Israeli-supplied conventional arms sales and licensing agreements with South Africa include the following: Reshef-class gunboats armed with Gabriel missiles; Dabur coastal portal boats; hardened steel for South Africa's armored corps; self-propelled 105 mm howitzers; air-to-air rockets; anti-tank missiles; assault rifles; radar bases; and surveillance equipment...45 percent of Israeli arms exports between 1970 and 1979 were naval ships. South Africa purchased 35 percent of the ships exported. (11)

The U.S. government, while pretending to adhere to a 1963 United Nations embargo on military trade with South Africa, has in fact used Israel (which has refused to join the embargo) as a conduit for arms sales to the apartheid state. In 1978, American artillery shells destined for Israel ended up in South Africa. (12) An article in Columbia University's Journal of International Affairs cites U.S.-made 106-mm recoiless rifles which the South African Army got from Israel. Likewise, the South African Air Force has reportedly acquired from Israel some 25 U.S.-made Augusta-Bell 205 A helicopters. (13)

THE 1975 KISSINGER EFFORT to cement Israeli-South African military ties has worked as planned. While Israeli leaders deny that their forces are advising or patrolling with South African forces, there is much evidence to the contrary. The Rand Daily Mail of South Africa in 1981 reported that Israelis were training South African-supported UNITA guerillas, a terrorist group which has attacked a number of civilian targets in Angola.

Israel's role in funneling U.S. arms to embargoed states did not begin with South Africa. In 1979, Israel declared 11 of its American-made Huey helicopters to be obsolete, then claimed they "went astray" while en route to Singapore. The helicopters eventually turned up in the hands of the Rhodesian army, which was trying unsuccessfully to maintain white control over what is now the African country of Zimbabwe. (14)

Perhaps the most famous and oft-cited example of collaboration between America, Israel and South Africa can be found in a series of charges and counter-charges leveled in 1979. On September 22 of that year, a U.S. Vela Satellite linked to the Los Alamos Observatory recorded an atmospheric nuclear explosion in the South Atlantic. A radio telescope at the U.S. observatory in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Navy Research Laboratory both picked up signs of the blast as well. At a CIA briefing to Congress, it was revealed that a South African naval task force had been in the area in question at the time. That part of the sea is avoided by all shipping vessels.

A month later, ABC News reported that something had happened, and the previously silent State Department, Pentagon and CIA acknowledged that a nuclear bomb had indeed been detected. But the White House, after forming a task force to cope with a public outcry, officially concluded that the Vela Satellite, after correctly identifying 41 nuclear explosions between 1969 and 1979, had made an error on its 42nd detection. British scientists reported that at the U.S. National Technical and Information Services, which records date on nuclear explosions, ordinary information for the period in question was missing.

The plot thickened. It became know that just after the day of the probable explosion. Col. Amos Horey, a nuclear scientist with the Israeli armed forces had visited South Africa and met with Abraham Rouse, the head of South Africa's Atomic Energy Board. Israel had reportedly already effected an exchange of South African enriched uranium for Israeli nuclear technology. A British team of investigative reporters, after surveying the evidence available at the time, concluded that the 1979 nuclear blast was an Israeli-South African warhead fired from a Belgian and American-made howitzer. (15)

In addition to denying charges that Israel had nuclear ties with the apartheid state, the Israeli government withdrew the press credentials of a CBS reporter and censored a book by two Israeli journalists. (16)

Notes

(1) Economist, Nov. 5, 1977

(2) Ibid

(3) Azim Hussain "The West South Africa and Israel. A Strategic Triangle," in Third World Quarterly, Jan., 1982, p. 71.

(4) Dan Jacobean, "The Jews of South Africa." In Commentary, Jan., 1967.

(5) Hussian, p. 70.

(6) Ibid