 May 2004, pages 13, 94 Special Report Israel's Failed
Assassination Attempt on U.S. Ambassador
Documented By Andrew I.
Killgore HAD Mossad, Israel's secret
intelligence organization, succeeded, it would have
been the perfect crime -- the crime of the century.
The plan was breathtaking in concept: to
assassinate the American ambassador to Lebanon, in
Lebanon, with American weapons, intended for
Israeli's defense only. Everything about it would
point to Lebanon as the culprit.  But
fate intervened, and things went wrong. The tires
on Ambassador John Gunther Dean's limousine
automatically reinflated when they were shot out in
1979 (see November 2002 Washington Report,
p. 15). The light tank shell simply bounced off the
car's armor. And, horror of horrors, Lebanese
intelligence had retrieved the empty shell casing
on which was written, "Made in the United States of
America."
Mossad's specialty was dirty tricks, even if (or
perhaps because) it was not very good as an
intelligence organization. Its modus operandi had
always been the same: pull off a dirty trick but
make it appear somebody else had done it. An early
example was the Lavon Affair, named for Pinhas
Lavon, Israel's minister of defense back in
1953. This Mossad operation persuaded some Jewish
men in Egypt to burn U.S. Information Service
libraries on the assumption that Egyptian President
Jamal Abdul Nasser would be blamed. But one
of the incendiary devices went off prematurely, and
the young spies were caught. Some of them were
executed. This provoked a scandal in Israel, and in
the ensuing investigation it eventually turned out
that Lavon's signature authorizing the operation
had been forged at the behest of Prime Minister
David Ben-Gurion. A dirty trick within a
dirty trick! Then came the June 8, 1967 attack
on the USS Liberty, killing 34 Americans
and wounding 171. Perpetrated by the Israeli air
force and navy, this was not a Mossad operation,
but it was suffused by the same spirit of stealth
and trickery. During the Arab-Israeli war of 1967,
unmarked Israeli jets raked the all-but-unarmed spy
ship Liberty, steaming slowly off Egypt's
Sinai Peninsula, with napalm and machine
gunfire. The Liberty was flying a large American flag,
and the ship's designation, in English, was clearly
visible on a cloudless day. But Israel said it
thought it was attacking an Egyptian transport
ship. Israel pleaded "a tragic accident" and still
pleads that miserable lie today. Now, thanks to
Ambassador John Gunther Dean, the full taste of
Mossad's evil will be available at former
President Jimmy Carter's Presidential
Library in Atlanta, Georgia. A part of the
National Archives, the Carter Center will
contain 42 files on Dean's service as ambassador
to Lebanon. The overwhelming majority of the
material is unclassified and thus readily
available to researchers, scholars and
journalists. The Dean papers -- which include documents,
messages, reports and telegrams -- constitute hard
evidence on the stultifying influence of the
Israeli lobby as Dean tried to get answers from the
Department of State on the Israeli assassination
failure. Nobody was willing to talk with him
because the subject was just too
"sensitive." The papers include documentation of efforts by
the Palestinians to help the U.S. with the American
hostages in Iran. They demonstrate that, unlike
today, the United States administration considered
the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) "valid
interlocutors" in the search for a negotiated
settlement of the Palestine-Israel conflict. In
fact, PLO leader Yasser Arafat and an
assistant made a special visit to Iran, where they
succeeded in gaining the immediate freedom of
several of the American diplomatic hostages. Arafat
performed a real favor for the United States for
which he never received any thanks -- perhaps
because, once again, it would have been too
"sensitive." By June 2004 all other papers in Dean's
possession will be housed in the National Archives.
Among the information they will contain will be the
role of certain congressmen with respect to nuclear
proliferation. Some of the American legislators
struck Dean as motivated more by fear of Pakistan
obtaining "the Islamic bomb" than they were by
defending U.S. policy of preventing the
proliferation of arms. Andrew I. Killgore, a retired
foreign service officer and former U.S. ambassador
to Qatar, is publisher of the Washington
Report. 
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