The Armageddon Network

By Michael P. Saba. Brattleboro, VT: Amana Books, 1984. 221 pp. $9.95 (paper).

Reviewed by Richard H. Curtiss

A chance incident started Michael P. Saba on what he calls "a personal odyssey" that at times must have seemed a thankless, if not downright bizarre, quest. In 1978 Saba, a North Dakota businessman who had once been executive director of the National Association of Arab Americans, was passing through Washington on his way home from an overseas trade promotion trip.

In a hotel coffee shop awaiting a breakfast meeting with a business client, he became aware of the conversation at an adjoining table where "Stephen Bryen of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee" had just been introduced to visiting officials of the Israeli Ministry of Defense.

The conversation was a frank briefing by Bryen on how Israel could halt the rapid erosion of U.S. administration and congressional support that followed newly-elected Prime Minister Menachem Begin's invoking of religious justification for holding all of the West Bank Palestinian lands first seized by Israel in 1967. "We must re-establish credibility," Bryen told the group in English. "The West Bank can be gained on security grounds. To get Jackson (the late Washington Democratic Senator Henry Jackson) and the others back we must push the security issue."

Espionage in the Making

Struck by Bryen's persistent use of "well instead of "you" when talking to officials of a foreign government, Saba began discreetly taking notes. An Israeli asked Bryen if certain military information were available. "I have the Pentagon document on the bases," Saba heard Bryen reply, "which you are welcome to see."

Saba went to the Justice Department with what he had heard, and subsequently concluded that the document to which Bryen referred was most likely top secret material on defense systems of Middle East countries.

Saba describes in detail his dealings with successive FBI investigators and requests they turned up from Bryen, or from committees on which Bryen served, for material that would be of military value to the Israelis. An FBI recommendation to indict Bryen was eventually ignored by Deputy U.S. Attorney General Philip Heymann. Saba's tireless research, however, revealed that Heymann was both a long-time professional associate and close personal friend of Bryen's lawyer.

Surprisingly, all of this is only the opening section of Michael Saba's book. Because the FBI investigation dragged on—literally, for years—Saba's attention remained focussed on Bryen, a long-time staff assistant to Senator Clifford Case of New Jersey, and on Bryen's friend and mentor, Richard Perle, a long-time aide to Senator Henry Jackson. These two Senators were for years among Israel's most vocal and effective friends in Congress.

Bryen served for a time as executive director of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs in Washington, D.C. Then under the Reagan Administration, Richard Perle became Assistant Secretary of Defense and brought in Bryen as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense.

At the Pentagon, Perle and Bryen led an effort to extend and strengthen the Export Administration Act (part of which Perle had drawn up himself when he worked for Senator Jackson) to grant the Pentagon a major role in technology transfer policy. The result was a series of restrictions and cumbersome licensing procedures that made it increasingly difficult for foreign buyers, including our European allies, to do business directly with American manufacturers.

European Allies Suffer, Israel Gains

The country that benefited at every step of the way was Israel which, perhaps not coincidentally, was developing products in some of the fields most affected by the U.S. government restrictions on U.S. manufacturers and technology.

Some European firms, according to Saba, got the message. If you wanted to do business with American firms producing militarily sensitive items, the way to do it was through an Israeli representative. He quotes an unnamed Northrop sales executive as saying that "if the rest of the world is persuaded that it can gain entry to the U.S. technology market only through Israeli salesmen, who have the sole privileged access to our advanced designs and products, then Israel alone will control the lion's share of this trade which runs in the tens of billions of dollars."

Mr. Saba's book is replete with examples of how programs Messrs. Perle and Bryen created or administered provided a Measure of economic renaissance for Israel, but at great cost to the U.S.

Although his book is a shocker, Mr. Saba says its purpose is not to "convictanyone or to serve as a substitute trial." Its unpleasant revelations, however, must be seriously considered by U.S. policymakers.

Stephen Green, author of Taking Sides, another book on hidden, pro-Israel activities within the U.S. government, sums up the problem in his forward to Mr. Saba's book. The people involved in this story, he says, "probably felt they were serving not only the national security interests of Israel, but those of the U.S. as well... (however) their zeal, their lack of balance in their desire to assist Israel, seems to have warped their judgement where U.S. interests are concerned."

Richard H. Curtiss, a retired foreign service officer, is Executive Director of the American Educational Trust.