"No Whitewash"

Leaks and rumors swirled anew last week as Israel continued to debate allegations that security agents lied, tampered with evidence and suborned witnesses to hide their involvement in the deaths of two captured Palestinian terrorists. Newly appointed Attorney General Yosef Harish began considering proposals for an inquiry into a possible cover-up by the Shin Bet (the Hebrew acronym for Israel's General Security Service), which handles antiterrorism intelligence operations. "There will be no whitewash of the affair," Harish told reporters. Still, few doubted that the Attorney General would come under heavy pressure from the Cabinet of Labor Prime Minister Shimon Peres to limit the scope of any probe.

Harish was named to his post only three weeks ago, when his predecessor, Yitzhak Zamir, was abruptly removed from office after demanding a police investigation into the Shin Bet affair. The two Palestinians were captured by Israeli forces after hijacking a bus in 1984. They were photographed being led away from the bus but were later severely beaten and died under circumstances that have yet to be explained.

Both Peres and Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir, his Likud-bloc partner in the ruling coalition, continue to oppose any investigation that might reveal the ( inner workings of the Shin Bet. "The Shin Bet," said Shamir last week, "can be examined," but "without revealing its secrets." Harish is shortly expected to appoint an investigator or a small commission of inquiry. One crucial question will be how much of the findings will be made public.

Zamir, meanwhile, was accused of trying to push the probe along by leaking details of the case to reporters. Israeli newspapers quoted a "senior judicial source" as saying that the two Palestinians were killed in a "lynching" by five Shin Bet agents on the orders of Director Avraham Shalom. Two Likud members of parliament and a dozen lawyers have filed police complaints against Zamir identifying him as the source. The former Attorney General denied any impropriety. The press reported that the three former Shin Bet officials who sparked the affair by going to Zamir with the cover-up story have received death threats and fear for their lives.

While the government continues to be under pressure to make a clean breast of the Shin Bet scandal, the public is ambivalent. A poll published last week by the Tel Aviv newspaper Hadashot showed that 47.6% of those questioned opposed an inquiry of any kind, while 28.8% were in favor and 19.4% supported a secret investigation.