Pollard and Beyond

We were getting information about our enemies that the Americans should have been giving to us anyway. Is that the same as stealing state secrets that could harm the United States security? —Unnamed Israeli official quoted by William Claiborne in The Washington Post, June 9, 1986.

Recently a story made the rounds in Washington that during a visit to Moscow Libyan Leader Muammar Qaddafi was shown a secret CIA report glowingly describing one of his cousins, an Army officer, as balanced, highly-respected and possessing leadership potential. When Qaddafi returned to Tripoli he abruptly sent for his kinsman. A few hours later the young officer was dead of gunshot wounds. There is no way to authenticate the Moscow portion of the story, but what's certain is that the influential Libyan officer is dead and their mutual relatives believe Qaddafi killed him personally.

The incident is worth recalling in connection with Israel's claim that it only spied in the U.S. to obtain information about the Arabs. In 1979 the CIA reported that Israel uses American spies to secure U.S. political and scientific secrets as well as information on the Arabs. A former chief of internal security for the Department of Justice has described Israel's intelligence activities in the U.S. as second in size only to those of the Soviet Union.

Even if Israel's cover story were true, however, it's no justification. The information Israel seeks, in the wrong hands, is harmful to the United States. That's why it's classified. American Mideast experts know that the most important goal of Israeli diplomacy is to undermine relations between the U.S. and Arab moderates—like the Saudi royal family, President Mubarak of Egypt, President Bourguiba of Tunisia, King Hassan of Morocco, Sultan Qaboos of Oman, and King Hussein of Jordan. The object is to make the U.S. increasingly blind and isolated in the Middle East and thus eventually as dependent upon Israel as Israel is upon the U.S. That's why a report praising a moderate potential Arab leader that falls into Israeli hands could find it.; way from there to someone who can destroy that Arab moderate. Israel needs Qaddafis, as many as possible, to project an aura of Arab intransigence and unremitting hostility to the U.S. Otherwise, how can Israel possibly persuade the U.S. Congress to continue appropriating an annual $1,500 per person American subsidy that makes it possible for Israel to continue occupying the West Bank, Gaza, and Golan Heights rather than give them back to the Arabs in exchange for peace?

The story of retired CIA counter-intelligence chief James J. Angleton is relevant here. Among his duties in the 1960s was implementation of an agreement first extended to Israel by the Eisenhower Administration, and presumably still in effect, whereby, in exchange for not spying upon each other, the two countries would freely exchange selected intelligence.

During the same period Angleton became convinced that persistent leakage of extremely sensitive U.S. intelligence to Moscow indicated the presence of a Soviet mole at the very heart of the U.S. intelligence community. Many of his colleagues now believe his two major concerns were, in fact, cause and effect. Either the Soviet mole was in Israel or there was a deliberate decision by Israeli officials to see that American secrets fell into Soviet hands where this furthered Israeli goals.

The Israeli second line of defense in the Jonathan Pollard case is that "everyone does it." A spate of articles to this effect appeared in U.S. newspapers when the young U.S. Naval counter-intelligence specialist was arrested last November and again when he pled guilty in June. In fact, a careful reading of all such articles proved the contrary.

Cited were covert propaganda activity by the British during World War II, acceptance by the Dutch of some classified information offered them in the 1950s by an American scientist, large donations by the Nationalist Chinese to Congressmen a generation ago, attempts in his later years by President Charles de Gaulle to obtain U.S. technology for France, activities by Tong Sung Park to obtain Congressional favors for South Korea, and more recent charges that Japan does not actively discourage its private companies from stealing American high tech. This 40-year accumulation isn't much of a deviation from the "acceptable" intelligence gathering of all foreign embassies in Washington, encompassing assiduous reading of U.S. newspapers and specialized journals, attendance at air shows and military demonstrations, and hobnobbing with U.S. officials, usually to plant an idea in the American's head rather than steal one out of it. No foreign country uses large-scale bribery and intimidation to have its way with Congress as does Israel. And only Israel launches large-scale secret stealing on the scale of Soviet Bloc, Communist China and Asian Communist countries in the U.S.

When the Communist countries get caught we hear about it. Until the Pollard case, however, when the Israelis got caught we didn't. Who remembers the Lavon affair in 1954 when Israel-trained provocateurs fire-bombed U.S. Embassy and Consulate libraries in Cairo and Alexandria and blamed the Egyptians? Or the 1967 Israeli air and torpedo boat attack off the Sinai Coast against the intelligence ship USS Liberty, in which 34 U.S. Naval and National Security Agency personnel were killed and another 171 wounded? Or the theft of fissionable materials from the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) to provide warheads for Israeli nuclear weapons. Rafael Eitan, mastermind of the Pollard affair, was among Israeli intelligence officials who visited Dr. Zalman Shapiro's NUMEC plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania, at the time the nuclear material was disappearing. Shapiro was never charged but he eventually lost his top secret security clearance.

Not even that happened to Stephen Bryen who, while a staff aide on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was accused by a witness of offering highly-classified documents to Israeli officials in Washington. Bryen left the Senate and became executive director of the Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs (JINSA) while the FBI investigated the charges and actually found his fingerprints on a document the witness had heard him offering the Israelis.

When no charges were brought against him, however, Bryen handed over JINSA to his wife and went on to become the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense who, at this very moment, coordinates U.S. efforts to protect secret American technology from falling into the hands of foreign powers. JINSA, under executive director Shoshana Bryen, now finds itself uncomfortably close to U.S. investigations of conspiracies to sell $2.5 billion in prohibited U.S. weapons, many of them already in Israel, to Iran for use in its war against Iraq. Paul Sjeklocha, also known as Paul Cutter, appointed to the JINSA board of directors in 1983, was convicted in 1985 of conspiring to sell anti-tank missiles to Iran.

The Customs Service this month is investigating charges that the Israeli government purchasing mission in New York sought to smuggle out U.S. technology for making cluster bombs.

Most people have already forgotten the 1985 Customs Service breakup of an Israeli attempt to steal U.S. tank barrel technology, even though NBC cameramen filmed the bust. In California, police are still searching for Richard Kelley Smyth, the businessman indicted in May, 1985, for illegally shipping 800 to 1,000 krytrons, sophisticated electronic timing devices which can be used to trigger nuclear weapons, to Aaron Milchan, his Israeli business associate. Smyth mortgaged his house to raise bail but he and his wife mysteriously disappeared from their houseboat before the trial.

These are only the cases where Israel was caught. They're all a matter of public record, but few Americans recall them. Some point to Jewish influence in the American media as an explanation for the lack of publicity, but that's only the second part of the story. If the U.S. government doesn't pursue the investigation or release any more information than it has to, then there's not much for even an honest journalist to report.

What the media have told us in the Pollard case is that the Justice Department has identified by name four Israelis involved. One is his first "handler," then Lt. Col. Aviem Sella, who has subsequently been promoted to Brigadier in command of Israel's largest air base. Others are his second handler, Israeli Embassy Science Attache Yosef Yagur, and Israeli Embassy secretary Irit Erb, to whose apartment Pollard brought a suitcase of classified documents every two weeks for photocopying. Both have new Israeli foreign service assignments. Rafael Eitan, mastermind of the entire operation, has been made chairman of Israel's Government-owned industrial chemical complex.

Pollard had been instructed by Yagur to identify non-American missile systems appropriate for Iran to use against Iraq. The assignment links Pollard's handler to those recurring attempts to evade U.S. sanctions against providing weapons to Iran. Among those accused in the U.S. of conspiring to smuggle American arms to Iran are Avraham Bar-Am, a retired Israeli general, who, along with two Israeli businessmen and two Americans, one living in Israel and one in London, were lured by U.S. undercover agents in April to Bermuda, where they were arrested and subsequently extradited to New York. General Bar-Am was authorized by the Israeli Government to deal in arms and threatens to tell all about his work if Israel doesn't support him now.

In May, Israeli reserve Lt., Col. Ze'ev Reiss and another Israeli, Gil Silva, were charged with trying to smuggle U.S. anti-tank missiles to the Iraq-Iran war front. Both of these cases are in addition to the 1985 California conviction of Sieklocha and Charles St. Clair for conspiring to sell U.S. wire-guided anti-tank missiles to Iran.

One reason U.S. Customs is breaking up these Israel-associated attempts to smuggle arms from the U.S. to Iran is that an Iranian victory in its war with Iraq would be a geopolitical catastrophe for the U.S. and its moderate, oil-producing Arab friends like Saudi Arabia. The Reagan Administration acknowledged this when it made Israel promise four years ago to stop supplying Iran with arms.

As rapidly as Justice or Customs uncovers such Israeli violations of U.S. law and its own word, however, the State Department covers up and obfuscates with the remarkable legal opinions of its General Counsel, Abraham Sofaer. Sofaer is the same Federal Judge who made Ariel Sharon's loss of a libel suit to Time magazine in his New York courtroom look like a Sharon victory, clearing the way for Sharon's return to Israeli right-wing extremist politics. Born in Iraq of Jewish parents, and accustomed to vacationing in Israel in the home he owns in Jerusalem, Sofaer seems an odd choice to represent the American people in sensitive dealings concerning Israel's espionage in the U.S. For that matter, when Egypt requested U.S. participation in order to hasten a settlement of its dispute with Israel over Taba, it must have been astonished that Abraham Sofaer was the American "honest broker" sent to attend the negotiations as a disinterested party.

There was a time when the State Department was the one, beleaguered part of the U.S. Government which felt obligated to offset Israel's domestic political clout by telling the President that the U.S. has other important interests in the Middle East. Reminded of this, apologists claim that Secretary of State Shultz's remarkable stonewalling to prevent the American public from learning the true extent of Israeli subversive activities in the U.S. is because when the full truth emerges it will be "embarrassing all around."

No more embarrassing, however, than learning that his predecessor, Alexander Haig, had in fact given a "green light" to Israel's disastrous and bloody 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Nor more embarrassing than having Shultz so eager to curry favor with a pro-Israel U.S. press and pro-Israel U.S. President that even U.S. lobbyists for Israel have warned he may be giving Israel more U.S. help than it can comfortably digest.

The new embarrassment will probably be the discovery that, by making it so easy for Israel to spy, we have harmed to a greater extent than has been revealed Arab and Muslim leaders who trusted us.

However bad that may be, the greatest embarrassments of all will inevitably be suffered by the American Jewish community. Never mind the private wisecracks by government officials at the time of Pollard's arrest that the only thing newsworthy was that the Israelis were paying for what everyone thought they were getting for nothing. All Americans now can see that Israel isn't concerned about the consequences of its actions on the great majority of American Jews who are loyal to the U.S. and who don't want an Israeli passport in a false name and a Swiss bank account like those Israel provided Pollard.

What's most embarrassing, however, is signified by Shultz's remarkable cover-up, and his stubborn insistence on using a negotiator whose impartiality is by this time legitimately open to question. Apparently Shultz believes that Ronald Reagan, whose formative years were spent in the Jewish-dominated film industry and who came into office as the most pro-Israel President in U.S. history, is—regardless of the evidence—too old or too dumb to change his mind. Even more demeaning, Shultz seems to have decided that American Jews, faced with their moment of truth, will react differently than has every other American group forced by history to choose between Old World and New World loyalties. In short, that as a group they will always react as American Jews, and never as Jewish Americans.

—Richard Curtiss