Project Flower: When the Shah Bought an Israeli Bomb

In the midst of a massive Israel-US campaign to deny Iran a (purported) nuclear weapon, a report by a former NY Times journalist exposed a 60 year-old Israeli project to develop nuclear-capable ballistic missiles for the Shah in the mid -1970s. As Elaine Sciolino wrote:

…Had history turned out differently, Iran’s Islamic Republic could have possessed a vast arsenal of advanced long-range ballistic missiles armed with nuclear warheads, able to strike targets hundreds of miles away. All thanks to Israel.

…Israel was prepared to develop surface-to-surface missiles with Iran behind Washington’s back. Israeli officials even suggested to Iran that such missiles could carry nuclear warheads.

…Code-named “Flower,” it was the most ambitious of six oil-for-arms contracts signed in 1977 by the Shah and Shimon Peres, then Israel’s defense minister. The project called for missiles with 750-kilogram warheads (1,650 pounds) and a range of up to 300 miles. The plan was to extend the range of an existing Israeli missile and replace its American-made parts so that Israel could export it without needing U.S. approval. The missiles were to be routed through a phony Swiss network, then assembled and tested in Iran.

The above passage summarizes an original NY Times report which Sciolino published in 1986. Project Flower (named for an Israeli sea-to-sea missile) was a top-secret effort to produce a version of the Israeli Jericho ballistic missile, which to this day is tasked with carrying Israel’s nuclear warheads. The Shah paid Israel $500-million to pursue the program. An Israeli defense official said these funds provided a crucial funding source for development of weapons which became Israel’s “front line of defense.”

This was only a few years after Israel itself had produced its first atomic bomb. But it was more than willing to share. Moshe Dayan said that though Israel never explicitly told the Shah that it had such a weapon and was willing to turn it over to Iran, the Iranian military officer who was the liaison with the Israelis told Sciolino that he clearly understood that the Israelis would be willing to do so.

If Iran had obtained the Israelis WMD, it would have created two nuclear powers in an already dangerous, tinder-box region.  It also would have enabled the Shah to become the predominant military power among the Arab and Muslim states in the region. In his book on the clandestine post-1979 war against Iran, Ronen Bergman implies that Israel could have brought a disaster upon itself, had Project Flower been completed:

If Khomeini had not take power as early as he did, he might have taken over a country armed with long-range missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads…

This underscores the foolhardiness of arming a foreign ally with advanced weapons systems, including nuclear reactors, which could fall into the hands of a future hostile regime. Something similar happened when Ronald Reagan armed the Afghan mujahadeen, who later became our sworn enemy after the Bin Laden 9/11 attack.

It only took a few short years after the overthrow of the Shah, before Israel began to warn the world (falsely) that the Islamic Republic was on the verge of creating such a weapon. It has been promoting this falsehood ever since, which is part of a carefully orchestrated campaign to demonize Iran, setting the stage for the attacks it is now waging against it. The Israeli claim has been widely accepted by gullible national leaders and global media.

German media mogul, Mathia Döpfner, is the CEO of the publishing house, Axel Springer, whose founder was a Nazi supporter.  The former asserted that Politico (one of Springer’s publications) journalists don’t need to buttress their reporting saying Ziran is making a nuclear weapon, because it is “self-evident:

Döpfner stressed that he did not feel it was necessary to muster evidence to support a point he viewed as self-evident. “I think you have to qualify or prove arguments or points if they are new or if they are debatable,” he said. “But for me at least, these two facts — that the Iranians are working on the nuclear bomb and that they are aggressors for decades — are so obvious, so proven for many times, they are almost — it’s like saying America is the biggest democracy in the world.  “I don’t have to prove that.”

No true journalist would ever say such a thing. Only Zionist media tools would do so.

Israel and Iran: a catastrophe narrowly averted

Despite the vitriol directed at Iran over it’s imaginary WMD, it was Israel which came within a year of offering the Iranian dictator the most powerful weapon the world has known. It did so in contravention of the Nuclear Non- Proliferation pact (which it has refused to sign). It did do without any consideration of the impact it would have in the delicate regional security environment. It did so purely out of short-term self- interest, an approach it has followed since its founding. Such short-term strategic thinking has led to repeated massive blunders, such as the 1973 War, the current war against Iran, the 20-year occupation of southern Lebanon and repeated invasions there and in Gaza since.  None of which have offered any long-term viable model for regional stability.

The termination of Project Flower convinced the Iranians they must pursue such a program independently without relying on foreigners. That launched them on their subsequent trajectory to self reliance in these matters. This led in part to Iran’s parish status. It engendered mutual mistrust between it and western states about the nature and status of this project. If the world had not ostracized the Islamic Republic after 1979, things may have turned out differently.

It should be a cautionary tale to countries like the US, which propose to develop nuclear reactors for countries like Saudi Arabia. There is no guarantee that the bomb will remain in the hands of the regime for which we intend it. Regimes rise. Regimes fall. Once you’ve given away the genie, there is no way of putting it back in the bottle.

Maxwell-Mossad spyware partnership

On a related matter, the Epstein’s Zorro Ranch in New Mexico is back in the news. Some of the Epstein files offer tantalizing claims that he was a Mossad asset. Much of this comes from an FBI source, whose name is redacted.  Another figure about whom far more detailed claims have been made is media mogul, Robert Maxwell, father of Ghislaine Maxwell.

Gordon Thomas, a former Times of London security reporter who published numerous stories about the Mossad, including his book, Gideon’s Spies: the Secret History of the Mossad prepared a 1999 sworn affidavit about Maxwell’s role in a Mossad operation. Relying on Mossad spymaster, Rafi Eitan, Thomas claims that a US official gave Eitan software which provided a backdoor to multiple foreign intelligence agency databases.  This made the Israelis privy to some of the world’s most closely guarded secrets.

Eitan is considered a key figure in the founding of the Israeli intelligence service.  His storied past included the capture of Eichmann, the assassination of Moroccan dissident Mehdi Ben Barka, running his most notorious asset, Jonathan Pollard, and the theft of enriched US uranium, orchestrated through another front company owned by future Hollywood producer, Arnon Milchan. The latter admitted in the past few years that he was a “Mossad operative.”

Thomas focussed on a cyber-operation Eitan engineered, which he viewed as the crowning achievement of his career:

…The sale to foreign governments through front companies of a computer software system for tracking terrorists, and Israeli intelligence’s secret downloading and copying of the information on terrorists that each government entered into its new terrorist-tracking computer system…[It] exploit[ed] a trap door in the form of a special microchip that it had secretly installed on each computer on which the terrorist-tracking software operated.

The software, named PROMIS, was first developed by a legal services company, INSLAW and intended for use tracking legal cases.  The CIA in turn modified it to track terror records on foreign government databases.  Officials in the US government then gave Eitan a copy of the software. Eitan then worked with Israeli intelligence programmers to modify and use the program for Mossad’s purposes.

Subsequently, he developed an even more ambitious plan to disseminate the software: he approached Maxwell, whose publishing empire included a sales and marketing division, to sell PROMIS worldwide.  The arrangement was very lucrative, earning him $500-million in sales.

Numerous media reports have claimed Maxwell was a Mossad asset.  In fact, the espionage section of the FBI tracked his travel to the US, closely monitoring those he contacted while here, including phone calls he made.  Given his relationship with Maxwell’s daughter, Ghislane, a close relationship with Ehud Barak and other Israeli figures, and donations to Zionist organizations documented in the files–it’s entirely possible Epstein was an asset as well.  Though his relationship may have been entirely transactional, rather than inspired by any strong sense of loyalty to the Zionist cause.

The “trapdoor” (now called a “backdoor”) referred to above was exploited to spy on foreign intelligence agencies; notably Jordanian intelligence, which tracked Palestinian “terrorists” in the aftermath of Black September, when the PLO sought to overthrow King Hussein.  The Israeli version of PROMIS employed a microchip which bypassed cyber-security protection to “copy and download information about terrorists who were being tracked by the foreign governments.”  According to Thomas, Eitan also claimed the software, was modified by Israeli programmers to use early versions of AI to “eliminate superfluous lines of enquiry and accumulate and correlate data at a speed and scale beyond human capability.”

This type of operation has been duplicated numerous times by the Mossad.  Most recently, the Hezbollah pager project employed an unwitting European distributor who shipped the pagers within which detonators had been implanted.  The resulting explosions killed 15 people including children, and maimed thousands.  Over a decade earlier, the intelligence agency used a front company to infiltrate the Iranian nuclear supply chain. The result was Stuxnet malware which sabotaged Iranian centrifuges, rigged to explode after installation.

The most common factor in all of these operations is that they have a short-term effect. But they do little or nothing to advance Israel’s long-term interests; unless those interests are to foment permanent regional dysfunction, rather than peace and stability (which is the policy of most countries).

Both Eitan and another Mossad chief, Tamir Pardo, have noted that the activities of Israeli intelligence have a criminal nature.  The latter told an Israeli TV interviewer that the “fun part” of his job was “having a license to crime.”  Eitan, Milchan, Maxwell, Pollard, etc. were criminals acting on behalf of a state.  Israeli intelligence is a criminal enterprise on behalf of a criminal state.

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