Historical Dictionary of Israeli Intelligence

would later get him out of the country if his regime was toppled (see

MOSES OPERATION). Sharon and Kimche went further and pro-

posed to Numeiri that Sudan become a gigantic arms cache for

weapons produced or captured by Israel. Saudi Arabia would finance

the project, aimed largely at selling weapons to exiled Iranian gener-

als of the ousted monarchial regime for a major coup attempt. The

Mossadfoiled the plan behind Sharon’s back, persuading the late

shah’s son, then in Morocco, to veto it.

Under U.S. pressure, Israel halted arms sales for a while, but pri-

vate Israeli citizens, particularly Nimrodi, continued making plans to

resume trade ties with Iran. In 1985 Nimrodi succeeded in obtaining

approval for his plans from Israel’s national unity government,

headed by Shimon Peres. Nimrodi and his partner Schwimmer, a

close friend of Peres, were authorized to provide Iran with LAU an-

titank missiles and Hawk antiaircraft missiles from Israel’s ware-

houses. These deals were part of what was later known as “Irangate”

(echoing the Watergate scandal of the Nixon administration in the

early 1970s).

In the mid-1980s Schwimmer played a key role in persuading the

U.S. administration itself to sell arms to Iran. Through a secret agree-

ment between the United States and the Israeli Defense Ministry in

1985, the arms to Iran went through Nimrodi. The United States re-

plenished the supplies Israel transferred to Iran. One aspect of the

deal was that Iran was to exert pressure on its protégé, the Hizbullah

organization in Lebanon, to release U.S. and Western hostages kid-

napped after 1982. The Reagan administration was fully aware of

these attempts at freeing the hostages by means of unsanctioned arms

sales to Iran.

News of Irangate first began to appear in the press toward the end

of 1986. The scandal also became known as the “Iran-Contra” affair.

It revealed how deeply the United States was involved in arms sales

to Iran, breaching its own laws that prohibited the sale of U.S.

weapons for resale to a third country listed as a “terrorist nation”—

which occurred precisely at a time when the Washington was pub-

licly calling for a worldwide ban on sending arms to Iran. Moreover,

the money Iran paid for the arms was used by senior officials in the

Reagan administration to buy arms for the Contra rebels in

Nicaragua. This went against the Boland Amendment of 8 December

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