Spies Against Armageddon (42 page)

Thanks to their eccentric but effective spy, the Israelis received CIA analyses, copies of messages exchanged among American facilities in the region, details of Syrian chemical weapons, reports on Iraqi efforts to revive its nuclear program, and lists of Soviet arms deliveries as seen by U.S. secret agents and satellites.

The photographs and analyses provided by Pollard allowed the Israelis, for nearly a year until he was caught, to monitor in detail the movement of various navies’ vessels in the Mediterranean. There was also a CIA file on Pakistan’s efforts to build a nuclear weapon, which could be the “Islamic bomb” that Israelis long had feared.

The most valuable pieces of purloined intelligence, in terms of enabling the Israelis to carry out a specific mission, were the aerial photographs of PLO headquarters in Tunis. There were also reports on the air defense systems of the North African states on the way to Tunisia, including Colonel Qaddafi’s Libya. Israel’s air force bombed the PLO complex on October 1, 1985, in the most distant Israeli bombing raid ever at that time. It flattened much of Yasser Arafat’s post-Lebanon base, and Pollard took pleasure in knowing that he had helped make it happen.

The spy was, however, driving himself too hard. His enthusiasm gave way to fatigue, and the Navy’s Anti-Terrorism Alert Center (ATAC) noted that his job performance markedly declined. He was doing a full-time job analyzing data and reports for the Navy, and then a full-time moonlighting job as a spy.

His boss at ATAC, Commander Jerry Agee, began to have doubts about Pollard after catching him telling lies about some trivial matters. Agee started paying attention and noticed stacks of secret documents on Pollard’s desk, many of them unrelated to his assigned projects.

The boss noticed that every Friday, Pollard was accessing Middle East message traffic and more computerized files than usual. Naval counterintelligence planted surveillance cameras over Pollard’s desk, and it looked like he was amassing his own intelligence library.

He was detained for questioning on November 18, 1985. He told naval intelligence agents that he could help them uncover a multinational spy ring of which he was aware. They let him call his wife, and while pretending to explain that he would be coming home late that night, he also told Anne to “take the cactus to friends.” It was a code they had developed earlier, indicating that he was in trouble and any secret documents at home should be removed at once.

Ironically, the Pollards were scheduled to have dinner that evening with Avi Sella, who was no longer their primary contact but was on a visit to the United States. Sella had told the Pollards that the air force had promoted him to brigadier general, and they ought to go out to celebrate. Instead, as Anne left for the dinner date, she was in a state of panic.

“Jay is in trouble,” she told Sella at a Chinese restaurant on K Street. The new Israeli general sensed severe danger and nervously told Anne not to admit that they had ever met. They never saw each other again.

Pollard was allowed to go home that night, after the first round of questioning. He and Anne decided to call their case officer and got through to Yagur in New York. Pollard demanded asylum and transport to Israel. Yagur said: “You’re probably being followed. If you shake your surveillance, come in and we’ll try to help.” The remark was unusually sloppy for an espionage handler: If Yagur believed that his agent was being followed, he should have known that Pollard’s telephone was being wiretapped, too.

Israel and the Pollards would all pay for their lack of professionalism in this most delicate and dangerous operation. The Israelis were in an unseemly race to see who could flee fastest. Yagur and Sella flew home from New York; Erb and her boss, deputy Lakam attaché at the Washington embassy Ilan Ravid, left for Israel from the capital.

Israel’s intelligence operatives were making a clean getaway, but they were abandoning their paid agent in America.

Three days after the Pollards’ arrest, Israel first admitted the possibility of having been involved with the couple. There was worldwide amazement that Israeli intelligence would have been so stupid as to have allowed an agent to be arrested at Israel’s embassy. And the assumption, which surprised the international press, was that the Mossad had acted stupidly.

Within a few days, however, it was revealed that “a scientific agency named Lakam”—whose existence never had been mentioned before—was responsible. Officials tried to dismiss the humiliating affair as a mere “rogue operation.” The Israeli government announced that Lakam would be dismantled.

On the American side, there was puzzled anger and a sense of betrayal. President Reagan, thinking of the juicy aid with which he nourished Israel, said: “I don’t understand why they are doing it.”

His astonishment also stemmed from the fact that at that very time, agents of the two countries were in the middle of a secret project—so sensitive that U.S. government agents lied to Congress about it, and Israeli agents hid it from the Mossad. This was Irangate, or the Iran-Contra affair, and it proved that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.

The idea was to win the release of Western hostages by Hezbollah in Lebanon. As one step in a sequence of secret moves in 1985, American arms would be supplied to Iran. The incredible irony was that Iran was an enemy of the United States and Israel, labeling them “the Great Satan” and “the Little Satan.”

Here was the scheme: Israel delivered weapons to Iran, which was then struggling in a brutal war against Iraq. The United States would replenish Israel’s arsenals. The Saudis would pay for the deal, and part of the money would be illegally funneled—behind the backs of Congress and the CIA—to the Contra rebels fighting a leftwing government in Nicaragua.

Iran did issue instructions to Hezbollah, and a few hostages were released. But the affair came to a halt when a Beirut newspaper leaked its essence. The Reagan Administration was greatly embarrassed, in part because the president’s policy of “never dealing with terrorists” was plainly violated by his own employees.

When Jonathan Pollard’s espionage activities were revealed, most American authorities were not very surprised. The CIA, for one, always assumed that Israeli spies were active in the United States. A secret study by the agency declared that after gathering intelligence on its Arab neighbors, the second and third priorities of Israeli intelligence were the “collection of information on secret U.S. policy or decisions, if any, concerning Israel,” and the “collection of scientific intelligence in the United States and other developed countries.”

Believing that there was now an opportunity to send Israeli intelligence a very stern message—that it should stop all espionage in the United States—federal prosecutors came down very hard on Pollard. The government attorneys declared: “This defendant has admitted that he sold to Israel a volume of classified documents, ten feet by six feet by six feet” if all gathered into one huge pile.

Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger wrote his own letter to Judge Aubrey Robinson: “It is difficult for me to conceive of a greater harm to national security than that caused by the defendant.” Weinberger said privately that Pollard deserved to be hanged or shot, adding that repairing the damage he caused could cost the United States a billion dollars.

Pollard, meantime, made the mistake of boasting that he had been “quite literally, Israel’s eyes and ears over an immense geographic area stretching from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean.” His own memo to the judge also offered the opinion that the information he gave to Israel “was so unique” that the country’s political leaders must “have known about the existence of an agent working in the American intelligence establishment.”

The way the Israeli handlers had “tasked” him, he said, indicated “a highly coordinated effort between the naval, army, and air force intelligence services.”

True as the assessment may have been, inflating the importance of his undercover work certainly did not get him a lighter sentence.

On March 4, 1987, nine months after pleading guilty in a bargain that was supposed to mean he would not have to spend the rest of his days in prison, Pollard was given a life sentence anyway. Weinberger’s letter had swayed the judge. Pollard’s wife Anne was sentenced to five years, and she served three.

The Israeli government, though caught red-handed in November 1985, evaded questions for a few days but then had no choice but to admit that Pollard’s actions were an Israeli operation. Prime Minister Shimon Peres told President Reagan by telephone that it had not been authorized and would not happen again.

Eitan—feeling under pressure to resign—testified later to an Israeli inquiry committee, apparently referring to special operations going back even earlier than kidnapping Eichmann in 1960: “All my actions, including Pollard, were done with the knowledge of those in charge. I do not intend to be used as a scapegoat to cover up the knowledge and responsibility of others.”

The others to whom Eitan referred were the leaders of two government administrations in Jerusalem: Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who had been a senior Mossad man; Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who had created Lakam; Defense Minister Moshe Arens, whose background was in military aeronautics; and Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, a former army chief of staff.

They might not have been aware of Jonathan Pollard’s name, but they must have had high appreciation of where the intelligence “product” was coming from.

U.S. investigators rushed to Tel Aviv to test the Israelis’ assertion that the American probe would get all possible assistance. The Israeli liaison assigned to “help” them was Avraham Shalom, the Shin Bet chief who later would stumble and fall in a scandal over the killing of bus hijackers. Shalom would protect the intelligence community’s interests, but definitely not Pollard’s.

Documents provided by Pollard were returned to the Americans. True, Israel was assumed to be keeping extra copies, but now prosecutors could see the full scope of what Israel had been given.

At the same time, Israeli intelligence maintained its standard, strong instinct for deception. That was why Shalom, the cover-up king, got the liaison job. The Americans were introduced to “everyone” involved with Pollard, but somehow Avi Sella was not mentioned.

Later, when the Americans discovered Sella’s role, they demanded that his promotion to be commander of one of Israel’s most important air bases be cancelled. The United States threatened to halt all cooperation with the air force. Sella was forced to retire from the military.

The Americans were also annoyed to see that Eitan—after the abolition of his agency, Lakam—was given a plum job as head of Israel Chemicals, the largest state-owned industry.

Instead of pleasing U.S. investigators with the provision of documents and some testimony, Israeli intelligence was getting on their nerves even further by treating Eitan and Sella so kindly.

Lakam’s duties were now to be spread among various parts of the government and private companies. After all, Israel still had its complex military-industrial requirements. They could not change, simply because America was angry.

When it came to public relations and politics, however, Israel had suffered a setback. The trusting relationship that it had with the United States, though never really perfect, was severely dented by the revelation of what Pollard had been doing.

As for the spy himself, he quite justifiably felt betrayed—similar to the fate of the imprisoned Jews who had worked for Israeli intelligence in Egypt in the 1950s. As in most criminal cases, Israel could have demanded that in exchange for its cooperation, its agent would be given a light sentence. But Israel did not ask for that.

This behavior led Pollard and his supporters—as his cause would come to be associated mainly with right-wing Israelis and American Jews—to think that Israel did not want him to be released. Perhaps it was feared that, as a new immigrant there, he would give so many speeches that he would be a nuisance. He also might be regarded as a living stain on the country’s conscience.

He was not totally abandoned, however. The Israeli government paid millions for his legal defense and helped Anne—who divorced Jonathan—to recover and settle in Israel. More importantly, the government eventually started lobbying publicly for his release. Cabinet members, members of parliament, and ambassadors visited him in prison. He was given a document showing that he had been granted Israeli citizenship, under his real name.

Prime ministers asked, at every meeting with American presidents, whether Pollard could be granted clemency.

It almost happened in 1998, during peace talks the Americans were hosting between Israel and the Palestinians in Maryland. President Bill Clinton nearly agreed to a demand by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Pollard be freed as part of a deal to evacuate some West Bank land. But the CIA director, George Tenet, threatened to resign if Pollard were released. He and other American intelligence officials contended that it would set a terrible precedent to be lenient in any way with Pollard—who violated his duties of secrecy. They wanted everyone with a security clearance to see that spying, no matter for which foreign country, would be dealt with extremely harshly.

For years to come, the Jewish community in America and Israel would continue to feel the fallout of this ugly affair. The FBI, noted for always being suspicious, never abandoned the belief that Israeli intelligence had penetrated even more deeply into the U.S. government. For many FBI agents, Pollard was just the tip of an Israeli iceberg.

That approach led to misinterpretation of even the tiniest clues. For years, the Mossad and then the Foreign Ministry had a code name for the CIA: “Mega.” In 1997, the Israeli ambassador in Washington received a request from Jerusalem to find out what the American thinking was on a development in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. After conferring with the State Department, which was quite routine, the ambassador, Eliyahu Ben-Elissar—ironically a former Mossad operative—turned to Yoram Hessel, the Mossad station chief based at the embassy, whose prime responsibility was to liaise with the CIA.