The Arms Pipeline That Came First

By DAVID ELLIS

A book due out next month makes provocative disclosures about the tangled relationship between U.S. and Israeli intelligence services. According to Major General Avraham Tamir, a retired senior Israeli defense official quoted in Dangerous Liaison, the REAGAN ADMINISTRATION approved Israeli arms shipments to Tehran for use against Iraq in 1981, long before the Iran-contra affair. Authors Andrew and Leslie Cockburn say the transfers were part of a strategy to head off Soviet influence in the gulf region. The book also describes in detail Operation KK Mountain, in which the CIA secretly paid Israel as much as $20 million annually throughout the 1960s to operate as its surrogate in the Third World. Security sources also told the writers that the Israelis have placed remote-controlled nuclear devices in the Golan Heights to deter an invasion by Syria.

With reporting by Linda Williams