Arye Naor announced that he has submitted his resignation as Cabinet Secretary, a post he has held for nearly five years, to Premier Menachem Begin. He said he asked to be relieved of his duties next April but denied that his resignation was connected in any way with a disciplinary hearing on charges that he leaked secret information to a European journalist to obtain a newspaper job had the Likud government been defeated in the Knesset elections last June.
A complaint was filed against Naor by syndicated cartoonist Raunan Lurie who works for the Times of London and was previously employed by the West German news magazine Die Welt. Lurie alleged that Naor leaked to him secret information about a conversation between former President Jimmy Carter and West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt in an effort to persuade Lurie to help him get a job on Die Welt. Naor has denied the charges and contends that the “secret information” had in fact been published weeks earlier in the Israeli daily Maariv. Naor is a staunch Herut loyalist. It was rumored here today that he would be succeeded by another Herut loyalist, Jerusalem lawyer Dan Meridor.
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