Spyfail, p.25
Spyfail, page 25
While waiting, he turned his attention to his latest flick. The $80 million screwball comedy opened in October 2022 to “withering reviews and bad buzz,” according to Variety, along with a 28 percent “rotten” ranking on Rotten Tomatoes. The Daily Beast called it an “all-around disaster.” Among the stars was his old pal Robert De Niro, who by then was deep in his own troubles and reduced to making commercials for Warburtons bagels and Kia automobiles. Then there were the films where he would demand an exorbitant amount for little more than a walk-on part to boost a B movie’s overseas sales, like the low-budget 2022 Savage Salvation—low-budget except for De Niro’s fee of $11 million, transportation in a Gulfstream IV, and $100,000 for a family vacation, via a Gulfstream, all for eight days’ work. “Fees for De Niro,” said the Los Angeles Times, “ate up half the film’s budget.” Which meant minimal pay for the rest of the hardworking, full-time cast and crew.
Like Milchan, De Niro also seemed to believe that multimillionaires and multibillionaires should be immune from paying taxes. According to his divorce lawyer, Caroline Krauss, the actor was millions of dollars behind on his taxes. On top of that were millions more owed to his estranged wife, Grace Hightower. He was also being sued for $12 million by a former employee, Graham Chase Robinson, who accused him of “gratuitous unwanted physical contact,” being “verbally abusive,” and making “sexually-charged comments to her.” Among the evidence was a voicemail recording De Niro once left her when she didn’t pick up the phone: “You fucking don’t answer my calls. How dare you? You’re about to be fired. You’re fucking history,” he screamed. “This is bullshit. How dare you fucking disrespect me? You gotta be fucking kidding me, you spoiled brat! Fuck you!” De Niro denied all the charges.
But for Milchan, remaining in the United States also has its dangers. Since there is no statute of limitations for espionage, he may someday face arrest. In that case, Netanyahu may be subpoenaed as a witness against him, along with John Kerry. And if Milchan testifies against the former prime minister, the former prime minister may look forward to testifying against Milchan. And then there are the questions surrounding his alleged failure to pay any taxes, despite making billions, for a decade or more.
Given the mountain of evidence against Milchan, it is now up to President Joseph Biden to decide whether political courage should finally win out over political expediency, and likewise justice for millions of Americans over millions in cash from politically powerful special interests. But the odds are unlikely. According to the nonprofit campaign data site OpenSecrets, Biden was the top recipient of pro-Israeli donations over the years, totaling over $4,228,000.
By the time Milchan arrived back in Malibu from Israel, it was nearly sixty years since he first joined LAKAM and began his career secretly assisting Israel build its covert stockpile of nuclear weapons at Dimona. It was a complex process that over the decades has created enormous amounts of highly lethal nuclear waste, much of it with a half-life measured in tens of thousands of years. By comparison, when the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in Southern California was closed down in 2013, it had accumulated sixteen hundred tons of nuclear waste in the form of spent fuel rods over its forty-five-year life span. Dimona, by contrast, was built ten years earlier and is still in operation. And its volatile waste has been sitting in aging containers, buried or aboveground, dangerously close to the nuclear plant. Considering the nuclear disasters at Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011, such conditions represent a great risk.
Around the same time that both Milchan and Netanyahu were coming under investigation, nuclear scientists at Dimona were realizing they had a very serious problem. With the deadly waste possibly leaking into the soil, there was the potential for widespread contamination as well as the risk of explosion from escaping gases. The problem was exacerbated by secrecy due to Israel being the only country in the world to conceal the existence of its nuclear weapons program. Along with North Korea it is also one of four rogue countries not a member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
As a result, Israel has continuously rejected any international safeguards, inspections, or accountability, a position that is coming increasingly under attack as unsustainable. What “the Israeli government is doing at this secret nuclear weapons plant is something for the Israeli government to come clean about,” argued Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Washington-based Arms Control Association. In contrast, Iran is a full signatory to the treaty and allows UN inspections.
By the 2000s, fears of a nuclear disaster began growing, and in 2004 the Israeli military even began passing out iodine pills in Dimona in the event of a radioactive leak. Though the reactor was initially slated for closure around 2023, Israel decided instead to extend its life span to 2040, at which time it will be over eighty years old. This was a potentially dangerous decision, with the city of Beersheba and its population of 209,000 to the north and the resort city and port of Eilat to the south. Soon, as concern over a homegrown nuclear catastrophe at Dimona began outweighing the potential of a nuclear attack from Iran, scientists and engineers at the facility began looking into ways to rebury the corroding waste. And in early January 2021, just a few months before the election, cameras on China’s SuperView-1 commercial satellite captured an image of the first new sizable project at Dimona in decades.
What Princeton University’s International Panel on Fissile Materials called a “significant new construction” consisted of a large hole several stories deep, about 165 yards long, 65 yards wide, and a few feet from the aging heavy-water reactor. Then just over a mile from the plant were boxes stacked in two rectangular-shaped holes with concrete bases. While there were a number of possible explanations for the excavation, high among them was digging up the old, worn containers of nuclear waste for reburial in more secure containers.
And just as the United States had long conspired with Israel to cover up the country’s illegal nuclear stockpile, hiding its existence from both the American public and the world, they would now help Netanyahu bury much of the deadly evidence.
According to U.S. Department of Energy documents, the first steps in Washington’s quiet assistance to Netanyahu began when a joint project was formed that included scientists from Dimona with those from the U.S. Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. For a number of years, Sandia had been experimenting with the idea of burying highly radioactive nuclear waste deep in boreholes drilled three miles down into crystalline rock. But due to objections first in North Dakota and then South Dakota, they had largely given up—until Israel came along. Following a number of conferences and visits both in the United States and Israel, the two organizations began looking for locations in the Yamin Plain near Dimona to begin drilling the boreholes.
But where Sandia’s original U.S. plans involved burying the plutonium and other waste miles underground beneath groundwater for complete safety, Dimona was only interested in going down several hundred yards. “With limited geological options for disposal, intermediate-depth borehole disposal is being considered in the arid Yamin Plain region of the northeastern Negev desert at depths of several hundred meters below ground surface,” said a Sandia report in March 2020. By 2022 a number of potential borehole sites had been mapped and the project was continuing, although no waste had yet been buried and there was no guarantee of success. Thus the danger would remain.
Despite the billions in yearly aid and the extensive U.S. assistance to Netanyahu with Dimona, there was no letup in Israel’s extensive spying and covert operations against Americans. By 2015, Israel was facing a new enemy, one against which its armory of nuclear weapons was useless. Where once the greatest threat to the state’s survival was incoming missiles, foreign invasion, and vast armies of soldiers, it was now incoming boycotts, foreign isolation, and vast armies of activists. The new enemy was delegitimization, the loss not of Israel’s territory but of its moral authority—to be judged like apartheid South Africa in the eyes of the world, an odious, racist, pariah state boycotted, sanctioned, and scorned.
In 2013 Israel’s highly respected Haaretz newspaper carried the distressing headline “Israel Among World’s Least Popular Nations.” It noted that the “only states less popular are North Korea, Pakistan and Iran.” The article reflected the results of the annual BBC World Service Country Ratings Poll, made up of the views of nearly twenty-five thousand people in twenty-four countries around the world. It was clear that through its actions, Israel was rapidly delegitimizing itself in the eyes of much of the world.
But rather than deciding to finally bring his country in line with international laws, norms, and basic human rights obligations, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu chose instead to go on the offensive. The United States was the one country Netanyahu dared not lose, the one country that filled his coffers with billions of American taxpayer dollars every year, and the one country that stood between Israel and scores of harsh UN resolutions and sanctions. But it was also the country where the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement was increasingly gaining in popularity, an unsustainable situation. He would therefore declare war on the movement, and on other human rights groups involved in the nonviolent struggle to force Israel to end its military occupation of Palestine.
And because a new and different enemy required a new and different spy organization, Netanyahu assigned the mission to the highly secret Ministry of Strategic Affairs, run by Gilad Erdan. He quickly began plotting his covert operations in the United States.
BOOK FIVE
THE INFILTRATORS
CHAPTER 21
Adelson’s Army
Sheldon Adelson’s Venetian Resort sits at the heart of the Las Vegas strip like a neon nirvana. Along with its adjacent Palazzo, it contains seventy-one hundred all-suite rooms and forty restaurants, making it the second biggest hotel in the world, after only Adelson’s Venetian Hotel in Macau, the largest occupied building on earth. Beneath the trompe-l’oeil sky ceiling, opera-singing gondoliers transport tourists in motorized gondolas over two man-made canals of chlorine blue water. Elsewhere, visitors marvel at Disneyesque replicas of the Rialto Bridge, the Doge’s Palace façade, and the Campanile di San Marco tower. To empty their wallets and bank accounts, the casino covers 120,000 square feet of space with over 1,247 slot machines, 139 games, and a high-limit salon for baccarat and other tables.
For the big winners, shops along the canal sell items such as a baccarat decanter of Rémy Martin Cognac Louis XIII Legacy for $24,499.99, or a Greubel Forsey Grande Sonnerie watch for $1.2 million. And for the super-rich, the hotel offers the four-day “Want the World” package for $450,000. It includes transport to Las Vegas in a private jet, pickup in a Maybach, a key to the sixty-five-hundred-square-foot presidential suite, a private butler, and monogrammed red silk pajamas.
On the weekend of June 5–6, 2015, several hundred well-dressed and well-heeled visitors entered the Venetian’s frescoed lobby with its gilded sphere held up by four golden female statues. They then bypassed the baritone gondoliers, the faux St. Mark’s Square, and the acres of vices as they quietly made their way to a side conference room in the hotel’s complex. Gathering behind closed doors was an army of middle-aged millionaires and billionaires on a mission. “All proceedings,” participants were told, “shall remain strictly confidential.” The invitation warned that that they must agree “not to discuss the events of the conference with media before, during and after” the meeting. What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.
Adelson, long the mogul-in-chief of Sin City and at the time the eighth richest human on the planet, with $40 billion, was used to holding court in his gaudy palace, especially during a presidential election year. In a traditional spectacle some referred to as “the Sheldon Adelson suck-up fest,” political hopefuls seeking his cash unashamedly took turns prostrating themselves in front of him, or jogging alongside the scooter he used to navigate around his empire, a dark blue three-wheeled Afikim Caddy complete with headlight and cane holder.
In 2012 he spent over $150 million, more money than anyone else in American history, according to ProPublica, to elect Mitt Romney and other Republican candidates. And in April, in preparation for the 2016 election, he hosted a three-day gathering of the Republican Jewish Coalition, on whose board he sits. As expected, the candidates came bearing gifts, inevitably with Israel rather than the United States in mind. “It’s not complicated for Republican politicians to come to the RJC and say, ‘We should stand with Israel,’” exclaimed Texas senator Ted Cruz. “Unless you’re a blithering idiot, that’s what you say when you come here.”
Republican Party bundler Fred Zeidman, a friend of Adelson who attended the 2014 RJC conference, agreed. “His priority is Israel,” he said. “I assure you that the first question is ‘tell me where you are on the safety and security of the state of Israel.’” Adelson’s single-minded obsession with Israel long ago morphed into dangerous fanaticism. “I had this crazy Jewish billionaire, yelling at me,” President George W. Bush told an Israeli official after Adelson discovered that Bush was considering a restart of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Adelson was opposed to any and all concessions to the Palestinians.
But the June conclave would be very different from the RJC gatherings, and it would take place behind tightly closed doors. Consisting of about two hundred people from fifty of the most far-right pro-Israel organizations in the country, many of them super-rich who had arrived on private jets, they would make up what would become Adelson’s Army, a task force of Gulfstream warriors. The objective was the launch of a secret psychological and propaganda war targeting Americans on behalf of Israel.
On the stage joining forces were the opposing generals, megabillionaire Adelson, the largest donor to Donald Trump and the Republican Party; and multibillionaire Haim Saban, the largest donor to Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. Both Saban and Adelson’s wife held dual Israeli/American citizenship. Adelson, however, seemed to regret only having U.S. citizenship. In a talk in Israel a few years earlier he had disparaged the American military and implied he felt a greater loyalty to Israel than the United States. “The uniform that I wore in the military, unfortunately, was not an Israeli uniform. It was an American uniform,” he complained. He added that both his wife and one of his daughters served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), and four of his five children were born in Israel. And he hoped that one of his sons would become “a sniper for the IDF.” “He’s a gun freak,” Adelson boasted.
Leading the charge from Israel would be the commander in chief, Benjamin Netanyahu. “Greetings from Jerusalem,” he told the crowd in a letter read from the podium by Adelson. Dressed in a chestnut brown suit with a maroon tie and matching handkerchief, an Israeli flag to his left, Adelson issued Netanyahu’s call to arms. “Delegitimization of Israel must be fought, and you are on the front lines,” he said, adding that “the Israeli government is committed to launching assertive and innovative programs and to joining you and many others around the world to combat the lies and slander that are leveled against us.” Then, engaging in rabid fearmongering, Saban warned of “an anti-Semitic tsunami that’s coming at us.” It was a lie, as Adelson himself would admit in Israel. There is “little to no sign in American society” of significant anti-Semitism, he said.
Netanyahu was asking Adelson’s task force to launch, on Israel’s behalf and with its secret financial and intelligence support, a nationwide covert operation targeting Americans. It was a dangerous proposition with the potential of turning those taking part into foreign agents of the State of Israel, a serious crime. Before the night was over, the group had raised upward of $50 million for Netanyahu’s propaganda war inside the United States; tens of millions more would covertly come from the Israeli government through a variety of hidden fronts and shell organizations. At the same time the summit was taking place, Netanyahu was meeting with his top national security and intelligence officials. He told them they would receive at least $30 million from the government for the secret offensive, and with the help of Adelson’s group and others possibly as much as $900 million.
The target of Netanyahu’s secret war in the United States was not a team of Iranian terrorists with plans to blow up the Israeli embassy, or a plot to assassinate Israeli diplomats. Instead, it was the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, a dedicated and growing assortment of college students and human rights supporters scattered across the country armed with Twitter followings as bullhorns. Their goal: to rally the world to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel until it ends its brutal, racist, and illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories.
And the best way to counter this movement was with lots of money to buy political power in America. Haim Saban, the cosponsor of the secret conclave, along with his Israeli/American wife, would donate $6.4 million to Hillary Clinton’s campaign, more than any other Hollywood donor. And less than a month after the secret Las Vegas meeting, Clinton wrote a “Dear Haim” letter to Saban expressing her “alarm” over the BDS movement. It was an organization she had never before paid any attention to. “I am seeking your thoughts and recommendations on how leaders and communities across America can work together to counter BDS,” she wrote. “From Congress and state legislatures to boardrooms and classrooms… I will be speaking out on this issue in the weeks ahead.”
