MIDEAST : Phone Taps Take In Israeli Who’s Who : Two private eyes are charged with listening in on hundreds of people’s cellular calls. The incident is viewed as a warning to a security-conscious country.

What do Israeli President Ezer Weizman, Tel Aviv Mayor Ronni Milo, the editors and publishers of the country’s best-selling newspapers, two bank managers, the manager of the Maccabees soccer team, several big building contractors and the owner of high-fashion clothing stores have in common?

The answer is that they were all on a list of 231 Israelis--many politically prominent, some financially powerful but a few relatively obscure--whose cellular telephones are said to have been methodically tapped for eight months by two Tel Aviv private investigators.

But the real riddle--why?--so far has no answer.

The two investigators, arrested in April and facing charges of illegal wiretapping, are refusing to tell police who hired them or what they overheard.

Rafi Friedan, one of the investigators, initially told police that he had been asked “to gather data” and that he was confident that his clients’ reasons were “personal and family related,” according to court records. But Friedan has said nothing further, on his lawyers’ advice.

The list of those whose calls were regularly monitored, according to preliminary evidence given Tel Aviv courts, is a veritable Who’s Who of Israel’s movers and shakers--and a warning to a security-conscious country of the risks many of its leaders are running in unguarded conversations on their always-in-use cellular phones.

“The police have found records of some conversations of some of our people that are, well, rather embarrassing in their content,” a senior Israeli official commented, asking not to be quoted by name. “Things were said that should not have been said on open lines, and then things were said that were professionally indiscreet.

“During World War II, Americans had a saying, ‘Zip a lip and save a ship,’ and we had better think the same way. People have gotten very, very casual in their use of their (cellular phones). If two guys in a Tel Aviv office building can listen to all that they did, just imagine what a real intelligence service is doing.”

Among the phones that were monitored, according to police, were some belonging to the Israeli Defense Ministry, senior officials of the country’s security services, two members of the opposition Likud Party, the state comptroller and the director of an airline used by the government for charter flights.

There were also Weizman, top executives of the country’s two television stations, a number of lawyers, the agency that administers the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, an insurance company, staff members from the newspapers Yediot Aharonot, Maariv and Haaretz--and 10 other private investigators.

Altogether, more than 400 different cellular telephones may have been monitored from August until the men’s arrest last month, according to prosecutors.

Friedan and Yaakov Tsur, his partner in Agam Security Consultants, were held for three weeks and are now under house arrest. If convicted under Israel’s laws prohibiting wiretapping, they would face sentences of three years for each conversation they monitored.

Although police do not believe the two monitored all conversations, they have had very limited success in determining which calls they did record and no luck in finding out what they did with them.

“Their clients did not exactly pay with company checks,” one police detective said.

Prosecutors theorize the monitoring operation may have grown out of the bitter rivalry between Yediot Aharonot and Maariv, which have been engaged in a long-running circulation war. But they are at a loss to explain how it came to encompass such high-ranking officials.

Friedan, a former undercover policeman, and Tsur listened to the conversations with a monitor that continually scanned the radio frequencies used by cellular phones for calls made to and from specified numbers, according to prosecutors.

They had rented the $200,000 monitor from its Israeli manufacturer, ECI Telecom, for “experimentation purposes” prior to its sale to foreign security services and police departments. Friedan and Tsur pledged in their contract with ECI to listen only to their own telephones and those of ECI.

Friedan has a reputation as a “tapping contractor,” working for a number of clients and taking on cases from other private investigators, and police and prosecutors have suggested that ECI knew what use he would make of its monitoring equipment.

“Even wiretapping for experimental purposes requires permission,” prosecutor Rafi Levy told a Tel Aviv court this week, “and they did not get it.”