"MEGA" Indyk
SBobrow940
Israeli Spies: 'Mega Was Not
An Agent; Mega Was the Boss'
by Jeffrey Steinberg
For a brief period of time in early 1997, the Central Intelligence Agency, the
Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the National Security Agency engaged in a
frantic mole hunt for an Israeli spy, believed to be operating inside the
highest levels of the Clinton Administration national security establishment.
By the time the mole hunt was made public--in a May 7, 1997 Washington Post
leak--the hunt had been abruptly ended, and for all intents and purposes, the
story disappeared from the news within a matter of days.
According to the Post account, in January 1997, the National Security Agency
(NSA) had intercepted a phone conversation between an Israeli official at the
embassy in Washington, and Danny Yatom, the head of the Mossad, Israel's
foreign intelligence service. The official sought permission from the spy boss
to "go to Mega" in order to obtain a copy of a confidential letter that had
been sent by then-U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher to Palestinian
Authority President Yasser Arafat, concerning U.S. assurances about a recently
negotiated agreement for an Israeli military withdrawal from the Hebron area in
the West Bank. Yatom, according to the NSA intercept, rejected the request,
admonishing his agent, "This is not something we use Mega for."
The idea that the Israeli government was running another spy operation inside
the U.S. national security establishment created a tremendous stir. The
Washington Post, in its May 7, 1997 leak, had reported, "One official with
knowledge of the FBI investigation into the identity of Mega cautioned that
much remained unknown. But the official said that if it turned out that a
senior U.S. official was passing sensitive information to Israeli authorities,
it could prove more serious than the espionage case involving Jonathan Jay
Pollard, a former Navy analyst who was convicted in 1986 of selling U.S.
military intelligence documents to Israel."
To this day, the Pollard affair is a hot-button issue inside the U.S.
intelligence community. At the time of Pollard's arrest in November 1985, it
was known that the Navy analyst had been "tasked" to obtain specific U.S.
military intelligence secrets, by someone much higher up in the U.S.
intelligence community. To this day, the hunt for "Mr. X," Pollard's inside
controller, continues. In 1986, EIR had revealed the existence of not merely a
"Mr. X," but an "X Committee," made up of nearly a dozen top-level Pentagon and
National Security Council officials, all suspected of having been part of the
Pollard spy network.
Given the seriousness of the Mega security breach, the abrupt shutdown of the
mole hunt naturally prompted some wild speculation about the circumstances
under which the search for Mega was abandoned. In March 1999, British author
Gordon Thomas released a book, Gideon's Spies, which alleged that Israel had
blackmailed the Clinton Administration, with the threat to release tapped
telephone conversations between the President and Monica Lewinsky, to force
Washington to abandon the Mega hunt. Indeed, in her testimony before
independent counsel Kenneth Starr, Lewinsky had reported that the President had
warned her, on March 29, 1997, at the height of the Mega hunt, that he
suspected the White House telephones were being tapped by agents of an unnamed
foreign country.
Years later, it was revealed that the White House communications system had
been overhauled and modernized during the early Clinton era, and one of the
main outside contractors involved in the project was an Israeli firm, Amdocs.
According to a May 2000 story in Insight magazine, Amdocs employees would have
had nearly unfettered access to White House telephone lines and other
super-sensitive communications equipment. However, the nature of the request
from the Mossad man in Washington to Yatom—to obtain a confidential State
Department document—rules out the possibility that Mega was an electronic
eavesdropping source.
Mega-Suspects
Even though the Mega hunt was formally called off, still in some U.S.
intelligence quarters, the effort to unearth the suspected Israeli spy cell
apparently continued. In September 2000, a CIA team of counterintelligence
specialists arrived in Israel, after U.S. Ambassador Martin Indyk had his
security clearances temporarily lifted. Ostensibly, Indyk had breached security
guidelines by bringing classified U.S. government documents to his residence in
Tel Aviv. But it later was revealed that the CIA probe was triggered by an
August 2000 unauthorized meeting between Indyk and the former head of the
Mossad, Ephraim Halevy, which the ambassador had never reported back to
Washington.
If there were anyone in the Clinton Administration's political hierarchy who
was a prime candidate to be the Israeli spy Mega, it was Indyk. A British-born
Australian citizen, Indyk had been Australia's top Mideast security official in
the late 1970s, as deputy director of current Mideast intelligence at the
Australian Office of National Assessments, the equivalent of the U.S. National
Security Council. But, Indyk abruptly quit the post after just ten months,
prompting speculation that he had come under suspicion of spying for Israel (he
had lived in Israel while completing his dissertation on "The Power of the
Weak: The Ability of Israel and Egypt to Resist the Policies of their
Super-Power Patrons"). According to British journalist Kevin Dowling, Indyk
next surfaced in Israel, as a "media consultant" to Israel's Likud Prime
Ministers, Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir.
In 1982, Indyk came to America, ostensibly on a six-month sabbatical from his
duties with the Office of the Israeli Prime Minister. Based out of Cornell
University, Indyk formed a research department for the America-Israeli Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the "official" Israeli lobby in the United States.
Within a year, AIPAC had ponied up $100,000 to Indyk to hive off the research
unit as the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). Pro-Israel
luminaries in Washington, including former Vice President Walter Mondale,
former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Alexander Haig, and former United
Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, were among the initiating members of
WINEP's advisory board, according to Dowling's Sept. 27, 2000 account of the
Indyk counterintelligence probe.
Indyk's "six-month sabbatical" never ended, but it was not until 1987 that the
Australian got his first green card, permitting him to work in the United
States. Indyk was made a U.S. citizen on Jan. 12, 1993—just eight days before
he was appointed to the incoming Clinton Administration's National Security
Council (NSC) staff as Senior Director for Near East and South Asian Affairs.
Indyk had already been an informal Mideast policy adviser to President George
H.W. Bush, at the initiative of Dennis Ross, Bush's Assistant Secretary of
State, previously a deputy to Indyk at WINEP. At the time of the Mega hunt,
Indyk had Ross' old job as Assistant Secretary of State for the Near East.
Another prime suspect in the Mega mole hunt was Leon Fuerth, Vice President
Albert Gore's national security adviser, and another well-known pro-Likud
fanatic. The Washington Post, in a 1998 profile of Fuerth, reported that he was
suspected by U.S. intelligence officials of passing sensitive U.S. policy
information to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Likud), a passionate,
personal enemy of President Clinton, who was suspected of activating the Mega
spy operation.
Also on the Mega list of suspects inside the Clinton national security
apparatus was Richard Clarke, the National Security Council "counterterrorism
czar," who was fired from the State Department and brought onto the Bush
Administration NSC in 1992, after he was accused by the State Department's
Inspector General of concealing illegal Israeli arms sales to China.
The Purloined Letter Principle
While all of the above-mentioned Bush- and Clinton-era national security
operatives may have been, indeed, secretly, or not-so-secretly passing critical
American policy papers and classified documents to the Likud faction in Israel;
and, while then-Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his Mossad mandarins may
have been attempting to blackmail the President, there is a much simpler answer
to the Mega puzzle: Mega was not a deep mole inside the White House. Mega was a
far more visible, far more powerful entity, known among its several dozen
members as "the Mega Group."
The existence of the Mega Group came to light, almost exactly a year after the
Washington Post revealed that the mole hunt was under way. Yet, the story of
the Mega Group, which appeared in the Wall Street Journal on May 4, 1998, made
no mention of espionage, and did not mention the Mossad, the CIA, or Monica
Lewinsky, even in passing. Despite that, the Mega Group precisely fits the
story of the illusive mole hunt, in a manner that has profound policy
implications to this day, as President George W. Bush struggles to avoid an
outbreak of war in the Middle East, which would have devastating consequences
for the entire planet.
Under the innocent headline, "Titans of Industry Join Forces To Work for Jewish
Philanthropy," Wall Street Journal staff reporter Lisa Miller reported on an
April 1998 gathering of some 20 Jewish billionaires, at the Manhattan apartment
of hedge-fund manager Michael Steinhardt. That gathering involved some of the
most powerful names in the Jewish lobby in America, starting with Edgar
Bronfman, the chairman of the World Jewish Congress. Others included: Charles
Bronfman, Edgar's brother and a top executive of the family's flagship Seagrams
Corp.; Leslie Wexler of Limited, Inc.; Charles Schusterman, chairman of Samson
Investment Co. of Tulsa, Oklahoma; Harvey "Bud" Meyerhoff, a fabulously wealthy
and powerful Baltimore real estate magnate; Laurence Tisch, chairman of Loews
Corp.; Max Fisher, the Detroit oil magnate and Republican Party powerhouse;
bagel magnate Max Lender; and Leonard Abramson, the founder of U.S. Healthcare.
According to the Journal account, the Mega Group was founded in 1991 by Wexler
and Charles Bronfman, to add greater clout to the Israeli lobby, by
establishing an informal, but all-powerful policymaking group, able to deploy
billions of dollars in "charitable" funds for the maximum effect on U.S. policy
toward Israel, the Mideast, and other issues of paramount importance to the
Jewish megabillionaires. The Mega Group convenes twice a year, for two-day
sessions, where, behind closed doors, the members make life-and-death
decisions, affecting U.S. policy. Membership is by invitation only; the
meetings are secret (the Wall Street Journal story was the only coverage to
ever appear in the U.S. media about the existence of the Mega Group, before the
publication of this EIR account); and the members each kick in $30,000 in
annual dues, to cover "operating expenses" for the twice-yearly sessions.
Charles Bronfman reflected the Mega Group's propensity for secrecy, when he
told the Journal's Lisa Miller, "From the beginning we didn't want to be seen
as a threat to anybody. And that still pertains. We don't want to be seen as
the Sanhedrin," a reference to the highest court of the ancient Jews. "We don't
want to be looked at crooked." Charles' far more sinister and slick brother,
Edgar, tried to dismiss the activities of the Mega Group, telling Miller, "We
want to make it cool to be Jewish."
Not So Cool
But then, a March 13, 2001 dispatch by the Jewish Telegraph Agency revealed
that the Mega Group is more than a loose bunch of Jewish billionaires out to do
good. The JTA reported that newly installed Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
was about to launch a two-pronged propaganda offensive inside the United
States, aimed at winning American support for his plans to overturn the Mideast
peace process. First, the JTA revealed, the Sharon government announced that it
was hiring two U.S. public relations firms—Rubenstein Associates and Morris,
Carrick and Guma—to peddle the Israeli government "spin" inside the U.S.
media and in policymaking circles in New York and Washington.
The JTA wire continued, "More controversially, a handful of Jewish mega-donors
has created a think-tank they hope will generate long-term strategies for
presenting Israel in a favorable light."
The new think-tank, Emet (the Hebrew word for "truth"), JTA reported, is the
collective brain-child of Leonard Abramson, Edgar Bronfman, and Michael
Steinhardt—three of the leading Mega Group members (JTA made no mention of
Mega). The Mega Group is expected to kick in $7 million to launch the new
organization, with the Israeli Foreign Ministry also pledged to pony up $1
million in startup cash. But, lest there be any confusion about who's in charge
at Emet, JTA revealed that "the group consulted with [Malcolm] Hoelein, [Abe]
Foxman and other Jewish activists—and only then notified Israel's Foreign
Ministry, Foxman said." Hoelein, the executive vice president of the Conference
of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, is a fanatical backer of
the Sharon war-drive, a view he shared with the just-retired president of the
group, Ronald Lauder, a big Sharon financial backer who met with Sharon in
September 2000—just before the latter staged his provocation at the Islamic
holy sites on the Temple Mount/al-Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem, triggering the
ongoing violence.
The Emet project has been criticized inside Israel, by Foreign Ministry
officials and peace activists alike. As JTA reported, "Some Foreign Ministry
officials grumbled that American Jews were poaching on their turf. Not
surprisingly, they would prefer that any extra money be funneled to the
ministry's efforts.... Israel's left appeared concerned that hawkish American
Jews will use Emet to push a hard-line approach to the peace process."
Steinhardt, Bronfman, and Abramson refused to talk about the project. But the
enthusiastic endorsement for Emet from Morton Klein, president of the hawkish
Zionist Organization of America, is strong confirmation that the outfit will
peddle Sharon's war line. As EIR reported recently, Klein led a delegation of
right-wing Zionists and evangelical Christians in a White House meeting, where
they threatened a Presidential representative with a cutoff of support, if Bush
attempted to interfere in Sharon's war schemes (see Anton Chaitkin, "Temple
Mount Fanatics Seek To Blackmail Bush," EIR Aug. 24, 2001).
The Power of Money
The Mega Group story came full circle on May 5, 2001, with the publication of a
story in an obscure Israeli online publication, Media Monitors Network, by
writer Israel Shamir. Shamir noted, with no lack of irony, the meeting of the
Mega Group, which had taken place the previous day at the Manhattan mansion of
Edgar Bronfman.
Shamir first described a meeting he had recently had with a Vermont-based
psychoanalyst, the nephew of Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion.
The nephew prided himself on the fact that his closest friends were
Palestinians, and that he rejected the idea of a Jewish "tribal" identity,
preferring to view all human beings as brethren.
Shamir observed, "That is the last thing the bosses want. I would not be amazed
if they discussed it yesterday, when they met in the Edgar Bronfman mansion in
Manhattan. The head of the World Jewish Congress hosted a meeting of the 50
richest and most powerful Jews of the U.S. and Canada. There was no press
coverage, no limelight, just a few lines in the newspapers.... They agreed to
launch a PR program under the Orwellian codename of 'Truth' with the purpose of
influencing American public opinion regarding Israeli policies."
Shamir continued, "The megabucks call themselves 'Mega group.' This name
appeared in the media a couple of years ago, as a name for the secret Israeli
mole in the upper reaches of the U.S. establishment. It came up in an overheard
phone conversation, later denied by the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. The
newshounds and spook watchers got it wrong. 'Mega' was not an agent, Mega was
the boss."
With some bitterness, Shamir wrote, "Megabucks influence us, even more than
they influence the U.S. Our politicians are as weak and corrupt as America's
and they are easier to swing. Even relative small-timers can cause eruption and
bloodshed, like the California bingo-parlor owner [Irving] Moskowitz, who
pushed our ex-prime minister Netanyahu to open the tunnel under the Haram al
Sharif.... The Megabucks can buy Israel with their spare change. If they wish,
we would have peace in Palestine today. But they are not interested in Israel
per se.... Megabucks care for themselves, and they need Israel in order to keep
the American Jews together, supporting them. That is why they do not mind
bloodshed in Palestine, and even a bloody regional war does not scare them."
Shamir concluded: "In my opinion, Megabucks, rather than forces of Caballa,
move the events in the Middle East. It is not magic, just money—but a lot of
money. They do not rule America or Israel, but they exercise a lot of
influence. Fifty multibillionaires united in one framework present a very real
force in the world."
Of course, Shamir does not have the picture precisely right. The
Bronfman-centered Mega Group is but one component of an insane and desperate
element within the transatlantic financial establishment that is now pressing
for a "Clash of Civilizations," as a means of responding to the collapse of
their global financial empire, and the threat of a new set of Eurasia-centered
cooperative arrangements among nations supplanting their power. But, as far as
the Mega puzzle is concerned, Shamir has solved the mystery.
No wonder Mossad boss Yatom scolded his Washington-based underling with the
warning, "This is not something we use Mega for."
wie...@algonet.se
And who said that USA do not have spy in Israel
and between Palestinians?
W.
OdrzanskiS
>From: "wie...@algonet.se" wie...@algonet.se
>Date: 9/16/01 2:22 AM Eastern Daylight Time
>Message-id: <3BA445...@algonet.se>
and.....
SBobrow940
--------------0 + 0 = 8----------
Subject: Re: "MEGA" Indyk
From: "wie...@algonet.se" wie...@algonet.se
Date: 9/15/01 11:22 PM Pacific Daylight Time
Message-id: <3BA445...@algonet.se>
S