Israel and the Iran-Contra Affair

In August 1985, ninety-six American-made TOW anti-tank missiles left Israel for Iran. Three weeks later another four hundred and eight followed, and an American hostage in Beirut, the Reverend Benjamin Weir, was released the next day. In November came eighteen HAWK anti-aircraft missiles, flown into Iran aboard an aircraft belonging to a CIA front company after a European government refused the Israeli charter permission to cross its airspace. The Iranians rejected the HAWKs. They were the wrong specification, and someone had failed to remove the Star of David from the casings.

Those three shipments became the Iran-Contra affair, the worst scandal of the Reagan presidency. The weapons were American. The approval was American. The prosecutions, all fourteen of them, were American. The channel that carried them ran through Israel, and not one Israeli ever answered a question under oath about it.

How the channel opened

Who started it has never been settled, and the official record is genuinely divided rather than merely cautious.

The Tower Commission, reporting in February 1987, refused to decide. It wrote that it “remains unclear whether the initial proposal to open the Ghorbanifar channel was an Israeli initiative, was brought on by the avarice of arms dealers, or came as a result of an American request for assistance.” Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh, writing six years later, was blunter, describing David Kimche, the director general of Israel’s foreign ministry, as the man “who had proposed the Iran arms initiative to Administration officials in the summer of 1985.” The congressional committees traced the specific proposal to sell a hundred TOWs to the Iranian middleman Manucher Ghorbanifar, at a meeting in Israel in June 1985.

What all three agree on is what happened next. In the Tower Commission’s words: “There is no doubt, however, that it was Israel that pressed Mr. Ghorbanifar on the United States.” And when the Americans wavered, Israel did not:

“Thereafter, at critical points in the initiative, when doubts were expressed by critical U.S. participants, an Israeli emissary would arrive with encouragement, often a specific proposal, and pressure to stay with the Ghorbanifar channel.”

The Israelis involved were not marginal figures. Kimche met Robert McFarlane at the White House three times in 1985. Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin breakfasted with CIA Director William Casey in November 1985 and phoned Oliver North directly two days later. Prime Minister Shimon Peres approved the second shipment personally. Adolf Schwimmer, the founder of Israel Aircraft Industries and an adviser to Peres, handled the chartering and the cargo manifests alongside the arms dealer Yaacov Nimrodi. From January 1986, Peres’s counter-terrorism adviser Amiram Nir took over as Israel’s operational channel, travelled with the American delegation to Tehran, and briefed Vice President George Bush in a Jerusalem hotel room that July.

Why Israel wanted it

The Tower Commission was unusually direct about motive, and about the fact that Israeli and American interests were not the same thing:

“It is clear, however, that Israel had its own interests, some in direct conflict with those of the United States, in having the United States pursue the initiative. For this reason, it had an incentive to keep the initiative alive.”

Elsewhere the Commission set out what those interests were: a long-standing relationship with Iran, a market for Israel’s arms industry, a stronger Iran to bleed Israel’s enemy Iraq, and something broader. Some in Israel, the Commission wrote, wanted the United States drawn in “so as to distance the United States from the Arab world and ultimately to establish Israel as the only real strategic partner of the United States in the region.”

Israel would supply the weapons on one condition. It wanted Washington’s approval and Washington’s promise to replace what it sent.

The law

The Arms Export Control Act does not let a foreign country resell American weapons at will. The President must consent, the recipient must give a written undertaking against onward transfer, and Congress must be notified in advance for shipments above fourteen million dollars.

None of that happened. The Tower Commission found the consent “did not meet the conditions of the Arms Export Control Act,” that “the requirement for Congressional notification was ignored,” and that it was therefore “difficult to conclude that his actions constituted adequate legal authority.” The congressional committees put it as a formal finding: the government’s approval of the 1985 Israeli sales “was inconsistent with the Government’s obligations under the Arms Export Control Act.” Caspar Weinberger had told McFarlane at the time that proceeding without notice to Congress “would be illegal,” and McFarlane had instructed North to keep the Israeli replenishment orders under fourteen million dollars apiece, which is what staying below a reporting threshold looks like.

One point has to be stated precisely, because it is routinely garbled. No official investigation found that Israel broke American law. The Arms Export Control Act binds the American President’s power to consent; it is not a statute a foreign sovereign can be charged under. Every legal finding here is a finding about the conduct of the United States government.

The Tower Commission was equally careful in the other direction, and its caveat deserves quoting alongside its criticism:

“Even if the Government of Israel actively worked to begin the initiative and to keep it going, the U.S. Government is responsible for its own decisions… Although Israel dealt with those portions of the U.S. Government that it deemed were sympathetic to the initiative, there is nothing improper per se about this fact.”

The eight hundred thousand dollars

There is a detail in the ledger that connects the Israeli channel to the second half of the scandal.

On November 20, 1985, the government of Israel paid one million dollars to the private network run by Richard Secord, known as the Enterprise, to cover the cost of flying weapons from Israel to Iran. The transport cost under two hundred thousand. The Enterprise kept the rest. That surplus, roughly eight hundred thousand dollars, is the documented origin of the off-books fund that would later be used to arm the Nicaraguan Contras in defiance of a congressional ban.

The November HAWK shipment mattered for a second reason. Because a CIA proprietary aircraft flew it, the operation required a presidential Finding, and none existed. One was drafted afterward, on December 5, 1985, to authorize retroactively what had already occurred and to direct that Congress not be told. National Security Adviser John Poindexter destroyed that document a year later, hours after telling the intelligence committees he would check the facts and get back to them. He testified that its disclosure would have embarrassed the President.

The witnesses who never appeared

This is the part of the record that belongs in this archive, and it is not seriously disputed.

The Tower Commission asked Israel to make people available. It reported the answer in a single flat paragraph: “They declined to do so. They agreed to answer written interrogatories. We dispatched those to the Government of Israel but no response has, as yet, been received.” The Commission published without a word from any Israeli participant, and said so: “Without the benefit of the views of the Israeli officials involved, it is hard to know the facts.”

The congressional committees got more, and described what they got as “unprecedented cooperation from the State of Israel.” The substance behind that phrase is worth reading closely. Israel refused to waive state secrecy or sovereign immunity, and refused to let its officials or citizens be questioned. Instead it offered to gather its own documents, interview its own nationals, and hand over two written chronologies, one historical and one financial. The committees interviewed no Israeli. Their entire evidentiary window into the Israeli side of the affair was a document Israel wrote about itself.

Walsh, running a criminal investigation, would not accept that. He was “effectively blocked from interviewing Israeli nationals by the government of Israel,” so in May 1987 he subpoenaed David Kimche during a visit to the United States. Then, in Walsh’s account, the United States State Department asked him to drop it. After lengthy negotiations he withdrew the subpoena and settled for the chronologies, which he judged “not a true substitute for live witness testimony.”

Amiram Nir, the Israeli closest to the 1986 operations, was never deposed by anyone. He died in a light aircraft crash in Mexico in November 1988.

What followed

Fourteen people were charged. Abrams, Channell, Clines, Fiers, George, Hakim, McFarlane, Miller, North, Poindexter, Secord, Clarridge, Weinberger, Fernandez. Every one of them an American. Weinberger’s indictment turned on his notes about the November 1985 HAWK shipment; Clarridge’s on seven counts of perjury about the same flight. President Bush pardoned both on Christmas Eve 1992.

No Israeli was charged with anything. No finding was entered against Israel or any Israeli by any of the three investigations. The United States replenished the five hundred and four TOWs in May 1986, and Israel paid $1.685 million for them. The arms relationship continued without interruption. The only legislative consequence was a generic amendment barring arms exports to state sponsors of terrorism, passed in August 1986, after the shipments were over.

The through-line is not that Israel committed a crime, because no American investigation ever found that it did, and two of the three took care to say the responsibility was Washington’s own. It is narrower and harder to argue with. A foreign government pressed a channel that entangled the United States in an operation its own investigators called inconsistent with American law, profited from the transport fee that seeded the Contra fund, then declined to produce a single witness to any American inquiry, and watched an American prosecutor’s subpoena withdrawn at the request of the American State Department.

Sources

• Report of the President’s Special Review Board (the Tower Commission Report), February 26, 1987 — Part III (the Israeli role and the refusal of witnesses, p. 17); Part IV pp. 75–77 (Arms Export Control Act analysis); Part IV pp. 83–84 (“The Role of the Israelis”)
• Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, S. Rept. 100-216 / H. Rept. 100-433, November 17, 1987 — Findings (the AECA finding); Chapter 9 (shipment dates and quantities, correcting the Tower Report); Appendix, “Cooperation from Other Governments,” pp. 689–690
• Lawrence E. Walsh, Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters, August 4, 1993 — Executive Summary; Part I; Part II and n.14 (the Kimche subpoena and its withdrawal); Part III; “Summary of Prosecutions”
• National Security Archive, George Washington University, Iran-Contra declassified document collection
• Samuel Segev, The Iranian Triangle: The Untold Story of Israel’s Role in the Iran-Contra Affair (Free Press, 1988)