Original name: Ehud Brog
Born: February 12, 1942, Mishmar HaSharon kibbutz, Palestine [now in northern Israel] (age 83)
Title / Office: prime minister (1999-2001), Israelforeign minister (1995-1996), Israel
Political Affiliation: Israel Labour Party
Role In: Arab-Israeli wars two-state solution
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ehud-Barak
In Ronen Bergman’s book Rise and Kill First, we find many mentions of Ehud Barak. We can start in 1986 working in the West Bank operations:
Back in 1986, Major General Ehud Barak, then the head of the IDF Central Command, together with the head of the operations department of the General Staff, Major General Meir Dagan, set up a highly secretive unit, Duvdevan (Hebrew for “Cherry”), to combat terrorists in the West Bank. The unit was now put into action. Its fighters were Mistaravim who would work undercover, generally posing as Arabs, deep inside Palestinian territory, and hit the people on the wanted list. The nucleus of Duvdevan comprised graduates of elite IDF units, particularly the naval commandos. The Cherry troops exhibited exceptional operational capabilities, thanks to the long and grueling training they underwent, which included special instruction to become familiar with the Arab territories, dress, and disguise techniques. They were uniquely capable of blending in when they were in crowded and hostile Palestinian environments, even in small villages where strangers attracted immediate attention. It was Cherry that had posed as an ABC crew and abducted Nizar Dakdouk in Salfit.
In 1991:
The upgrades to the drones were part of a larger technological push in the IDF, which in the late 1980s invested significant resources to acquire and develop precision ordnance—“smart bombs” that could hit their targets more accurately, making them more effective and less likely to inflict collateral damage. This process was accelerated when technology buff Ehud Barak, who wanted to build “a small, smart army,” became chief of staff in 1991, in effect shaping the Israeli war machine for the coming decades. Under his direction, the IAF’s Apache attack helicopters were equipped with laser-guided Hellfire missiles.
And here in 1992:
In the end, it was decided to strike at Saddam at the only place outside of prohibitively well-guarded Baghdad where everyone could be sure that he himself, and not one of his doubles, would be: his family’s plot in the cemetery at Tikrit, for the funeral of someone very close to him. That someone would be his uncle, Khairallah Tulfah, the man who had raised him, who was very ill. The Israelis closely followed the treatment Tulfah was receiving in Jordan and waited for news of his death. But he kept clinging to life, so an alternative plan was decided upon. Instead of Tulfah, the Mossad would eliminate Barzan al-Tikriti, the Iraqi ambassador to the United Nations. Sayeret Matkal commandos would be flown to Tikrit in helicopters that would land some distance away and then proceed to the cemetery in jeeps that looked exactly like the ones the Iraqi army used but were in fact equipped with a special system that turned the roof of the car upside down and pulled out guided missiles. When Saddam came to attend the funeral, they would launch the missiles and kill him. If this plan succeeded, many of those involved believed, chief of staff Ehud Barak would go into politics and become a candidate with a good chance of becoming prime minister. This would be only natural for a man who was marked for greatness from the time he was a young lieutenant. At the huge Tze’elim training camp, in Israel’s Negev Desert, Sayeret Matkal built a model of the Hussein family’s cemetery and practiced the operation. When they were ready, on November 5, 1992, the IDF’s top brass came to watch a dress rehearsal. The hit team with the missiles took up positions, with members of the unit’s intelligence and administrative staffs playing Saddam and his entourage.
Then
The SLA troops were also dissatisfied, feeling like cannon fodder, restrained from fighting back. Aql al-Hashem, the deputy commander of the militia, had for years pleaded with Israel to at least target Hezbollah officers. These calls didn’t fall on deaf ears. On January 1, 1995, Amnon Lipkin-Shahak succeeded Ehud Barak as chief of staff. Determined to escape the shadow of his predecessor, he decided to change the policy in Lebanon. From now on, it would be a war, and Hezbollah would be treated as a full-fledged enemy. He needed resources: personnel who could gather intelligence and special-operations squads skilled in sabotage and assassination.
And
As for then–chief of staff Ehud Barak, he admitted the facts, but not the error. “The question,” he said, “is how did things look at the time of the act? We had identified Mussawi as a threat, and we thought it was right to strike at him. This was correct thinking for that moment. It was very difficult to foresee then that he would be replaced by Nasrallah, who seemed less significant then and less influential, and that he would become a leader with such great power. It was also difficult to know that Mughniyeh would come to be his number two, who turned out to be super-talented at operations.” By 1995, he remained alive, and he was now only one of Israel’s antagonists.
Further
BENJAMIN NETANYAHU DID NOT wait for the final results of the elections. On May 17, 1999, shortly after the TV exit polls began indicating a clear victory for the Labor Party and its leader, Ehud Barak, Netanyahu announced his retirement from political life. Netanyahu had been elected because of Hamas suicide bombings, but his years as prime minister had been marked by a series of political scandals, coalition crises, security debacles like the Mashal affair, and a diplomatic dead end with the Palestinians. Barak was perceived by the electorate as Netanyahu’s exact opposite—the IDF’s most decorated soldier, a disciple of and successor to Yitzhak Rabin who had promised to get the army out of Lebanon and to bring peace. In his victory speech, Barak said that it was “the dawn of a new day” as he stood before hundreds of thousands of supporters in Tel Aviv’s central plaza, now called Rabin Square, after the prime minister who’d been assassinated there four years earlier. “Peace is a common interest, and it bears within it enormous benefits for both peoples,” Barak told the Knesset a few months later, declaring, “True peace with Syria and the Palestinians is the peak of the realization of the Zionist vision.” With his tremendous energy, decisiveness, and sense of purpose, Barak set about implementing his policies. Once the master of special ops, he was imbued with self-confidence, and sure that he could plan diplomatic maneuvers the same way he had planned targeted killing operations behind enemy lines—with strict attention to detail, careful planning to anticipate all possible contingencies, and aggressive action when necessary. But it turned out that although these methods worked well on a small scale, they did not always work with complex international processes. And Barak seldom listened to the advice of his aides. Under America’s aegis, Israel engaged in negotiations with Syria. Acting as Barak’s emissary, President Clinton met with President Hafez al-Assad in Geneva on March 26, 2000. Clinton told Assad that Barak was willing to withdraw from the entire Golan Heights, except for some very minor border adjustments, in exchange for peace, though Clinton’s language was somewhat less enthusiastic and alluring than might have been expected. Assad, who came to the meeting suffering from a variety of ailments, including incipient dementia and exhaustion, was more obdurate than ever about getting every inch back. The encounter blew up only a few minutes after the two presidents had finished initial formalities and begun discussing the substance of the dispute. Barak had to keep his promise and pull out of Lebanon, but without any agreement with either Syria or Lebanon. In order to prevent Hezbollah from exploiting the retreat to kill a large number of IDF troops, however, it had to be carried out overnight and kept a complete surprise. Shortly before the pullout, AMAN managed to locate Imad Mughniyeh, Hezbollah’s military chief and number one on Israel’s wanted list, as he conducted tours of inspection along the confrontation lines in southern Lebanon to see whether Barak was about to keep his promise and pull out, and to prepare his militia for the day after. They planned to have him assassinated. But Barak, who came to the northern border and met with top military officials there on May 22 for an urgent consultation, ordered them only “to continue intelligence surveillance of the object M,” and not to strike him, in effect liquidating the entire project. Barak’s first priority was to make sure the retreat was carried out without any casualties, and he feared that assassinating Mughniyeh would provoke Hezbollah into bombarding Israeli communities or launching major attacks against Israeli targets abroad, which would require an Israeli response and make a quiet, surprise retreat all but impossible. Barak was right, at least in the short term. The day after the meeting at the northern border, he ordered the immediate withdrawal of the IDF from Lebanon. The entire withdrawal was carried out without any casualties. But Nasrallah celebrated the withdrawal as a complete victory for his side, depicting the Israelis as cowardly and fearful, running away from Mughniyeh’s army. “Israel is feebler than a spider’s web,” he crowed. “A spirit of defeatism is prevalent in Israeli society … the Jews are a lot of financiers and not a people capable of sacrifice.” In retrospect, the end of the Israeli occupation in Lebanon came at the worst possible moment for Barak. He saw that he couldn’t reach a deal with the Syrians, so he decided to speed up the handling of the Palestinian situation. But there were many Palestinians who saw the retreat from Lebanon as proof that guerrilla tactics and terrorism could defeat the strongest military and intelligence forces in the Middle East, and they began contemplating the possibility of applying these methods to their own arena. Clinton invited Barak and Arafat to Camp David in July 2000, in order to hold marathon negotiations and, hopefully, reach a peace agreement. “I knew that such an agreement had to include a Palestinian state and a compromise in Jerusalem,” Barak said, “and I was ready for that. I was sure I would be able to persuade the public in Israel that it was to our advantage, that there was no other option.” Arafat, for his part, did not want to come, and he agreed only after Clinton promised him that he would not be blamed if the talks failed. During this time, Israeli intelligence indicated that ferment among the Palestinians had reached new heights. The Palestinian Authority was reported to be making preparations for an armed confrontation with Israel in order to pressure it into making far-reaching concessions. “We were not preparing, and we did not intend to start, a confrontation with Israel, but ‘hope is by nature an expensive commodity,’” said Jibril Rajoub, quoting Thucydides. Barak told his associates, “We’re on a giant ship that’s about to collide with an iceberg, and we will manage to divert it only if we succeed at Camp David.” The atmosphere at the meetings was festive. Barak was ready for concessions that left the American participants “open-mouthed and overjoyed,” including a major compromise that would have given the Palestinians parts of East Jerusalem and international rule over the Temple Mount, the site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque. No Israeli leader had ever agreed to give away so much, or to make compromises on matters that until then had been considered taboo. But Barak hadn’t done enough in advance to prepare the ground for the meeting; he hadn’t tried to get the broader Arab world to press Arafat to compromise on Palestinian principles like the right of return of refugees. He also behaved in a manner that was perceived as bossy and conducted the negotiations with Arafat via emissaries, even though his cabin was no more than a few hundred yards away. Arafat refused to sign, perhaps because he thought he would get better terms from Israel if he held out, or perhaps because he simply didn’t see any Arab leader ever backing a compromise with the great enemy. Clinton blew up in anger. He ended the summit and broke his promise to Arafat not to blame him for the failure. “If Clinton had adopted Carter’s strategy and knocked their heads together until they agreed to a compromise, history would have been different,” said Itamar Rabinovich, one of Israel’s top Middle East scholars and diplomats. In the ensuing two months, attempts were made to bridge the gaps. But by now the tension and suspicion between the two sides had passed the point of no return. “We were living with the feeling that we were breathing gunpowder,” said one of Barak’s close associates. And wherever there is gunpowder, there’ll be a pyromaniac to set it alight. This time the pyromaniac was Ariel Sharon.
Ehud Barak was working toward a 2 state solution with President Clinton whilst he was Prime Minister. They must have talked and met many times before the summit meeting:
The 2000 Camp David Summit was a summit meeting at Camp David between United States president Bill Clinton, Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat. The summit took place between 11 and 25 July 2000 and was an effort to end the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Wikipedia
Barak was visiting Jeffrey Epstein after the Epstein sweetheart deal:
The “sweetheart deal” refers to a controversial non-prosecution agreement negotiated in 2008 by then-U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta, which allowed Jeffrey Epstein to serve only 13 months in jail for serious sex crimes, effectively shutting down a federal investigation into his activities. This deal has faced significant criticism for being lenient and for not consulting Epstein’s victims. Axios PBS
Since 2013:
Epstein’s diary reveals 36 meetings with former Israeli PM Ehud Barak
Newly revealed documents from the Wall Street Journal show that former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak met with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein at least 36 times between 2013 and 2017.
https://www.newsrael.com/posts/k00ajkfhurf
Did he visit Little St James Island in 2002, or was another PM the mystery rapist? We do not know the answer to this yet……he was a former Prime Minister by then.
Jeffrey Epstein’s Survivor Was Raped By “Well-Known Prime Minister”: Memoir
According to the memoir, Virginia Giuffre met the “Prime Minister” on Epstein’s private island in the US Virgin Islands in 2002, when she was 18.
And since the Hamas atrocities occured on October 7th 2023, his reaction was:
Former Israeli Prime Minister: Israel’s Endgame in Gaza Should be a Palestinian State
14 minute read
Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak speaks during a rally to protest the Israeli government’s judicial overhaul plan, in Tel Aviv on June 24, 2023Jack Guez—AFP via Getty Images
November 6, 2023 3:36 PM EST
https://time.com/6332127/israel-palestine-war-ehud-barak/
Is someone wanting to link him to the abhorrent rape of Virginia Guiffre to protect another Prime Minister, and/ or to ruin his reputation as he has disagreed with the Netanyahu’s government?
More mystery…….or does the timeline seem to fit the opportunities for his presence at the time the crime was committed?
borderslynn 