In London, Nicholas Davies read the report on the execution on a Reuters message that came to the
Since 1974, the publisher had been the most powerful sayan in Britain. Davies would remember: “Bob read the report without comment,” but could not recall “in all honesty” what he had felt about Bazoft’s death.
In Tel Aviv, among those who read about the execution was one of the most colorful characters to have served Israel’s spymasters, Ari Ben-Menashe. Until then he had never known of the existence of Bazoft. But typically, that did not stop the mercurial Ben-Menashe feeling a sense of grief that “another good man had been in the wrong place at the wrong time.” It was emotional judgments like that which had made the darkly handsome, quick-witted Ben-Menashe such an unlikely candidate for a key position in the Israeli intelligence community. Yet, for ten years, 1977–87, he had held a sensitive post in the External Relations Department (ERD) of the Israel Defense Forces, one of the most powerful and secret organizations in the intelligence community.
ERD had been created in 1974 by then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. Smarting over the way Israel had been completely surprised by the Syrian-Egyptian onslaught in the Yom Kippur War, he had decided the only way to avert such an intelligence failure occurring again was to have a watchdog to monitor other intelligence services and, at the same time, conduct its own intelligence gathering.
Four branches had been created to operate under the ERD umbrella. The most important was SIM; it provided “special assistance” for the growing number of “liberation movements” in Iran, Iraq, and, to a lesser extent, Syria and Saudi Arabia. The second branch, RESH, handled relationships with friendly intelligence networks. Top of those was the South African Bureau of State Security. Mossad had a similar unit called TEVEL, which also had close links with the Republic’s intelligence community. The relationship between RESH and TEVEL was often tense because of the inevitable overlapping.
A third ERD department, Foreign Liaison, dealt with Israeli military attachés and other IDF personnel working overseas. The department also monitored the activities of foreign military attachés in Israel. That brought further conflict, this time with Shin Bet, who until then had the sole prerogative to report on such activities. The fourth arm of ERD was called Intelligence Twelve. Set up to liaise with Mossad, this unit had further soured relations with the men on the upper floor of their building on King Saul Boulevard. They felt overall that ERD would diminish their power.
Ben-Menashe had been attached to RESH, with a specific responsibility for the Iranian “account.” He arrived at a time when Israel was about to lose its most powerful ally in the region. For over a quarter of a century, the shah of Iran had worked diligently behind the scenes to persuade Israel’s Arab neighbors to end their hostility toward the Jewish state. He was still making limited headway, notably with King Hussein of Jordan, when the shah’s own Peacock Throne was swept away by Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic fundamentalist revolution in February 1979. Khomeini promptly handed over the Israeli embassy building in Tehran to the PLO. Equally swiftly, Israel turned to helping the Kurds wage guerrilla war against the new regime. At the same time, Israel continued to supply arms to Tehran for them to use against Iraq. The “kill both sides” policy that David Kimche and others in Mossad advocated was well and truly in force.
Ben-Menashe soon found himself involved in David Kimche’s grand design to trade hostages for arms with Iran. Both men traveled together to Washington, where Ben-Menashe claimed he prowled the wide corridors of the White House, met President Reagan, and was on first-name terms with his senior aides.
