Ari Ben-Menashe

[Magda Hassan]

Profile: Ari Ben Menashe

Positions that Ari Ben Menashe has held:

• Israeli intelligence officer
  

Ari Ben Menashe was a participant or observer in the following events:

1984-1989: Israeli Intelligence Officer Supplies Arms to Iran; Some Profits Allegedly Used to Fund False Flag Attacks

By his own account, Israeli intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe runs a covert Israeli arms network, primarily supplying weapons to the Islamic fundamentalist regime in Iran for use in the Iran-Iraq War. Huge profits are made. "At various times the fund reached peaks of more than $1 billion," he later explains in his book, Profits of War. "At its height it stood at $1.8 billion.… Between 1984 and 1989 no less than $160 million was funneled to [Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak] Shamir's [Likud] faction." He also says that the money helped finance the intelligence community's "black" operations including "Israeli-controlled Palestinian terrorists' who would commit crimes in the name of the Palestinian revolution but were actually pulling them off, usually unwittingly, as part of the Israeli propaganda machine." The Israeli government will later deny that Menashe had any association with their intelligence services. But faced with evidence, the government will change its story, alleging that he was only a low-level translator who had taken to freelancing arms deals. However, Ben-Menashe is able to produce strong evidence to support his version of events and his 1991 trial in New York will culminate in his acquittal on the grounds that the jury disbelieves the Israeli government's denials. [BEN-MENASHE, 1992, PP. 120; CONSORTIUM NEWS, 1997; COLL, 2004, PP. 120]
Entity Tags: Yitzhak Shamir, Ari Ben Menashe
[B]Timeline Tags: [URL="http://www.historycommons.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=western_support_for_islamic_militancy_tmln"]Alleged Use of False Flag Attacks
[/URL][/B]http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp...en_menashe