[Marxism] US Envoy Writes of Israeli Threats

[sabocat59@xxxxxxx]

Readers may be amused to know that George Shultz, who is mentioned in the 
article, has a tatoo of a tiger on his buttocks. Presumably a Princeton grad? 
Its amazing what you learn about the guests as a therapist at a high-end spa, 
(pun intended). 

Greg McD 

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13136

In the wake of the accusation by Chas Freeman that his nomination to lead the 
National Intelligence Council was derailed by an "Israeli lobby," a forthcoming 
memoir by another distinguished ambassador adds stunning new charges to the 
debate. The ambassador, John Gunther Dean, writes that over the years he not 
only came under pressure from pro-Israeli groups and officials in Washington 
but also was the target of an Israeli-inspired assassination attempt in 1980 in 
Lebanon, where he had opened links to the Palestine Liberation Organization. 
Dean's suspicions that Israeli agents may have also been involved in the 
mysterious plane crash in 1988 that killed Pakistan's president, General 
Mohammed Zia ul Haq, led finally to a decision in Washington to declare him 
mentally unfit, which forced his resignation from the foreign service after a 
thirty-year career. After he left public service, he was rehabilitated by the 
State Department, given a distinguished service medal and eventually encouraged 
to write his memoirs. Now 82, Dean sees the subsequent positive attention he 
has received as proof that the insanity charge (he calls it Stalinist) was 
phony, a supposition later confirmed by a former head of the department's 
medical service.

Dean, whose memoir is titled Danger Zones: A Diplomat's Fight for America's 
Interests, was American ambassador in Lebanon in August 1980 when a three-car 
convoy carrying him and his family was attacked near Beirut."I was the target 
of an assassination attempt by terrorists using automatic rifles and antitank 
weapons that had been made in the United States and shipped to Israel," he 
wrote. "Weapons financed and given by the United States to Israel were used in 
an attempt to kill an American diplomat!" After the event, conspiracy theories 
abounded in the Middle East about who could have planned the attack, and why. 
Lebanon was a dangerously factionalized country.The State Department 
investigated, Dean said, but he was never told what the conclusion was. He 
wrote that he "worked the telephone for three weeks" and met only official 
silence in Washington. By then Dean had learned from weapons experts in the 
United States and Lebanon that the guns and ammunition used in the attack had 
been given by Israelis to a Christian militia allied with them."I know as 
surely as I know anything that Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, was 
somehow involved in the attack," Dean wrote, describing how he had been under 
sharp criticism from Israeli politicians and media for his contacts with 
Palestinians. 

"Undoubtedly using a proxy, our ally Israel had tried to kill me."Dean's 
memoir, to be published in May for the Association for Diplomatic Studies and 
Training Memoir Series by New Academia Publishing under its Vellum imprint, has 
been read and approved for publication by the State Department with only very 
minor changes, none affecting Dean's major points. Its underlying theme is that 
American diplomacy should be pursued in American interests, not those of 
another country, however friendly. A Jew whose family fled the Holocaust, Dean 
resented what he saw as an assumption, including by some in Congress, that he 
would promote Israel's interests in his ambassadorial work. Dean, a fluent 
French speaker who began his long diplomatic career opening American missions 
in newly independent West African nations in the early 1960s, served later in 
Vietnam (where he described himself as a "loyal dissenter") and was ambassador 
in Cambodia (where he carried out the American flag as the Khmer Rouge 
advanced), Denmark, Lebanon, Thailand (where Chas Freeman was his deputy) and 
India. He takes credit for averting bloodshed in Laos in the 1970s by 
negotiating a coalition government shared by communist and noncommunist 
parties. He was sometimes a disputatious diplomat not afraid to contradict 
superiors, and he often took--and still holds--contrarian views. He always 
believed, for example, that the United States should have attempted to 
negotiate with the Khmer Rouge rather than let the country be overrun by their 
brutal horror.As ambassador in India in the 1980s he supported then-Prime 
Minister Rajiv Gandhi's policy of seeking some kind of neutral coalition in 
Afghanistan that would keep the American- and Pakistani-armed mujahedeen from 
establishing a fundamentalist Islamic state. For several years after the Soviet 
withdrawal, India continued to back Najibullah, a thuggish communist security 
chief whom the retreating Soviet troops left behind. After the mujahedeen moved 
toward Kabul, Najibullah refused a United Nations offer of safe passage to 
India. He was slaughtered and left hanging on a lamppost.

It was in the midst of this Soviet endgame in Afghanistan that Dean fell afoul 
of the State Department for the last time. After the death of General Zia in 
August 1988, in a plane crash that also killed the American ambassador in 
Pakistan, Arnold Raphel, Dean was told in New Delhi by high-ranking officials 
that Mossad was a possible instigator of the accident, in which the plane's 
pilot and co-pilot were apparently disabled or otherwise lost control. There 
was also some suspicion that elements of India's Research and Analysis Wing, 
its equivalent of the CIA, may have played a part. India and Israel were 
alarmed by Pakistan's work on a nuclear weapon--the "Islamic bomb."Dean was so 
concerned about these reports, and the attempt by the State Department to block 
a full FBI investigation of the crash in Pakistan, that he decided to return to 
Washington for direct consultations. Instead of the meetings he was promised, 
he was told his service in India was over. He was sent into virtual house 
arrest in Switzerland at a home belonging to the family of his French wife, 
Martine Duphenieux. Six weeks later, he was allowed to return to New Delhi to 
pack his belongings and return to Washington, where he resigned.
Suddenly his health record was cleared and his security clearance restored. He 
was presented with the Distinguished Service Award and received a warm letter 
of praise from Secretary of State George Shultz. "Years later," he wrote in his 
memoir, "I learned who had ordered the bogus diagnosis of mental incapacity 
against me. It was the same man who had so effusively praised me once I was 
gone--George Shultz."Asked in a telephone conversation last week from his home 
in Paris why Shultz had done this to him, Dean would say only, "He was forced 
to."

 Barbara Crossette, United Nations correspondent for The Nation, is a former 
New York Times correspondent and bureau chief in Asia and at the UN
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