Pollard - "Common Sense and Impudence" Richard Sale

By Richard Sale, author of Clinton’s Secret Wars                                                      

The recurring pressure from Israel to repatriate convicted spy Jonathan Pollard is clearly an expression of common sense if Israel wants to recruit any other agents in place. The KGB was always conscientious in extracting its snared spies by one means or another. 

If anything smacks of impudence it’s the current Israeli pressure when contrasted with the stormy ocean of pious Israeli government denials when the case first broke. 

My own view is that Pollard should never be released. 

I was the reporter who broke the story of how the Israeli government was selling the pilfered Pollard material to the Eastern Bloc in return for increased emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union. 

I don’t recall the exact date of my story but I believe it was 1987.  My sources were senior U.S. serving counterintelligence (CI3) officials.  According to them, the Israel-Soviet deal on emigration was made on Cyprus in 1981 and was the brilliantly cunning idea of top Israeli defense official Ariel Sharon.  (CI3 officials also told me at that time that Mossad was “full of Soviet moles.”) 

The recruitment of Pollard was not an aberration – he became an operative of Israel as early as 1981 when he was working for the U.S. Navy’s Field Operations Intelligence Office. Israel was targeting certain oil fields in southern Russia and Pollard’s task was to gather information on the targeting. 

In any case, although Sharon appears to be the initial villain, high level Israeli officials including Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin, Yitzhak Shamir and others knew of Pollard’s existence. Shamir, for example, was very active in peddling the Pollard data to the Soviets. 

At the time of his arrest, the Justice Department alleged that Pollard had provided Israel with 1,800 documents or 100,000 pages. The damage Pollard inflicted on U.S. security was enormous.  Senior DOD officials told me that Pollard stole from the Navy's Sixth Fleet Ocean Surveillance Information Facility

(FOSIF) in Rota, Spain, the daily report, a top-secret document filed every morning at 0800 Zulu time (Greenwich Mean Time) that contained NSA data on events in the Middle East and North Africa during the previous 24 hours. NASA and Navy Intelligence shared the site. 

The U.S. Navy’s obsessive focus was on Soviet ballistic missile submarines cruising the Mediterranean whose weapons were aimed at the United States; ships which had to be quickly destroyed in the event of war. 

Pollard gave the Israelis the Rota reports for a year, also providing them with the  National SIGINT Requirements List, a day-to-day compendium, listed by priority, of NSA collection units around the world that would have included things such as alerts to U.S. bases in a region before an insertion by U.S. Special Forces or a forthcoming bombing mission. 

Pollard also plundered the Defense Intelligence Agency's Community On-Line Intelligence System, which was one of the government's first computerized information-retrieval-network systems, called  DIAL-COINS, that contained all the intelligence reports filed by Air Force, Army, Navy, and Marine attaches in Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa. 

Pollard also stole a huge 10-volume manual called Radio Signals Notations or RAISIN, lauded as the bible of signals intelligence that lists how the United States collects signals around the world. This outlined the sites, frequencies, and significant features of Israeli communication spied on by the United States including the U-2 “Senior Stretch” flights from Cyprus, the RC-135 electronic warfare flights, the joint CIA/NSA listening post in the U.S. Embassy in Israel, along with all the known communications links used by the Soviet Union. All of these were compromised by Pollard. 

The Pollard thefts had sinister consequences. U.S. agents in the Eastern Bloc or the Soviet Union were rolled up and America’s ability to collect technical intelligence on Soviet designs was shut down or crippled, leaving us blind. 

At the time I broke my stories, I did not know former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger, now deceased.  However, friends eventually put us together and I talked with him informally over 30 times about what Sy Hersh, myself and others had written about Pollard.  Weinberger could not calmly discuss Pollard but hardened into furious rage each time. 

Sy Hersh and I became friends over the story. He had a book coming out about Israel and after I talked about the moles in Mossad, he called me at UPI and began by saying, “Thanks for screwing up my book,” chiding me for ruining one of the book’s exclusives.  The book had plenty more of them, and Sy remains for me a gigantic figure in journalism for his integrity and toughness. 

To conclude, Pollard should sit where he is until we can, with grace, send his body to Israel for burial.

----------------------------------

I was on the JCS damage assesment board for this matter.  Richard Sale is altogether correct in his account of how greatly Pollard and the Israelis hurt us.   Ehud Barak was Director of General Staff intelligence during the Pollard operation.  While Pollard stabbed the United States in the back, Barak was smiling and smiling in his best "hale fellow well met" manner in dealing with DIA.  pl

Comments

[walrus]

With friends like these.........

[J]

Colonel,

It is like I said earlier, those Israeli military and intelligence personas who were Pollard's accomplices need to face U.S. murder and espionage charges, to the tune of 110 for their American victims alone.

Richard,

To heck with 'grace' in sending Pollard corpse to Israel, Pollard belongs in a potter's field, unnamed and unmarked forever just like many of his victims wound up.

[MRW]

Pollard should sit where he is until we can, with grace, send his body to Israel for burial.

I would omit the grace.

[Fred]

They are now simply twisting the knife.

[zanzibar]

Doesn't American political and military leadership have any pride anymore?

How could they deal with Ehud Barak and the rest of the crew in Israel that screwed them over and made them look like chumps?

[John Walters]

http://america-hijacked.com/2010/09/29/wake-up-america/

You might agree with Giraldi's comments on Pollard.

Let us further suppose that that individual violated his trust in the most egregious and vile fashion, offering to sell the information to anyone, but eventually settling on a nation ostensibly friendly to the US but not in any way a formal ally.

More tangentially, you might like:
http://committeeofpublicsafety.wordpress.com/2010/09/11/the-looming-numbers/

[MRW]

Wake Up, America! by Philip Giraldi on this issue. Don't miss it. It's great.
http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/2010/09/29/wake-up-america/

[Retired (once-Serving)Patriot]

And yet we constantly complain about the perfidy of others (eg Iran).

Wouldn't it be nice if the President would state publicly, "what part of throwing away the key do you not understand?"

RP

[Chris S]

Try getting any serving politicians to criticize Pollard openly ..

[Lewie]

The USA and Israel are allies. Yet, the two countries have spied on one another for a long time. If Israel has sold US secrets, probably too, The USA has sold Israeli secrets. The problem was, from Cap Weinberger's perspective, Pollard made Israel too strong and cost USA too much. A little spying between friends was expected, but Pollard gave away the store. If he were a professional mole, and was discovered to be a spy, he could be fed false data, but Pollard was not detected early enough,
upset the applecart by throwing a monkey wrench into the works and had to be taught a precedant setting lesson. Pollard's defense claims Weinberger made a statement before his death that The Pollard Affair was a relatively minor matter which was made into something bigger. What exactly did he mean by that? Either he wrecked things or he did not.
Pollard obviously had not developed deep ties with the Israelis, on the contrary. Handler Eitan contemplated shooting Pollard himself.
I think Pollard was unstable and should have never ever received any kind of security clearance.
We have a competancy problem across the board in our country,let's be fair, it is not only The US Military.
I do not contest Colonel Lang's assertion that Pollard harmed US interests. Clearly Pollard did not care what the fallout was from his actions, how could he have. The volume of material was too great for anyone to carefully make such an assessment.
Maybe Woolsley is right, let him go!

[William R. Cumming]

Actually I don't believe that Israeli efforts to get Pollard released are based on faithful effort to protect one of their own who was a spy.

I believe the effort is to drive the notion that Israeli spying on the US is in fact not a threat to the US and Israeli domestic US ops should be considered impliedly authorized by the US. My arguments for this position are too lengthy for this blog. Oddly discussion of the "Liberty" incident fits this schema also. Why? Israeli belief that they and only they can determine whether US interests should be sacrificed whenever necessary to allow Israli freedom of action in their military and foreign affairs. As is self evident this trumping of the US by Israel is never discussed publically or in Congressional oversight, or action.

[CK]

Humans sometimes have friends and sometimes enemies; countries have neither, countries have interests designed by whoever is the current ruling heirarchy based mostly on inertia and organizational aggrandizement.

[Medicine Man]

Stunning — stunning that they would dare hatch such a plot against their own meal ticket and more shocking still that they would walk away scott free when caught.

I had no idea; words fail me.

[walrus]

Hasbara Lewie:

"The USA and Israel are allies. Yet, the two countries have spied on one another for a long time. If Israel has sold US secrets, probably too, The USA has sold Israeli secrets. The problem was, from Cap Weinberger's perspective, Pollard made Israel too strong and cost USA too much. A little spying between friends was expected, but Pollard gave away the store. If he were a professional mole, and was discovered to be a spy, he could be fed false data, but Pollard was not detected early enough,
upset the applecart by throwing a monkey wrench into the works and had to be taught a precedant setting lesson. Pollard's defense claims Weinberger made a statement before his death that The Pollard Affair was a relatively minor matter which was made into something bigger. What exactly did he mean by that? Either he wrecked things or he did not.
Pollard obviously had not developed deep ties with the Israelis, on the contrary. Handler Eitan contemplated shooting Pollard himself.
I think Pollard was unstable and should have never ever received any kind of security clearance.
We have a competancy problem across the board in our country,let's be fair, it is not only The US Military.
I do not contest Colonel Lang's assertion that Pollard harmed US interests. Clearly Pollard did not care what the fallout was from his actions, how could he have. The volume of material was too great for anyone to carefully make such an assessment.
Maybe Woolsley is right, let him go!"

Your argument boils down to:

"Everybody does it" (Cosi Fan Tutti)

"It was expected"

"America is at fault for not detecting Pollard"

"Pollard only did minor damage"

"America is at fault for giving him a security clearance"

"It's Pollards fault not Israel's".

Your Israeli talking points ignore the fact that if Israel was indeed Americas Ally, it should have refused to deal with Pollard and immediately alerted the U.S.

Instead it immediately made use of Pollard and did great and lasting Damage to America for its own Political, not Defence related, reasons.

Israel's actions are consistent with those of a parasite feeding off its host, not an ally.

[Patrick Lang]

walrus

There was another, even more egregiously insulting message from "hasabara highlander," the talking points were much the same. I posted this one but that is enough. pl

[William R. Cumming]

As state before Nation-States that rely on the constancy of the US are mistaken in their analysis of US military history and history of US foreign policy and foreign relations. It could not be otherwise in a democracy where the information flow can at best be hoped in the long long run to balance accuracy against error and be "fair and balanced'! It is the total absence of discussion of some of this blogs issues and discourse that tells me that self cenorship or actual censorship is taken place! No olne seems willing to ask why?
Perhaps blog control will be the next big effort of those who want none of the interested public to find out or even question official policy.
Speaking of that what are the bloggers of Israel doing?

[Lord Curzon]

The US Government should cut off his head and stick it on a pike as a warning to the next ten generations that some favors come with too high a price.

[WILL]

" While Pollard stabbed the United States in the back, Barak was smiling and smiling in his best "hale fellow well met" manner in dealing with DIA."

shxt eating grin- comes to mind.

[WILL]

But how do you weigh the damage of a mental misfit such as Pollard against that inflicted by the cabal of our national elite such as Scooter Libby, Feith, Perle, Wolfwitz, Senor, Elliott Abrams, Dubya, Cheney, et al.

The crew that hijacked 9.11 and sucked us into a trillion dollar war against a country that did not threaten us nor desired war w/ us. The causalities in blood & treasure are known & continuing.

[Fred]

Lewie said:
"...Pollard harmed US interests."

Pollard was an employee of the government of Isreal. They are responsible for all his espionage activities. Isreal could just as easily NOT used/sold/given away all the information obtained via thier employee.

BTW thanks for all the help you gave Ollie North and company selling arms to Iran, a country Isreal now wants to bomb.

[R.d.]

Pollard? he is safe, for now.. beware of the Art students.. they are back!!!

http://www.abc4.com/content/news/slc/story/Door-to-door-spies-in-Utah-County/sjOWsjk_zEqf6QeAfk4ZJw.cspx

http://dir.salon.com/news/feature/2002/05/07/students/index.html

[MRW]

Pollard's defense claims Weinberger made a statement before his death that The Pollard Affair was a relatively minor matter which was made into something bigger.

For the record, because I've been seeing this around the web, ostensibly from the pen of reporter Edwin Black, who also claims no American lives were lost as a result of what Pollard did: B.S.

For the record, Pollard's defense attorneys worked for Israel; Israel paid for his defense.

Nothing, nothing -- not even Israel's attempt to rewrite history -- overrides the 46-page memo that Weinberger wrote to the judge detailing the harm this traitor caused. Nothing. It was Weinberger who begged the judge to give Pollard life no matter what Dershowitz's plea agreement.

Pollard should have been hanged by his testicles. There's still time.

[Jake]

The USS Liberty. The CALEA Investigation back in 2001, the Israeli Moosad posing as art students, the economic spying and Pollard...

Lets see we just deported and traded without prosecution a bunch of sad rookie FSB trainees over so-called spying charges and we let Israel get away with what?

"We Have Met The Enemy and He Is Us"

[Byron Raum]

Mr Cummings,

I fear I disagree with you somewhat on the reason as to why Israel wants him released. I would suggest that the reason is more primal, in that Pollard's existence shows that American and Israeli interests are not the same thing. If he was pensioned off in Tel Aviv or something, he could be conveniently forgotten and we could all get along.

B.R.

[brock Abdo]

We punished Pollard, but we never punished Israel, on contrary, we had been rewarding Israel for more than 60 years.