April/May 1997   pg. 30

From the Israeli Press

Current Translations and Commentary From Hebrew-Language Newspapers

Ma’ariv, Dec. 23, 1996, by Eli Kamir

The main headline of the Sunday Times (London) yesterday said that since the 1970s the Israeli army has supplied tons of hashish to soldiers of the Egyptian army.

This information aroused great interest in Egypt. Even before the paper appeared, the SKY TV network quoted the main headline of the Sunday Times. But as soon as the item was published, all the main electronic media in the world began to quote the story again and again, despite denials by the Israeli army spokesman.

“In one of the most bizarre situations in the Middle East conflict,” wrote the Sunday Times on its front page, “Israel has flooded Egypt for decades with cheap hashish. The goal was to drug Egyptian soldiers so that they would be unable to fight effectively.” The operation, so claimed the Sunday Times, was called “Operation Blade.” The most interesting part of the affair was that it was revealed by the paper’s Israeli correspondent, Uzi Mahanaimi, the son of Col. Gideon Mahanaimi who died of an untimely heart attack.¹ According to Uzi Mahanaimi, for years many tons of hashish have been smuggled from Lebanon to Egypt through Israel. He said he has testimonies of eight Israeli officers, directly involved in Operation Blade, on which the Sunday Times article was based.

The Israeli army spokesman has strongly denied these allegations. “Israeli army officers were never involved in drug dealing,” he said. The article claimed that Israel came up with the idea for Operation Blade on the eve of the Six-Day War when pressure from the Egyptian border increased on Israel.² Since then, according to the Sunday Times, the Israeli army, even after the signing of peace with Egypt in 1979, has continued to supply hashish to Egyptian soldiers. Only in the late 1980s, the paper added, did Israel end this operation.

“I have no remorse for what was done,” a senior reserve officer who was in charge of military operations of this nature in the 1970s told the Sunday Times. “It allowed us to control the inflow of drugs to Israel and to increase drug use among the Egyptians....

According to the Sunday Times, in the 1960s, the Israeli army still was making great efforts to seal the border between Lebanon and Israel to hashish smuggling. The intention was to close the border crossings and increase the naval patrols to catch the shipments of hashish on Lebanese boats. “But we quickly understood,” explained a senior Israeli reserve officer, “that we were missing a golden opportunity. We reached the conclusion that we could obtain the drugs ourselves and transfer them to dealers whom we favored to sell at low prices to Egyptian army staff. That way, we believed, we would manage to weaken the Egyptian soldiers.” The proposal to use hashish for this purpose, said the mentioned Israeli officer, passed through the entire chain of command and was officially sanctioned.³ Operation Blade quickly began. All financial profits it generated were transferred into a secret Israeli army fund to be used for additional secret operations.

Despite denials of the Israeli army spokesman, the Sunday Times has continued to insist that the facts are correct. According to Mahanaimi, the officers admitted to him that they had participated in the operation on orders from above and not for personal gain....Among the officers who spoke with the paper—none of their names were published—two are still serving in the Israeli army. One of them told Mahanaimi that drugs smuggled from Lebanon to Egypt were transferred in trucks driven by Israeli officers. Another officer told the Sunday Times that he had sat in a van next to a Lebanese drug dealer when the hashish was being taken south. In the case of another shipment, he said, Israeli navy ships accompanied Lebanese drug boats from the area from which the drugs were smuggled to Nahariya.

“We were forced,” so claimed an officer ordered to transfer “important material” from Lebanon to the Egyptian border, “to sign a declaration of secrecy, according to which if I spoke about what I saw, I might be sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment.” According to him, a lieutenant-colonel named Ya’akov accompanied them to Lebanon. “He ordered us to start loading our trucks with material on the Lebanese trucks, which came up close to ours. When the Lebanese removed the cover from their loads, I was utterly shocked. The baggage compartments were filled with hundreds of small packages. I immediately identified them as hashish. Ya’akov told me to shut up and continue loading our trucks.”

Once, another Israeli officer said, the Israeli forces in south Lebanon received an order to impose a curfew in an area of the Lebanon valley. At the same time, local drug dealers arrived there with their goods and gave them to Israeli army officers who were waiting for them. According to the Sunday Times, the Israeli army transferred the merchandise to Egyptian drug dealers who were instructed to distribute it among Egyptian soldiers stationed in the area between Sinai and Cairo.

The Egyptian army spokesman told the Sunday Times that in the late 1960s and early 1970s the use of drugs among Egyptian senior officers had reached 50 percent, and two out of three soldiers regularly smoked hashish. In Cairo,⁴ so the Sunday Times stated, there have been rumors for many years that the Israeli army was involved in increasing drug use in the Egyptian army.⁵

Notes:

1. Colonel Gideon Mahanaimi, an almost legendary figure, was the chief founder of the Arabic part of the military intelligence of the Israeli army. He didn’t get the rank of general because he quarreled with Moshe Dayan. His son, for years a correspondent for Hebrew papers, inherited many intelligence sources from his father.
   
   
2. Although I believe the story I doubt the date on which drug smuggling started. I strongly suspect that it had started, perhaps under another name or in a less organized manner, much earlier.
   
   
3. This means, under the usual Israeli decision-making system, that it was approved by Rabin (chief-of-staff), Moshe Dayan (defense minister) and Levy Eshkol (prime minister). Very probably, the foreign minister, Abba Eban, that great dove, was notified about the drug smuggling.
   
   
4. Not only in Cairo. In Tel Aviv and Jerusalem too.
   
   
5. One of the favorite methods of the Hebrew press to circumvent the military censorship is to quote reports from foreign papers about issues which Israeli papers cannot publish. The method of hinting to the readers that the story is true consists of refusal to deny it. Ma’ariv duly quoted the denial of the Israeli army spokesman as it had to, but it carefully refrained from saying that it disbelieves the story.