After his wedding on January 22, 1962, Tom Mboya, one of Kenya’s prominent nationalist leaders, left Nairobi for a honeymoon in Jerusalem. At that time, Israel was working hard to establish a political foothold in eastern Africa.
The previous evening and as Nairobi’s most popular band, Kiko Boys, belted out their tunes at the City Hall reception, no one seemed to notice the presence of some senior Israeli officials who had organised the grand trip to Israel for Mboya and his newlywed wife, Pamela Arua Odede, one of the beneficiaries of the Mboya airlifts.
In the crowd was Asher Naim – a man who would be instrumental in the setting up of what turned to be the National Youth Service – a body that has recently been in the news for the wrong reasons.
Naim had been sent to Nairobi in December 1960 by Ehud Avriel, then special adviser to the Israeli foreign minister, with a specific mission: to befriend the leaders of the incoming leadership and lay ground for the establishment of diplomatic relations. He was also to act as the deputy to Israel Somen, the former Nairobi mayor who also acted as the Jewish state’s Honorary Consul.
Somen, known in Nairobi as Izzy, was well known in political and business circles. He was not only Mboya’s friend but was also the president of the Board of Kenya Jewry and an astute businessman.
Israel’s attempt to appoint another diplomat, Uzi Nedivi, as Consul-General was thwarted by the colonial government. That is how the low-ranking Naim found himself in Nairobi in the hope that, as he would later write in an academic journal, “nobody would notice him” given his junior status.
In mid-1959, Mboya had led a delegation to Israel where he – and other African leaders – had been introduced to the Gadna-Nahal movement, during a six-week seminar.
The conference was organised by the CIA-funded International Union of the Socialist Youth (IUSY), which frequently published Mboya’s articles on African socialism.
Gadna was an acronym meaning youth formations, while Nahal meant fighting pioneer youth. These were youth organisations controlled and financed by the Israeli government to instil a sense of “national purpose”, and to “conduct civic and social duties”.
Upon his return to Nairobi, Mr Mboya told the press: “In Israel I have seen youths trained so that they are a source of pride to the nation, and they are readily available for all sorts of national work programmes.”
As a result of the lessons learnt in Israel, Mboya hoped to transform the youth wing of his People’s Congress Party into a formidable political tool. Also on the trip was Joseph Nyerere, brother of Tanzania’s leading politician Julius Nyerere.
He wanted to turn the Youth League of Tanu, which he led, into a formidable group. The Israelis also funded Kamuzu Banda’s Malawi Young Pioneers and Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana Young Pioneers.
In Israel, Mboya had also become friends with Aharon Becker, the secretary general of Histandrut, a trade union movement that owned businesses and factories and was a key backer of Ben Gurion’s Mapai party. It was the Histandrut that organised his honeymoon.
Mboya had wanted to replicate the Israeli experiments within his Kenya Federation of Labour (KFL) and signed an agreement in 1962 with Histandrut to start a newspaper, Mfanyi Kazi, a construction company, a bank and co-operatives.
Only one company, a retail cooperative shop known as Kenbir Trading Company Limited, managed by an Israeli named Israel Benjamin managed to take off. It was opened in Nairobi by Commerce and Industry minister, Dr Gikonyo Kiano, on July 2, 1963, a day after Kenya achieved self-governing status (Madaraka).
All this time, Jomo Kenyatta knew about the covert Israeli operations in Nairobi. When the Israeli diplomat Naim arrived in Nairobi in 1961, his first destination was Kenyatta’s Gatundu home, where the would-be President was still under British watch.
By this time, some seven months earlier, Mboya had already merged his party with other small outfits to form Kanu and had become a friend of Golda Meir, Israel’s foreign minister, who on August 18, 1961, sent a congratulatory letter to Kenyatta upon his release from detention. Another personal letter from Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, delivered by Ehud Avriel and Gen Aharon Remez, invited him to visit Israel.
Gen Remez was a commander of the Israeli Air Force, which he had helped to establish. He told Kenyatta that Israel stood ready to help Kenya train some air force pilots besides the youth project.
Trade unionist Tom Mboya, then only 30, was regarded as the bedrock of the youth movement within Kanu. Another key figure was Kenyatta’s youthful private secretary, the 31-year-old former detainee, J.M. Kariuki.
It was this Mboya-Kariuki group that would work with the Israelis to set up the National Youth Service all as part of Israel’s efforts to build close ties with the Kenyatta administration. Both would later meet the same fate: Mboya was assassinated in July 1969 while Kariuki was assassinated in March 1975.
The Gatundu discussion was on how Kenya could adopt Israel’s Nahal experiment in uniting the Kenyan tribes using the youth organisations. Naim also impressed upon Kenyatta to embrace the Kibbutz idea – a collective community farming system manned by trained youth as pioneers.
How the name of Waruhiu Itote, the Mau Mau general known as “General China” was proposed to be among the first Nahal trainees is not clear, but this was Israel’s first clandestine recruitment effort in Kenya.
During the first week of October 1962, Itote – who had spent his detention years with Kenyatta in Maralal – was approached by an Israeli secret agent Mr E. Peled and had a meeting in Nairobi’s Embassy Hotel. He briefed Gen China on the training programme.
The meeting took place after Gen Remez and Avriel’s meeting with Kenyatta. Itote, according to his biography, was to adopt the name Otto Kenya.
On November 12, 1962 Itote sneaked out of Kenya via Tanzania without a passport accompanied by 30 other Kenyans. He was picked by the Israelis and taken to Kibbutz Kfar Hannassi in Upper Galilee where he attended the Military Officers Training School in Tel Aviv.
While Itote’s and the trainee pilots departure remained secret – only revealed after Kenya’s independence – Kenyatta and Mboya had mid-October publicly witnessed the departure of 75 visitors from Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania who were guests of Histandrut, the workers umbrella body.
Elsewhere, Julius Nyerere also received some 30 advisers to train his National Service Corps grouped in three branches – agriculture, construction and military.
It was after the January 1964 revolt by the regular army, that Nyerere sought for the retraining of the youth by Israel to form the current Tanzania Peoples Defence Forces. The reason: the Nahal-trained service units trained by Israel had remained loyal to the government during the mutiny.
The Israelis had hoped that Kenyatta would follow Nyerere’s path and that Itote would be in charge of this unit. The main political task was given to JM Kariuki who was given the rank of National Youth Leader in the 1964 appointment. It earned him several enemies.
When government was challenged by Leader of Opposition Ronald Ngala in September 1964 with regard to JM’s appointment, Secretary for Labour, James Nyamweya said: “There are certain factors which are not necessarily a matter for public knowledge or matters to be disclosed by the government.”
With good Jewish connections, JM started a whirlwind tour of the US organised by Senator Robert Kennedy, a brother to slain US President John F. Kennedy. As a young Boston Post reporter, Robert had not hidden his admiration of the Israeli Kibbutz experiments.
As JM prepared to return to Kenya on July 31, 1965 he asked Geoffrey Griffins, the NYS director, for a favour: “Let me know whether there will be guard of honour and whether you want me to be in uniform that day.”
Griffins agreed. It was a political mistake and JM was accused of training the youth for his own benefit and seconding them to the military. In February 1966, a Motion was brought to Parliament by Embu’s J.G. Mbogo seeking the disbandment of the Israeli-funded unit arguing that the youth were being trained “for somebody to stand up there and look very big”.
“I hear there is a very senior man there called Mr Griffins who is the director…and there is a very great man called Hon. Kariuki who was given that job. (Griffins) is only there as a symbol,” Parliament was told.
To protect the Israeli project from disbandment, it was included as part of disciplined forces in the April 1966 amendment of the Kenya Constitution. That was a triumph for J.M. Kariuki who had now continued to solicit for more funding from other countries.
“The youth should be taught about politics and the party system, a form of indoctrination as to what the country requires,” he said. “They should be trained how to handle military weapons (for) it is of no use drilling with spades and shovels. We realise the shovels are important but if they are being called to join the army in case of trouble, they should know how to use machine guns.”
Wariithi, one of Kenya’s first lawyers, did not tell Parliament that he was the one who accompanied Itote (Gen China) to meet the Israeli secret agent at Embassy Hotel.
Interestingly, the NYS Bill had been brought to the House by Agriculture minister Bruce McKenzie, whose dalliance with Mossad was to later cost him his life after his plane was brought down in 1978 by a bomb planted by agents of Uganda’s President Idi Amin.
Inside NYS, the Israel-trained Itote became another face of the movement and its roving ambassador. But the entry of Britain, Denmark and Japan into NYS threw the Israelis into a spin.
With the infighting that was going on in the government, Tel Aviv started to lose interest in funding NYS and by 1966 they left for Uganda to start a similar project for Milton Obote.
It was this exit that saw the US Secret Service start having interest in the project. In 1973 a dispatch from the US Embassy described the National Youth Organisations as largely “impotent”.
In June 25, 1975 Nathaniel Davis, an assistant secretary arrived in Nairobi for a visit to the NYS. He had lunch with Vice-President Daniel arap Moi and Finance minister Mwai Kibaki.
Overall, the Nahal movement as crafted by the Israelis in East Africa failed.
Steven Carol, a foreign policy scholar on the Nahal says that the East African experiment did not yield fruit because most of the youth were illiterate and unlike the Israelis “they had no avowed enemy, or marauding terrorists across the border.”
With the failed NYS project, the Israelis now turned to training Kenyans in the field of intelligence and security.
Later, the Chinese took over the funding and introduced pre-university training which also failed. Not to be left behind, the Italians helped set up the Nyayo-bus project which again collapsed.
