Spy files expose Israel’s arms deals with Lutwa, Museveni

The Financial Times has unwrapped details of the Ugandan military acquiring the Pegasus spyware, which when implanted in a mobile phone, gives an attacker complete access to the target’s device.

The expose published mid-December last year in the world’s leading global business publication based in the United Kingdom, was scantly noticed as it was likely crowded out by the Christmas festivities.

The dossier indicates that the Ugandan military acquired the software for between $10m (Shs35b) and $20m (Shs70b) from the Israeli manufacturer, NSO Group.

The newly-appointed Uganda Peple’s Defence Forces (UPDF) spokesperson, Brig Felix Kulayigye, said he had not yet assumed office. The deputy spokesperson, Lt Col Ronald Kakurungu, said he was not aware of the acquisition of the spy software.

When the spyware is implanted on a device, it effectively gives an attacker complete access to the target’s phone. It can read messages and passwords, access social media, use GPS to locate the target, listen to the target’s conversations, and even record them.

Even end-to-end encryption, which is available through popular apps like Signal, does not protect against Pegasus once the phone is compromised.

The London-based Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), a global investigations non-profit, in another exposé earlier in July, detailed how neighbouring Rwanda employed the software to tap mobile phones of senior Ugandan government officials, including former Foreign Affairs minister Sam Kutesa. Kigali denied the claims.

The military grade spyware is among Israeli defence supplies to sub-Saharan African countries, including Uganda.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), in a 2011 study, reported that Tel Aviv has for long sold or given weapons to a host of developing countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.

The study showed the deals are often accompanied by serving or retired Israeli military personnel and Israeli civilian contractors, who double as instructors.

“Since the United Nations Register of Conventional Arms (UNROCA) became operational in 1993, Israel has submitted data on exports of major arms every year,” the SIPRI study reads in part.

“The Israeli reports have been of a relatively high standard as they include details about the actual type and designation of equipment.

While many of the larger transfers reported by Israel to UNROCA are also well documented in other open sources, UNROCA reporting has often revealed smaller transfers, especially to African states such as Chad and Uganda,” the findings stated.

But in another 2019 study, SIPRI reported that out of submission of arms sales to UNROCA by the 10 largest exporters for the period 2013 to 2017, Israel had not made any report by mid-March 2019.

Uganda and Israel enjoy warm bilateral relations, especially on defence and security front; arms purchases and the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) training Uganda military. Neither country has an embassy in each other’s territory, but leaders of both countries have tossed around the idea for a while.

During a news conference at State House, Entebbe, in February 2020, former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Nentanyahu suggested that Israel would open an embassy in Kampala if Uganda were to open one in Jerusalem, whose eastern part is claimed by Palestine.

“We are studying that,” President Museveni responded guardedly.

Guns, rifles and carbines

Early last year in the run-up to the general election campaigns, mired by human rights violations, including arbitrary arrests and detention, and disappearances of Opposition supporters, rights activists filed a suit in the District Court of Tel Aviv seeking to revoke the Israeli Defence ministry’s arms export licence, especially of the Galil-ACE and Tavor assault rifles and other weaponry made by Israel to the Special Forces Command (SFC), a semi-independent unit of the UPDF.

In the suit, the rights activists methodically detailed curated photos of the Galil-ACE and Tavor assault rifles and other weaponry made by Israel, mostly tweeted by First Son Lt Gen Muhoozi Kainerugaba. The activists argued that SFC had been turned into a tool of oppression.

The UPDF and the police initially denied SFC’s involvement in the arrest and torture of the youth, particularly of the Opposition National Unity Platform (NUP) party.

Justice Orna Levi of the Tel Aviv District Court later, in February, issued a gag order, including another gag order as requested by the Israeli ministry of Defence on grounds of national security and foreign affairs.

But declassified documents from Israel’s State Archives published in December last year detail Israel’s long-standing weapons exports to Uganda even before 1986 when President Museveni shot his way to power.

The archives published by the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, detail how in July 1985, Gen Tito Okello Lutwa, with his would-be army commander Bazillio Okello, had plotted a coup against the Obote II government on January 27 that year, perhaps concerned about the ground slipping to the National Resistance Army (NRA) rebels, turned to Israel requesting for military aid.

Israeli’s ministry of Foreign Affairs officials, archives reveal, accepted to provide the necessary ammunition to frustrate Museveni’s band of rebels but in exchange for formalisation of diplomatic relations between the two countries.

The Kampala-Tel Aviv diplomatic relations had been severed earlier under President Idi Amin, who was unapologetically pro-Palestine. The position worsened when in late June 1976, Amin allowed members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Red Army Faction (a West German radical leftist group), who had hijacked a French jet airliner, to land in Entebbe.

At Entebbe, the hijackers freed all but the Israeli and Jewish hostages in exchange for the release of 53 militants imprisoned in Israel, Kenya, West Germany, and elsewhere.

At 11pm on Sunday of July 3, 1976, a Special Forces unit of the IDF, Sayeret Matkal, slipped into the country under cover of the darkness— for a clinical mission: Operation Thunderbolt—to rescue the 102 Israel nationals held by the hijackers.

In 90 minutes, the hostages had been rescued, the hijackers killed and more than two dozen Ugandan soldiers killed in the melee.  Only three hostages died as did Yonatan Netanyahu, the commander of the Sayeret Matkal unit, and brother of the future prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is now the leader of Opposition.

Lutwa’s arms deal

To cover up the thawing of relations, according to the cables published in the Haaretz, the Israeli Foreign Affairs and Defence ministries employed services of a former diplomat and ex-coordinator of government activities in Beirut, Lebanon, Uri Lubrani, now turned businessman.

Through his business undertakings, Lubrani transacted with the Israeli ministry of Defence and had visited Kampala numerous times to coordinate weapons shipments from Israel. The association between Israel and Gen Lutwa is reflected in cables and minutes from a number of meetings held around that time.

For instance, in November 1985, an unnamed son of Lutwa visited Israel and in December, Lubrani, a representative of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, and the commander of the Border Police, visited Kampala.

On January 10, 986, Lutwa’s defence minister, Brig Gad Wilson Toko, landed in Tel Aviv for a visit.

On the importance of the arms deliveries in a now-declassified report he drew up on January 19, 1986, Lubrani said: “Indeed, we carried out three special flights of chartered planes to send to Entebbe three shipments of combat material, which were apparently important to the regime both substantively and in terms of the timing, and this helped us pave the way toward advancing the effort to renew relations.”

However, it was as if, Israeli Foreign Affairs and Defence ministries officials knew that Lutwa’s government was on borrowed time, ostensibly from the US’s Central Intelligence Agency and the British foreign intelligence services, the M16.

In any case, the officials believed, the then Marxist-leaning Museveni, wouldn’t go against the idea of resetting relations between the two states should he succeed in edging out Lutwa.

In a November 22, 1985 cable, the director of the Africa Desk in the Israeli Foreign ministry, wrote: “There is no stability since the coup, and the government is not in control of the whole country. The rest is controlled by the rebels, and their forces are more united… We are being guided by the view that the establishment of relations will also be binding on the future governments of Uganda and, therefore, we have an interest in diplomatic ties despite the instability of the present government.”

Between December 1985 and early January 1986, the cables show that Israel sent three plane-loads of weapons and that in exchange Gen Lutwa approved that the two countries would appoint non-resident diplomatic representatives.

On December 19, 1985, Museveni agreed to sign a ceasefire agreement – which in Gen Lutwa’s assessment, was due to the determent provided by the Israeli arms. The deal collapsed soon and fighting resumed, as Israel continued to monitor the situation.

On January 19, 1986, Israel’s appointed representative to Uganda, Arye Oded, visited Kampala, and on January 22, Gen Lutwa’s helicopters fired Israeli-supplied rockets at Museveni’s rebels, forcing them to withdraw from several positions they had captured.

Soon enough, it dawned on the Israeli Foreign Affairs and Defence ministries that Museveni stood a better chance and they left Gen Lutwa in the cold by making a U-turn on the arms sales and rejected his last frantic calls for military aid. On January 25, 1985, Museveni and his NRA guerrillas overran Lutwa’s men and captured Kampala.

From no great bargainer to great bargainer

A cable on January, 26, 1986, by the then appointed Israeli representative to Kampala, Oded, detailed that a shipment of 2,000 rockets, for which payment had been done, was stopped.

In another cable he sent two days earlier, he wrote that these were rockets “of the type they purchased in the third shipment, and which have proved their effectiveness.”

The director of the Foreign ministry’s Africa Desk, Avi Primor, in another cable sent four days after NRA’s takeover of Kampala, detailed that a representative from Museveni (pictured) was already in contact with the Israeli Embassy in Washington.

The next day, Israeli representatives met with Museveni’s envoys in Nairobi, Kenya, and contacts between the sides began. Museveni’s representatives complained that Israel had armed Gen Lutwa’s faction and had disregarded their requests for military aid – to which the Israelis responded that Israel supports governments, not rebels.

Henceforward, the Israeli ministry of Defence would back Museveni’s regime, train and arm his military forces.

Meanwhile, Haaretz reported that, all along, Tel Aviv was fully aware of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi’s support to the rebel NRA guerrillas who had also conscripted underage boys as soldiers fighting on the battlefront.

In late August 1986, the Israeli ambassador to Swaziland, Shlomo Dayan, notified his colleagues about the fact that the new government in Kampala had underage children as part of its military.

Dayan also sent the director of Foreign ministry’s Africa Desk an article about children who had been deployed as combat personnel in the NRA, “which you may find of interest.” Apparently, the director didn’t agree.

Not so much to Israeli’s disappointment, Museveni did not sever ties with the Tripoli regime under Gaddafi, who visited Kampala in September 1986, nor stop sympathising with the Palestinian cause.

In early September 1987, senior Israeli Foreign ministry officials met with the US State Department officials. In the meeting, the head of the department’s Bureau of African Affairs noted that although Museveni ‘is no great bargain, he is Uganda’s last chance to stand on its feet’.

In the years that followed, President Museveni became a useful asset to both Israel and the West. Most recently in early 2020, Mr Museveni brokered a high level meeting, the first in more than 60 years, between Mr Netanyahu and the head of Sudan’s sovereign council, Gen Abdul Fattah al-Burhan, following the ouster of former Sudanese strongman Omar-al Bashir.

Since 1958, the Republic of Sudan, a long-time member of the Arab League—an alliance of North African and Middle East countries— formed to safeguard interests of Arab countries,  had a law in place that outlawed any association, diplomatic, business, or otherwise, with Tel Aviv. Relations soured in the 1990s under Bashir, who offered sanctuary to al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

But the Khartoum-Tel Aviv relations were restored in October 2020, and on April 6, last year, the Sudanese Cabinet greenlit scrapping the 1958 law.

President Museveni visited Israel in 2003, while Mr Nenyahu visited Uganda three times during his premiership alongside several other African countries.

The last prime minister to visit the African continent was Yitzhak Rabin in the early 1990s.

At the ceremony to commemorate 40 years after IDF’s raid on Entebbe in July 2016, President Museveni, a virulent critic of his predecessors, said Israel was right to attack Uganda. 

“It is actually Israel and the Western countries that had supported Idi Amin. Therefore, Amin’s hobnobbing with the terrorists was a crime in itself. Fortunately, his illiterate army had no discipline to deploy properly,” he said.