Walworth Barbour
| Walworth Barbour link (Diplomat) | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 1908-06-04 Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA |
| Died | 1982-07-21 Gloucester, Massachusetts, USA |
| Nationality | US |
| Alma mater | Phillips Exeter Academy, Harvard University |
US Ambassador to Israel for 12 years, with "willingness to operate the American embassy as a subsidiary if necessary of the Israeli foreign ministry". | |
Walworth "Wally" Barbour was a US diplomat who was US Ambassador to Israel from 1961 until 1973.[1] He attended the 1958 Bilderberg meeting, at the time he was Deputy Chief of Mission at the Embassy in London, UK.
Education
Walworth Barbour went to school at Phillips Exeter Academy and studied at Harvard University, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1930.
Career
His first position abroad was the post of vice-consul in Naples in 1932. Other posts were Greece, Iraq and Bulgaria. During the Second World War he was seconded as an officer to the US Embassy in Egypt. In 1949 he was appointed as a consultant to the embassy in Moscow.[2] From 1952 he made a career in the US State Department. He first headed the Department for Eastern European Affairs and then became Deputy Assistant Secretary for the whole of Europe. In 1956 he became a chargé d’affaires at the Embassy in London. Allen Dulles called him "Wally" on first name basis in a 1953 correspondence.[3]
In 1961 Barbour was appointed as Ambassador to Israel by President John F. Kennedy.[4] He remained there through the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson and passed up an appointment as Ambassador to the Soviet Union by Richard Nixon.[2]
He was considered as a diplomat who was sensitive to the needs of Israel.[4] At a dinner in his honor, Israel Prime Minister Golda Meir said about Barbour "There's no big deal in having an Israel-American friendship society when you have friends like Nixon in the White House and Wally in Israel."[2]
After the USS Liberty incident, the Israeli attack on a US warship, during the 1967 Six-Day War, Barbour played a part in determining that the Israeli government had lied regarding certain aspects of their explanation as to how the attack happened. After an Israeli claim appeared in The Washington Post that they had inquired about the presence of US. ships in the area before the attack, Secretary of State Dean Rusk telegrammed the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv and demanded "urgent confirmation." Barbour confirmed that Israel’s story was bogus: "No request for info on U.S. ships operating off Sinai was made until after Liberty incident. Had Israelis made such an inquiry it would have been forwarded immediately to the chief of naval operations and other high naval commands and repeated to dept."[5]
Barbour also arrived at a time of extreme US sensitivity over Israel's burgeoning nuclear weapons development.[6] Seymour Hersh described his long assignment a testament to his "willingness to operate the American embassy as a subsidiary if necessary of the Israeli foreign ministry."[7] and as saying after the 1967 war that "Arab oil is not as important as Israel is to us. Therefore I'm going to side with Israel in all of my reporting."[8]
In 1967, says Hersh, Ambassador Barbour, eager not to upset Lyndon Johnson, told his subordinates to stop monitoring the progress of the Israeli nuclear reactor at Dimona, where the bomb was thought to be. Later, during the Nixon Administration, Barbour was given a special intelligence briefing on the Israeli weapons program and announced he did not believe it. One of the briefers told Hersh that Barbour gave this explanation: "If I acknowledge this, then I have to go to the President. And if he admitted it, he’d have to do something about it."[9]
Family
Barbour was never married.
References
- ↑ https://static.jfklibrary.org/78u7ff06f714vuwxwi8kogng3e6i336c.pdf?odc=20231115182755-0500,
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 https://www.nytimes.com/1982/07/26/obituaries/walworth-barbour-diplomat-who-served-12-years-in-israel.html
- ↑ https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80R01731R001300290007-4.pdf
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 https://www.jta.org/1982/07/26/archive/walworth-barbour-dead-at-74#ixzz30rLORLkB
- ↑ Scott, James (June 2, 2009). The Attack on the Liberty: The Untold Story of Israel's Deadly 1967 Assault on a U.S. Spy Ship. ISBN 9781416554820.
- ↑ https://www.unz.com/article/from-dallas-to-gaza-the-jfk-assassination-was-good-for-zionist-israel/
- ↑ https://english.palinfo.com/opinion_articles/Israel-s-nuclear-weapons-make-the-world-a-more-dangerous-place/
- ↑ https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v13/n23/victor-mallet/dual-loyalty
- ↑ https://time.com/archive/6718863/did-shamir-give-away-secrets/
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