Friday 22 November 2013
In the early 1980s, movie producer Arnon Milchan presided over a string of hits, collaborating with Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Sergio Leone and Ridley Scott. But what his film industry friends didn’t know was that while his Hollywood career flourished, Milchan was also winding down a secret double life as an arms dealer. The mogul behind hits such as Pretty Woman, Fight Club and LA Confidential also spent about 20 years as a leading Israeli intelligence agent.
Although Milchan’s clandestine career was widely known, he had never confessed to it in public until now. The Israeli investigative documentary series Uvda (“Fact”) will broadcast an interview next week, in which Milchan revealed that he facilitated arms deals on behalf of Israel, beginning in the 1960s. Speaking to Uvda host Ilana Dayan, he asked, “Do you know what it’s like to be a twentysomething-year-old kid [and] his country lets him be James Bond?”
Milchan was born in 1944 in what was then the British Mandate for Palestine. According to the 2011 book Confidential: The Life of Secret Agent Turned Hollywood Tycoon Arnon Milchan, by Meir Doron and Joseph Gelman, he was recruited to Israel’s intelligence services as a young man by its then deputy defence minister, Shimon Peres, now the Israeli President. Milchan joined the Bureau of Scientific Relations, or Lekem, which supported the country’s nascent nuclear arms programme.
Categories: Intelligence Gathering, M.I.C.E., Military Intelligence
NSA Warns of Rogue System Administrators 1996 / Irony? 
Engineering Evil 