The IDF's spending list: Useless planes and broken English

Around two months ago, an indictment was issued in the Kastina military tribunal against Warrant Officer Eliyahu Rahimi, who is suspected of fraud, forgery and stealing more than $40,000 from the Defense Ministry - all for allegedly lying about English lessons he never took.

There was also a major suspected of involvement in this case who was found guilty of disciplinary violations and censured.

"Between the summer of 2007 and the summer of 2009, the warrant officer served as a Defense Ministry emissary in the United States," states the indictment. "The investigation of his case began in the summer of 2009 after the supervisor of finances for the Defense Ministry delegation found major irregularities in his requests for the reimbursement of expenses for English lessons to which he was entitled."

The information reached the supervisor of security for the defense establishment, who ordered an investigation opened.

The investigation found that "the senior noncommissioned officer, together with his neighbor, Nona Friedman, an Israeli citizen, forged reports indicating that his neighbor supposedly gave him and his family English lessons, although she never did so. Later on the senior NCO forged checks and receipts, and submitted them to those in the unit responsible for reimbursements. In total, during a period of approximately two years, the senior NCO ostensibly received around $40,540 fraudulently."

Rahimi was suspended from the army in September 2009 and his trial will begin soon.

This incident shows yet again that the army and Defense Ministry send people on missions to the United States who do not speak English, and then pay a lot of money to (ostensibly) teach them the language. This is, of course, a serious waste of public funds.

Too much, too late

The reason Rahimi was in the United States in the first place is that he was a member of an Israel Defense Forces delegation staying at a base near Dallas, Texas, that took part in a venture aimed at enabling Israel to purchase the F-35 Lightning II stealth fighter jet and install special systems to meet Israel Air Force requirements.

This shows that Israel's air force is working with its American counterpart and with defense manufacturers, and is preparing for the moment it acquires what is considered the most advanced fighter plane in the world. This comes despite the fact that the Israeli government has yet to decide whether or not to purchase the jet and despite the fact that the United States has yet to agree to the Israeli air force's requests to modify the plane to its specifications.

The air force wants to purchase 22 planes for the outlandish price of around $130 million each, for a total of some $30 billion, to be paid over several years. Israel says it wants to obtain aircraft with the most advanced technology in the world and thereby maintain its qualitative edge and technological superiority over other air forces in the Middle East.

The IDF also wants the plane to be accessible in a possible attack on Iran. However, the greatest problem of all may be that even if Israel does decide to buy the fighter plane and all its demands are met, the air force wouldn't receive the first planes before 2016 - and intelligence assessments indicate that is three to five years after the time Iran is expected to go nuclear. The moment that happens, it will be too late to bomb Iran.

And if Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons by then, that means its leadership has decided not to produce them and Israel wouldn't need the F-35 to bomb the country in the first place.

Violating the sacred rule

In 2004 former Mossad chief Zvi Zamir and two retired senior Military Intelligence officers filed a complaint with the attorney general against Military Intelligence chief Eli Zeira, whom they accused of leaking the name of the best agent Israel had in the 1970s, who relayed a warning about the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Zamir, along with Amos Gilboa and Yossi Langotsky, accused Zeira of telling Israeli and foreign reporters that the agent was Ashraf Marwan, a son-in-law of Gamal Abdel Nasser and personal assistant to Nasser's successor as Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat. In June 2007, his body was found on the sidewalk beneath the balcony of his London apartment.

Attorney General Menachem Mazuz, as was his wont, hesitated and deliberated, and only after four years ordered the Shin Bet security service and the Israel Police to launch an investigation. Contributing to Mazuz's hesitation was the reaction of the Mossad, which was not eager for such an investigation to open, even though the leak related to one of its most valuable agents. The investigation opened in May 2008 and has been dragging on since then, even though it should be relatively simple since most of the materials have already been published in the press.

All the investigators needed to do was gather testimony from Zeira and the complainants (which they did), review the reports that appeared in the media and, on the basis of that, reach a decision and send it on to the attorney general. But the fact that the investigation has been proceeding very slowly and with a lot of foot-dragging by all those involved in the case may indicate that the delays are intentional.

It is possible that the investigators don't want follow through for fear that this will complicate the situation even more and open a Pandora's box that will give rise to a new wave of accusations and counter-accusations. Perhaps they are afraid that what may be the most sensitive subject in intelligence work will rise to the surface: how to recruit and handle elite agents and how to process the information they provide. Perhaps their approach is to let sleeping dogs lie.

But on the other hand, they cannot overlook the fact that Marwan has since died in a rather mysterious fall, which the British police are investigating. He appears to have been eliminated by Egyptian intelligence agents avenging his betrayal of their homeland. In other words, it is possible the agent's death was caused as a result of an information leak, an act of unparalleled severity that violates the sacred rule of intelligence work: Protect the identity of your intelligence agents.