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60 - PLACES/COUNTRIES/Israel.md

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----
-created: 2025-07-22
-updated: 2026-05-17
-title: Israel
-tags:
-  - Organization
-  - Government
-  - Country
-  - Middle East
-  - Intelligence
-description: The State of Israel, a country in the Middle East. It has been connected to various intelligence and psychic research activities.
+---
 category: "Country"
-summary: "Israel is a Middle Eastern state whose intelligence agencies (Mossad, Shin Bet, Aman), nuclear weapons program, and political relationships with U.S. intelligence and the American Jewish community are central subjects of this vault."
+tags:
+  - Country
+  - MiddleEast
+  - Intelligence
+  - NuclearWeapons
+  - ArmsTrade
+summary: "Middle Eastern state whose undeclared nuclear arsenal, intelligence operations in the United States, covert arms sales to Iran and Latin America, and surveillance-technology industry run through much of this vault."
+created: 2025-07-22
+updated: 2026-09-22
 ---
 
-The State of [[Israel]] is a country in the [[Middle East]]. It has been connected to various intelligence and psychic research activities, notably through figures like [[Uri Geller]] and its intelligence agency, [[Mossad]].
+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.[^1][^2]
+
+### 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 [[United Kingdom|Britain]] and was forced by [[Dwight D. Eisenhower|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, D.C.|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 *[[The Sunday Times|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.[^1][^3]
+
+### What Washington Knew
+
+The [[Central Intelligence Agency|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 [[United States|American]] weapons to Israel, [[HAWK missile|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; [[Lyndon B. Johnson|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 [[Jimmy Carter|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 Incident|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."[^4][^5] After the [[Osirak bombing]] of June 7, 1981, [[William J. Casey|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 [[U.S. Navy|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 [[Department of Justice|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."[^6][^7]
+
+### 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 Affair|Iran-Contra]] channel, 96 [[TOW Missile|TOW]] missiles from Israeli stocks in August 1985.[^8][^9] 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."[^2][^7] 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.[^2][^10]
+
+### Latin America and Southern Africa
+
+The former Mossad officer [[Mike Harari]] was named by [[Jose Blandon|José Blandón]] before the [[United States Senate|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 [[Guatemala|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.[^1][^12]
+
+### 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]
+
+### Footnotes
+
+[^1]: Hersh, Seymour M. *The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy.* Random House, 1991: chapters 2, 3 and 5 (Bergmann, Suez, Dimona), 4, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 16 and 18 (U-2 imagery, Kennedy, Barbour, Duckett, Shapiro, the Liberty), 17 (the Yom Kippur War), 1 (Osirak and the KH-11 review), 21 and 22 (Pollard, Eitan, Sella, Garment), and pp. 313-314 (Vanunu).
+[^2]: Ben-Menashe, Ari. *Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network.* Sheridan Square Press, 1992. Sole source for the Joint Committee, Eagle, Paraguay and SIMWA passages.
+[^3]: Cohen, Yoel. *The Whistleblower of Dimona: Israel, Vanunu, and the Bomb.* Holmes and Meier, 2003.
+[^4]: Mangold, Tom. *Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's Master Spy Hunter.* Simon and Schuster, 1991, as cited on the Angleton page, whose KK MOUNTAIN passages carry no specific page citation.
+[^5]: Powers, Thomas. *The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA.* Knopf, 1979.
+[^6]: Thomas, Gordon. *Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad.* St. Martin's Press, 1999.
+[^7]: U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary. *The INSLAW Affair,* H. Rept. 102-857, September 10, 1992, reproducing the memoranda of Jack Rugh of May 6 and 12, 1983; U.S. Department of Justice, *Report on the Review of Special Counsel Nicholas J. Bua's Report,* September 27, 1994.
+[^8]: Sick, Gary. *October Surprise: America's Hostages in Iran and the Election of Ronald Reagan.* Times Books, 1991.
+[^9]: Walsh, Lawrence E. *Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters.* 1993.
+[^10]: "Probe by House finds no 'October surprise,'" *The Baltimore Sun,* January 13, 1993. https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1993-01-13-1993013111-story.html
+[^11]: "Ex-agent of the Mossad Implicated in Drug Deals with Panamanian," *Jewish Telegraphic Agency,* February 1988. https://www.jta.org/archive/ex-agent-of-the-mossad-implicated-in-drug-deals-with-panamanian
+[^12]: "Media Baron Sues Seymour Hersh," *The Washington Post,* October 25, 1991. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1991/10/25/media-baron-sues-seymour-hersh/c16c29e2-04ba-4038-9fff-08113fa33b77/ ; "Maxwell, Colossus Even in Death, Laid to Rest on Mount of Olives," *Jewish Telegraphic Agency,* 1991. https://www.jta.org/archive/maxwell-colossus-even-in-death-laid-to-rest-on-mount-of-olives
+[^13]: "Where NSO Group Came From and Why It's Just the Tip of the Iceberg," OCCRP. https://www.occrp.org/en/project/the-pegasus-project
+[^14]: Brewster, Thomas. "Epstein Could Have Made $100 Million On A Secret Police Tech Investment With Ehud Barak." *Forbes,* February 2026.
+[^15]: "Palantir, Israel Agree Strategic Partnership for Battle Tech." *Bloomberg,* January 12, 2024.