Pollard and the Poisonous “Ally” Israel

The New Observer
November 21, 2015

The official and ecstatic Israeli welcome given to Jewish spy Jonathan Pollard’s release has definitively revealed the hate-filled attitude of the Jewish state toward America—and how poisonous the US’s supposed “best ally in the Middle East” actually is.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hailed Pollard’s release, saying that he had “longed for this day. The people of Israel welcome the release of Jonathan Pollard.”

Israeli President Reuven Rivlin said in a statement that “Over the years, we’ve felt Pollard’s pain and felt responsible and obliged to bring about his release.”

The full caucus of the Israeli Knesset (parliament) said in an official statement released by its chairman Nahman Shai, that it “would not rest until [Pollard] was free to depart the United States for any destination of [his] choosing, first and foremost—Israel.”

Pollard’s release was judicially correct: he had served a full 30 years in prison, and had qualified for parole.

But his crime was so heinous, so outrageous, and so devastating to America, that it is an indication of the poisonous nature of the Israeli state that it has officially welcomed the spy’s release in such a manner.

At the time of Pollard’s sentencing, US Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger made a formal statement before the court (original PDF here) explaining why Pollard had to be sentenced to jail for a long period.

In his statement, Weinberger wrote:

It is difficult for me, even in the so-called “year of the spy,” to conceive of a greater harm to national security than that caused by the defendant in view of the breadth, the critical importance to the US, and the high sensitivity of the information he sold to Israel.

That information was intentionally reserved by the United States for its own use, because to disclose it, to anyone or any nation, would cause the greatest harm to our national security.

In so doing, he both damaged and destroyed policies and national assets which have taken many years, great effort, and enormous national resources to secure.

The exact nature of Pollard’s offenses were so serious that they are still classified. Israel in fact, denied for sixteen years after his sentencing that Pollard had even been on their payroll.

In 1999, Jewish journalist Seymour Hersh—famous for his remarkable, and rare, honesty—wrote a lengthy article in the New Yorker magazine, revealing as much as could be found out about Pollard’s crimes.

In the article, titled “The Traitor: The case against Jonathan Pollard”(The New Yorker, January 18, 1999, pp. 26–33), Hersh revealed that Pollard’s espionage had severely compromised American intelligence procedures from top to bottom—and that Israel had sold the information which Pollard had stolen to the Soviet Union.

Hersh started out by saying that every single significant Jewish organization in America, through their mouthpiece, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, had publicly called for Pollard’s release, arguing that his crimes did not amount to high treason against the United States, “because Israel was then and remains a close ally.”

This is the same defense which Pollard and his defenders use to the very day.

However, as Hersh pointed out, when on trial, Pollard elected to plea bargain rather than face a trial.

The government, Hersh said, agreed immediately, because then nothing would have to be revealed about the extent of the Jewish espionage. Hersh continued:

Pollard gave the Israelis vast amounts of data dealing with specific American intelligence systems and how they worked.

A number of officials strongly suspect that the Israelis repackaged much of Pollard’s material and provided it to the Soviet Union.

A significant percentage of Pollard’s documents, including some that described the techniques the American Navy used to track Soviet submarines around the world, was of practical importance only to the Soviet Union.

One longtime CIA officer who worked as a station chief in the Middle East said he understood that “certain elements in the Israeli military had used it”—Pollard’s material—“to trade for people they wanted to get out,” including Jewish scientists working in missile technology and on nuclear issues.

They also said that the documents that Pollard had been directed by his Israeli handlers to betray led them to no other conclusion.

High-level suspicions about Israeli-Soviet collusion were expressed as early as December, 1985, a month after Pollard’s arrest, when William J. Casey, the late CIA director, who was known for his close ties to the Israeli leadership, stunned one of his station chiefs by suddenly complaining about the Israelis breaking the “ground rules.”

The issue arose when Casey urged increased monitoring of the Israelis during an otherwise routine visit, I was told by the station chief, who is now retired. “He asked if I knew anything about the Pollard case,” the station chief recalled, and he said that Casey had added, “For your information, the Israelis used Pollard to obtain our attack plan against the USSR all of it. The coordinates, the firing locations, the sequences. And for guess who? The Soviets.”

Casey had then explained that the Israelis had traded the Pollard data for Soviet emigres. “How’s that for cheating?” he had asked.

There was little doubt, I learned from an official who was directly involved, that Soviet intelligence had access to the most secret information in Israel.

Hersh also revealed that the names of American agents in the Soviet Union, harvested by Pollard, had also been turned over to the Soviets. Many of these agents had then “disappeared.” As Hersh wrote:

The Justice Department further informed Judge Robinson, in a publicly filed memorandum, that “numerous” analyses of Soviet missile systems had been sold by Pollard to Israel, and that those documents included “information from human sources whose identity could be inferred by a reasonably competent intelligence analyst. Moreover, the identity of the authors of these classified publications” was clearly marked.

A retired Navy admiral who was directly involved in the Pollard investigation told me, “There is no question that the Russians got a lot of the Pollard stuff. The only question is how did it get there?”

In addition, Pollard also handed over to Israel a mountain of data which was of no strategic or military advantage to the Jewish state. The only state with an interest in acquiring that information would have been the Soviet Union.

This data included the National Security Agency’s (NSA) signals intelligence (SIGINT) in-house manual known as the RASIN (an acronym for radio-signal notations).

RASIN contained the site, frequency, and significant features of all the known communications links used by the Soviet Union, and the theft of this document was “number nine” on the damage-assessment list cited in Defense Secretary Weinberger’s still secret declaration to the court before Pollard’s sentencing.

Pollard’s betrayal of the RASIN put the NSA in the position of having to question or reevaluate all of its intelligence collecting, Hersh wrote.

Another important operation compromised by Pollard was the daily report from the US Navy’s Sixth Fleet Ocean Surveillance Information Facility (FOSIF) in Rota, Spain.

FOSIF reported all that had gone on in the Middle East during the previous twenty-four hours, as recorded by the NSA’s most sophisticated monitoring devices, and used the most advanced technical means of intercepting Soviet military communications. Its primary targets were the ships, the aircraft, and, most important, the nuclear-armed submarines of the Soviet Union on patrol in the Mediterranean.

Those submarines, whose nuclear missiles were aimed at United States forces, were constantly being tracked; they were to be targeted and destroyed within hours if war broke out.

Israel had no interest itself in these reports, but demanded of Pollard that he supply them with all FOSIF details—obviously for consumption by the Soviet Union.

As Hersh wrote:

Pollard’s American interrogators eventually concluded that in his year and a half of spying he had provided the Israelis with more than a year’s worth of the daily FOSIF reports from Rota.

Pollard himself told the Americans that at one point in 1985 the Israelis had nagged him when he missed several days of work because of illness and had failed to deliver the FOSIF reports for those days. One of his handlers, Joseph Yagur, had complained twice about the missed messages and had asked him to find a way to retrieve them. Pollard told his American interrogators that he had never missed again.

Hersh also revealed how Pollard provided vital information which allowed Israel to directly interfere with American military operations through the National SIGINT Requirements List. This is a compendium of the tasks given to various NSA collection units around the world.

Hersh explained it as follows:

Before a bombing mission, for example, a United States satellite might be redeployed, at enormous financial cost, to provide instantaneous electronic coverage of the target area.

The Requirements List is “like a giant to-do list,” a former NSA operative told me.  “If a customer”—someone in the intelligence community— “asked for specific coverage, it would be on a list that is updated daily.” That is, the target of the coverage would be known.

“If we’re going to bomb Iraq, we will shift the system,” a senior specialist subsequently told me. “It’s a tipoff where the American emphasis is going to be.”

With the List, the specialist added, the Israelis “could see us move our collection systems” prior to military action, and eventually come to understand how the United States Armed Forces “change our emphasis.”

In other words, he added, Israel “could make our intelligence system the prime target” and hide whatever was deemed necessary.

“The damage goes past Jay’s [Pollard] arrest,” the specialist said, “and could extend up to today.”

This then, is only what is known about the extent of Pollard’s betrayal of America. Most likely, far more serious consequences resulted from his spying activities, details of which remain classified.

The crimes which are known are dramatic and far-reaching enough to make Pollard the single greatest spy ever to have been arrested in American history, and possibly even more dangerous to US security than his fellow Jews, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who stole the atom bomb secrets and gave them to the Soviet Union in the early 1950s.

The chutzpah of the Israeli government in welcoming Pollard’s release is a slap in the face of all Americans, and is yet another indication of the duplicitous nature of the Jewish state and its so-called “special relationship” with the US—which is, and always has been, a strictly one-way affair.