SPYING ON AN ALLY
Melik Kaylan on how the
Israeli spy scandal at length emerged in the United States
New York LIKE a runaway Rasputin, the Israeli spy scandal has refused to die, indeed has grown more indecently eye-catching the more concerted and strenuous the attempts to kill it. Nor, with the trial still to come, will it perish in the near future. Through- out the long and exquisitely awkward charade, custodians and apologists of the US-Israeli wedlock have repeatedly been caught instigating premature reconcilia- tions just as new and more damaging information emerged. In consequence, the public has had a delicious glimpse of how such arranged marriages are imposed, how the illusion of harmony is maintained and the public blessing assured.
To recap briefly, when the US Navy intelligence analyst Pollard was first arrested on charges of spying for Israel, one read reports of a wounded President Reagan wondering in bewilderment: 'How could they do this to us?' Ah, but surely, one thought, the President doth protest too much. Doesn't he know that it goes on all the time? Apparently not, and neither, it seemed, did the Israelis, who maintained that this was a minor isolated incident, the work of an unstable amateur not endorsed by them. As for the American media, if they'd ever seen the like, they had never reported it before.
For reasons that will soon become clear all eyes were on the New York Times, which dutifully reported that 'the Pollard affair . . . broke the Israeli Intelligence rules against spying in America', and that a `present or former Mossad agent was run- ning an independent operation in Washing- ton, without the knowledge of the current Mossad chief or the political leadership'. News wallahs around the country breathed a sigh of relief. So this was not to be the moment. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortu- nately, Jerusalem's boisterous print media lack the elegant co-ordination of their American counterparts when reporting Israeli affairs. For just as the beast was subdued in the United States, they were busy leaking information which tied Rafael Eitan, aide to Begin, Shamir and Peres, to the Pollard caper. Reacting a day or two later, the New York Times tried another tack, with most of the country's news broadcasts following suit. To wit, the Israeli government had pledged its utmost in co-operation etc to clear up the matter etc. This too appeared to be an exaggera- tion as the Israelis had summarily with- drawn the two diplomats involved.
By this time, perhaps sensing the threat to their credibility, other newspapers be- gan to break ranks. Contradicting the NY Times, some reported the fury of Amer- ican officials at Israel's lack of co- operation. Most astonishingly, in an unpre- cedented statement, albeit of the obvious, the Boston Globe virtually accused the New York Times of serving as an Israeli disinformation pipeline: 'The Times . . . has historically been Israel's chief conduit for news for American consumption.' It added that an article published therein, written by NY Times correspondent Fried- man, and 'carefully attributed to a "highly placed" source in the Israeli government, serves as an unofficial but authoritative Israeli explanation of recent events'. (The NY Times it was that removed the adjec- tive 'indiscriminate' from the phrase 'indis- criminate Israeli bombing' in a dispatch by Friedman during the Beirut invasion, which elicited a letter of protest from him at the time.) By now, about three weeks into the scandal, a few things were becoming clear. The story wasn't about to die. Indeed the very fact that it had surfaced at all was extraordinary. Something odd was going on. A steady stream of information kept leaking out, aimed a little too exactly at contradicting each new cover-up man- oeuvre in the press. In rapid sequence, the public learned that Pollard had boasted indiscriminately of his Israeli connection before naval intelligence chose to hire him, that his spying was not limited to data on Arab states, that he had probably sold top-secret naval codes and manuals to the Israelis. Nor did the White House seem capable of containing a situation that was not of their making, as evidenced by their initial shock and subsequent embarrassed silence. Even the staunchly pro-Israeli leaders of national Jewish organisations and their Washington lobbyists, having sensed the futility of secrecy, were angrily calling on Israel to co-operate. Their rap- port with legislators was being under- mined, they said. The most damning revelation, that a case such as Pollard's was the rule rather than the exception, rumbled on the hori- zon like distant thunder. To appreciate the near-volcanic force required to push this single stream of information into public view one has to understand the context, to consider the staggering scale of the black- out hitherto maintained on the subject of the history and magnitude of Israeli espionage in the US. Any glimpse of the latter would reveal the former, and if it had been successfully kept under wraps this long, one could only imagine the resistance now. At stake, in rising order of import- ance, were: the President's pretence of wounded innocence, ditto the Israeli gov- ernment's, the reputation of the media over several decades, the US-Israeli alliance itself.
Yet information began to dribble through from the periphery. One read that Chaim Herzog, now President of Israel, may have been the first Israeli spy to be caught while acting as military attaché in 1954. He was tipped off by a sympathiser in the State Department, left ahead of the FBI, and records of the case were sealed for over 25 years. Reports emerged of countless recent cases of Justice Depart- ment and FBI investigations against people under strong suspicion of passing secrets on to Israel which were either quashed or quietly ignored. One Geoffrey Bryen, allegedly overheard while doing just that in a Washington restaurant, is now a top official in the Defence Department. The Pentagon was said to be so riddled with Israeli spies that Israel was often in posses- sion of American military technology be- fore the US armed forces. (This might explain why Private Goodman, eventually rescued by Jesse Jackson in Syria, was shot down over the Bekaa Valley and Israeli aircraft escaped unscathed.) Finally the pressure of information circu- lating abroad became such that the New York Times published an exhaustive end of the year article covering many of the cases, and subtly admitting the media's incompe- tence: 'The general media and public perception was that it [the Pollard case] was the first time this had ever happened.'
The article took a complacent line: its tenor and purpose are indicated by its headline and subheadlines: 'Close Israeli Relationship Makes Keeping Secrets Hard' . . . 'Information Flows On Several Paths . . . Some Officials Are Not Astonished' etc. and the inevitable 'A Danger Is Seen Of Anti-Jewish Feeling.'
Yet this urbane view is not shared by the public, and certainly not by the Washing- ton bureaucracy. In fact, in his marvellous book on the subject, They Dare to Speak Out, published last summer, an ex- Congressman from Illinois, Paul Findlay, quotes Admiral Thomas Moorer (former Joint Chief of Staff): 'If the American people understood what a grip those peo- ple have on our government, they would rise up.' Indeed, without the ire of the military and intelligence community, there simply wouldn't be a scandal. They, it seemed, had had enough, for throughout the whole episode one could call almost any such available official, within Washing- ton or without, and come away deluged with information. Far from originating in pro-Arab or left-wing circles, this has been nothing less than a full-scale internal re- volt, a sort of patriotic trahison des clercs. It is said that the Navy, in particular, led the way, having never forgiven Israel's bombardment and murder of 34 American crewmen on the USS Liberty during the Six Day War. It is also rumoured that Pollard leaked the kind of information that would allow Israel to avoid such a future con- frontation by calculating US naval move- ments.
Despite attempts finally to still the scan- dal, rumblings continue, and propaganda set-pieces appear in the media. Recently, the head of the Jewish Defence League the self-confessedly violent organisation founded by Meir Kahane — and a top political commentator discussed the topic on a popular showbiz chat show. Ingen- iously, the latter contrived to be in favour of Israeli espionage in the US, while the former deplored it vehemently. Such events are still necessary owing to the controversy's half-baked resolution. The Israelis had, apparently, 'handed over the documents'. Presumably the American public have never heard of the Xerox machine.
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