Mike Harari

Mike Harari (February 18, 1927, Tel Aviv, to September 21, 2014) was the Mossad officer who ran its special operations section in the years after the Munich massacre and who led the team that killed Ahmed Bouchiki, a Moroccan waiter mistaken for the Black September planner Ali Hassan Salameh, at Lillehammer, Norway, in July 1973. Ari Ben-Menashe writes that Harari "had just left Israel because of his failure in the 'Moroccan Waiter Affair'" when he joined the private arms network that Ariel Sharon ran in Central America from the late 1970s, and that he "was a close associate of Panama's military intelligence chief, Manuel Noriega." By 1981, in Ben-Menashe's account, "Sharon and Harari were running what Harari described as more of a CIA network than an Israeli operation," supplying the Contras and financing itself, "according to Harari," by "transporting cocaine from South America to the United States via Central America," with Noriega "a major player."¹

Panama

In February 1988 Jose Blandon, Noriega's former consul general in New York, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations under Senator John Kerry. On February 9 he named "Mike Harari" among those with "legal dealings" with Noriega, "an Israeli general who retired and worked for 10 years with the Israel intelligence forces services, and he now works for Noriega"; asked by Kerry whether Harari trained Noriega's personal guards, he answered, "Yes. But more than training Noriega's personal guards, he has very important dealings with Noriega in the area of weapons trafficking, because he uses what is called the end user certificate," and said that "his signature on those certificates produces millions of dollars." On February 10 he said that falsifying end-user certificates was "one of Noriega's businesses. I told you that with Harari he has that business."⁴ He was also quoted as saying that "Michael Harare" had "close contacts with Noriega and was Panama's honorary consul in Tel Aviv," and that his network did "business with Noriega in Panama for a series of companies for arms contraband, smuggling to supply arms to Central America and to the counterrevolution, the Nicaragua counterrevolution." Asked by Kerry what "other things" the network handled, Blandon answered, "Drugs," and confirmed "a direct linkage" between "the Harare network and these airstrips, in which guns would go in one shipment and drugs would come out in another." "The Harare network is a network that was established with Israeli citizens, Panamanians and U.S. citizens for arms supply purposes," he said. The Israeli embassy spokesman Yosef Gal replied that Harari was "acting as a private citizen" and that Israel "had no knowledge of his activities." Harari was not named in the Miami and Tampa indictments of Noriega that month, left Panama at the time of the American invasion of December 1989 and returned to Israel.²³

PROMIS

Ben-Menashe's account of the sale of a modified PROMIS to Guatemala states that "the price Israel had to pay for this agreement was that the Eagle company, run by Pesach Ben-Or in Guatemala and his associate Mike Harari in Panama, and overseen by Ariel Sharon, would continue selling weapons to the Guatemalan government." The special counsel Nicholas J. Bua found Ben-Menashe's PROMIS affidavits contradicted by his later testimony, and no official inquiry examined Harari's part. He received the Mossad chief's medal of distinction in 2007 and was the subject of a 2014 Hebrew biography by Aaron J. Klein.¹³