Espionage: Con Man or Key to a Mystery?

By NANCY GIBBS

It is especially hard to solve a mystery if all the people who actually know the truth are either accomplished liars, adamantly mute, or already dead. Such a conundrum is facing investigators who are still trying to unravel the Iran- contra scandal and other baroque plots that American officials may have hatched in the Middle East over the past decade. Last week, as yet more charges came to light, there was no shortage of fingerprints, plot twists or stool pigeons. But there was a desperate shortage of certainty, perhaps because when truth is stranger than fiction, the two are harder to separate.

There are a handful of people who could plausibly answer the frightening questions that date back to 1980. Did Reagan campaign officials conspire with Iran to delay the release of the hostages until after the election? For how long did U.S. officials secretly help supply weapons to Iran? Were they also helping the Iraqis to illegally acquire missile parts and chemical weapons? If they were willing, Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani could probably answer; if they were still alive, former CIA Director William Casey, Israeli counterterrorism expert Amiram Nir and Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini could.

And so can I, claims Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli intelligence officer who clings like kudzu to every new conspiracy theory that sprouts in the thicket of conflicting tales. Since the others aren't talking, even his wild charges get a wide audience. He was among the first to leak the details of secret U.S. arms sales to Iran back in 1986. He is one of the sources behind the stories about a purported "October surprise" hostage deal in the 1980 campaign. And now he has told Senate investigators that between 1986 and 1988 the Reagan Administration was secretly supporting shipments of arms -- including chemical weapons -- to Iraq, despite pleas and complaints from Israel about the dangers that Baghdad posed to its neighbors.

As charges mount that the Reagan Administration consistently violated both the law and its own stated policies, the Senate Intelligence Committee seems compelled to at least hear out even the most outlandish tales that come its way. The lawmakers must decide whether to recommend confirmation of White House deputy for national security affairs Robert Gates as the new CIA director. Ben-Menashe's claims have provided another wrinkle, since he charges that Gates, while serving on Jimmy Carter's NSC staff and then as Casey's deputy at the CIA, participated in illegal operations.

Over Memorial Day weekend, Ben-Menashe arrived in Washington bearing allegations about Gates that went far beyond his handling of the Iran-contra scandal. Ben-Menashe charges that Gates was present at three 1980 meetings between William Casey, then manager of Reagan's election campaign, and Iranian officials in Madrid, at which they allegedly discussed delaying the release of the 52 American hostages in Iran in return for shipments of arms through Israel. Ben-Menashe also claims that Gates attended a final meeting in October in Paris, which included not only Casey but the vice-presidential candidate and former CIA chief, George Bush. President Bush has repeatedly denied being present at that meeting, calling the charges "bald-faced lies."

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.

In August 1983 his boss wanted to send Ben-Menashe to the Israeli military attache's office in Washington to work as a translator. He then appeared before a committee for a routine job-qualification examination. The committee's report was blunt: "It was found that he has serious personality disorders."

Even so, some knowledgeable -- and skeptical -- experts do not dismiss Ben- Menashe as a gifted con man. His information, with its richness of detail and its grains of truth, was enough to win the attention of some journalists and investigators who are trying to piece together the truth behind the conspiracy theories. Gary Sick, the former Carter White House official whose lengthy investigations refocused attention on the "October surprise" story in April, admits that he was deeply suspicious of Ben-Menashe's tales at first. But one by one, at least some of Ben-Menashe's stories have turned out to be plausible. Among them: that Casey and the Iranians had met in March or April, as ABC News suggested. Previous accounts had the meetings taking place months later.

Likewise, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, who is writing a book about Israel's nuclear program, has found some of Ben-Menashe's testimony credible. Ben-Menashe claims to have operated at one time out of Ayacucho, Peru, where he says his job was to protect supplies of minerals essential to Israel's nuclear program. At one point, Hersh devised his own test of the agent's veracity. He handed Ben-Menashe a list of 10 minerals, asking him to pinpoint the critical ones for nuclear-weapons production. Ben-Menashe checked three, and they were the right ones.

It might be easier to judge Ben-Menashe's credibility if anyone could pinpoint his motives. He portrays himself as a patriot who was angered at Gates for helping Israel's enemies. "I didn't do anything for myself," he told TIME. "I did it for Israel." He is also in the process of writing his memoirs, so he may be looking for some limelight. He says he is frightened and bitter at the Israelis for abandoning him.

Ben-Menashe, on balance, appears to be a practiced poseur. But his charges will continue to attract attention as long as questions linger about the Reagan Administration's bizarre dealings with Iran and Iraq. If Casey in fact cut a deal with Iran to delay the release of the hostages, the act would verge on treason. If no such bargain was ever struck, the reputations of innocent men have been smeared. Either way, it is long past time to get to the bottom of the mystery.

With reporting by Ron Ben-Yishai/Tel Aviv, Dan Goodgame and Bruce van Voorst/Washington