A Tale of Two Spies

By Ian Williams

Two Jews convicted of spying are serving life sentences. For one, there is a massive campaign for clemency in both Israel and within the organized U.S. Jewish community. For the other, apart from a few dozen supporters in Israel, there is total silence. The reason, of course, is that American Jonathan Pollard was convicted of spying for Israel, while Israeli Mordechai Vanunu was found guilty of spying against Israel.

Moved by his conscience, Vanunu had confirmed to the world that Israel not only had nuclear weapons, but had many more of them than either the Soviets or the CIA suspected. He received no money from any government for his revelations, which he made after a year of wrestling with his conflicting loyalties as an Israeli and as a human being opposed to nuclear proliferation.

By contrast, although Pollard insists he was motivated by concern for Israeli security, he was paid (and is still being paid) a handsome salary by the Israeli government. His Israeli handlers also provided gifts and trips to Europe for Pollard and his wife, Anne. The severity of Pollard's sentence was based on secret testimony by Caspar Weinberger, who is on record as saying that Pollard was lucky—he should have received three life sentences. Pollard provided Israeli intelligence with more than 1,000 classified U.S. documents, some consisting of hundreds of pages, comprising overall some 360 cubic feet of paper.

According to American investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, Pollard sold information on nuclear targets in the Soviet Union to Israel. U.S. defense sources suggest that what caused the most bitter anger against Pollard in the Pentagon and throughout the American intelligence community was the fact that the information compromised human agents in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. U.S. intelligence sources have concluded that the Israeli government bartered this information to the Soviet Union.

Interestingly, Pollard spoke Afrikaans and had had ambitions to work for South Africa's Bureau of State Security. Part of his responsibility was monitoring U.S. intelligence from and about South Africa. The Pretoria/Jerusalem axis was well established by then, and presumably information on U.S. intelligence assets in South Africa received from Pollard also would have been traded by Israel to South Africa as part of the sanctions-busting military and civilian commerce in which Israelis were engaged.

In March 1987, Pollard pled guilty and received a life sentence. One year later, in March 1988, Mordechai Vanunu, after a trial conducted in secret, during which he was forced to wear a motorcycle crash helmet in and out of the court, was sentenced to 18 years' imprisonment. Since then he has been kept in solitary confinement in a 2-by-3-meter cell with artificial light only, kept on 24 hours a day.

His family believes that the Israeli government is trying to drive him insane so that when his sentence is over he can be transferred straight to an asylum. Any information that he gives would then be discounted as the ravings of a lunatic. There is evidence that the Israeli authorities have done this before. The victim was Professor Marcus Klingberg, accused of being a Soviet agent while working at the Israeli chemical and biological warfare plant at Nes Tziona.

Although President George Bush refused to accede to the massive campaign for clemency for Pollard, just before Bush left office Caspar Weinberger seemed to retreat from his earlier stance and implied that he would be prepared to see Pollard set free.

At the 1993 AIPAC convention in Washington, DC, Executive Director Thomas Dine, while not giving the full backing of the Israeli lobby to the campaign, revealed that the current application for clemency was moving between the Justice Department and the White House. Some national U.S. Jewish organizations have demurred from publicly endorsing the clemency campaign because their leaders believe Pollard's crime, and the efforts on his behalf, lend credence to suspicions that American Jews have dual loyalties. However, few Jewish leaders risked the opprobrium of the mainstream Jewish leader ship by publicly opposing the clemency campaign.

While President Clinton has, on most issues, shown himself extremely solicitous of the feelings of American Jewish leaders, he is uneasily aware that this issue would involve him in further conflict with the U.S. military, already unhappy with his lack of military service and his promise to permit gays to serve in the armed forces. For most of the Pentagon establishment, Pollard is simply and unequivocally a traitor.

Former Israeli paratrooper Gideon Spiro is one of the few Jews publicly campaigning for the release of Mordechai Vanunu. On a visit to the U.S. in March, he called for an exchange of Pollard for Vanunu. He is careful to point out that Pollard was a genuine spy, who confessed to taking a lot of money from a foreign government for information, while Vanunu got no money for his exposure of activity that the Israeli government had never even confessed to its citizens. To the argument that Vanunu is not an American, Spiro replies: "Neither was Sharansky, but the U.S. still arranged an exchange for him."

Spiro has been touring the world on behalf of Vanunu and proudly points out that a group of Australian legislators has sponsored the prisoner for a Nobel Peace Prize. That is in stark contrast to the behavior of Amnesty International, which has condemned the cruelty of solitary confinement but has consistently refused to adopt him as a prisoner of conscience.

Their explanation is that Vanunu broke the law. Of course, so do most political prisoners—which makes Amnesty's reticence so much the more intriguing. In contrast, the European Parliament has passed several resolutions calling for Vanunu's release and condemning his abduction by Israeli agents from Western Europe. The Japanese government invited Gideon Spiro to Japan to speak at a conference on nuclear disarmament, but such international concern has had little resonance in Israel.

Spiro was one of the Israeli soldiers who refused their call-up papers for the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Since he had served directly under General Rafael Eitan, parachuting into Egypt's Mitla pass in the 1956 Suez attack, and again in the assault on East Jerusalem in 1967, it would have been too embarrassing for the authorities to prosecute him.

That, however, did not mean that the Likud government was prepared to drop the matter. Spiro was sacked from his government job in the Ministry of Education for accusing Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and Defense Minister Ariel Sharon of war crimes. Spiro fought the case all the way to Israel's Supreme Court and lost. He now is writing a book on anti-Arab racism in the Israeli judicial system.

"A settler is part of the occupation."

"Just look at the demolitions, deportations and shooting they have approved," Spiro says dismissively. "The Nuremberg trials established the principle that obeying the law is not the supreme principle. Things don't have to get as bad as the Nazis before the judges refuse to obey the law. "

Spiro escaped with his parents from Germany in 1939, just five months before the outbreak of World War II. His memory of that has led him to condemn the hypocrisy of Israeli leaders who continually invoke the Holocaust to win the sympathy of the world, but have acted as close allies to a South Africa whose racial laws were as draconian as the Nuremberg laws in Germany. He is at pains to say that he thinks a comparison between the Nazi extermination campaigns and Israel's treatment of Palestinians is unwarranted, but he has shocked Israelis by comparing conditions in Israel directly with South African apartheid.

He made himself unpopular by writing, after a Jewish woman settler and her children were killed when the car they were traveling in was fire-bombed in the West Bank: "A settler who decides to live in the occupied zone under the umbrella of the occupation forces is part of the occupation, and cannot be seen as an innocent person hiking in a lovely nature reserve. If he brings his family, his wife and children, to live in these dangerous circumstances, he is putting their lives in jeopardy. "

In 1988, he compared Israel's president to a Mafia leader, or Papa Doc Duvalier of Haiti, for the pardons he gave to the Shin Bet murderers. "To me, Jewishness means love thy neighbor as thyself, and don't do to the other what you would not like to be done to you," he says in explaining the motivation for his writing and his campaign on Vanunu's behalf.

Many Arabs suspected at the time Vanunu was lured from England, kidnapped in Rome and brought back to Israel for trial that the dramatic circumstances were part of a sophisticated Mossad plot to convince the Arab world and the West that Israel did indeed have nuclear weapons. But after seven years in solitary confinement, and with his sanity under siege, it is clear that if there were such a plot, Vanunu was not a willing party to it.

Vanunus Story

Mordechai Vanunu was the son of immigrants to Israel from Morocco. He worked for nine years at Israel's nuclear reactor at Dimona, built with French help before the 1967 war.

Although it was supposed to be a peaceful research reactor, no one could work there without realizing that its purpose was far from peaceful. While there, Vanunu studied philosophy, and, without awakening suspicion in the Israeli Security Services, he befriended Arab students in Beersheba.

He began to agonize about what everyone knew was happening. He smuggled in a camera and took pictures which now are regarded as conclusive evidence of the military nature of the reactor.

After leaving Dimona, Vanunu went on a round-the-world tour. He passed through Moscow with a roll of undeveloped photographs of the secret reactor in his backpack. He could have named his own price with the Soviets, but he did not reveal Israel's nuclear secrets until after his conversion to Anglican Christianity in Sydney, Australia. That conversion was used by the Israeli government to help destroy any public sympathy for him within Israel. Spiro points out that one of the judges was a religious Jew, who would have been particularly shocked by Vanunu's apostasy.

Spiro notes that when he went to Vanunu's church in Sydney and asked what the congregants were doing to help, the vicar told him they were praying for Vanunu.

Spiro clearly felt this was not enough.

The Israeli campaign is hoping to link up with a similar campaign in Egypt calling for a nuclear-free Middle East. The Egyptian activists complain that the aging nuclear reactor in Dimona could prove to be another Chernobyl—and that the concentration of over 200 nuclear warheads in a country so small is dangerous in itself.

While in the U.S., Spiro approached public figures like George McGovern and many congressmen to support the idea of an exchange of Pollard for Vanunu. Spiro paid particular attention to Episcopalian leaders. Since the Clinton administration puts stress on stopping nuclear proliferation and on supporting human rights, Spiro says, Washington should support the swap on both grounds. An op-ed piece he prepared on the subject for The New York Times was, perhaps not surprisingly, rejected. He now has plans for newspaper advertisements and articles. Whether successful or not, the campaign to trade Pollard for Vanunu probes the foundations of the humanitarian grounds upon which many Pollard supporters are basing their own campaign.

Ian Williams is a British journalist based at the United Nations.