TABLE OF CONTENTS The F-16 with our F110 engines won orders in many countries around the world. One that gave us great satisfaction because it was where our engines would be put to the toughest test was Israel. This order, however, also gave me and the rest of us at GE one of our greatest setbacks from a moral point of view. The person in charge of procurement of engines for Israel was Brigadier General Rami Dotan, who was considered a great patriot by the U.S. Air Force and the Israeli government. Unfortunately, he was dishonest, and his dealings hurt many fine people both in the Israeli Air Force and at GE.
Dotan was a very forceful character. After one lunch I had with him at the request of our sales representative covering Israel, Herb Steindler, who turned out to be his co-conspirator, my wife said that Dotan was one of the scariest men she had ever met. How she came to this conclusion I am not sure, but her feelings were certainly a valid premonition. Dotan and Steindler, together with several other Israelis based in the United States and Switzerland, came up with a scheme whereby they were misdirecting U.S. military funding into their personal bank accounts. The money was being released through GE as the contract administrator to the Israelis for flight testing and for the building of some engine test cells and other tooling.
In May of 1992, one of the people in our Military Engine Operations received a...
