From Arms Dealer To Movie Producer

In a rare and candid interview, Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan speaks openly about a mysterious part of his life that people in Tinseltown only whisper about, his involvement in procuring high-tech weapons for his native Israel. Milchan opens up to Steve Kroft in an interview for the March 5 60 Minutes.

Today, Milchan is the head of Regency Productions, the company responsible for such movie hits as Pretty Woman and JFK. He also is involved in many other business ventures, including the Puma athletic brand.

But his success began when he was a young man in Israel with an agricultural business. He tells Kroft he made a patriotic offer to help the government of Israel when it set out to build its own arms industry after the Arab-Israeli war in the early '70s. "I one day said to Shimon (Peres) my friend, who happened to be the minister of defense all of the sudden, 'You know, I could help you guys,'" recalls Milchan.

Milchan tells Kroft how he helped Israel sell arms to countries that couldn't buy them from the U.S., such as the apartheid government of South Africa. Before long, Milchan was helping to procure Patriot and Hawk missiles for his country, a role he reveled in as a young man. "It was almost a glamorous thing, to be involved in the aerospace industry," he tells Kroft. "Everybody looked to me as a James Bond."

Milchan says he was never a spy, nor a part of the Israeli government.

But he admits he gave Israel free rein to use his companies for its arms dealing with the U.S. "to help in the defense and survival of the state of Israel."

Some of the transactions made by one of those firms got its president indicted for illegally exporting krytrons to Israel, items that could be used for nuclear armaments. "I was away, not involved, in the business at all at that time," says Milchan.

"In my language, the word arms dealer is somebody who sells arms to all kinds of shady countries to make money or start revolutions and makes a buck out of it," he tells Kroft. "This is clearly what I was not."