Lekem, BIRD, BARD & BSF- Covert and Legal Ways Soviet Israel Transfers United States
Original article by Jeff Buckley: https://medium.com/@jeffbuckle....y7881/lekem-bird-bar
The agency which planted, protected, and paid Pollard is the Israeli-U.S. Binational Industrial Research and Development (BIRD) Foundation, an intergovernment organization which acts as a channel between the U.S. Treasury and State Department and the Israeli Defense Ministry and Mossad. The organization is a product of Henry Kissinger’s tenure at the State Department, and one of dozens which have been used to run joint U.S.-Israeli covert operations, of the sort typified by the Iran-Contra sales.
Key BIRD activists include:
Meir Amit, the former director of both the Mossad and Israeli military intelligence.
Yuval Ne’eman, minister of science and development, the former deputy director of military intelligence, and father of the Israeli nuclear bomb.
Dan Tolkowsky, former chief of the Israeli Air Force, and founder of one of Israel’s top arms smuggling firms, Elron-Elbit.
Itzhak Ya’akov, former chief scientist of the Israeli Defense Ministry, founder of BIRD, and currently U.S. station chief for the Defense Ministry’s intelligence agency, LEKEM.
Rafi Eytan, LEKEM chief and Pollard task-master.
Harold Katz, counsel of the Israeli Defense Ministry and BIRD.
Dr. Jordan Baruch, former assistant secretary at the U.S. Commerce Department.
Pollard was paid for his espionage by BIRD’s counsel, Harold Katz. He was tasked by the Israeli Defense Ministry’s intelligence agency, LEKEM, whose U.S. station chief is Itzhak Ya’akov. Pollard was protected by a network within the U.S. Justice Department, including former Criminal Division director William F. Weld, and former Deputy Attorney General Arnold I. Bums, who are both linked to BIRD. The BIRD Foundation was established by treaty arrangement between the United States and Israel in 1977, based on discussions held in 1975 when Kissinger was Secretary of State. Its sister organization, the Binational Agricultural Research and Development (BARD) foundation, was formed the same year. Both organizations were modeled on the Binational Science Foundation (BSF), another U.S.-Israeli organization, that had been formed under Kissinger in 1973.
As their names imply, the three organizations, which have overlapping governing boards, officially sponsor joint U.S.-Israeli industrial, agricultural, and basic scientific research. The joint projects, and associated conferences, have provided traveling Mossad officers the means to find new U.S. scientists and industrialists to recruit. These operatives have naturally targeted major U.S. university science departments and aerospace firms for penetration.
BIRD, BARD, and the BSF maintain an endowment of $300 million in Israeli banks. One bank known to be tied to the BIRD network is the Bank of Boston, which Harold Katz had used to pay Pollard for his espionage. In 1984, then U.S. Attorney in Boston William Weld protected the Bank of Boston, when it was caught laundering over $2 billion in illicit funds used to finance intelligence operations such as BIRD’s.
U.S. intelligence sources stress that the secret to the BIRD network is the petro-dollar recycling apparatus established by Kissinger following the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. As a result of that war, oil prices skyrocketed, and the Persian Gulf oil states were suddenly inundated by massive amounts of U.S. dollars. These petro-dollars, however, were never, ever substantially controlled by the Arab states, but simply siphoned back into the Western banking system …
These petro-dollars have various illicit uses. These include financing “off-budget,” “privatized” U.S. intelligence operations, outside the knowledge and reach of Congress and even the White House. The use of such schemes has now been made famous by the Iran-Contra affair. The postwar U.S. intelligence community first used such techniques when it began to fund its operations through the sale of Southeast Asian heroin. The BIRD network, and its associated covert banking apparatus, is simply one such “off-budget,” putatively U.S.-Israeli capability, that has been financed by petro-dollars and dope.