Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May/June 1998, Page 45

The Ostrovsky Files

At Age 50, Israel Should Admit Its Responsibility to Jonathan Pollard

By Victor Ostrovsky

Espionage—in most cases—is not a game where individuals set out to gather information and then seek to sell it to the highest bidder. For one to become a spy, one must first find an agency that wants the information he or she has access to, then an arrangement must be reached.

In the real world it is the agency that seeks out the spy and not the other way around. Then, for starters, a method must be devised to provide the payment the spy-to-be wants, and that the agency in question is willing and authorized to make.

In most cases, payment is in the form of hard currency. On occasion the incentive is revenge or—the most colorful and revered by fiction authors—sex. The most powerful motive, however, is a common ideological, ethnic or religious bond in which the promise of hero status amongst your own is payment enough.

Once the incentive for which a spy will work is established, his accessibility to information is the yardstick by which the employing agency measures his value. After the initial steps of recruitment are covered and the potential spy’s accessibility to information is verified, the operation moves to the next level—deciding what it is the recruiting agency wants the new asset to bring them.

As spy agencies do not work in a vacuum, it is a given that the recipients of the information—or the “customers” as they are referred to in the intelligence community—are the ones who place the orders for the goods—the information to be gathered—very much like the ordinary citizen would order something from a catalog. What that means is that if Jonathan Jay Pollard brought to his handlers copies of secret satellite images that he had stolen from his office for them, these images were not selected by Pollard at random. It is certain that his handlers gave him a “shopping list” of what they wanted him to bring them. And there is no doubt that the list was not compiled by his handlers, but by the end users of the information in the Israeli security establishment.

As nothing is simple in espionage, the lists handed over to Pollard’s handlers had to go through a bureaucratic gauntlet of their own. Only after receiving several levels of official approvals were those lists finally handed to Pollard.

Top Israeli leaders had no qualms about operating a spy in the United States.

When Pollard responded and handed over the goods, his handlers had to give the customers some information as to their source. Describing the standing of the source and the degree of his reliability is a major factor in assessing the credibility of the information he provides. Some customers, such as the top political and security echelons, therefore are told who the particular agent is. That is a necessity resulting from their obligation to evaluate the information they are given.

The fact that Pollard was Jewish was a positive factor in evaluating the information he provided. The leaders had more faith in a Jew helping the state of Israel—even if greed was his primary motivation—than they would in a spy who was Muslim or Christian.

All this boils down to a simple statement of fact. There was full knowledge of Pollard’s activities among top Israeli leaders. They had no qualms about operating a spy in the United States. If there were any complaints, they would have had to do with the fact that his handlers were putting a Jew in harm’s way—something of which the Mossad disapproves, at least officially.

The Israeli government’s attempt to sweep this fact under the rug should serve as a warning to other active or potential spies for Israel. Had Pollard not been reared on love for Israel, and with the belief that Israel was above reproach, he probably would not have done what he did and would still be a free man. Yet, although it took all the information he brought, when he finally was caught the Israeli government shed its responsibility for him by saying that his activation was an unauthorized operation.

Which raises the question: When they were examining the satellite photos they knew full well were not handed over by the American government. So where did they think the photos were coming from—Motophoto?

Furthermore, not only did the Israeli government use the information for its own security purposes, it reportedly bartered some of it to other countries, including the Soviet Union, with which the U.S. was not the best of friends.

Rafi Eitan, Pollard’s top handler, was the head of the now-defunct Lishka Lekishry Mada (Lacham), the section for scientific cooperation, a semi-intelligence agency attached to the office of the prime minister which carried out overseas operations the Mossad found too fetid to handle. Today Eitan is running a large agricultural business in Cuba and is said to be one of the strongmen of that country.

So if the Pollard affair was indeed a “rogue operation,” how is it that the man who allegedly ran that rogue operation without the knowledge of the Israeli government, as it claims, has never been prosecuted, or even reprimanded, in Israel?

In fact it’s ironic that the Israeli government has not seen fit to admit its responsibility for Pollard’s plight, even as American Jewish friends of Israel alternately plead with and bully the White House to release Jonathan Pollard on grounds that he did what he did out of patriotism for Israel and that, after all, he only spied for a friendly country.

I personally agree that there is room to consider leniency toward Pollard. He does not carry alone the burden of his treason. It should be shared by all the family members, friends and associates who brought him up to place the well-being of another country before that of his own. Then there also is the need for Israel’s government to come clean and admit it was behind him and that it has given the term “ally” a bad name. And at 50, it would not be a day too soon.