Revealed: how Israel offered to sell South Africa nuclear weapons

[Paul Rigby]

The author of the piece below is a veteran Foreign Office cypher:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/...ar-weapons

Israel's nuclear weapons: the end to nods, winks and blind eyes

Continuing official ambiguity served a useful purpose. Now the veil has been torn aside

Simon Tisdall
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 23 May 2010 21.00 BST

To the Editor, The Daily Coalitionistgraph, May 23, 2010

Dear Sir,

Your editorial, Grauniad-Round Table Humbug and the Hebrew Love-Bomb, constitutes an island of sanity in an ocean of Foreign Office Arabist propaganda. Let me plant a palm tree of perspective upon it, based upon my extensive knowledge of the key negotiators and their principles, as buttressed by various incomprehensible briefings courtesy of man with a speech impediment from the Israeli embassy, not to mention a large brown envelope bearing the happy title, “BBC Expenses.”

The chief South African negotiator was not a miserable Kraut Communist, as the FO’s Anzanian glove-puppets would have it, but rather Wing Commander “Buffy” Van der Kaffirbasher, a distinguished officer of impeccably humanitarian impulses. (In 1945, let it be noted, he rescued me from a crowd of baying Transvaal savages at a nocturnal Afrikaner political rally, where I had been mistakenly apprehended for possession of an unconvincing wig, and, er, a small incendiary device disguised as a lump of biltong.) If such a man did indeed plan to irradiate huge numbers of blecks - and his signed confession to that effect is by no means the last word on the subject - it was undoubtedly for good and sound reasons of national security, most likely corporate America’s.

His Semite counterpart, Gideon “the Strangler” Dombrowski, was no less a man of the highest ethical standards, not least in his little-documented negotiations with various flotsam and jetsam from the Austrian water-colourist’s leather-clad inner-circle. Despite recognising me as the British intelligence officer who had ordered a couple of Mosley’s finest to dunk him repeatedly in a capacious vat of goat excrement following the ritual disembowelment of an unimportant Mancunian soldier in Haifa in March 1947, the ever-affable “Strangler” gave me a comprehensive tour of the Coca-Cola bottling facility at Dimona in August 1963, where I chanced to met this harmless soft-drink enterprise’s lyric caretaker, Bartleby Angleton, reading selections from T.S. Eliot to a rapt audience of Mossad’s finest. Has there ever been a more felicitous union of Nuclear Power and Poetry?

By far the most important lesson of this entire tawdry episode, however, concerns the declining standard of British journalism. For this I lay unqualified blame on Bill Haley and his threepenny daily worker comets, who began the gross misrepresentation of Dimona in the winter of 1960 by regurgitating, doubtless at the instigation of the Arabist Communist Philby, a Moscow-radio Arab language broadcast to the effect that Langley and the Pentagon had turned over the bomb to Tel Aviv. Has any single piece of British “reportage” been so mercilessly exposed as rot and nonsense by the passage of time? I think not.

Pike-Darkness