Samson Option: Israel, America and the Bomb by Seymour M. Hersh

Samson Option: Israel, America and the Bomb by Seymour M. Hersh

Author:Seymour M. Hersh [Hersh, Seymour M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Middle East, Israel & Palestine
ISBN: 9780756755119
Google: tMWSAAAACAAJ
Publisher: Diane Publishing Company
Published: 1991-02-14T19:00:00+00:00


* The State Department’s historical office lists George P. Marsh, minister to Italy from 1861 to 1882; Edwin V. Morgan, ambassador to Brazil from 1912 to 1933; and Claude G. Bowers, ambassador to Chile from 1939 to 1953. † His sister, Ellen, served as embassy hostess during her extended annual visits to Israel. Barbour kept photographs of Ellen and one other woman on his desk; a personal aide recalled Barbour explaining, when queried, that the other woman was someone he’d known in Cairo, where he was serving as political officer during World War II. “What happened to her?” “I asked her to marry me and she said no,” Barbour replied. The young aide was astonished: “She said no and he kept her picture there twenty years later.” ‡ Alba got Hadden in trouble with the Israeli foreign office by inadvertently putting Hadden’s American license plates on a jeep before taking one of his weekend jaunts to the Negev. All diplomatic cars in Israel were required to have special license plates, and the embassy mechanics routinely removed the American license plates from the private cars of newly arrived diplomatic personnel and placed them on the walls for decoration. Alba had asked the embassy car pool for a black jeep. It arrived with no plates, and the colonel, in a hurry, ordered the mechanic to grab a set at random from the walls and throw them on. The plates turned out to be Hadden’s. The jeep, of course, was monitored by the Israelis, leading to a stiff protest: why was the CIA station chief sneaking around in the Negev? § “We were very strict,” recalled Herman Pollack, then the director of the State Department Bureau of International Scientific and Technological Affairs. “No intelligence work by science attachés. He was supposed to keep his hands very clean.” Hadden, who retired from the Agency a few years after returning from Israel, acknowledged with a laugh that he “never paid any attention to organizational charts and titles. Life seemed to be better run if people worked together to accomplish joint goals that made sense.” ‖ Braderman, now retired and living in Washington, recalled the 1967 visit to Israel and said it was “possible that I’d said something like that” to Bill Dale. He added that Dale’s recollection certainly reflected his general view of the issue of Jewish loyalty. a The Johnson Library documents also show that Clark Clifford, a key presidential adviser and later secretary of defense, complained about the government’s initially tepid response at a National Security Council meeting the next day: “My concern is that we’re not tough enough. Handle as if Arabs or USSR had done it.” It was “inconceivable,” Clifford added, according to the NSC notes, that Israel destroyed the Liberty by error, as it claimed. b It was a different CIA, too. A former senior intelligence officer recalled that “a big change took place” inside the Agency after the Six-Day War. “All of a sudden a lot of people were saying the Israelis were wonderful,” the former official added.



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