Two decades ago, the U.S. and Israeli governments reached around the world to silence an ex-Israeli intelligence officer who was exposing sensitive secrets. The goal was to discredit, if not capture, Ari Ben-Menashe much the way Israel went after nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu, reports Marshall Wilson.
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Despite the evidence that Israeli officials had first lied and then retreated to a new cover story, the Bush administration and the Israeli government still managed to galvanize friendly journalists who went out of their way to discredit Ben-Menashe as a compulsive liar. [For details about one of the key denouncers of Ben-Menashe, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Unmasking October Surprise ‘Debunker’”.]
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In the United States, Ben-Menashe’s credibility continued to come under withering attack, but he refused to budge from his sworn testimony about the October Surprise machinations, which he had given to a congressional task force assigned to look into the allegations.
The intense U.S. media attacks on the supposed “low-level translator” and the stern denials from the then-sitting president, George H.W. Bush, carried the day in Official Washington. It didn’t seem to matter even when some Israeli officials confirmed that Ben-Menashe, indeed, had been involved in important clandestine operations for Israel.
For instance, American journalist Craig Unger was told by a senior intelligence official, Moshe Hebroni, that “Ben-Menashe served directly under me. He had access to very, very sensitive material.” [Village Voice, July 7, 1992] In the Israeli daily, Davar, reporter Pazit Ravina wrote, “in talks with people who worked with Ben-Menashe, the claim that he had access to highly sensitive intelligence information was confirmed again and again.”
Substantial corroborating evidence also emerged that Reagan operatives in 1980 had contacted Iranian leaders behind President Carter’s back. But Republicans were determined to exclude from the investigation any investigator who thought Ben-Menashe might be telling the truth.
At the insistence of Bush’s Republican allies on Capitol Hill, the House October Surprise task force blocked participation by House Foreign Affairs Committee chief counsel Spencer Oliver, although he may have been the most knowledgeable congressional investigator on this topic.
Then, after President Bush lost his own re-election fight in November 1992, there was a sense that pressing for the full truth about Bush’s role in the October Surprise case or in the Iran-Contra scandal amounted to piling on. Some Democrats feared that further investigation would only fuel Republican anger that would be taken out on Democratic President Bill Clinton once he assumed office in January 1993.
So the October Surprise task force under the leadership of Rep. Lee Hamilton, a centrist Indiana Democrat known for his avoidance of confrontation with Republicans pushed aside late-arriving evidence that pointed increasingly to the guilt of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
That evidence included sworn testimony that supported Ben-Menashe’s claims of a secret meeting in Paris and a lengthy letter from former Iranian President Abolhassan Bani-Sadr who described the internal disagreements in Tehran about the Republican overtures. [For details, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]
Indeed, so much incriminating evidence arrived in December 1992 that the task force’s chief counsel, Lawrence Barcella, later said he urged Hamilton to extend the investigation three more months, but was told instead to wrap up the inquiry with a finding of Republican innocence.
With his hands tied, Barcella said he even set aside a secret report from the Russian Duma, which was delivered to U.S. officials on Jan. 11, 1993, just nine days before Bush left office. The Russian report indicated that Soviet-era intelligence files confirmed the alleged Paris meeting with Bush in attendance. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Key October Surprise Evidence Hidden.”]
The Russian report, like much of the other evidence, was simply stuck into boxes that were then shipped out for storage. Parry later gained access to some of this material and published the contents at the Consortiumnews.com Web site. [For the most recent developments, see the “New ‘October Surprise’ Series.”]
However, the dismissive report by the October Surprise task force, issued on Jan. 13, 1993, cemented Official Washington’s opinion about Ben-Menashe, that he was just “a low-level translator” who had lied about his role in events that had never taken place.
New evidence that has surfaced in the nearly two decades since like the Russian report confirming the allegations of a Republican-Iranian deal in 1980 has failed to shake that conventional wisdom in Washington or Canberra.
Ben-Menashe, the “almost Vanunu,” later settled in Montreal where he married a Canadian woman and was granted Canadian citizenship. To this day he insists that his accounts about covert U.S.-Israeli operations with Iran — and Australian involvement — are true.
https://consortiumnews.com/2012/02/01/t ... st-vanunu/
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