U.S. Team Finds No Sign of Arms Deal, Israel Says

Israeli officials said Saturday that American inspectors found nothing to back up allegations that Israel has sold Patriot antimissile rocket technology to China as well as U.S.-supplied arms and sensitive arms know-how to South Africa and other countries.

An American inspection team, sent here after U.S. newspapers reported that the State Department’s inspector general was studying such allegations based on intelligence reports, left for home Saturday, Israeli radio said.

The 15-member team made no comment before its departure. Israeli Defense Ministry spokesman Danny Naveh was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that the Americans did not show their findings to the ministry, and the U.S. Embassy here had no comment on the team’s work.

Carmela Menashe, Israeli radio’s military correspondent, said that “as far as is known, the delegation didn’t find anything confirming that Israel transferred Patriot technology to China.”

The assertions of arms and technology diversions, which are against U.S. law in the absence of permission from Washington, kindled bitter responses from top officials in the government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.

The officials accused the Bush Administration of trying to tarnish Israel’s image in the United States.

Hard feelings here were aggravated when reports circulated that during the American team’s inspection of Patriot antimissile installations, U.S. security guards kept watch over the rockets day and night to preclude Israeli “tampering.”

“We will want an apology,” a senior government official said. “Of course, Americans don’t lose gracefully, and this is a fiasco for American policy.”

Just what signs the inspection team was after are unclear, Israeli officials insisted. The Israelis described scenes of silent tinkering by the inspectors and suggested that the Americans themselves were not sure what they were looking for.

“Why did they come in the first place?” a senior official asked.

The official directed reporters to a local newspaper report suggesting one explanation, at least as far as the Patriots were concerned: that the team was looking for a technical flaw and that the technology diversion complaint was simply a smoke screen to hide the fact that the missiles did not work as well as advertised.

In Washington, a senior American official scoffed at any such notion.

“That is absolutely not true. We have plenty of missiles here we could look at, and we have a very good relationship with Raytheon”--the Massachusetts firm that builds the Patriot.

The official added: “We sent the team for exactly the reason we said we did. We had a legitimate reason to be concerned (about transfer of Patriot technology to China), and we wanted to check it out.”

The Patriot antimissile missiles gained fame during the Persian Gulf War when they were used to protect cities in Israel and Saudi Arabia from barrages of Iraqi Scud missiles.

There was some question about the effectiveness of the shield; several Scuds appeared only to have been diverted from their course, causing them to strike populated Israeli neighborhoods where they caused extensive damage and one death.

The flap over alleged arms and technology transfers by Israel raised alarms that political differences between Shamir and President Bush are spilling over into the usually cozy relationship between the two countries on military and defense matters.

Israelis spoke of a “conspiracy” that would ultimately rob Israel of U.S. military support.

“It appears to me that someone is trying to sabotage Israel-United States relations,” Defense Minister Moshe Arens said flatly.

Shamir and Bush have been at odds over American pressure on Israel to stop building settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Such construction is viewed by the Administration as a unilateral effort by Israel to sink Middle East peace talks.

There have been several reports of Israeli arms sales to China, especially after much of the world imposed an arms embargo on that country in the wake of Beijing’s 1989 crackdown on the pro-democracy movement there.

U.S. technology used in the design of Israel’s Jericho missile was allegedly transferred to South Africa.

Any objections to such transfers in the past were usually registered in confidential complaints, Israeli officials said.

To head off a crisis, Israel and the United States made images of cooperation available last week, timed to show that all is well with the military partnership between the two countries.

Television here showed the arrival of U.S. F-15 jets for the inauguration of a joint maintenance program. Publicity was given to the creation of a testing program in connection with the “Star Wars” antimissile project.

“We’re now in a period of damage limitation,” remarked Gerald Steinberg, a defense analyst at Bar Ilan University. “The United States and Israel are now trying to remove the strategic aspect from what is essentially a political dispute.”

Jerusalem’s relations with Washington have become a hot political issue in advance of Israeli parliamentary elections to be held in June.

Shamir appears intent on reversing some of the recent anti-American rhetoric of his government. “Good relations will continue in the future, and I expect improvement,” he said.

However, in a speech to visiting American fundamentalist Christians, Shamir pledged to continue Israeli expansion in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

His rival for the post of prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin of the opposition Labor Party, suggested that he could make the needed repairs. “There must be relations of respect,” he said.

In comments to reporters, Rabin said he would limit settlements to defensive lines and predicted that Washington would understand the difference between that policy and Shamir’s.

Times staff writer John M. Broder in Washington contributed to this report.