The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Rafael Eitan.md

title	aliases	created	updated	category	tags	summary	born	died	location	relations
Rafael Eitan	Rafael Eitan Rafi Eitan Rafi the Stinker	2024-04-25	2026-10-14	Intelligence & Government	Person Israel Mossad LAKAM PROMIS JonathanPollard Intelligence 1970s 1980s	Rafael Eitan was an Israeli intelligence operative who led the LAKAM bureau, ran Jonathan Pollard as an agent against the United States, and was alleged by several sources to have distributed backdoored PROMIS software.	1926-11-23	2019-03-23	Tel Aviv, Israel	type with reverse start end role fn reported_to Jonathan Pollard true 1984-11 1985-11 Controller of the Pollard operation 2 type with reverse start role fn investigated Department of Justice true 1987-01 Named in the government's sentencing filings; granted immunity 4

Rafael Eitan, also known as "Rafi the stinker," was an ambitious Israeli clandestine operative and a crony of Ariel Sharon. He was appointed the new head of LAKAM (Science Liaison Bureau) and also served as Menachem Begin's special assistant for counterterrorism. Eitan had participated in the 1960 kidnapping of Adolf Eichmann in Buenos Aires and was a veteran of many operations inside the Arab world. He had been forced to resign from Mossad years earlier and was bitter about his stunted career and the failure of Mossad and Israel's other intelligence agencies to cooperate with his counterterrorism office.¹

Eitan decided to change the rules after unproductive meetings with U.S. officials, agreeing with Ariel Sharon that the United States was holding back on intelligence essential to Israeli security, such as KH-11 photography. He recruited Jonathan Pollard in October 1981, a move viewed by military intelligence as "the worst fucking thing Rafi could have done."¹

The 1987 damage assessment records that Pollard himself dated his volunteering to late June 1984 and that he met Eitan in Paris in November 1984. Eitan is described there as the adviser on counterterrorism to the prime minister and the senior Israeli in charge of the case. The assessment records that at this meeting Eitan emphasized that Pollard should resign from naval intelligence rather than undergo a polygraph examination.² This account stands beside Hersh's October 1981 date for the recruitment.

According to the defense's second sentencing memorandum, Eitan asked Pollard for documents on American knowledge of Israeli arms dealings with other countries, particularly China, and on United States knowledge of Israeli intelligence efforts in the United States. Each time Pollard did not provide such documents or information, the memorandum states, Eitan responded with threats of recrimination.³

The Washington Post reported in January 1987 that, according to Pollard's account, Eitan assured him that he would be "taken care of" if arrested, and that any U.S. investigation of Eitan could be "contained." Eitan was one of three Israelis granted immunity from prosecution in the case.⁴

Eitan's LAKAM operations in the United States produced a steady stream of routinely transferred scientific and technical documents. Illicitly obtained intelligence flew so voluminously from LAKAM into Israeli intelligence that a special code name, JUMBO, was added to the security markings on the documents. There were strict orders that anything marked JUMBO was not supposed to be discussed with American counterparts.¹

Reuven Yerdor, then in charge of Unit 8200, had little respect for Eitan and worried about the long-range implications of Israeli intelligence activities in the United States. Yerdor was convinced Eitan was driven by personal ambition and a need to settle old scores with Yitzhak Hofi, the head of Mossad, and Avraham Shalom, Shin Beth's director. Yerdor also believed that Eitan had recruited two or more Americans, and was dismayed by the fact that Jonathan Pollard's material, marked JUMBO, was not supposed to be discussed with American counterparts.¹

After the Sabra and Shatila massacres, Eitan remained in Menachem Begin's cabinet as a minister without portfolio. The Israeli officials most tarnished by the Pollard scandal were Eitan and Aviem Sella. However, Eitan did not suffer financially and was subsequently named to a high administrative position with the Israel Chemicals Company, authorized by Ariel Sharon.¹

On December 21, 1985 Israeli officials told the New York Times that Eitan had been removed from his post as head of an intelligence-gathering unit of the Ministry of Defense and was expected to retire quietly in the near future. The report said that the Liaison Bureau for Scientific Affairs was being dismantled.⁵ The Knesset intelligence subcommittee chaired by Abba Eban, which reported on May 26, 1987, accused Eitan of "a gross excess of authority." The Post also reported that Eitan had become chairman of the country's largest state-owned company.⁶ The Christian Science Monitor reported that Eitan had been forced to resign as head of the Scientific Liaison Unit and that the unit was disbanded.⁷

PROMIS and LAKAM Intelligence Operations

The writer Gordon Thomas wrote that Eitan played a central role in the Israeli acquisition and international distribution of the PROMIS software. According to Gordon Thomas's account in Gideon's Spies, Eitan traveled to the United States posing as an Israeli Ministry of Justice assistant prosecutor and met with INSLAW founder Bill Hamilton, acquiring a copy of PROMIS through back-channel contacts with the Department of Justice.⁸ Eitan then assembled a team of former LAKAM programmers who deconstructed the software, rearranged its components, and embedded a "trapdoor" - a built-in chip enabling covert remote monitoring of any database queried by a user of the modified program.⁸

Eitan stated regarding PROMIS: "We can use that program to stamp out terrorism by keeping track of everyone. But not only that, we can find out what our enemies know too."⁹ He reportedly admitted collaborating with CIA officials in selling "more than half a billion dollars worth of INSLAW's PROMIS to foreign intelligence and law enforcement agencies" as part of joint covert operations to steal intelligence from foreign governments.⁹

Distribution of the backdoored software was handled in part through British media mogul Robert Maxwell, who used his Israeli computer company Degem and a network of international holdings as vehicles for sales to intelligence and law enforcement agencies worldwide.⁸ Eitan's involvement in what became known as the PROMIS Software Scandal was never formally adjudicated; U.S. government investigations, including the Nicholas J. Bua (1993), found no credible evidence that enhanced PROMIS was distributed internationally.¹⁰

Ben-Menashe's Claims

Ari Ben-Menashe wrote that Eitan was an initial member of the Iran-Israel Joint Committee in 1980 and that, after Yitzhak Shamir became prime minister, Eitan ran it.¹¹ The October Surprise Task Force reported that Ben-Menashe said Eitan confirmed to him reports of 1980 meetings in Spain between William J. Casey and Mehdi Karrubi, in the presence of Yehoshua Sagi; that Eitan told the Government of Israel that he did not know Ben-Menashe and had never met him; and that Saguy told the Government of Israel that he had never met Ben-Menashe. The task force wrote that credible testimonial and documentary evidence show Ben-Menashe "to be totally lacking in credibility regarding his allegations about meetings in Spain in 1980."¹² Israeli authorities also reported to the task force that Eitan, with Kimche, Saguy and others, had never met, known or heard of Ben-Menashe until 1991.¹³

Dr. Ben Orr

The documentary trace of an Israeli visitor to the Department of Justice is two memoranda of Jack Rugh, the department's deputy project manager on the INSLAW contract. On May 6, 1983, Rugh wrote that "Brick Brewer recently instructed me to make a copy of an LEAA version of PROMIS available to Dr. Ben Orr, a representative of the Government of Israel. Dr. Orr called me to discuss that request... I have made a copy of the LEM DEC version of PROMIS and will provide it, along with the corresponding documentation, to Dr. Orr before he leaves the United States for Israel on May 16," and on May 12 he recorded delivery of the materials to C. Madison Brewer for transmittal. The version so recorded was the public-domain LEAA one. Eitan, in the account he gave Thomas and Dillon, was Dr. Orr, travelling on a forged passport in the identity of a real retired prosecutor, "Dr Benjamin Orr, an assistant public prosecutor in the Ministry of Justice in Tel Aviv," who first flew to the United States on December 19, 1982, met Brewer, and returned in February 1983 to be shown the enhanced PROMIS at INSLAW's own offices by Bill Hamilton and Nancy Hamilton, after which Brewer handed him a tape from an office cupboard; Hamilton is quoted recalling eyes "like a computer, tracking everything."¹⁴

Later Career

Eitan founded the Pensioners' Party, Gil, which won seven Knesset seats in March 2006 and joined Ehud Olmert's coalition, in which he served as minister for pensioner affairs; in October 2008 he told a German magazine that Iran's president should be kidnapped and tried at The Hague. Of the Eichmann capture he told Gordon Thomas that "almost every published fact about the capture of Eichmann is pure bullshit. I know because I personally am the man who captured him."¹⁵

Footnotes

---

1. Hersh, Seymour M. The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. Random House, 1991. Chapter 21. ↩︎

2. Foreign Denial and Deception Analysis Committee, The Jonathan Jay Pollard Espionage Case: A Damage Assessment, October 30, 1987, section on the Paris sessions (November 1984). https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/sites/default/files/documents/7332518/National-Security-Archive-Doc-13b-Foreign-Denial.pdf ↩︎

3. Defendant Jonathan J. Pollard's Second Memorandum in Aid of Sentencing, Crim. No. 86-0207 (D.D.C.), filed March 1987. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB407/docs/EBB-PollardDoc7.pdf ↩︎

4. Howard Kurtz, "Spy Papers Kept by Israel, Court Told," Washington Post, January 7, 1987. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp90-00965r000403620007-3 ↩︎

5. Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, December 22, 1985 (Jerusalem dateline December 21). https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp90-00965r000302120025-0 ↩︎

6. Glenn Frankel, "Israeli Spy Probes Fault Leadership," Washington Post, May 27, 1987. https://archive.org/details/cia-readingroom-document-cia-rdp90-00965r000302080002-0 ↩︎

7. "Israel hopes that book is now closed on Pollard spy case," Christian Science Monitor, May 28, 1987. https://www.csmonitor.com/1987/0528/omary.html ↩︎

8. Thomas, Gordon. Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad. St. Martin's Press, 1999. ↩︎

9. U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary. The INSLAW Affair: Investigative Report. House Report 102-857, 102nd Congress, 2nd Session, September 10, 1992. ↩︎

10. U.S. Department of Justice. Report of Special Counsel Nicholas J. Bua to the Attorney General of the United States Regarding the Allegations of Inslaw, Inc. March 1993. ↩︎

11. Ari Ben-Menashe, Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network (Sheridan Square Press, 1992; TrineDay reprint, 2015). https://archive.org/details/profitsofwarinsi0000benm ↩︎

12. U.S. House of Representatives, Joint Report of the October Surprise Task Force, January 3, 1993, p. 97. https://archive.org/details/JointReportOfTheOctoberSurpriseTaskForce ↩︎

13. Joint Report of the October Surprise Task Force, January 3, 1993, p. 98. ↩︎

14. House Report 102-857, September 10, 1992, reproducing Rugh's memoranda of May 6 and 12, 1983, which do not identify Dr. Orr; Thomas, Gordon, and Martin Dillon, Robert Maxwell, Israel's Superspy, Carroll and Graf, 2002. https://archive.org/details/robert-maxwell-israels-superspy-2002 The February 1983 visit in the book and the May 1983 transfer in the memoranda are not the same transaction, and no record reconciles them. ↩︎

15. Thomas, Gordon. Gideon's Spies, 2009 edition. https://archive.org/details/gideons-spies ↩︎