The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Harry H. Schwartz.md

category	tags	summary	relations
Intelligence & Government	Person Nuclear Israel	Deputy assistant secretary of defense in the office of Paul Warnke, present at the November 1968 meetings with Ambassador Yitzhak Rabin on the F-4 sale and the draft memorandum of understanding on nuclear assurances.	type with role start fn employed_by Office of the Secretary of Defense Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (International Security Affairs) 1968 2

Harry H. Schwartz was a deputy assistant secretary of defense in the office of Paul C. Warnke, the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs.¹² He attended the November 22, 1968 meeting at which Yitzhak Rabin, then Israel's ambassador to Washington, D.C., said that a paragraph of the draft memorandum of understanding on Israeli nuclear assurances implied that the United States considered Israel "the bad guy," and Warnke answered that he had discussed the paragraph with Clark Clifford and Clifford with Dean Rusk, and that the government did not put that construction on it.¹ In a conversation with Warnke on November 26, 1968, Rabin said that General Mordecai Hod had met Schwartz the day before and presented a list of the items desired so that a letter of offer could be prepared.³ On December 20, 1968, in Warnke's office, Rabin said that the negotiations with Schwartz were finished.²

Seymour Hersh wrote that Schwartz was present at a meeting where Warnke directly questioned Rabin about Israel's nuclear capabilities, and that Schwartz recalled Warnke stating, "Mr. Ambassador, we are shocked at the manner in which you are dealing with us.… You, our close ally, are building nuclear bombs in Israel behind our back."⁴

Footnotes

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1. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, vol. XX, Document 330, Memorandum of Conversation, Washington, November 22, 1968. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v20/d330 ↩︎

2. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, vol. XX, Document 355, Memorandum of Conversation, Washington, December 20, 1968 (lists "Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense (NESA)"). https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v20/d355 ↩︎

3. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, vol. XX, Document 332, Memorandum of Conversation, Washington, November 26, 1968. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v20/d332 ↩︎

4. Hersh, Seymour M. The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. Random House, 1991. Chapter 14. ↩︎