Defense Secretary Clark Clifford testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee today that the Johnson Administration has made no decision on Israel’s application to buy Phantom jet fighter-bombers. He said that he was “guided entirely by the President’s statement after meeting Prime Minister Levi Eshkol of Israel” at the LBJ ranch in Texas last January. At that time, the President promised to keep the request under review. Mr. Clifford said the two governments had been in constant contact and that “sympathetic consideration” had been given to the Israeli request, but he would not go beyond that.
Testifying on a bill that would authorize credits for the supply of arms to various countries, Mr. Clifford said that nothing had come of efforts to achieve joint control with Russia on arms shipments to the Middle East. He said that the growth of Soviet naval power in the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf was “not benign.”
(The NATO Council, meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland, yesterday, endorsed a report by the NATO defense committee on the dangers of Soviet infiltration into the Mediterranean area, specifically the build-up of Russian naval power there since last June’s Arab-Israel war. The endorsement was given by 14 of the 15 members of the Western alliance. Only France abstained. The statement directed the Permanent Council of NATO to seek means to safeguard the southern flank of the alliance.)
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