The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Shimon Lavee.md

aliases	category	tags	summary	location	created	updated	relations
Shimon Lavie שמעון לביא	Military	Person Military Israel SouthAfrica SIMWA MilitaryIntelligence AriBenMenashe	Ari Ben-Menashe names Lieutenant Colonel Shimon Lavee as head of an Israeli military intelligence branch and as preparer of the Israeli text of the SIMWA agreement with South Africa.	Israel	2026-10-09	2026-10-09	type with role fn head_of Special Assistance Branch (SIM) branch head, External Relations Department, Israel Defense Forces Military Intelligence (per Ben-Menashe, undated) 1 type with role fn employed_by Military Intelligence Directorate (Israel) officer, External Relations Department (per Ben-Menashe) 1 type with start end role fn participant_in SIMWA 1978 1980 prepared the Israeli version of the agreement (per Ben-Menashe) 3

Lieutenant Colonel Shimon Lavee is named by Ari Ben-Menashe in the 1992 memoir Profits of War - Ari Ben-Menashe as the branch head of the Special Assistance Branch (SIM) of the External Relations Department of Military Intelligence Directorate (Israel). Ben-Menashe also credits him with preparing the Israeli version of the SIMWA (SADF-IDF Mutual Wartime Agreement) between Israel and South Africa.¹

The External Relations Department

Ben-Menashe described the External Relations Department as having four branches when he joined it in 1977. He named the first as the Special Assistance Branch (SIM), "through which special military assistance was to be given to other countries and various 'liberation movements.'"¹ According to his account, the Mossad department that had handled external military assistance became "a liaison department between foreign countries and SIM."¹ The second branch was R, which handled intelligence exchange with foreign services. The Mossad had a parallel branch, Tevel, which after R gained prominence found itself playing a liaison role to R.¹

Ben-Menashe names the chief of External Relations in 1977 as Col. Meir Meir, who interviewed him that year.²

The SIMWA negotiation

Ben-Menashe's account of the agreement begins in 1978, when Menachem Begin sent his defense minister, Ezer Weizman, to Pretoria. He wrote that P.W. Botha pushed for a wartime alliance "as the price for continuing nuclear tests," and that "to Begin's dismay, Weizman agreed with Botha." After Weizman reported back, Begin relented. In Ben-Menashe's words: "It took two years to work out the military cooperation agreement."³

He wrote that the agreement "was drawn up in the special assistance branch of the External Relations Department of the Israel Defense Forces/Military Intelligence" and was "referred to as SIMWA, an acronym for the SADF-IDF Mutual Wartime Agreement, drawn up between the South African Defense Force and the Israel Defense Forces." He then wrote: "The Israeli version was prepared by the branch head, Lt. Col. Shimon Lavee."³ The provisions he described were that either party, if at war or in military operations and short of matériel, could request supplies from the other's stockpiles, and that the deputy chiefs of general staff would meet once a year, alternately in Israel and South Africa.³

Ben-Menashe placed the 1978 and 1979 sale of 175mm artillery "that could carry small nuclear devices" beside a South African agreement to invest in Israel's nuclear program and to allow Israeli tests in the Indian Ocean without South African supervision. He wrote that in 1979 Israel carried out a number of such tests, "one of which was detected by satellite because its big flash occurred during a break in the otherwise cloudy weather." He wrote that the South Africans denied the flash was theirs, that the Israeli government "has refused to comment on this test," and that Israel "did, however, issue a blanket denial" of Seymour Hersh's book The Samson Option, which asserts that the 1979 flash was an Israeli atomic device.³

On September 22, 1979, at 00:53 UTC, the U.S. satellite VELA Satellite detected a double flash of light.⁴

The 1975 documents

In May 2010 the The Guardian reporter Chris McGreal reported "top secret" minutes of 1975 meetings between senior officials of the two countries. According to the article, P.W. Botha, then South Africa's defense minister, asked for warheads, and Shimon Peres, then Israel's defense minister, responded by offering them "in three sizes." The article states that the documents show the two sides met on March 31, 1975, and quotes Sasha Polakow-Suransky, the author of The Unspoken Alliance, that at those talks Israeli officials "formally offered to sell South Africa some of the nuclear-capable Jericho missiles in its arsenal." It reports that Peres and Botha met in Zurich on June 4, 1975, by which time the Jericho I project had the codename Chalet, and that the minutes record: "Minister Botha expressed interest in a limited number of units of Chalet subject to the correct payload being available." The minutes then record: "Minister Peres said the correct payload was available in three sizes."⁵

The article reports that the former South African naval commander Dieter Gerhardt, jailed in 1983 for spying for the Soviet Union, said after his release that an agreement between Israel and South Africa called Chalet involved an offer to arm eight Jericho missiles with "special warheads," which Gerhardt said were atomic bombs. It also reports Polakow-Suransky's statement that the Israeli defense ministry tried to block his access to the Secment agreement.⁵

The South African History Archive holds documents released under South Africa's access-to-information law. Among them is a memorandum dated March 21, 1975, from the Chief of the Defence Staff to the Chief of the South African Defense Force on Israel's Jericho weapon system, which the Department of Defence declassified in September 2003. The same archive holds an agreement it dates to March 30, 1975, signed by Botha and Peres, with a clause stating that "the very existence of this agreement" was to remain secret.⁶ The Mail & Guardian article describes the memorandum of Lt. Gen. R. F. Armstrong as dated the same day as the March 31 meeting. It also reports that a covert agreement governing the military alliance known as Secment had been signed some weeks before Peres's offer, and quotes it: "It is hereby expressly agreed that the very existence of this agreement … shall be secret and shall not be disclosed by either party."⁵

The office of President Shimon Peres responded that "there exists no basis in reality for the claims published this morning by the Guardian," that "Israel has never negotiated the exchange of nuclear weapons with South Africa," and that "there exists no Israeli document or Israeli signature on a document that such negotiations took place." It said the paper had based the piece on "selective interpretation of South African documents and not on concrete facts."⁷

Shimon Levinson (Lavi)

Shimon Levinson (שמעון לוינזון, also written לביא, Lavi) was an Israeli reserve colonel who was convicted of spying for the KGB. The Shin Bet disclosure of November 2009 was reported in Hebrew by Kikar HaShabbat under the headline "30 שנה אחרי": "ביולי 1973 חזר לשירות קבע בצה"ל ושירת כקצין קישור לאו"ם בדרגת אל"מ עד אוגוסט 1978" ("In July 1973 he returned to regular service in the IDF and served as a UN liaison officer at the rank of colonel until August 1978"). The report gives his birth as 1933 in Jerusalem and his enlistment as 1950, and lists service as a clerk on the Israel-Jordan Armistice Commission, in the IDF attache office in Turkey ("בנספחות צה"ל בתורכיה"), and as head of a documentation section in Military Intelligence collection ("ראש מדור תיעוד באמ"ן איסוף"). The Shin Bet recruited him in 1963, and in 1965 he transferred at his own request to the Mossad, where he worked on reliability checks until March 1967.⁸

After commanding the Israeli UN liaison unit until 1970, the report says he returned to the Mossad: "ל"מוסד" לאגף קשרי חוץ, בו שימש, במשך שנתיים, בתפקיד ראש שלוחה בחו"ל" ("to the Mossad's Foreign Relations Division, where he served for two years as head of a branch abroad"). He was recalled over a security incident for which he was responsible and was then special assistant to the head of the Mossad's Special Relations Department until 1973. Haaretz, summarizing the same disclosure, gives the Mossad posting as head of the Mossad's Tevel station in Ethiopia, in charge of Israel's secret military aid to the army of Emperor Haile Selassie against Eritrean rebels.⁸⁹

The Kikar report states that he used his United Nations connections to be appointed in 1979 to lead the anti-drug effort in Thailand, a post he held until June 1983. It dates his April 1983 approach to the Soviet embassy in Bangkok, where he offered his services to the Russians ("והציע את שירותיו לרוסים"), and states that the KGB ran him until his arrest in May 1991. The Mossad rejected him in 1984, and in May 1985 he became chief security officer of the Prime Minister's Office, leaving in December. He was lured back from abroad and arrested at Ben Gurion Airport in May 1991: "נחקר, הודה מיד במיוחס לו, נשפט, ונדון ל-12 שנות מאסר" ("he was interrogated, immediately confessed, was tried and sentenced to 12 years in prison"). The Shin Bet account puts the payments from the KGB at $31,000 over seven years and says he shared a cell with Marcus Klingberg and was released in 1999.⁸

Haaretz reported that the Prime Minister's Office appointment was made by Avraham Tamir, then director general of the office, and that those who recommended Levinson included then prime minister Shimon Peres. It reported that his arrest followed information that reached the Mossad from a foreign source, that the investigation was code-named Eshel Hamidbar, and that Ariel Sharon and Rafi Eitan, whom Haaretz described as a close relative of Levinson, testified on his behalf at trial.⁹ The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported on September 9, 1993 that a district court had the previous week sentenced Levinson, 60, a colonel in the Israeli reserves, to 12 years for "serious espionage" for the former Soviet Union in a trial that began in May 1991. It stated that he left the IDF in 1983 and then joined the United Nations staff in Bangkok, whereas Kikar and Haaretz give his retirement from the IDF as 1978.¹⁰

None of these reports places Levinson in the IDF External Relations Department or names him in a branch called SIM; they give his IDF post from 1973 to 1978 as UN liaison officer and place his Mossad foreign-relations posting between 1970 and 1973. Ben-Menashe gives Lavee the rank of lieutenant colonel and dates the SIMWA drafting to the two years after 1978, and the reports give Levinson the rank of colonel and place him in Thailand from 1979. No source located establishes whether Levinson is the Shimon Lavee named by Ben-Menashe, and none connects Levinson to South Africa.³⁸⁹

Footnotes

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1. Ben-Menashe, Ari. Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network. New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1992; TrineDay reprint, 2015, p. 26 (the External Relations Department, the Special Assistance Branch (SIM), the Mossad department and Tevel). Lending copy: https://archive.org/details/profitsofwarinsi0000benm ↩︎

2. Ben-Menashe, Ari. Profits of War, end of chapter 2 and chapter 3, "Love in the Time of Revolution" (interview with "the chief of External Relations, Col. Meir Meir," May 1977); TrineDay reprint index, "Meir, Meir, 37, 38, 53." Lending copy: https://archive.org/details/profitsofwarinsi0000benm ↩︎

3. Ben-Menashe, Ari. Profits of War, TrineDay reprint, pp. 209-210 (index: "SIMWA, (SADF-IDF Mutual Wartime Agreement), 209-10"; "Lavee, Shimon, 210"). Lending copy: https://archive.org/details/profitsofwarinsi0000benm ↩︎

4. Christopher M. Wright and Lars-Erik De Geer, "The 22 September 1979 Vela Incident: The Detected Double-Flash," Science & Global Security, vol. 25, no. 3 (2017), pp. 95-124. "On 22 September 1979, at 00:53 UTC, U.S. satellite Vela 6911 detected a double-flash." https://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs25wright.pdf ↩︎

5. Chris McGreal, "Revealed: How Israel offered to sell SA nuclear weapons," Mail & Guardian, May 24, 2010 (reprinted from guardian.co.uk). https://mg.co.za/article/2010-05-24-revealed-how-israel-offered-to-sell-sa-nuclear-weapons ↩︎

6. South African History Archive, "Declassified documents on apartheid South Africa - Israel talks on nuclear weapons," May 25, 2010. Documents held in SAHA Collection AL2878 (Freedom of Information Programme Collection), items A3.1.1 (memorandum, March 21, 1975, declassified by the Department of Defence, September 2003) and A3.2.1 (agreement dated March 30, 1975, signed by P.W. Botha and Shimon Peres). https://www.saha.org.za/news/2010/May/declassified_documents_on_apartheid_south_africa_israel_talks_on_nuclear_weapons.htm ↩︎

7. "Israel denies 'nuclear exchange' talks with SA," Mail & Guardian, May 24, 2010 (AFP), statement from the office of President Shimon Peres. https://mg.co.za/article/2010-05-24-israel-denies-nuclear-exchange-talks-with-sa/ ↩︎

8. Yoni Gabbai, "30 שנה אחרי: מיוחד: המרגל הדתי שהפיל את ישראל," Kikar HaShabbat, November 9, 2009 (reporting the Shin Bet's disclosure). https://www.kikar.co.il/security-news/19477 ↩︎

9. Yossi Melman, "Why did a top Israeli intelligence officer join the KGB?," Haaretz, November 12, 2009. https://www.haaretz.com/1.5056541 ↩︎

10. "Israeli Officer Gets 12 Years for Spying for Soviet Union," Jewish Telegraphic Agency, September 9, 1993. https://www.jta.org/archive/israeli-officer-gets-12-years-for-spying-for-soviet-union ↩︎