Richard Holbrooke, Peter Jennings Have Reliable Middle East Sources

By Richard H. Curtiss

Alert viewers of Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke's press conferences as he mediates a peace agreement for Bosnia have noted his frequent comparisons of Sarajevo and divided Bosnia with the problems in Jerusalem. There's at least one good reason. He is married to Kati Marton, author of the recently released book A Death in Jerusalem, describing the assassination in August 1948 of the Swedish U.N. Mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, by Jewish Lehi (Stern Gang) terrorists led by a triumvirate that included future Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.

Kati Marton is the former wife of ABC anchorman Peter Jennings, who once was married to a Lebanese woman and who now is squiring superstar Barbra Streisand, surely qualifying Jennings, who used to cover the Middle East personally when he was in ABC's London bureau, as the best informed journalist on all points of view of the half-century dispute between Arabs and Jews.

Holbrooke may have even more Middle East insights than meet the eye. For a time between the end of his second and the start of his third marriage (to Marton), his girlfriend was CBS correspondent Diane Sawyer. It was Ms. Sawyer who was named this summer as "Deep Throat," the Washington Post's source on Watergate doings in Richard Nixon's White House by the late Rabbi Baruch Korff ("Nixon's Rabbi"), who was personally involved both in Middle Eastern and in Nixon White House affairs. Ukrainian-born Rabbi Korff had been an avid supporter of Israel and of Sephardic Jewish communities in the Middle East before he undertook high-profile efforts to defend Nixon against Watergate accusations. He was a man of conscience, and for this reason his death-bed accusation cannot easily be dismissed, even though Sawyer, who was in the Nixon White House press office at the time "Deep Throat" was leaking White House secrets to the Washington Post, called them "laughable."

Yes, we've already checked: retired Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee declines to identify "Deep Throat" in his just-published book, A Good Life. Bradlee says he and Washington Post managing editor Howard Simon and investigative reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein all promised that Deep Throat's identity would not be revealed until after his, her or its death.

We say "it" because it's long been our opinion that whoever played the role of "Deep Throat" (in real life, not the film) was in fact only a conduit for information collected by Israel's Mossad and used to discredit Nixon. That was because at the beginning of his second term Nixon had signaled both orally and in writing to then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that having armed Israel to the teeth during his first presidential term, he was going to insist that Israel make peace with the Arabs in his second term.

What we did learn from discussions of Bradlee's book was that Simons, now deceased, felt his role in Watergate was "fatally shortchanged" in the film "All the President's Men," and that his relationship with Bradlee "was never the same after the film." Simons, who was Jewish, has been credited by both Woodward and Bernstein for giving them the time, encouragement and backing to pursue the story that finally brought down a president before he could do any of the politically dangerous things he had hoped to do after being safely re-elected.

Not Middle East-relevant but intriguing nevertheless was Bradlee's revelation that British-born Pamela Harriman, now U.S. ambassador to France, once prevailed upon both Richard Holbrooke and Diane Sawyer to go to Bradlee and ask that an unflattering story about Harriman be killed. It wasn't, but perhaps losing an argument with Bradlee gave Holbrooke some experience for winning arguments with the former Yugoslavs.

There may someday be a Washington Report "People Watch" column that doesn't mention convicted spy for Israel Jonathan Jay Pollard—but not this month. While serving his life sentence, Pollard has divorced his wife Anne, who moved to Israel after serving part of her own sentence for assisting his espionage. Then, supposedly, he married a pretty Canadian brunette, Elaine Zeitz, who now has taken the name Esther Zeitz-Pollard. (We say supposedly because although a wedding in jail seems hard to conceal, Elaine/Esther refuses to reveal either to journalists or to Pollard's family when or where the happy event took place.) Now, by telephone, Pollard has fired his Washington, DC lawyer, Nancy Luque, and has disassociated himself from two of his most visible former supporters, president Seymour Reich of the American Zionist Movement and chairman Amnon Dror of the Israel Public Committee, based in Jerusalem.

"This can't possibly be Jay" (Jonathan), said Carol Pollard, his sister, who has been conducting a 10-year campaign to free him, but whose calls Pollard has not returned for almost a year. Carol and Pollard's father, Notre Dame professor Morris Pollard, have questioned whether Elaine/Esther, who has Pollard's power of attorney, is married to him at all. They also charge that Esther Zeitz-Pollard is disrupting years of planning to free the former U.S. Navy counter-intelligence specialist, who pled guilty to handing over thousands of U.S. secret documents to the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC before he was caught and convicted in 1985. However, when he last spoke with his sister Carol, Jonathan Pollard asked: "Have you gotten me out in 10 years? Maybe she will."

The new and maybe Mrs. Pollard struck back at criticism from the Pollard family, saying that her husband had learned through "reliable sources" that when his case comes up for a parole board hearing after he has served a full 10 years this year, the board will use a "15-year set-aside" that would keep the case from being reviewed for another 15 years. She said her strategy was to advise Pollard, who has been seeking Israeli citizenship for 10 years through "quiet channels," to go public with his request and thus force his new country to come publicly to his defense. (Pollard was arrested after FBI agents pursued him, his wife and their cat to the Israeli embassy, which refused to let them take refuge inside, forcing them back out into the street and the waiting arms of the arresting officers.)

Unfortunately for the new strategy, Pollard did request Israeli citizenship publicly this summer, but in late September Israeli Minister of Immigration and Absorption Yair Tsaban turned down the request because, although Pollard is a Jew, he does not reside in Israel. Now, unless he's granted parole, it looks like he won't.

Or maybe he will. According to White House spokesman Michael McCurry, in a private meeting with President Bill Clinton after the Sept. 28 signing ceremony, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin asked for the early release of Pollard, and Clinton "indicated he would review the case properly if he received a clemency petition."

While Palestinian National Authority President Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Rabin were shaking hands in Washington, Jerusalem's Likud Mayor Ehud Olmert and Israeli Police Minister Moshe Shahal were shaking their fists at PLO representative Faisel Husseini for "establishing facts in Eastern Jerusalem." They said that if the East Jerusalem leader, who was a member of the Palestinian delegation to the Washington peace talks, continues to receive foreign dignitaries in his headquarters at Orient House, a former hotel only a block away from the American Colony Hotel, he will have to apply for re-zoning or be closed down. Israeli authorities already have closed three other Palestinian agencies in East Jerusalem, and the public threats against Husseini, a relative of Yasser Arafat, are probably a test of how the political winds are blowing not in Orient House but in the White House, where smog sometimes obscures the view.

President Bill Clinton's pursuit of reelection campaign funds results in some strange guests in the White House. One who arrived with a group of Democratic Party contributors on Sept. 15 was Swedish-born Manfred Lehmann , who five days later received the Menachem Begin Leadership Award from Likud USA, the U.S. branch of Israel's hard-line opposition party. Lehmann earned the invitation with a $40,000 donation to the Clinton election campaign in 1992. He earned the award by denouncing the peace process and taking out a full-page advertisement in the Jewish Week of New York on the first anniversary of Dr. Baruch Goldstein's murder of at least 29 Muslim men and boys at prayer in Hebron in 1994. The advertisement said "there is every reason to honor Goldstein's memory as a Jewish patriot." Lehmann later told the press that Hillary Clinton pronounced a verdict of "interesting" on his account of how her speech at the world women's conference in Beijing was an inspiration to Israel's anti-peace protestors. Lehmann also told journalists that President Clinton listened sympathetically to his warning that the peace process threatened Israel's existence, but told him, "I can't undermine Rabin."

U.S. friends of Israel were jubilant when Australian-born Martin Indyk, a former official of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Israel's Washington lobby, became the first Jewish U.S. ambassador to Israel. But the same leaders of U.S. Jewish organizations burned up the telephone lines to the White House when Indyk sent a lesser U.S. diplomat to attend opening festivities of the 15-month-long celebration of the "3,000th anniversary of the Jewish presence in Jerusalem." Said executive director Malcolm Hoenlein of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, who also is American executive director of Jerusalem 3,000: "There was concern that a decision had been taken not to participate. Everyone came up to us and asked, 'Where is your ambassador?'"

Indyk arrived in Israel early this year. If he had gone to the Jerusalem 3,000 ceremony he might have been the only ambassador of a major nation present. Diplomatic representatives of European Union member countries and Canada, among others, have been ordered not to participate in Jersalem 3,000 events, which the EU says focus on Jewish contributions to the city at the expense of other religions.

West Bank Jewish settlers' spokesman Yechiel Leiter, a 35-year-old native of Scranton, PA, came to the U.S. in August to launch a legal defense fund to support the families of hundreds of Jewish settlers Leiter says will be arrested in coming months during a widespread civil disobedience campaign against withdrawal of Israeli forces from the West Bank. He declined to comment on how his U.S. fund- raising activities would differ from those of organizers for Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group which also opposes the peace process. The only immediately discernible difference between Hamas and Leiter's YESHA Council of Jewish settlements, each of which denounces on religious grounds any territorial compromise between Israelis and Palestinians, is that under pending anti-terrorism legislation now before Congress, Hamas activities are expected to be outlawed, and YESHA activities are not.

In a telephone conference with journalists from U.S. Jewish publications, Leiter sought to compare YESHA activities with those of Martin Luther King. His remarks echoed those of Rabbi Shlomo Riskin, who left his New York synagogue to become chief rabbi of the West Bank settlement of Efrat, many of whose inhabitants are immigrants to Israel from the United States. In leading Efrat residents to seize a nearby hilltop for another settlement, Riskin told journalists he had marched with Dr. King in the civil rights struggle in the American South. When journalists subsequently sought to pin down the date and place of his association with the U.S. martyr to civil rights, however, Rabbi Rishkin said the place was Selma, AL, but he could not recall when or whether Dr. King actually was present at the time.

Leiter and Riskin seemed understated, however, compared to Rabbi Aaron Soloveitchik of Yeshiva University, who spoke at an inaugural dinner for a new organization, Pro-Israel, at New York's Hilton Hotel. In support of the organization's goal of keeping the land of Israel entirely in Jewish hands, he quoted the Talmud: "If a man comes to kill you, rise up and kill him." Emboldened by the hearty applause elicited by his remark, the rabbi, who is one of Yeshiva University's best known figures, continued: "Don't be afraid that in shooting back you might kill, God forbid, women and children. The Arabs use them as shields. Shoot!" If only Rabbi Soloveitchik had been Alabama Sheriff Bull Connor's spiritual adviser two generations ago, the "Solid South" might still be just as segregated as Leiter, Riskin and the revered Rabbi Soloveitchik hope to make Israel, Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Alleged Palestinian Hamas leader Mousa Abu Marzook remained in U.S. custody at this writing, while Israeli officials reportedly tried to build a case that would justify his extradition to Israel. Abu Marzook, a long-time resident of Virginia, was detained when he returned with his family from an extended visit to the Middle East. While PNA President Arafat asked State Department Middle East peace talks coordinator Dennis Ross to allow Abu Marzook to be deported to a Middle Eastern country, Brooklyn Assemblyman and wheeler dealer Dov Hikind, an outspoken Likud supporter, also called for the U.S. to turn down Israel's extradition request—but for different reasons. "The sad fact," said Hikind, "is that Israel's track record on releasing terrorists is an embarrassment."

Responding to the ferocity of such American "supporters" of his country, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres commented in early August, "I don't understand American Jews. They want to sit in Brooklyn and defend Hebron and Shechem from there?" Asked about the threat by American allies of the settlers to launch an intifada in New York, the Israeli leader waved it aside, saying, "They can start an intifada there, and let the American authorities deal with it." Peres was less sanguine in discussing demonstrators in Israel. "They are a group of people who are undermining the democratic system and the rule of law," he said. "This government is not only defending its own policies, but the very rule of law and the democratic nature of Israel...They don't want a dialogue...They say, 'In order to preserve the unity of our people, you must do as we say.' This is not democracy."

Chinese-American human rights activist Harry Wu let both Israel and its American friends have it in an Aug. 25 interview with the Jewish Week of New York shortly after he arrived back in California after yet another two-month session in a Chinese jail. He had been criticized by friends of Israel for accusing Israel of selling arms that help maintain in power a communist regime that he says has imprisoned and tortured eight million of its citizens in more than 1,000 concentration camps.

"If I were to sell high-tech military information to Hitler, how would you feel?" Wu asked staff writer Eric Greenberg. "If I said, 'I just want to do my job, this is just business,' what would Israel think about me? Just like you hate Hitler's evil, I hate the communists' evil...Just because there are no Jews in the Chinese labor camps, you shouldn't say 'I don't care.' The Chinese people also deserve human rights...The [Israeli] military equipment is going to support the [Chinese] regime becoming stable."

In his Jewish Week article, Greenberg noted that "the military relationship between the two countries has been increasing over the years despite controversy over charges that Israel has been illegally trading American military technology to China, either for money or information...The Central Intelligence Agency has estimated that it has cost China 'several billion dollars' to acquire defense technologies from Israel from 1983 to 1993.

"In contrast, the Israeli government has estimated arms sales to China during 1992 at a more modest $60 million. But in recent months, defense magazines have reported that Israel has been helping Chinese nuclear experiments by supplying measuring and monitoring equipment. Also, the respected Jane's Defense Weekly reported that Israel has been helping China develop an advanced submarine and upgrade Russian-made submarines. Israel has denied the charge. Perhaps the most controversial concern about the Israeli-Chinese military connection are U.S. charges that Israel has been reselling American-made military technology or arms—a violation of U.S. law."

Greenberg's Jewish Week article also quoted Prof. Duncan Clarke of American University (see September Washington Report, page 8) as saying: "There is widespread agreement that Israel has not been complying with the laws on re-exporting for many years, and one of the principal recipients has been China...It has led to some very awkward implications. In the Persian Gulf war, according to my sources, re-exported technology from Israel to China was put in tanks that China sold to Saddam Hussain and used against U.S. Marines."

Illegally re-exporting American technology to China is one thing, of course. But let's hope Israeli arms merchants don't send any of that stuff to the U.S. Likudniks now planning to launch "an American intifada" against the Middle East peace process on the sidewalks of New York.

Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington Report.