MAX FRIEDMAN:ON ISRAEL, GATES AND “INTERDEPENDENCE”
MAX FRIEDMAN ADDS COMMENTS TO DAVID ISAAC ” A STATE OF INTERDEPENDENCE”
Max Friedman has been both an accredited and freelance journalist/author/columnist for over 40 years, from covering the Vietnam war to Jewish affairs, internal security and media bias.He has been published in Human Events weekly, was a special investigative reporter for the Jewish Week (Wash. D.C.), and was a researcher for the national best seller about John Kerry and the Swift Boat Veterans, “Unfit for Command.
Israel’s contributions to America’s defense were (and probably are) much more valuable in terms of lives saves, aggression prevented, and the development of countermeasure equipment to protect our armed forced around the world, than one could imagine, or put a price-tag on. Secretary of Gates got it wrong, big time, about this quiet, but very essential mutual exchange of information between the U.S. and Israel over the past many decades.
During the June 1967 War and aftermath period, I happened to be at the Israeli Embassy getting some information for either a school project or something else I was writing on. By accident, I passed a room where a film was showing, and I’m sure that it was a highly classified film for the following reason. It showed an Egyptian SAM missile complex that the Israelis had captured INTACT with their lighting strikes into Egyptian territory.
The SAM complex is usually composed of anywhere from 3-6 missiles in a circular formation, with radar equipment/vans and other communication vehicles as part of these circle. The missiles could not be launched back them independent of its electronic support vehicles which located a target and did the computer calculations which were entered into the missile’s guidance system.
By capturing the whole complex (or as we used to say in shual, the “whole Megillah”), Israel gained real-time information on the state of art of the Soviet Union’s main anti-aircraft defense system. Not only did it enable them to devise countermeasures for the Israeli Air Force (IAF) that saved them many planes and lives later on, it allowed the Israelis to share this with the U.S. who was taking heavy losses in aircraft to SAMs in North Vietnam during the war.
Based on reading news articles and reading between the lines about our air operations over N. Vietnam, I could see that there was a decrease in U.S. aircraft losses to SAMs in certain operational circumstances and areas (some other losses were attributable to ridiculous McNamara and Air Force rules of bombing approaches used to attack N. Vietnamese bridges which were among the most heavily defended sites in the world).
While in So. Vietnam in the Fall, 1970 as an accredited correspondent, I was talking to a new friend who was in a key position as an intelligence analysis to tell me things that one did not find in the news media. One of these gems of information was about the trip to So. Vietnam by Gen. Dayan and others about which very little had been written back then. He told me that the Israelis were there to observe and learn about anti-guerrilla warfare tactics and to share information that they had gained from the capture of Soviet arms during the “100 Day War” (from tanks to SAMs).
Over the years, I have only seen little bits and pieces about Israeli help to the U.S. in their fight against the Communists in Indochina, but I believe that this help saved the lives of many American pilots and bomber crews, something that the families of these fliers appreciated without knowing how it came out.
Another key intelligence gift that the Israelis gave to the U.S. and the world were not only the Soviet weapons they seized in Lebanon in 1983, but also the immense cache of PLO documents from PLO archives and command centers captured in Beirut. They revealed the real extent of Soviet Bloc hidden aid to the PLO, massive in terms of tonnage of small arms, ammunition, light artillery, etc.,.This paralleled what had happened in the Vietnam War but which the American media missed as a key factor in the Communist’s ultimate victory, simply having more arms and ammunition and supplies than the supply-starved So. Vietnamese and Cambodians.
These documents also showed the ideological/political/tactical alliances made between Soviet Bloc and Red Chinese Bloc as weapons/logistics suppliers to the PLO in its efforts to build a “nation-within-a-nation” in Lebanon, a precursor base to invade Israel with a potentially heavily armed 10,000 armored/artillery heavy force.
These captured PLO/Communist Bloc documents paralleled exactly the type of documents the U.S. captured in the archives of the Grenadian Marxists of Maurice Bishop, Coard, and others during the 1983 operation there. I not only saw many of these documents, but also saw a display of captured Soviet Block weapons from Grenada at Andrews Air Force Base later that year. While the Grenada stockpiles were being established as a forward depot/ jump-off base for communist subversion throughout the Caribbean/Latin America, so too were the larger PLO arms depots and caches being established in Lebanon for a future war with Israel and to use against the remnants of the Lebanese Government if the PLO was to try and take-over the rest of the country.
Israel’s contributions to America’s defense were (and probably are) much more valuable in terms of lives saves, aggression prevented, and the development of countermeasure equipment to protect our armed forced around the world, than one could imagine, or put a price-tag on. Secretary of Gates got it wrong, big time, about this quiet, but very essential mutual exchange of information between the U.S. and Israel over the past many decades.
This is the nature of the game of survival that both nations are engaged in, a “nature” that is of the secret kind, and must remain so for many decades. However, any good journalist knows how to read between the lines and listen to the unspoken words of someone’s speech. It is what you see and hear in this “silent world’ that tells you what is really going on. Unfortunately somebody failed to fill Secretary Gates in on this “silent world.”
Max Friedman, So. Vietnam/Cambodia journalist, Fall, 1970
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