Spies Against Armageddon (43 page)

Since this was over the weekend, Hessel was at home. Knowing he was on an open phone line, Ben-Elissar asked Hessel to find out what “Mega” thought about the topic.

The phone conversation was monitored by America’s NSA and passed to the FBI. The G-Men immediately guessed that Mega was the code name of a very senior Israeli agent who was still totally undercover.

FBI suspicions have also haunted many Jews employed in the U.S. government. The FBI frequently did not trust them, and when a Jew was called in for extra security screening, that person’s loyalty to America was being questioned.

AIPAC—the pro-Israel lobby group—was also targeted by investigators. Some of AIPAC’s employees were routinely involved in collecting information from open sources which had relevance to U.S.-Israel relations. They met regularly with State Department and Pentagon officials and with Israeli diplomats, visiting officials, and cabinet ministers.

To federal investigators, these meetings looked like a guilty fabric of improper links. In 2005, trying to confirm the suspicions, the FBI concocted some information about a supposed terrorist threat to Israelis in Kurdistan, in northern Iraq, and sent that to Larry Franklin, a non-Jewish Pentagon official with pro-Israel leanings. Franklin, in one of his encounters with AIPAC officials Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, passed on the information. A short while later, Rosen and Weissman gave the warning to an Israeli diplomat. To them, it was a matter of life and death. For the FBI, it was
prima facie
proof of espionage.

Charges were filed against Franklin, Rosen, and Weissman. The Pentagon analyst pleaded guilty, as part of a plea bargain, and was sentenced to 10 months of house arrest. Rosen and Weissman were harassed by investigators and prosecutors for years, but charges were dropped in 2009.

Pollard remained in jail since 1985, still serving his life sentence. Israelis kept pressing for his release, directly by pleading to U.S. administrations, and indirectly by trying to cook up clandestine deals.

The Committee to Release Jonathan Pollard, backed by the Israeli government, raised the possibility of swapping him for an Israeli army officer who was imprisoned after entertaining a recruitment approach by the CIA.

His name—Yossi Amit—was not well known, in part because of judicial gag orders and military censorship in Israel that made media coverage difficult. Yet the basic notion that the CIA probed into Israeli secrets, while Israel did some spying inside the U.S., was far from shocking to officials who were truly in the know.

It was true that the Mossad and the CIA reached an understanding in the early 1950s that they would not spy on each other, but perhaps the real deal was that they should not get caught doing it.

American intelligence certainly used the National Security Agency to listen in on security-related conversations and data in Israel. U.S. diplomats based in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem gathered all they could from open sources—so as to be well informed about Israeli political intentions, as well as technological and military capabilities.

In rare cases, it can now be stated with confidence, the United States did send spies into Israel. They were on specific missions to learn about military, economic, and scientific projects—including the nuclear program. Defense Minister Rabin remarked immediately after Pollard’s arrest, but without details, that Israel had discovered five American spies in the late 1970s and early 1980s in sensitive nuclear and industrial facilities.

Israeli intelligence, for its part, was more aggressive inside the United States. The main goal, however, was not to figure out what the administration in power intended to do. That kind of analysis was openly available from knowledgeable people at the Israeli embassy and the AIPAC lobby.

The only field where the Israelis were anxious to know the very latest was technology. For that purpose, they had few inhibitions against covert operations, paying American agents or tasking Israeli official visitors to steal secrets. Thus, the FBI or U.S. Customs agents would occasionally expose Israelis—or Americans working for Israel—who were breaking the law.

If there were a competition of ignominy, Israeli losses would outnumber America’s embarrassments. The only exposed case in which the CIA was close to running an Israeli as an agent was that of Amit. When the Pollard case came to light, a member of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee let it slip that American spies had run at least one Israeli soldier as an agent. The senator was almost surely referring to Amit.

While Pollard suffered in prison and campaigned to have his life sentence cut short, Amit was spending seven years in a cell in Israel’s most heavily guarded prison at Ramle, 20 miles east of Tel Aviv.

Amit was a former major in Aman’s agent-running Unit 504. His crime: unauthorized contacts with the CIA.

He was born in 1945 in Haifa. His father was a police officer, and Yossi studied at a military academy. In 1963, after graduating, he joined the IDF, passed the officer training course with flying colors, and served in a special forces unit.

Amit was wounded in a battle with Palestinian guerrillas in Lebanon. After recovering, he joined Unit 504 and ran Arab agents in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt. Amit did well there, and at the callow age of 32 he was commander of the unit’s northern base, which was responsible for operations in Lebanon.

He became privy to the unit’s most guarded secrets, including operations that most anyone would call dirty. Amit admitted, years later, that he participated in extrajudicial liquidations of Palestinian agents who betrayed Israel.

He also came across drug dealers whom the Mossad and 504 exploited and turned a blind eye to their activities. Some nights he would return home from his secret meetings with drug smugglers deep inside Lebanon, his clothes reeking of hashish.

Though Amit was a tough, bright, and ambitious intelligence officer, the scenes he witnessed scarred his soul. His promising career came to an unexpected end in 1978, when police detectives arrested him on suspicion of drug dealing. Major Amit denied the charge, but a court martial was convened. Military doctors declared that he was mentally unstable and had suicidal tendencies, so he was ruled unfit to stand trial.

Amit attributed his mental state to the dark side of his work for Unit 504. He was discharged from the army and forced into a mental hospital for three years. Electroshock therapy only seemed to make his condition worse.

In 1981 he returned to his wife Tzila and their children in Haifa. He did odd jobs, and among other things he worked as a private investigator.

Three years later, he happened to meet an officer in the U.S. Navy, whose ship was docked in the port of Haifa. The man called himself “David”—with no last name given. The two of them seemed to get along wonderfully.

Amit told David about his work in Israeli intelligence and complained about always being short of money and having difficulty finding a decently paying job. The American confided to Amit that he would soon retire from the navy and set-up a textile business in Germany. Perhaps there would be a place there for his new friend Yossi?

Amit loved the idea. In 1985, he flew to Frankfurt at his own expense to meet David. They met in a hotel and discussed their future partnership in textiles.

David, it seems, was either a CIA talent scout or a genuine naval officer who was ordered to keep in touch with the Israeli intelligence major he had just happened to meet.

The American did Amit favors, such as paying for a visit to a medical clinic, where his old physical injuries were assessed.

David then introduced Yossi to another friend, “Bob,” mysteriously calling him “one of the good guys.” Bob, as though making casual conversation, mentioned everything he knew about the Israeli—and that included quite a lot that Amit had never told David. Bob’s brown shoes were so distinctive, with dots and other design details, that Amit could not help but notice them.

Bob said, “We need your help,” and asked for details about Unit 504 and Israeli military intelligence in general.

Amit said he would love to work for the Americans—and stated, “I’m crazy about intelligence work”—but he stipulated that he would not agree to do anything for them within the borders of Israel. Instead, he suggested that they use his knowledge of Arab countries, notably Syria and Lebanon, which he knew well after running agents there.

Amit asked for a salary, a United States passport, and help in leaving Israel. Bob said, “I think we can work something out,” and asked Amit for more details about Israel. Amit declined.

Bob then said, “Okay. You want to work for us? We have to work out some details, and first we have to check your reliability.” Amit agreed to take a lie detector test and to an evaluation of his personality.

The polygraph quiz included, again and again, whether anyone in Israel knew about his trip to Germany. The Americans obviously suspected that Amit was a double agent, sent by Israeli intelligence to trap the Americans—just the same suspicions that Israel would have about any walk-in.

Another member of the CIA team—a woman who called herself “Lesley”—praised Amit for his test results and told him he had a very high IQ. The Israeli could not tell, of course, whether she was merely using flattery to win his confidence and cooperation.

At a certain stage during the test, the Americans departed from the room, leaving their documents on the table. Amit did not touch the papers or even peek at them. As a trained intelligence operator, he knew the papers had been left there deliberately to test his honesty.

Later, Bob told Amit that they needed more time to check out the possibility of recruiting him. The American with the memorable footwear took $2,000 in cash from his pocket and offered it to Amit “to cover your expenses.” Amit refused to take the money.

David called later and asked if he could be in touch in the future. “Remember that I’ll be calling myself ‘Herbert’ when I call,” he said. Amit still wanted this job, whatever it might be, but he got the impression he was not being hired.

On his flight home to Israel, he was certain he saw Bob on the airplane. There was no beard or long hair now, so those had obviously been false. But it was unmistakably Bob: His height and his distinctive brown shoes were those of the man he had met the previous day. Amit still had the eye for details of a good intelligence officer.

He never heard from Bob or David again.

As time went by after the meetings in Germany, Amit’s frustration grew. He was still having nightmares about his military intelligence experiences, and he was almost perpetually in a foul mood. He started talking too much—even about his close brush with the CIA.

One of his friends took seriously what most listeners took to be false boasting. This man was an Arab Israeli with a very unusual background. He was part of a large family that had worked for Israeli intelligence in the formerly Syrian Golan Heights and in Lebanon. When the spies were exposed, they were hurriedly relocated to Israel. He ended up in Aman’s 504, serving in Yossi Amit’s unit as an expert tracker.

Betraying his friend, but feeling he was doing his duty, the Arab Israeli went to the police and told them of Amit’s babbling. The police passed the information to Shin Bet.

Now, a counterespionage section responsible for “Westerners” came into the picture. This department was in charge of foiling and exposing espionage acts of any organization or individual that did not fit the definition of Arab or Communist espionage.

Amit was put under surveillance, and authorities said a search of his apartment uncovered classified documents about military intelligence operations, including lists of Arab agents and details of contacts with drug traffickers.

He was arrested in March 1986 at his Haifa home. He cooperated fully with Shin Bet interrogators, and he told them all about his meetings with the CIA team in Germany.

Amit also said he had been motivated by emotional problems and by not liking his commanders in the army. He hoped that his punishment would therefore be light or non-existent, and he imagined that Shin Bet might ask him to re-contact the Americans and serve as a double agent to penetrate the CIA.

He had an excellent memory and described the rendezvous locations, the discussions, the names used by the Americans, and the man with the brown shoes on the flight home from Germany.

Shin Bet found it easy to consult travel and passport-control records, to discover that a CIA man—under diplomatic cover in Tel Aviv—named Tom Waltz had been on that flight.

Waltz had served in the CIA station in the U.S. embassy in Bonn and was transferred in 1982 to Tel Aviv to work on counter-terrorism issues. At his liaison meetings with Shin Bet and the Mossad, they would exchange information on and assessments of radical Arab organizations. It was something of a surprise to Shin Bet that Waltz was also trying to recruit a former Unit 504 officer to spy for America.

Despite all the information provided to Shin Bet and prosecutors by Amit, Haifa’s district court was hard on him. In April 1987, he was sentenced to 12 years in prison.

The trial had been conducted entirely behind closed doors. The Israeli public was not told a word about Amit, his alleged involvement with drugs, his shadowy military service, and his contacts with U.S. intelligence.

Whenever Amit—after serving his time behind bars—made some effort to leak his story to journalists, the military censor prevented publication. When a Hebrew-language newspaper in the United States did print a version of the story, saying an Israeli army major had been arrested for spying for Syria, that angered Amit even more. He figured that the article must have been an Israeli government attempt to destroy him with a false charge of treason. He now virulently hated what he called “the Establishment.”

Some government officials privy to the truth thought that perhaps—at the very least—Israel should complain to the United States about the CIA attempt to recruit an Israeli officer, as though that were equivalent to the Pollard case in America. The officials thought that might prompt the Americans to admit their dalliance with Amit, and that might prompt U.S. officials to lean toward swapping Pollard.