Spyfail, p.24
Spyfail, page 24
Q: Did you see the quantities of champagne bottles?
A: From time to time I saw a bottle here, a bottle there… What do you think, that I count bottles?… Maybe I count different things that are related to our existence here? Such as how many missiles are aimed at us, things like that?… In Milchan’s home, champagne was drunk in lakes, in cascades, in rivers.
Netanyahu would often give one answer, only to be contradicted when Meshulam quoted Milchan:
Q: Did your wife receive a piece of jewelry from Milchan?
A: No. I don’t know that she received [one].
Q: You don’t?
A: Maybe she did, maybe not.
Q: You don’t know?
A: I don’t know, maybe.
Q: Last September your wife received a piece of jewelry worth almost 11,000 shekels [approximately $3,000 at the time].
A: I don’t have the foggiest idea.
Q: You don’t have the foggiest?
A: I don’t have the foggiest… Nothing.
Q: I say that you knew about the item of jewelry your wife received from Milchan.
A: About the last piece of jewelry? A total lie.
At another point, Netanyahu denied making a tape recording of a conversation, only to have Meshulam produce it.
Q: You told us you didn’t make recordings. That is a lie.
A: My dear Momi, it is not a lie, just a memory problem.
Q: If it’s not a lie, sir, I don’t know—and forgive me for saying this—I don’t know what a lie is.
Q: Do you believe what you’re saying?
A: Every word.
Q: It’s even embarrassing…
A: The truth embarrasses you.
Q: Embarrassing, embarrassing…
A: Don’t talk to me like that… I’m asking you.
There would be at least three more interrogations of Netanyahu that month. They would lead, according to close associates, to haunting fears by both Bibi and Sara of once again staring at the moldy walls inside the police interrogation rooms in Petah Tikva—the same facility where Palestinians are regularly detained and often tortured. Soon after Netanyahu’s first-term defeat in 1999, around the time he became close to Milchan, both Bibi and Sara were suspected of accepting $50,000 in bribes. Although the police recommended that they both be indicted, the attorney general eventually declined. “The Netanyahus thus escaped a criminal trial by the skin of their teeth,” said Haaretz columnist Yossi Verter.
For Milchan, one of his many problems was eliminated in September 2017 when his former agent, Richard Kelly Smyth, suddenly died of a stroke. At the time, Smyth and his wife were still living meagerly in a mobile home in Lompoc, California, not far from the prison where he had been held. Nevertheless, other members of the Smyth family who worked at Milco and dealt with Milchan and the krytrons, as well as former board members, could still testify against him. And then there was Robert De Niro, to whom he had confessed. In addition, all the documents showing the transfers, as well as the phone call records, were still in FBI custody, as was Smyth’s statement to the FBI confirming Milchan’s role.
Milchan’s luck was running out. Five months later, on February 13, 2018, Chief Superintendent Meshulam recommended that he be indicted on bribery charges for showering Netanyahu and his wife with $215,000 worth of lavish “gifts” in exchange for interceding on his behalf with John Kerry and the Obama administration for his visa. He also recommended charging him with bribing Netanyahu to renew the “Milchan Law” tax exemption to save him tens of millions of dollars. However, the scheme was eventually rejected by then minister of finance Yair Lapid, now Israel’s interim prime minister. “It was not my job to help Milchan or any other tycoon, but rather to look after the country’s coffers,” said Lapid. “Despite all the pressure, I refused to pass the law.”
But after yearlong negotiations, on February 28, 2019, the prosecutors agreed to set aside the charges provided Milchan appear in court and give testimony as a key witness against Netanyahu. Some of Milchan’s friends worried that Netanyahu might retaliate somehow, given his power as prime minister. But Milchan had much more dirt on his old friend. “He won’t attack me,” he told them, sounding like a character in one of his more subpar films, “because he knows I have more bullets in the chamber.”
The prosecutors had also requested the testimony of former secretary of state John Kerry and former U.S. ambassador Dan Shapiro. But, standing behind his corrupt ally in Bibi, President Donald Trump denied the request. By then, after years of investigation, the police had discovered even more evidence of graft, bribes, and corruption by Netanyahu. And as before, to save his own skin, Milchan agreed to become a principal witness—or, as in countless Hollywood Mafia flicks, principal “rat.”
Finally, six years after the butterfly fluttered its wings in Malibu during the Uvda interview, a hurricane engulfed Tel Aviv. On November 21, 2019, Attorney General Avichai Mendelblit formally charged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with multiple crimes involving corruption, including bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. “You took the favors,” said the indictment, “in full awareness that you were taking a bribe.” It was an almost unheard-of action against a sitting head of state. Milchan was featured prominently in the indictment, which focused on his hundreds of thousands of dollars in “gifts” to Netanyahu for his visa intervention.
Among the actions mentioned as a reward for the bribes was Netanyahu agreeing to show up at Milchan’s glitzy, star-packed 12 Years a Slave Best Picture Oscar party. “As part of the relationship between you and Milchan, you acceded to his request by making a speech in his home in the United States in 2014,” it said. Bibi also let Milchan join his official party when Netanyahu addressed the U.S. Congress in 2015. Tzipi Livni, Israel’s former foreign minister, accused Netanyahu of “living at the expense of others,” adding that he no longer had “the moral right” to serve as prime minister. And former Labor leader Shelly Yachimovich said that the prime minister’s acceptance of gifts from his “sugar daddy” Milchan was “corruption exemplified.”
It was a supremely anxious time for Milchan. In his homeland of Israel he was under criminal investigation for bribery, and in his adopted homeland of the United States he was under criminal investigation for espionage and nuclear smuggling. Nevertheless, he had just begun filming his latest movie, Deep Water, an erotic thriller starring Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas and directed by Adrian Lyne. The title of Lyne’s earlier film Indecent Proposal seemed to fit Milchan’s predicament.
On February 8, 2021, a Monday, the trial of Benjamin Netanyahu opened in Jerusalem District Court on Saladin Street in East Jerusalem. Outside, grim-faced police officers, Border Police, Shin Bet agents, and members of the court security service had ringed the building in case of violence. Only a month before, thousands of insurrectionists had stormed the U.S. Capitol to overturn the U.S. election. The street was divided with Bibi-bashers on one side shouting, “He’s a thief” and “He’s an undertaker,” while across the invisible divide, a lone Bibist was draped in a “Bibi vaccinated me” T-shirt. Beyond were roadblocks, police vans, explosives detection dogs, and a low-hovering helicopter. “It was a war zone,” noted Moran Sharir in Haaretz. “It looked as though half the security and policing forces of the State of Israel were concentrated in the streets around the courthouse.”
Inside was an unusual sight. Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, was sitting in a seat at the defendant’s table, twitching, as one commentator noted, like “a drugged cockroach in a bottle,” as he waited to be called. For a dozen years, Netanyahu had instead been a man for whom others waited and waited, hoping to be called.
After about twenty minutes, the panel of three black-robed judges appeared and everyone clambered slowly to their feet as hoarse chants of “Bibi go home! Bibi go home!” could be heard through an open window. When addressed by the judges, he was shorn of his grand title and became simply “Mr. Netanyahu.”
In the meantime, on March 23, 2021, Israeli voters could at least decide whether to evict Netanyahu and Sara from the prime minister’s residence with another election, the fourth in two years. Sensing the mood throughout the country, Bibi had long had fears of voters heading to the polls at the same time that he was under indictment for bribery and other felonies, and those fears were justified. Although his Likud Party won the most seats, Netanyahu needed to form a coalition government by May 4 in order to remain prime minister. It proved to be a difficult task and instead, like his pal Donald Trump, he wanted a redo—still another election, giving him a second bite at the apple.
But that required getting the support of one of his chief rivals, former defense minister Naftali Bennett, another denizen of the extreme far right. Desperate, Netanyahu turned into Vito Corleone. “When he realized that I didn’t intend to let him drag Israel into a fifth election, he really threatened me,” said Bennett. “‘Listen,’ he said to me, ‘if I understand correctly what you’re going to do, you should know that I am going to employ my entire machine, the army against you.’” Netanyahu then “demonstrated with his arm,” Bennett said, an aircraft coming in for an attack. “I will send the drones at you, and we’ll see,” Netanyahu snarled.
Despite the threats, Bennett refused. And in the end, it was he and former finance minister Yair Lapid who formed a coalition government without Netanyahu. On June 13, 2021, Bennett was sworn in as the new prime minister. Asked about his predecessor’s corruption case, he said, “I would not like to see Netanyahu in jail, in a prisoner’s uniform. That is not an image that would bring honor to him or the country’s citizens.”
Stunned by the defeat, Netanyahu seemed for a time as if he would need to be physically removed from the official mansion, his home for a dozen years. The delay in leaving gave him time to order a massive shredding operation in the “aquarium,” a sterile area where the prime minister and his most senior aides sit. “Before I left, I took documents out of the safe, gave them to my deputy and told her to shred them immediately,” said Tzachi Braverman, Netanyahu’s cabinet secretary. “She shredded them, and with that, it was over.” In the meantime, others volunteered to help evacuate Netanyahu from the residence. “We decided to come with our truck, and we are ready to help him anytime,” said one of the demonstrators who had crowded nearby Paris Square for months, chanting for the defeat of the “Crime Minister.”
Finally, late on Sunday July 11, the Netanyahus departed the mansion in a modest Skoda, heading toward their oceanside villa in Caesarea. Left behind was their former car, a shiny armor-plated Audi. Moments after they disappeared down the road, protesters took to Facebook. “The defendant and his family fled as the last of the thieves in the night,” one wrote. For many activists, however, it was joy mixed with anxiety. While happy to see the Netanyahus vanish into the darkness, come the next morning they were not welcoming his replacement, Naftali Bennett, a pro-settlement right-wing ultra-nationalist. “There will never be a peace plan with the Palestinians,” he has said. “I will do everything in my power to make sure they never get a state.”
Among the protesters was Guy Hirschfeld. “Until Sunday I’ll fight for the establishment of a new government,” he said. “And beginning Monday morning I’ll fight that government.” He added, “In the end, the main problem is the occupation.” Nor did Bennett’s election help Israel’s image with its diaspora in the United States. In January 2022, leaders of the two largest streams of U.S. Judaism signed letters sharply critical of Bennett, describing his actions as “unacceptable” and expressing “outrage” and a sense of “betrayal.”
After originally entering a plea of not guilty, by early 2022, with so much evidence against him, Netanyahu was instead looking to settle with a plea deal. It was an outcome even endorsed by the right-wing Jerusalem Post. “The time has come for the country to move on from Netanyahu-gate,” said an editorial. The question was whether the plea would contain a clause that his crimes involved “moral turpitude,” thus ruling out any future in Israeli politics for seven years. For Netanyahu, with visions of one day returning to the prime minister’s residence, the clause was a deal-breaker and he therefore rejected the plea agreement.
Nor would the deal have ruled out jail time. “A bribery conviction, should there be one, would send him at the age of 76 or 77 to Wing 10 at Maasiyahu Prison, the maximum security facility near Ramle, for several years,” noted an analysis by Yossi Verter in Haaretz. “There he will find the tabulation of remaining days scratched into the wall by his predecessor Ehud Olmert.” In March 2015, former prime minister Olmert was convicted of fraud, breach of trust, and tax evasion and sentenced to eight months in prison. “It’s about time Israel had a prime minister who didn’t need investigating,” said Netanyahu’s former defense minister, Moshe Ya’alon. Corruption in Israel, he added, “causes me more sleepless nights than the Iranian bomb.”
But by the summer of 2022, with the trial still going on, the public was left to wonder whether Netanyahu would eventually end up in Olmert’s dingy cell or back in the lavish prime minister’s residence, which had been unoccupied since his departure. Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, in contrast, chose to live in his home on Chipman Street in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ra’anana. But despite an enormous $14 million in security upgrades, he had to endure constant “deafening” pro-Netanyahu demonstrators. Known as “Bibists,” they used powerful megaphones, sirens, and drums to let Bennett know their displeasure at his replacing their dear leader. “They were insufferable,” said a neighbor. “They said terrible things about Bennett’s children.”
In June, Bennett was out following the collapse of his coalition government, and Netanyahu was looking to take his place with a repugnant, anti-Palestinian race-baiting campaign. He said he would “never agree to allow” any Arab politicians to join his coalition. “One benefit of a victory,” noted the London Times, “is that Netanyahu could engineer a law change that would end a corruption trial in which he is accused of three counts of fraud and one of bribery.”
This time Netanyahu would be facing off against Yair Lapid, Bennett’s former foreign minister and now, with end of Bennett’s government, the caretaker prime minister until the November 1, 2022, election. Like his predecessors, Lapid promoted Jewish supremacy over Palestinians’ rights and planned no changes in the occupation. Human rights groups were the enemy; he accused Breaking the Silence of “smearing Israel abroad” for telling the truth about apartheid.
As his temporary official residence, he even chose to move into Villa Hanna Salameh at 2 Balfour Street, a home that Palestinians fled during the war in 1948. Like all property owned by Palestinians, many fleeing as a result of massive ethnic cleansing operations they call the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” it was stolen by the government with no compensation to the owners and no right of return. Known as the Absentee Property Law, a Haaretz editorial called it “incomparably broad and draconian,” and said it must be repealed. At least two former prime ministers had declined to move into similar confiscated homes.
Years before, as he waited to be called to take the witness stand, Milchan had flown back to Hollywood in his private jet. What had been a dangerous and complicated situation became even more so with Lapid now prime minister, since the two had a long history. And Lapid had worries of his own. He had also been grilled by the police about his possible involvement with Milchan and Netanyahu regarding bribes and fraud. “I remember [Milchan] and me sitting with George Clooney on the balcony,” he told the investigators. “His closeness to Bibi came from his need to be close to power for publicity. I told him: ‘He’ll just use you and you’ll become like his servant… ‘I remember I talked about it once with [Avigdor] Lieberman… I said: ‘Well, you can’t rely on Arnon, he has become like Bibi’s servant.’”
Sometime after the election, Lapid was also scheduled to testify at the trial, a time when he might be the newly elected prime minister testifying against former prime minister Netanyahu. Or it might be newly elected Prime Minister Netanyahu testifying against former prime minister Lapid. And Lapid making accusations against Milchan, or vice versa. He first became acquainted with Milchan in 1994 when working as an Israeli television journalist. “I interviewed the Dalai Lama, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Bill Gates,” Lapid told investigators. “I was traveling with a film crew abroad, and that’s how we became friends.” A year later, Milchan offered Lapid a job managing his television company in Los Angeles. He agreed but left after just six months.
In 2013, Netanyahu appointed Lapid finance minister, despite the fact that he had never even finished high school, never managed a large bureaucracy, and never served in government. Eventually fired by Netanyahu, Haaretz would report, “Lapid’s 22 months as finance minister were a disaster.” But Milchan was delighted by the appointment of his former employee and he even sent him a huge bouquet, which Lapid quickly returned.
By the summer of 2022, worried about arrest or other charges, Milchan hadn’t set foot in Israel for five long years, even staying away from his mother’s funeral. Then, as the time for his testimony approached, he began seeking ways to continue avoiding a return to Israel, including claiming ill health, an excuse the prosecutors weren’t buying. Every witness must testify, he was told, implying there were no exceptions for multibillionaire Hollywood producers or Israeli spies. And since he promised to testify in exchange for not being indicted, his failure to show up could lead to his extradition and sharing an adjoining cell with Netanyahu. “It’s difficult to guess how he will behave when the moment of truth arrives,” noted one Israeli commentator.
For decades, Milchan had gone to great lengths to hide his racist, traitorous, money-grubbing, Scrooge-like past by giving few serious interviews unless he was convinced they would be puff pieces. Now his government had turned on him, and finally, so had the public and the press. “All those who are clucking their tongues at the Netanyahus’ disgusting behavior are holding their noses to the stench of the Milchans and their aides, a stench that is possibly even worse,” wrote Gideon Levy in Haaretz. “One of the things he sought to get through this bribery was particularly stingy: He wanted to avoid paying taxes in the United States, where he lives, and also in Israel, where he was born, despite making a loud display of his patriotic emotions for Israel, as far-off Diaspora Jews are wont to do.”
