BAIT-UL-MOQADDAS Israel's Mossad intelligence agency secretly helped Morocco's late King Hassan II battle his domestic and foreign rivals in the 1960s, at one point sending him 100 tanks, Israeli newspapers reported on Sunday. The Maariv newspaper said the chief of the Mossad at the time, Rafi Eitan, visited Morocco in 1962 when the newly enthroned Hassan faced army mutinees and assassination attempts.

Eitan agreed to provide Hassan's regime with 100 tanks needed for a border conflict with Algeria, the newspaper said in the report published two days after King Hassan died of a heart attack. Maariv and the Haaretz newspapers said Hassan allowed the Mossad to set up a station in Rabat as part of the cooperation. In 1965, Maariv said, Mossad agents reportedly played a role in the kidnap-murder of Hassan's political arch-rival Mahdi ben Barka. Such cooperation lapsed after Morocco sent a brigade to Syria during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War in a symbolic sign of solidarity.

But ties were quickly renewed and Hassan played a key behind-the-scenes role in mediating secret contacts between Israel and Egypt which led to their 1979 peace treaty. Zvi Zamir, who headed the Mossad from 1968 to 1974, confirmed in a radio interview Sunday that the agency long had secret links with Hassan, but denied it had played a direct role in his personal security.

"There were contacts with the Moroccan secret service, but he didn't need us for his personal security," Zamir said. The former spy chief said Mossad gave great importance to maintaining relations with King Hassan, both because it viewed him as a potential mediator with the Arab world and because of the presence of a large Jewish community in Morocco.