24 Facts About Ari Ben-Menashe

Ari Ben-Menashe is an Israeli-Canadian businessman, security consultant, and author.

Ari Ben-Menashe was previously an employee of Israel's Military Intelligence Directorate from 1977 to 1987, and an arms dealer.

In 1989, Ben-Menashe was charged with attempting to sell three military aircraft to Iran in contravention of the US Arms Export Control Act.

Ari Ben-Menashe was born in Tehran, Iran and immigrated to Israel as a teenager.

Ari Ben-Menashe's parents were Iraqi Jews who settled in Tehran in 1945.

Ari Ben-Menashe served in the Israel Defense Forces in signals intelligence from 1974 to 1977.

Ari Ben-Menashe served in the Military Intelligence Directorate until 1987, once under Moshe Hebroni, the deputy to the Directorate's Director, General Yehoshua Sagi.

Time was unwilling to publish the allegations, and Ari Ben-Menashe later passed the information to the Lebanese Ash-Shiraa, which published them on 3 November 1986, and soon led to congressional investigations.

Ari Ben-Menashe claimed that the Israeli government offered him a plea bargain.

In 1992 Moshe Hebroni, the deputy director of the Military Intelligence Directorate, told Craig Unger that Ari Ben-Menashe had worked directly with him and had access to sensitive material.

In 1990 and 1991, Ari Ben-Menashe said that he had been personally involved in Iran in order to assist the Reagan's presidential campaign with its October surprise of preventing the American hostages from being released before the 1980 election.

Ari Ben-Menashe gave Seymour Hersh information about Israel's nuclear program, which was published in Hersh's book The Samson Option.

Ari Ben-Menashe then fled to Australia and, in his application for refugee status, declared himself a victim of persecution of the Israeli and US governments.

Ari Ben-Menashe claimed that Robert Maxwell, the owner of Mirror Group newspapers in the United Kingdom, was a Mossad agent and that Maxwell had tipped off the Israeli embassy in 1986 about the Israeli nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu after Vanunu and a friend approached the Sunday Mirror and The Sunday Times in London with a story about Israel's nuclear capability.

However, Ari Ben-Menashe was used as a key source by Pulitzer Prize-winning The New York Times journalist Seymour Hersh for his book about Israel's nuclear weapons, The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy, published in Britain in 1991 by Faber and Faber.

Ari Ben-Menashe claimed that Maxwell had been assassinated by Mossad for trying to blackmail it.

Ari Ben-Menashe's seduction begins with a display of his mastery of the trade craft of the legendary Israeli intelligence services.

Ari Ben-Menashe told journalist Dylan Howard that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad spy.

Ari Ben-Menashe moved to Sydney, Australia, in 1992, then to Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where he married a Canadian woman and became a citizen.

Ari Ben-Menashe was arrested in 2002 during acrimonious divorce proceedings and charged with assault, following complaints by his wife and mother-in-law, but he was acquitted.

Ari Ben-Menashe again came to the attention of the international media in 2002, when he alleged that Morgan Tsvangirai, the leader of Zimbabwe's opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, had asked him to help "eliminate" President Robert Mugabe.

Ari Ben-Menashe produced a videotape of conversations between himself and Tsvangirai in London, England, and Montreal, where the latter appeared to ask for Ari Ben-Menashe's help as a political consultant.

Ari Ben-Menashe was hired by Paul Le Roux, an international drug lord and DEA informant born in the former Rhodesia to lobby the Zimbabwe government to grant leases to Zimbabwean farmlands.

Ari Ben-Menashe's Montreal based lobbying firm was hired by Sudanese General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo in a $6 million deal.