The London Times, December 22, 1996


        Revealed: Israel made the Egyptian army go to pot



        By Uzi Mahnaimi, Cairo

        IN ONE OF THE MORE BIZARRE episodes of the Middle East conflict, Israel flooded Egypt with cheap hashish for decades to make the Egyptian soldiers so stoned that they would be incapable of fighting effectively.

        Tons of hashish were smuggled from Lebanon via Israel into Egypt, according to eight Israeli officers who were directly involved and have been interviewed by The Sunday Times. The operation, codenamed Lahav (Hebrew for "blade") began in the 1960s and continued until the end of the 1980s. The shipments were co-ordinated by Israeli officers who arranged for them to be escorted to the Egyptian border in military vehicles.

        The hashish was then sold to dealers who supplied Egypt's conscript army.

        The operation was launched amid rising fears about the threat to Israel in the build-up to the Six Day war with Egypt in 1967. According to the officers, it continued well after the 1979 peace agreement between Israel and Egypt.

        One former colonel, who was in charge of shipments in the early 1970s, said: "I have no regrets. It allowed us to control and practically avoid drug smuggling into Israel and increase the use of drugs within the Egyptian army.

        "Sometimes they [the units in charge of the smuggling] said they had too much so I authorised them to dump the drugs in the sea west of Tel Aviv."

        Initially the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) intended only to cut off the traditional smuggling routes out of the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, 20 miles from the Israeli border and one of the biggest sources of hashish in the world. The idea was to block the border with Lebanon and patrol the eastern Mediterranean to stop shipments by boat.

        According to senior military sources, IDF officers soon realised they were missing a golden opportunity: they could run the drug shipments themselves, flooding Egypt with cut- price narcotics and weakening the Egyptian army.

        The proposal is said to have been passed up the military chain of command and given official sanction. Commissions from the lucrative deals are claimed to have been channelled into a secret IDF fund which paid for other covert operations.

        Last week the IDF denied all the allegations by its former members. "Officers of the IDF do not engage in drug traffic," it said.

        Those who have admitted their part deny they acted independently or for personal gain. One commander stationed at an IDF base at Nahariya, a city less than 10 miles from the Lebanese border, says he oversaw drugs being brought ashore in the early 1970s and is adamant that the operation was sanctioned by a higher authority. "What I have done was authorised by my superiors," he said.

        Detailed information about Operation Lahav has also been provided by six other military officers, two of whom are still serving in the IDF. One, involved in the project from 1977 to 1987, said the drugs were generally smuggled into Egypt from Lebanon in Israeli military trucks escorted by IDF officers.

        On most trips an Israeli army colonel was said to have sat beside a Lebanese drug dealer in a saloon car as the drugs were being escorted south. On other shipments, Israeli navy combat boats escorted Lebanese drug boats to Nahariya, from where the drugs were smuggled through Israel and across the border.

        One Israeli officer told how he first learnt about the operation more than a decade ago after being ordered by his superiors to transport "important material" from Lebanon to the Egyptian border.

        "I had to sign a document of confidentiality warning me that if I talked about what I saw I would be sentenced to at least 20 years' imprisonment," he said. "A colonel named Jacob Z escorted us into Lebanon. Jacob ordered us to start loading our truck with the contents of a Lebanese lorry which moved closer to ours.

        "When the Lebanese removed the cover from their truck, I was shocked. It was crammed with hundreds of small packages. I recognised it immediately as hashish. Jacob told me to shut up and continue loading our truck."

        Another officer said that on one occasion the Israeli army in south Lebanon was instructed to close down a selected area in the Bekaa Valley by imposing a curfew. Drug dealers then arrived with their merchandise on the Israeli border, where IDF officers were waiting to receive it.

        Several meeting points were then set up to co-ordinate the transfer of the drugs to the Egyptian drug dealers. They were told to sell the drugs to the hundreds of thousands of Egyptian soldiers posted between Sinai and Cairo.

        The Egyptian military said last week that during the late 1960s and early 1970s drug consumption in the ranks rose by 50%, with almost two out of three soldiers regularly smoking hashish.

        In Cairo, rumours that Israel was behind the increased flow of hashish into Egypt circulated for many years. Egyptian military authorities were surprised by reports after the 1967 war that some of their soldiers had been incapable during combat.

        One Israeli soldier was quoted in the Israeli press shortly after Egypt had been defeated as saying: "We were shooting them like ducks. They were running towards us as if they were on drugs."


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