Documentos de Académico
Documentos de Profesional
Documentos de Cultura
By JENS NAUNTOFTE
The midday sun is baking the city landscape og makes these old citywalls
from Richard Lionheart's time look like a black and white backdrop in a
play out of the Middle Ages. But Yaacov Nimrodi can chase away unwanted
associations swiftly.
He immodestly throws out his hand - "Do you like my view?" - which was
this 180 degree panorama painting on his wall.
But the truth is, we are standing on the terrace of his luxury apartment
with the old Jerusalem at our feet.
The Omar mosque's gold plated cone stands before us like a raised fist;
framed by the Gethsemane garden and the onionshaped church dome in the
distance.
What we can't see from Nimrodi's penthouse on the upper echelons of Hotel
King David, is that there is a general strike all over the arabic sector
of the city and West Bank. Businesses are closed, curtains are pulled out
- the busy merchant stands in the old city are empty; even the exchange
booths at the Damascus gate are closed.
But that hardly makes Yaacov Nimrodi lose sleep at night. Since his
arrival in Jerusalem as a child, 62 years ago, jews and palestinians have
been fighting over the inherent right to the land in Palestine. Nimrodi
is on the winning side, something that permeates his entire compact round
being, as he eagerly points out over the arabian district and confides:
"In 1967, when we conquered east Jerusalem, we should have forcibly
removed the entire arabic population from the city.It could have been
done within a day and Israel would have been rid of the most bitter part
of this conflict. The challenges here in Jerusalem are harder than all
the other territorial disputes in the West Bank and Gaza.
But the crown jewel of Nimrodi's work came in the golden 70's, when he as
a private businessman in Tehran sold the Shah's men everything from
weapons to desalination equipment. With the Petrodollars building up in
Iran's treasury, this israeli had gotten himself a straw into the
moneybag and it made him a multi millionaire.
In December 1978, a month before the Shah's fall, the Nimrodi family
packed their bags and along with 34 other jewish associates, left a
Tehran that neither the Shah's army, the CIA or the Mossad could preserve
- in the "peacock-emperor's" hands.
Khomeini stood ready to take power and Tehran had become a wimping kennel
of revolutionary hatred against the Shah, the U.S. and Israel.
Irangate
Oliver North
These days Nimrodi is bitter over the brutal way that the Prime Minister
at the time, Shimon Perez, pushed him and his american colleague,
Schwimmer, aside during the new year of 1986 - and instead let terrorism
adviser Amiram Nir take over control of the continued arms trade with
Iran.
Out of the six shipments containing american made arms which "Irangate"
describes as spanning from the summer of 1985 until the year after in
1986 - Nimrodi, Schwimmer and David Kimche were involved during the 3
first ones. In January of 1986 the second fase had begun and new players
were entering the field. Amiram Nir releaves the director of foreign
affairs, David Kimche, at the same time that Nimrodi and Schwimmer are
releaved of their duties. In similar fashion, back in Washington, Robert
McFarlane who was Reagan's safety advisor, gets releaved and it is John
Poindexter and his assistant, Oliver North, who takes the charge of
directly controlling fase 2 of the Iran affairs, which is characterized
in weapons now being sent by the CIA as opposed to Israel.
This second fase also consisted of 3 separate arms shipments.Yaacov
Nimrodi found that the first fase was structured just right. The fact
that it was himself and Schwimmer who oversaw the shipments gave the
Peres cabinet a case for plausible deniability, as it were, something
which Oliver North and Poindexter made famous during the congressional
hearings last summer. What Nimrodi is saying is that Peres, in case of
being exposed, could essentially write off any knowledge of any private
affairs that people such as Nimrodi and Schwimmer may have had. It is a
coldly calculated trick. It is not a coincidence that Israel has
approximately a thousand active weapons dealers, the majority of which
are former military officers who have licenses to trade arms as private
actors on the international market. According to Nimrodi everything
started going south from the moment PM Peres let his advisor, Amiram Nir,
take the stage on the secret project. At that point the arms trade became
a directly controlled government affair with Peres right at the top.
Nimrodi's argument seems valid. But why would Peres give control of the
operation to Amiram Nir? The answer is a simple one. The arms shipments
to I ran were on the verge of ceasing. Reagan's safety advisor, Robert
McFarlane, had gotten cold feet. The iranians didn't release all the
american hostages located in Beirut - as McFarlane had initially
demanded. He felt deceived by the iranians and recommended all arms
trades with Iran be stopped.
The Contras
[Picture caption: NIMRODI - "These days I trade only in property and real
estate"]
The next day in his massive villa in Savyon, a suburb of Tel Aviv, he
pulls me from one glass case display to the next, where medals and gifts
from the Shah and iranian generals is on display along with miniature
models of the weapons he sold them throughout his lifetime. In a small
video library he has copies of the tv programs he has taken part in. "Do
you want to se some of them?", he asks but proceeds to pull me along
further before I can answer, to a shelf where photo albums stand lined
up. One of the albums is particularly interesting. It displays his own
snapshots from the 50's and 60's, when he was a Mossad agent and military
attach, traveling to kurdish locations in north-western Iran. There, he
trained with israeli instructors on handling of guns such as the ones
they supplied to the kurdish "peshmergas" in their battle against the
irani government.
The widespread coverage of his role in "Irangate" has left his reputation
in the dirt and he is desperate to wash it off. He wants to be a
respectable israeli business matador, dressed in the zionist motherland's
colors of white and blue.
While he is in the middle of sharing is visions for the future, I ask him
fankly how he fared during his training of the Shah's intelligence agency
SAVAK, known for its hands bloody during the years before 1979. The
israeli lashes out with his hand as he seemingly wades off a couple of
flies:
"I didn't train SAVAK. That was not my task. I built the irani military
intelligence from scratch. In that endeavor I had utilized young israeli
instructors who spoke fluent farsi and their iranian students never
realized they were israeli. The iranian chief of intelligence, General
Leutenant Ali Khia, encouraged my government in 1960 to extend my stay
and this is part of why I was made a military attach to Tehran. We sold
alot to Iran. I got the Uzi introduced to the iranian army and over the
years those numbers became enormous. Nimrodi pulls me over to the glass
displays again, where we study models of canons, patrolboats, tanks and
Soltram mortars of 81, 120 and 160mm kalibers. "I saw through contracts
worth many hundreds of millions of dollars. Iran was one of our very best
customers. On a yearly basis, Israel sold for over 500 million dollars
worth of goods to Iran alone, of which about a 20% where weapons. But by
then I had been called back home. I wanted to be general in chief of the
army in occupied West Bank. When that proved impossible I left the
service."
After that the veteran left for Tehran again. His formidable network of
contacts spanned from the Shah at the top to the military intelligence
and his previous work history served him well. He now organized at his
own expense what he had previously done for the israeli government.
"I represented all israeli weapons factories in Iran. They knew my
connections were solid."
What followed were bountyful years where Nimrodi was able to line his
pockets.
But in the previous year of 1985, the pretext to Irangate starts to form,
long before president Reagan's advisors had come into play. The Iranian
businessman and former SAVAK agent, Manucher Ghorbanifar, was frustrated
over the fact that he could not get a proper conversation started in
regards to doing arms trades with the U.S.- via his secret weapon
channels in Western Europe. Ghorbanifar contacted Adnan Khashoggi and
requested advice. Khashoggi had ambitious plans of his own where he
sought to bring about a peaceful relationship between Saudi Arabia and
Iran.
To this end, Israel could be useful and Khashoggi personally was on good
footing with people such as Shimon Peres, Ariel Sharon and David Kimche.
Khashoggi's cunning plan was to combine Iran's needs for armaments with
Israel's particular connection with Reagan's government. The result would
turn out to be a duet between Tehran and Washington. Ghorbanifar claimed
that surrounding Prime Minister Musavi and head of parliament, Hashemi
Rafsanjani were people who were interested in re-opening connections to
the West. They feared that the Soviet Union, in case of Khomeini's death,
would gain a foothold in Iran.