British-born Israeli spy

David Kimche, who died on March 8 aged 82, was a British-born Israeli spy and diplomat who slipped between the covert and overt domains of foreign affairs, building both the fearsome reputation of his country's intelligence service and its valuable official ties to other nations.

Kimche (centre) with US chief delegate Morris Draper (R) and Lebanese negociator Antoine Fattal (L), after the three completed their marathon negociations that produced the agreement between Israel and Lebanon to begin the withdrawal of foreign troops fro Photo: AFP

As deputy head until 1980 of the Israeli external security service, the Mossad, Kimche was deeply involved in Operation Wrath of God – the plot to assassinate the terrorists who had killed 11 members of the Israeli team at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Kimche ensured that, rather than eliminating the terrorists with a straightforward sniper's bullet, Mossad used more sophisticated methods (booby-trapped mattresses or telephones) that both burnished the agency's own reputation and struck fear into potential future targets.


"We wanted to make them afraid of being a terrorist," he said. "We wanted to make them look over their shoulders and feel that we are upon them. This was a message that they can be got at anywhere, at any time and therefore they have to look out for themselves 24 hours a day."


Long before the recent furore over the use of foreign passports by Mossad for its assassination operations abroad, Kimche was at the heart of a similar scandal. As Mossad was being ticked off by Whitehall for using fake British documents for Wrath of God "hits", Kimche was applying to have his own, genuine, British passport renewed.

"This is really extraordinary," one Foreign Office official noted. "At the same time as the minister is about to protest to the Israeli ambassador over the misuse of British passports for Israeli intelligence operations, we are apparently contemplating issuing a British passport to a man who may well have been in charge of the operation complained of."

Chutzpah.

But Kimche was by no means a stereotypical Israeli blood-and-guts man of war. He was an urbane and cultivated official diplomat, who, as director general of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 1980 to 1987, drew on his extraordinary contacts to bring his nation out of the cold at a time when many foreign partners, fearful of an Arab oil-embargo, were minded to shun the Jewish state. No one will now be able to say for sure exactly where Kimche exerted most influence. But it is certain that he had long experience dealing with the Soviet Union and African nations.

Inevitably he focused on building ties with the Arab world: "You have to be very sensitive. You have to understand Arab society," he once said. "Above all, you have to be sensitive to their feelings and their attitudes. I've had a lot of dealings with the Arab world. I find it interesting."

This boundless interest in people and places was one of Kimche's great assets both in the overt and covert domains. His friends said he was a well-rounded man, not purely focused on operational intrigue. "The fact is that I know the world fairly well," Kimche conceded. "The fact is that I know how to make contacts with people. This enables me to do things that many others don't know how to do."

David Kimche, usually known as Dave, was born in London in 1928 to an aristocratic Jewish family with Swiss roots. His parents and brother, Jon, were active Zionists, and Dave left Britain Palestine in 1946, fighting in the war two years later that accompanied Israel's creation. He then joined the Jerusalem Post before joining Mossad in 1953. His postings to Africa and Asia, often under journalistic cover and using the name David Sharon, were designed to create an Israeli sphere of influence on the periphery of the Arab world.

A frequent tactic was to approach Christian ethnic groups and offer support in civil wars or uprisings against Muslim rivals. In this role Kimche became known as the "Man with the Suitcase", appearing in various African states shortly before dramatic coups and disappearing again quickly afterwards. There was rarely room for scruple in this "Great Game" strategy, and among the Israeli proteges on the continent was the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. No state was too remote to prove useful, however, and Israel sought and secured allies from Central America to South East Asia.

By the late 1970s, Kimche's covert work was proving crucial in the delicate peace negotiations with Egypt. Using contacts in north Africa, he is thought to have convinced Morocco's King Hassan to broker talks between Jerusalem and Cairo. But Kimche, by then deputy-director of Mossad, fell out with his boss, Yitzhak Hofi, and, in 1980, he resigned to join the Foreign Ministry. It was there that he almost came unstuck. The caution inherent to covert work seemed to give way to adventurism as he championed an Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 where, true to form, he backed Christian militias – which then went on to carry out massacres at Palestinian refugee camps Sabra and Chatila. It was in Lebanon too, that Kimche almost became snared by a web of intrigue that stretched from Nicaragua to Tehran.

Following the suggestion that Iran could use its influence with Hizbollah to win the release of American hostages held by the Lebanese militant group, Israel agreed to sweeten Tehran by supplying the regime there with weapons, in defiance of an arms embargo. The CIA funnelled profits from the deals to anti-communist rebels, or Contras, that it was backing in Nicaragua.

Fall out from the so-called Iran-Contra affair proved deeply damaging, and afterwards there was a suspicion that the idea had originated with Kimche. But he retained his contacts in Iran. In 1991, after he had officially retired to pursue "business interests", an American television team reporting in Tehran found that, "whenever we went to interview Islamic revolutionary government officials, David Kimche seemed to be just leaving their offices". But an undercover relationship with a sworn enemy inevitably produced worrying and comical moments.

"I was in Hamburg for discussions with a certain ayatollah," he once recalled. "The talks went on into the night, ending at 2am. Then the Iranians beckoned us to go with them.'We have something to show you,' they said, and drove us into the depths of Hamburg's dockland. We stopped outside a warehouse and were led up an unlit staircase. I felt quite nervous when we suddenly emerged into a huge chamber. The light went on – and spread before us was an extraordinary spectacle: a huge collection of magnificent carpets once owned by the Shah of Persia. They had been shipped out for sale to finance the Mullahs' revolution." Sadly for Kimche, his salary could not stretch to meet the price of the treasures on display.

In his later years, Kimche, ever the pragmatist, focused on achieving a peace settlement with the Palestinians. He had previously sought to destroy the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) of Yasser Arafat ("Arafat was our mortal enemy" he said). But having weakened the PLO, he later accepted that "like it or not, Mr. Arafat is the only Palestinian leader with the power to curb violence and work out an enduring ceasefire, let alone a peace accord." Even after Arafat's death, and despite endless failures that hardened mistrust among people on both sides, Kimche kept at behind-the-scenes peace efforts. In his last years, and as informed as anyone of Israel's capacity to strike at its enemies if need be, he was in a position, perhaps, to be more trusting than most.

"I do not share what I regard as the Diaspora mentality of seeing danger under every rock we pick up," he says. "I do not believe that a Palestinian state poses a danger in any way or form. Whether the territories become a part of Jordan or a Palestinian state, neither will pose a threat to Israel."


David Kimche, the author of several books on foreign affairs, married twice. He is survived by his wife, Ruth, and four children

Colourful and successful career in the wartime RAF

Jack Brotherton-Ratcliffe, who has died aged 90, co-founded the Croudace group of companies, one of the biggest and most successful privately-owned construction companies in Britain.

The thumbnail picture is accompanied by this summary: Innovative building tycoon who prospered in the 1980s property boom but insisted on an ethical approach. Implied is that ethics is not necessary for prospering, and that ethics do not preclude prospering.


Published: 5:56PM GMT 28 Feb 2010 - London Telegraph

He enjoyed a colourful and successful career in the wartime RAF, piloting Liberators and Halifaxes on more than 90 operations during 1943 and 1944, and ending the war as a squadron-leader. For his exploits he was awarded the DSO.


John Brotherton-Ratcliffe, known as Jack, was born on November 18 1919, the fifth of a family of seven. His early years were spent in Ealing and later Kenley, with a year in Belgium when he was six to ensure he could speak his French mother's language.


At Harrow, Ratcliffe had mixed success, excelling in gymnastics and electro-mechanics. He was in the Officer Training Corps and had a keen interest in flying, building a kit aircraft, the "Flying Flea", which had a very dubious safety record. Fortunately, before he and his brothers could test it, their father confiscated the propeller.


In 1938 he went up to Balliol College, Oxford to read Physics and learned to fly with the University Air Squadron. At the outbreak of war he joined the RAF and completed his training at Cranwell before becoming a flying instructor. In July 1941 he left for South Africa where he trained pilots at an air school in the Transvaal. After two years he moved to the Middle East and converted to the Liberator heavy bomber.


Ratcliffe joined No 148 Squadron at Gambut in Libya in April 1943. The squadron had a special duties role, its main task being to drop arms and agents into the Balkans where partisans were operating. When not engaged on these missions Ratcliffe carried out bombing raids on targets in Italy and southern Europe. On October 21 1943 he unexpectedly found himself detailed to fly a Dakota to a remote landing strip in Greece where he was to pick up 26 people before flying back to Gambut. He had never flown the aircraft type before and, after two brief familiarisation sorties, he completed the operation successfully.


Ratcliffe had completed almost 70 operations when No 148 replaced its Liberators with the Halifax, flying from an airfield in southern Italy. Returning from an abortive supply-dropping operation over Yugoslavia, severe weather and a shortage of fuel forced the crew to bale out and they were rescued from the Gulf of Taranto.

Bale out?

Six weeks later, on January 10 1944, Ratcliffe and his crew were detailed to make two drops to partisans in Albania and Greece. On the outward journey one of the four engines failed but the crew pressed on. After making the first drop, Ratcliffe flew on to the second dropping zone in a valley. Another engine failed and the aircraft was unable to climb away so he ordered his crew to bale out. Ratcliffe remained at the controls until the last man had left, by which time the aircraft was too low for him to parachute to safety and he was forced to make a crash landing in a maize field. The crew managed to join up and make contact with Greek partisans and their British liaison officer who took them back to his base in the mountains. After spending a few weeks in hiding, Ratcliffe and his crew were picked up by the Royal Navy and taken to Italy. He was awarded the DSO for "his skill, courage and devotion to duty".

In July 1944, Ratcliffe left No148 and served with a mobile operations wing in Italy. He was released from the RAF as a squadron leader in December 1945. He trained on Liberators and Halifaxes and in 1943 moved to Libya from where he flew supplies to rebel groups across the Balkans, and also undertook bombing missions.

After the war, not wanting to resume his undergraduate career, Ratcliffe joined his next door neighbour, Oliver Croudace, in his fledgling construction company. At once Ratcliffe saw the opportunities both for renovation and for new council and private housing in the South East, by then scarred by bomb damage and years of neglect, and where a strong political drive for more houses meant that planning restrictions were few.

Ratcliffe bought out his partner and began rapidly to expand Croudace's business, gearing it up for the acquisition of sites for private housing. In 1946 the groundbreaking New Towns Act had heralded the incoming Labour government's political dynamic for town and country development, and the subsequent Conservative governments of the 1950s continued housing policies which among other things facilitated the release of land for building.


During these years Ratcliffe rode the crest of a wave, achieving large-scale success with contracts for developments in Surrey and, especially, in the development of Crawley New Town. An innovator in his style of management, Ratcliffe pioneered the introduction of time and motion studies on building sites, supported by centralised formal control systems. These far-sighted methods enabled him to collect and accurately evaluate data for forecasting project profitability, and so radically to increase Croudace's business during a series of building booms in both the private and local authority sectors. Ratcliffe continued to respond to new commercial challenges, and with his 1974 acquisition of Maybrook, an ailing property investment company, he added a new arm to Croudace's operations, enabling it to continue to prosper through the property sector's golden years in the 1980s.


Despite the inevitable periods of economic recession, which saw so many of his competitors fail, Ratcliffe's firm control and lucid appreciation of his market enabled him to sustain his company's success. In all his business dealings Ratcliffe insisted on an ethical approach, in part a consequence of his admiration for his great-uncle, the last Lord Brotherton, a philanthropist and successful industrialist in his native Yorkshire. A humanist and dedicated family man, Ratcliffe was generous both with his wealth and with his time, while eschewing any desire for public recognition.


Jack Brotherton-Ratcliffe, who died on Christmas Eve, married, in 1945, Rona Greengrass. She predeceased him in 1995. Their two sons and two daughters survive him.

Relentless Challenger of Apartheid System

Helen Suzman, the internationally renowned anti-apartheid campaigner who befriended the imprisoned Nelson Mandela and offered an often lonely voice for change among South Africa’s white minority, died in Johannesburg early on Thursday, a family member said. She was 91.

Her son-in-law, Jeffrey Jowell, a law professor in London, said she died peacefully at her home in the affluent northern suburbs of Johannesburg after a brief illness.

For decades, Mrs. Suzman was among the most venerated of white campaigners urging an end to racial rule. As the liberal Progressive Party’s lone representative in the all-white Parliament for 13 years until the mid-1970s, a period when many of apartheid’s most repressive features were being devised, she used her parliamentary immunity to speak out when other avenues of protest were harshly suppressed.

While she challenged apartheid at a time of violent protests among the black majority, she advocated peaceful change. More controversially, she differed sharply with more radical campaigners inside and outside South Africa who were supportive of economic sanctions to press the country’s white rulers toward reform, saying sanctions would hurt poor blacks more than whites.

To Mrs. Suzman’s frustration, this led some of her critics to say she was unwittingly helping to prolong apartheid. This was a variation on a critique she had long endured, and to some extent accepted — that by engaging in what was largely a charade of parliamentary politics in apartheid South Africa, she became complicit, however unwillingly, in the larger deceits of apartheid, which would ultimately be ended not by a small band of white dissenters, but by the more powerful forces of the black freedom struggle and external political pressure.

Among her friends, it was a reality Mrs. Suzman conceded, though she and many opponents of apartheid believed that it was important to keep the hopes of eventual democracy in the country alive and that she could help the victims of apartheid by her efforts to expose the evils of the system in and out of Parliament.

John Parkin/Associated Press

Helen Suzman with Nelson Mandela at his Soweto home in February, 1990. 

In a 1966 profile in The New York Times Magazine, Joseph Lelyveld, the newspaper’s correspondent in South Africa at the time, recounted one of her favorite stories, about an overeager dinner host who gave a black man serving her a lecture on her parliamentary achievements.

“Do you know who this is, John?” the host asked. “This is Helen Suzman, the champion of your cause — the champion of human rights in South Africa.”

“She waste her time,” John replied, as Mrs. Suzman retold it later, laughing brightly as she repeated the line. “She waste her time.”

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Helen Suzman in 1975.

Diminutive, elegant and indefatigable, Mrs. Suzman confronted the forbidding Afrikaner prime ministers — Hendrik F. Verwoerd, John Vorster and P. W. Botha — who became synonymous with apartheid’s repression of the black and mixed-race populations. She was dismissive of the death threats she received by telephone and in the mail, and undaunted in her showdowns with the men she described as apartheid’s leading “bullies,” who in turn dismissed her as a “dangerous subversive” and a “sickly humanist.”

Shouts of “Go back to Moscow!” greeted her when she rose in Parliament, and, on at least one occasion, “Go back to Israel!” — a reference to her antecedents as the daughter of early 20th-century Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. After the 1976 Soweto riots, Mr. Vorster mocked her for beating with what he called her “pretty little pink hands” against apartheid, while secure in the knowledge, as he claimed, that she and other white opponents could continue to enjoy the privileged lives apartheid guaranteed without fear that their demands for an end to the racial laws would succeed.

“I am not frightened of you — I never have been, and I never will be,” she told Prime Minister Botha in a parliamentary exchange in the late 1970s. “I think nothing of you.”

For his part, Mr. Botha called her “a vicious little cat.” When a government minister once accused her of embarrassing South Africa with her parliamentary questions, she replied, “It is not my questions that embarrass South Africa; it is your answers.”

Her home and office telephones were constantly tapped, an intrusion she liked to counter by blowing an ear-splitting whistle into the mouthpiece.

But perhaps because of her parliamentary immunity, a feature of their showpiece democracy that apartheid leaders guarded with care, she was never detained or subjected to one of the stifling “banning orders” that apartheid leaders used to curb dissent by prohibiting people from attending political meetings, speaking in public or even leaving their homes.

Her opposition to economic sanctions made her a contentious figure among some apartheid opponents, including protesters on American college campuses, like Brandeis and Harvard, where she received honorary degrees. “I understand the moral abhorrence and pleasure it gives you when you demonstrate,” she told a New York audience in 1986. “But I don’t see how wrecking the economy of the country will ensure a more stable and just society.”

She rarely faced such criticism from South Africa’s best-known black leaders. Mr. Mandela spoke with affection of her visits to the Robben Island prison in the chilly Atlantic waters off Cape Town, where he was serving a life sentence imposed in 1964 and where he remained until he was moved to a mainland prison nearly 20 years later. Using her parliamentary visiting rights, she made her first trip in 1967 and returned frequently.

Alexander Joe/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Helen Suzman in Johannesburg in November 2007.

“It was an odd and wonderful sight to see this courageous woman peering into our cells and strolling around our courtyard,” Mr. Mandela recalled in an interview when he was released in 1990 after serving 27 years. “She was the first and only woman ever to grace our cells.”

On Thursday, the governing African National Congress paid tribute by saying in a statement that Mrs. Suzman “became a thorn in the flesh of apartheid by openly criticizing segregation of Blacks by a Whites-only apartheid system.” Mr. Mandela’s foundation issued a statement from its Johannesburg headquarters saying that South Africa had lost “a great patriot and a fearless fighter against apartheid.”

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, winner of the 1984 Nobel Peace Prize, who forged a close friendship with Mrs. Suzman when they were leading proponents of peaceful change during the violent upheavals of the 1970s and 1980s, said in his statement that the country owed her an enormous debt. “She really was indomitable,” he said.

By the early 1990s, when apartheid gave way to black majority rule, there was widespread affection for Mrs. Suzman in black townships like Soweto, where many people knew her simply as Miss Helen.

But while no longer in Parliament in her final years, she remained an acerbic critic of what she viewed as official wrongdoing, now by the country’s new black rulers. Only recently, she joined other prominent South Africans in demanding a fresh inquiry into dubious government arms contracts in the 1990s, some involving the president of the African National Congress, Jacob Zuma.

Mrs. Suzman was born Helen Gavronsky on Nov. 17, 1917, in Germiston, a gold-mining town on the outskirts of Johannesburg. She was educated at the Parktown convent school in Johannesburg, and studied economics at the city’s Witwatersrand University. At the age of 19, in 1937, she married Moses Meyer Suzman, known as Mosie, a cardiologist, with whom she had two daughters, before returning to the university in 1944.

She is survived by her daughters, Frances, an art historian, and Patricia, a medical specialist.

Universities around the world awarded Mrs. Suzman 27 honorary doctorates, and she received numerous other honors from the United Nations and an array of religious and human rights groups around the world. Queen Elizabeth II made her an honorary dame, customary for citizens of countries other than Britain.

Mrs. Suzman traced her opposition to apartheid to her university years, when she studied South Africa’s racial laws and was incensed by what she learned, particularly by the so-called pass laws, which were fundamental to the apartheid system, restricting where blacks could live and work.

She ran for Parliament in Johannesburg’s upscale Houghton district and remained the district’s legislator from 1953 to 1989. She began as a member of the United Party, which had been usurped in 1949, after decades as South Africa’s governing party, by the Afrikaner-dominated National Party. It was the Nationalists, under Mr. Verwoerd, who codified and extended the existing racial laws, creating apartheid.

In 1959, impatient with the United Party’s tolerance of racial segregation, she became a founder of the liberal Progressive Party, later known as the Progressive Federal Party, which favored a more inclusive, nonracial franchise that would lead to black majority rule. Some of the most relentless enforcers of apartheid eventually developed a grudging respect for her, even a hint of affection. James T. Kruger, the justice minister under Mr. Vorster during the Soweto riots, was one of the “bullies” Mrs. Suzman frequently denounced.

Years later, out of office, Mr. Kruger learned that Mrs. Suzman was planning a tourist visit to the Soviet Union with her husband. A keen amateur philatelist, he approached her in the parliamentary lobby and gave her a sheaf of self-addressed postcards and letters, each bearing new South African stamps, asking her to mail them back to him from Moscow.

When she said that the Soviet postal authorities would not accept South African stamps, she recalled, Mr. Kruger was puzzled. For Mrs. Suzman, the incident demonstrated the occluded world inhabited by many apartheid leaders, who often acted, she said, as if they belonged to the 17th, not the 20th century. “Poor old Jimmy Kruger,” she said. “Like most of them, he knew very little of the world beyond South Africa.”

Celia W. Dugger contributed reporting.
January 2, 2009
Helen Suzman, Relentless Challenger of Apartheid System, Is Dead at 91
By JOHN F. BURNS and ALAN COWELL