Bonn Admits Secret Arms Effort for Israel : Germany: Security service had 14 Soviet-built heavy tanks ready for shipment.

An embarrassed German government admitted Monday that the country’s intelligence service had tried to secretly ship several Soviet-made tanks to Israel but claimed that the vehicles were for “testing purposes” only.

After several hours of silence in the wake of a Hamburg newspaper report Monday morning that the city’s harbor police had foiled an attempt “by unknown persons” to export 14 T-72 heavy tanks under the bogus description of agricultural machinery, deputy government spokesman Norbert Schaefer told reporters that the shipment was the work of the German intelligence service, BND.

Schaefer, speaking in Bonn, called the false labeling of the military equipment “unfortunate” and claimed that the shipment had been ordered without the knowledge of BND President Konrad Prozner or Lutz Stavenhagen, coordinator of German intelligence services in the federal chancellery.

“It is military materiel of Soviet origin,” Schaefer said. “The materiel came from the supplies of the (former East German) National People’s Army and was put at the disposal of the BND by the Defense Ministry. . . . Israel wanted to test this materiel.”

Israel’s traditional Arab adversaries have relied on Soviet equipment for their armed forces. Both Iraq and Syria, for example, have T-72s.

With unification, Germany inherited East Germany’s Soviet-equipped armed forces, which included about 300 of the Soviet-made T-72 tanks. Military experts here described the tanks as among the more modern of the former Warsaw Pact’s military arsenal but not Moscow’s newest technology in the field.

Attempting the play down the significance of the incident, Schaefer said it is “entirely normal” for intelligence agencies from friendly powers to share information on weapons and weapons technology gleaned from third countries but that it is usually done without publicity. “One doesn’t like to shout such things from the rooftops,” he said. “That’s why it was declared as agricultural material.”

But the apparent lack of Cabinet approval and the absence of any knowledge by key senior members of the country’s intelligence service raised questions that the attempted shipment may violate Germany’s strict controls on weapons exports. Schaefer said an investigation into possible violation of export laws had been ordered.

Although Germany has exported technology and industrial equipment to the Middle East--it almost provided Libya with chemical weapons and was instrumental in the development of Iraq’s chemical warfare capabilities--it maintains strict controls on the export of finished military equipment to so-called crisis areas.

After embarrassing revelations of German industry’s help to Iraq, both in the area of chemical weapons and in missile technology, Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s government agreed to relax these controls during the Persian Gulf War and supply Israel with funds to buy U.S.-made Patriot missiles, two German submarines, sniffer tanks that detect and analyze chemical weapons and a large number of gas masks.

The Hamburg Morgenpost on Monday reported that the city’s harbor police had seized the T-72 tanks in a transit shed Saturday as they awaited loading onto an Israeli ship.

“Who wanted to ship these tanks?” the report asked.