Did Israeli PM Netanyahu Make Secret Trip to Moscow?

Sept. 10, 2009 — -- For 10 hours this Monday Prime Minister Netanyahu disappeared.

His office refused to answer reporters' questions about his whereabouts until late Monday it was finally revealed he had spent the day at a secret Mossad installation inside Israel.

Mossad is the Jewish state's famous foreign spying agency. That news was revealed by the prime minister's own military secretary.

But in Wednesday morning's papers that version of events was challenged by Israeli journalists. With the help of the usual "unnamed political sources" it was claimed that the prime minister had in fact been on a secret overseas trip. Some said in an Arab country, perhaps Saudi Arabia, others said Moscow.

By Thursday the consensus view was that it was Moscow, for secret talks with Prime Minister Putin. If the speculation is correct, extraordinary steps were taken to keep the trip under wraps. Even the Israeli embassy in Moscow did not know. The prime minister is said to have flown in a private jet lent specially by an Israeli businessman.

The prime minister's office still refuses to confirm Netanyahu's secret trip but did issue a statement Wednesday night saying the prime minister "was busy with confidential and classified activities" and that his military secretary "who was not in touch with the prime minister at that time, acted on his independent initiative in order to defend that activity....with the best of intentions."

Official Russian sources in Moscow at first rejected the story of the secret visit. But on Thursday foreign ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko seemed to encourage ambiguity: "I am not saying yes or no, I am just saying I don't have any information."

The Israeli press, meanwhile, turned their frustration into anger with the actions of the Israeli prime minister's office, accusing it of misleading the media with a false story.

"On the way to Moscow the prime minister's credibility was dealt a sharp blow," one the country's leading columnists wrote in the daily Maariv.