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Ben-Menashe did not stop there. He told Senate investigators that during the Iran-Iraq war, the CIA secretly helped ship weapons to Iraq, including missile parts and chemical arms. At the time, the U.S. was officially embargoing arms sales to Iraq, but privately tilted toward Baghdad out of fear that an Iranian victory could spread Islamic fundamentalism throughout the region. Ben-Menashe now belatedly portrays Gates as a central figure in the secret arms sales and describes meetings in Tel Aviv, Santiago and Kansas City at which the transfers were discussed.
In response to the charges, Gates sent over to the Intelligence Committee a foot-high stack of travel documents and work logs covering the period of August 1980 to the present, which White House officials say prove beyond question that he could not have been at the secret meetings that Ben-Menashe says he attended. Committee investigators went over to the White House to check secondary and tertiary records. They showed that on many of the dates, Gates was attending government meetings or had other ironclad alibis.
As for the claim that Bush and Gates were in on the October 1980 meetings in Paris, other sources dispute the charge. Last week ABC's Nightline and the Financial Times of London, acting as an unofficial grand jury, sorted through the evidence about the Madrid and Paris meetings. They found hotel records indicating that Iranian arms dealers Jamshid and Cyrus Hashemi, the alleged go-betweens for Casey and Tehran, were in Madrid when the meetings supposedly occurred. They also reported that neither Casey's family nor Republican campaign officials could document his whereabouts on the dates in question. But Jamshid Hashemi denied that Bush was involved in the Paris session.
Chameleons are doomed to have credibility problems, and Ben-Menashe is no exception. He is an Iranian-born Jew of Iraqi parentage who attended an American school outside Tel Aviv. He smokes Marlboros, listens to Mozart and speaks Farsi, Hebrew, Arabic and English. He went to work for Israeli intelligence in 1974, where his language skills helped him crack the codes of intercepted Arabic and Iranian communications. After Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, he says he became part of an Israeli team to supply Iran with military equipment. By his breathtaking, and implausible, account, $82 billion worth of arms were shipped over the next few years.
In 1989 he was arrested in California on charges of attempting to smuggle C- / 130 transport planes to Iran. In his defense he declared that he had acted on behalf of Israeli intelligence -- but Israeli officials at first denied even knowing him, and later dismissed him as a lowly translator. Ben-Menashe sat in jail without bond for 11 months before he was acquitted in a jury trial.
Israeli officials continue to insist that he was never more than a desk jockey and that all his accounts of being a major player in global intelligence are bogus. "All the work he did for us was done in his room while sitting at his word processor," says a colonel in Israeli military intelligence who was Ben-Menashe's last boss.