Barak accuses ex-army chief of ‘criminal behavior’

Former defense minister Ehud Barak submitted an affidavit charging that former IDF chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi led a group of senior officers, reserve officers and civilians, using “tools and behavior that were prima facie criminal… to thwart the legal process of appointing a [new] IDF chief of staff and against the political echelon.”

In the document, submitted Tuesday to the Central District Court in Lod, Barak accused the group of “forging a document; using a forged document; gathering slanderous information about the political echelon and senior IDF officers; and disrupting an investigation — all in violation of the penal code, the Basic Law on the Army, the norms of command and the spirit of the IDF,” Haaretz reported Wednesday.

According to the former defense minister, who has also served as prime minister, the senior officers in question were Col. Erez Weiner; Lt. Col. (res.) Boaz Harpaz; and former IDF spokesman Brig Gen. (res.) Avi Benayahu.

Harpaz — after whom the affair has been named — was singled out for harsh criticism, with Barak stating: “The very fact that Harpaz — a private individual with the potential for [having] outside interests, including business interests — was exposed to and involved in sensitive, real-time issues connected to the defense establishment, in an unauthorized fashion and 
contrary to army regulations, endangered the security of the state and of those acting on its behalf and in its service.”

Barak also accuses Benayahu of “generating media manipulations meant to hurt the defense minister and undermine his public status” in his role as IDF spokesman.

Interviewed on Army Radio Wednesday, the author of the Haaretz report, Ari Shavit, said the Harpaz affair, as the scandal has become known, was “worse than Watergate and worse than the Bus 300 affair” in which Shin Bet agents executed two captured Palestinian hijackers in 1984.

“If there’s suspicion that there was an officer, who was not liked by other senior officers, who were his superiors, and the way to punish him was by looking for personal, incriminating details about his life, it’s the end of the world. It’s as simple as that,” Shavit said.

Shavit also angrily charged during the interview that the Israeli media failed to properly cover such an important affair, in which the army led a campaign against the Defense Ministry and the government, and he singled out a few journalists, like Ronen Bergman and Dan Margalit, whom in his opinion strove to reveal the truth.

The document was submitted in the context of a libel suit by Benayahu against the Haaretz and Yedioth Ahronoth dailies, and the McCann Erickson public relations firm.

Earlier this month, Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein ordered a criminal investigation of Ashkenazi and Weiner in connection with the Harpaz affair. Weinstein announced that police investigators would participate alongside military police who had already been working on the case.

An official statement issued by the attorney general explained that the decision to broaden the investigation of the affair was made after military police investigators acquired new and possibly incriminating evidence. Ashkenazi and Weiner are suspected of breach of trust and conduct unbecoming of officers.

Weiner took the brunt of the criticism in a state comptroller’s report released in early January that compiled suspected misdeeds among the army’s brass from 2009 to 2011 and that found Weiner to have had a hand in drafting a forged letter that smeared a candidate who was in line to replace Ashkenazi as chief of staff.

The report, which detailed a bitter inter-office battle between Ashkenazi and Barak, also said Weiner offered to carry out covert activities against the defense minister for his boss.

The investigation was sparked by reports of the forged letter, which was apparently meant to stymie the appointment of Yoav Galant as Ashkenazi’s successor. First revealed on Channel 2 on August 6, 2010, and portrayed as an attempt to smear Ashkenazi, the police found within days that the author of the document was Harpaz — “a family friend,” by his own admission, of Gabi Ashkenazi and his wife, Ronit.