stations in the Negev or the north of the country had left early, in order to make sure they’d be back to Tel Aviv in time for the “moment of victory.” Now, I sent out wor

. The first of about a half-dozen meetings came a few days later at the Prime Minister’s residence in Jerusalem. Then, we shifted venue, meeting at a Mossad-owned villa north of Tel Aviv. I brought along Bougie Herzog, a bright young lawyer, and Labor Party member, who was working in the same law firm and

iving a tractor. I woke up early and accompanied him into the fields of wheat, barley or rye. We also made a series of trips 130 miles south into the Negev to a moshav called Patish. It had been set up by newly arrived Moroccan Jews. Since they didn’t have the equipment or know-how to cultivate all their

r, Hafez al-Assad, a few months earlier. Yet these three dedicated men — Gili, who was by training a lawyer; Shlomo, an academic; and Danny, a former Mossad chief — had just been through dozens of hours of intricately detailed talks with each of Arafat’s top negotiators at Camp David, not to mention the d

cross the Jordan River, in a town called Karameh. From early 1968, they had been launching hit- and-run raids, not just on the West Bank but into the Negev. Eshkol's cabinet was initially divided on whether to attack his base in Jordan, in both an act of retaliation and a signal to King Hussein that if h

ne of it, however, could alter the reply I got from Ahrahle a couple of hours later. "We decided to send Zvika," he said. Zvika Zamir was the head of Mossad, and he would be going only as an observer. Any operation against the terrorists would still be in the hands of German units. The German police's bun

found themselves in a similar situation, mentioned as possible chiefs of staff but never chosen: Arik and Ezer Weizman. I saw Arik on his farm in the Negev. He was obviously enjoying his extraordinary political rehabilitation since the Lebanon war. His expanding girth was settled into a sofa in the livin

diplomacy in the hopes of reducing one of the obvious risks in such an attack: a conflict with Jordan, which we'd have to overfly to reach Iraq. The Mossad had a unit called Tevel, a kind of shadow foreign ministry for states with which we had no formal relations but with which, in both side's interests,

rrowest of margins, might determine the outcome. After the 1996 election, I'd learned of cases where Peres volunteers outside polling stations in the Negev or the north of the country had left early, in order to make sure they'd be back to Tel Aviv in time for the "moment of victory." Now, I sent out wor

. The first of about a half-dozen meetings came a few days later at the Prime Minister's residence in Jerusalem. Then, we shifted venue, meeting at a Mossad-owned villa north of Tel Aviv. I brought along Bougie Herzog, a bright young lawyer, and Labor Party member, who was working in the same law firm and