Secret U.S.-Israeli Accord on Covert Operations Told

Amiram Nir, the former Israeli official who was identified as a victim in a Mexican plane crash Wednesday, said last June that a confidential American-Israeli agreement authorized still-secret counterterrorist operations that he and Oliver L. North supervised in 1985-86.

U.S. and Israeli sources confirmed that there was such an accord. Its existence, however, has never been disclosed to Congress, according to American sources familiar with it.

A White House spokesman said Saturday that the Reagan Administration would have no comment on the agreement or on any operations that may have been conducted under it.

Won’t Discuss Accord

Yossi Gal, spokesman for the Israeli Embassy, said: “I won’t go into this agreement . . . . Israel and the United States have lots of agreements . . . . We have never maintained that Nir was operating on his own or as a renegade . . . . Everything he did was being done by the government of Israel.”

Nir disclosed the existence of an agreement in two interviews with Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward in London last June.

In those interviews, Nir said repeatedly that half or less of the story of the secret arms transactions with Iran was publicly known. He refused to elaborate.

He maintained that, under the accord, secret U.S.-Israeli covert operations were authorized by President Reagan and then-Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres. Few details of these operations have been disclosed. Nir said that the Israeli government has detailed records of all of them.

Conversations ‘Private’

Nir discussed some of his activities with the understanding that these were preliminary and “private” conversations. He said he expected to tell his story publicly later. Woodward and Nir agreed that the information Nir provided was not to be attributed to him without further discussions, but after the reports on Nir’s death, Post editors decided that there was no longer any reason to withhold attribution of the information.

The disclosure of the agreement adds another layer to the mysteries surrounding the Iran-Contra affair. References were made to the North-Nir “off-the-books” operations during the congressional Iran-Contra investigation, but Nir’s assertion that they were carried out under an agreement was the first indication that he and North, a former National Security Council aide, claimed top-level governmental authorization for their activities.