Review of Wolf Blitzer, Territory of Lies: The Exclusive Story of Jonathan Jay Pollard: The American Who Spied

on His Country for Israel and How He Was Betrayed (NY: Harper & Row, 1989). By Jonathan Marshall Middle East Report, January-February 1990, 43-45. Back in 1976, a college acquaintance of mine, Jay Pollard, used to talk in great detail about his work for Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. He was convincing enough that I could listen for hours, even if I never quite believed his stories. Eleven years later, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger would tell the court that convicted Pollard, a Navy intelligence analyst, of stealing 360 cubic feet of classified material for Israel: 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 important to the US and the high sensitivity of the information he sold to Israel.'' Such an important spy case deserves a more definitive chronicle than that produced by Wolf Blitzer, Washington correspondent for the Jerusalem Post. In the end, after a good read, you still don't know much more than press accounts have provided. Just how deeply implicated were Israeli political leaders? What exactly did Pollard steal? How much damage did it do? How did the Israelis recruit him? Did other Americans work for the Israelis? Why did Navy security fail so badly? And what really made Pollard tick? To all these questions Blitzer gives half answers at best. Like the dog that didn't bark, Wolf Blitzer's account of the Pollard spy scandal is most interesting for what it doesn't say. In particular, his failure to explore serious, published charges about the broader ramifications of the Pollard espionage ring, including the possibility that it had ties to Soviet intelligence, suggests just how sensitive some of the remaining issues in the Pollard case really are. The title tells something of Blitzer's sympathies: The betrayal he refers to was of Pollard, not of his country. Yet the account is not uncritical, either. Pollard reminds Blitzer very much of other bright young Jews for whom religion wasn't necessarily Judaism, but Israel--an ideological passion for the country as a birthright for all Jews. Their image of Israel is often highly exaggerated, not very realistic.'' But where did this passion come from? As the various witnesses to Pollard's life recount their stories to Blitzer, a fascinating, Roshomon-like tale unfolds. To his family, Pollard was bright, warm, sensitive and stable. But the evidence proves them blind. Somewhere--and Blitzer, preferring not to speculate, does not say where--Pollard became a deeply troubled young man, subject to grandiose delusions, flights of fantasy and personal conflicts that led him to ruin. The source of Pollard's unhappiness, according to his own story, was his daily fight'' against brutish antiSemites in school. He claims he was constantly beaten up, an experience which helped him realize that only in Israel could Jews be safe. That conviction was reinforced by his attendance at a Hebrew Day School, which he recalled having a highly concentrated curriculum of religious and Zionist indoctrination that regularly stressed the advisability of aliya, or emigration to Israel.'' But even in Israel Pollard couldn't find security. As a teenager he won a coveted chance to attend a science camp at the Weizmann Institute. His parents remember that Jonathan tried to protect'' a Jewish kid who was being taunted by a non-Jewish student; for his trouble, Pollard was beaten to a pulp and hospitalized. Pollard himself remembers only a water balloon war'' that got a bit out of hand. Yet one of the scientists at the Institute recalled that Pollard left behind him a reputation of being an unstable troublemaker, the worst case of this kind in the history of the summer camp.'' In his own sick mind, Pollard was always the victim. He returned from camp, this time to become the target of white fascists'' and militant blacks'' at school. Later, while attending Stanford, he dropped his pre-medical plans because his fellow students were sabotaging'' his lab results. In the late 1970s, at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, he found the environment very anti-Jewish,'' except for his mentor Uri Ra'anan, a former registered agent for Israel.

Like many professional victims, Pollard seems to have gone out of his way to make enemies. One of his former Stanford friends recalled that he had a penchant for playing dirty jokes on people'' by wiring room lights so fireworks would go off when the lights went on, or leaping out at them from closets. That's just scratching the surface of the dirty tricks he used to do,'' the friend said. One practical joke that Pollard took all too seriously was his claim, throughout his college career, to be an officer in the Israeli army and intelligence service. (His college yearbook actually lists him as Colonel Pollard.'') Pollard now dismisses all that as a game and a misunderstanding, or even worse as a smear invented by government agents. Blitzer draws no judgments from all these facets of his early life, but they would make great material for a psychologist. Blitzer misses one truly remarkable incident: In 1976, several years before his recruitment by Israel, Pollard confided to a close friend that his assignment from Mossad was to infiltrate the United States government on behalf of Israeli intelligence.''i Assuming he was not in fact telling the truth, Pollard certainly had a remarkable facility for making his fantasies come true. And his openness about his fantasy life makes one wonder how he ever managed to get a military job, much less a top secret security clearance. All the more so since he had been turned down by the CIA for a job in the late 1970s because of his heavy drug use. Just how Pollard was recruited by the Israelis, however, remains unclear from Blitzer's vague and ambiguous account. The book relates that a New York stockbroker and family friend, Steven Stern, introduced Pollard to Col. Aviem Sella, who recruited him for Israeli intelligence. (Blitzer hints that Stern was receiving inside tips on the Persian Gulf oil market from Pollard.) Stern claimed that he didn't know Pollard wanted to meet Sella precisely in order to volunteer as a spy. Yet even before meeting Pollard, Sella received clearance to enlist Pollard from a civilian in the New York consulate who reported to LAKAM, a scientific intelligence gathering unit of the Defense Ministry. Two possibilities arise: Either Stern told Sella of Pollard's desire to work undercover for Israel or Sella routinely sought to recruit every well-placed American (or American Jew) that he met. Either raises intriguing and sensitive political questions about the relationship between Israeli intelligence and American Jews. Yet Blitzer makes no effort to clarify the story. Blitzer gives only the sketchiest details about LAKAM, the agency for which Pollard worked. Blitzer notes that it was partially responsible for the theft of the blueprints for the French-made Mirage jet fighter in 1968'' and that one major and supersensitive objective was to strengthen Israel's nuclear development program.'' But he fails to mention that Rafael Eitan, who ran'' Pollard as head of LAKAM, had in 1968 gone undercover as a chemist to visit the NUMEC nuclear reprocessing facility in Apollo, Pennsylvania from which Israel is believed to have secretly obtained several hundred pounds of nucleargrade plutonium.ii Just as this coup helped propel Eitan to the top of his field, so Sella's successful raid on Iraq's nuclear power plant in 1981 made him a star. Perhaps the most significant questions raised by the Pollard case are what Israel hoped to gain from the information Pollard supplied, and what damage, if any, his spying did to the United States. Here, again, Blitzer fumbles badly. In a statement to the court prior to Pollard's sentencing, the Justice Department raised the possibility of a so-called false-flag'' recruitment, i.e., that Pollard was misled into thinking he was serving Israel when in fact his information went to a hostile power. Such a recruitment poses enormous risks to national security, since it plays on misplaced but worthy loyalties rather than mere avarice or fear of blackmail. As one recent counterintelligence primer observes, KGB officers have pretended to be Israeli officials, NATO military attaches, and even neo-Nazis.''iii One of the most serious intelligence breaches of all time, the loss of naval codes through the John Walker spy ring, was made possible by the source's belief that he was working for Israel, not the KGB. Could the Soviets have similarly profited from Pollard's enormous intelligence haul? Was Pollard a dupe as well as a traitor?

Blitzer disposes of the problem with a fatuous quotation from the defense brief, which notes that Pollard questioned his controllers at length to satisfy his curiosity, and to establish their bona fides. Even the best trained agents could not have known the details or events on which these individuals were quizzed. The specter of a `false flag' was in reality, therefore, non-existent.'' But Pollard could have learned nothing from his handlers, who presumably were genuine, loyal Israelis. The question really is who were the ultimate consumers of the intelligence. Pollard never interrogated the anonymous individuals whose specific demands for information guided his spying. Pollard did note, however, that his handlers showed absolutely no interest in intelligence on terrorism, a topic one would think would be of special interest to Israel. On the other hand, Blitzer reports, Perhaps the most important single document Pollard provided to Israel consisted of a lengthy, extremely sensitive US handbook on communications intelligence that had been his handlers' number one priority in obtaining.'' Access to the handbook, he adds, would signal to hostile powers that the United States had penetrated their most sensitive communications.'' Clearly, such a handbook would be of far greater value to the Soviets than to Israel. So too would the vast information Pollard collected on US ship positions, aircraft stations, tactics, and training operations,'' to cite the US government's sentencing memorandum. The notion of a false-flag recruitment of Pollard is more than a mere theoretical possibility. Israel has been infiltrated many times in the past by East bloc agents; its openness to Soviet migrs makes it all the more vulnerable. Knowing this, many US counterintelligence analysts firmly believe either that Soviet moles'' directed Pollard's intelligence collection or that Israel sold his invaluable material. Neil Livingstone, founder of the Institute on Terrorism and Sub-National Conflicts, says There's no question that Mossad's penetrated. A lot of what Pollard stole wasn't related to Israeli security. Israel is a great trader of intelligence. To get an advantage someplace, they get something someone else wants and they create an indebtedness.''iv Official US suspicion that Moscow was the ultimate consumer of Pollard's take grew, according to historian Stephen Green, when, during the Pollard investigation, a Soviet defector in US hands revealed that in addition to the two Soviet spies serving prison terms in Israel (Shabtai Kalmanovitch and Marcus Klingberg), there was a third who had not been caught. He was well placed in the Defense Ministry and still `active.' Quite possibly, secrets Pollard sent to Israel were passed on to Moscow, whether or not that had been intended.''v UPI reporter Richard Sale, who has excellent sources in the intelligence community, gave further details in two little-noticed stories published in December 1987.vi Sale reported that US counterintelligence agents became aware of the Israeli-Soviet espionage pipeline when data stolen by Jonathan Jay Pollard . . . were `traced to the Eastern bloc,''' in the words of one Justice Department official. A State Department source revealed that top Israeli defense officials had traded stolen US intelligence documents to Soviet military intelligence agents in return for assurances of greater emigration of Soviet Jews.'' It began as a straight data-for-people deal,'' Sale's source said, but as a result the Soviets penetrated the Israeli defense establishment at a high level.'' Sale's sources also revealed that the most significant Soviet penetration had taken place in the early 1980s, under Defense Minister Ariel Sharon. One US intelligence analyst was quoted as saying he was not surprised at the Soviet success because Sharon had surrounded himself with people who are extraordinarily vulnerable to penetration.'' One of those closest to Sharon was Rafael Eitan, the LAKAM spymaster who directed Pollard. It was Sharon who brought the embittered and angry'' Eitan back into the intelligence community as head of LAKAM after his advancement in Mossad was blocked.vii Another member of the Sharon clique was the international arms dealer Ya'akov Nimrodi, who tried to use his relationship with the Kremlin-connected businessman Armand Hammer (to whom Sharon introduced him) to sell distillation equipment to the Soviet Union.viii Nimrodi is best known as one of the

private arms dealers who orchestrated Israel's role in Irangate. Though Blitzer doesn't say, Nimrodi is almost certainly the leading international arms dealer who specialized in sales to Iran,'' code-named Uzi'', who helped run the Pollard espionage operation.ix Uzi'' tasked Pollard in the fall of 1985 to steal classified information on missile systems that could defend Iran's Kharg Island oil facilities from Iraqi air attack; Nimrodi and his partners soon thereafter arranged the profitable sale of US-made HAWK antiaircraft missiles to Iran in November 1985 in exchange for American hostages.x Such connections suggest that the Pollard operation was more than the mere rogue operation'' that Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir dismissed it as. Blitzer is skeptical of Shamir's claim, citing the fact that the Israeli government continues to put money into Pollard's bank account in recognition of his services. Pollard himself never bought the rogue'' theory, noting that the guidance he received suggested a highly coordinated effort between the Navy, Army and Air Force intelligence services.'' Sella received a promotion in the Air Force. Eitan, far from being punished, was made head of Israel Chemicals, the largest state-owned industry in the country. (Blitzer might also have mentioned that one of Israel Chemicals' leading foreign representative, Shaul Eisenberg, is a sometime Mossad agent who reportedly helped negotiate the sale of Chinese silkworm missiles to Iran.)xi Given a life sentence for his espionage, Pollard has become a martyr to a wide range of the Israeli and American Jewish publics. A fall guy, perhaps, but he is too pathetic for martyrdom. His sad fate should arouse indignation not against the American criminal justice system but against those who used him for reasons that can still only be guessed. Israel lied to the United States about the involvement of its top officials. It obstructed American efforts to assess the damage to national security and trace the stolen documents. The true tale of its espionage in the United States has yet to be told.

Oakland Tribune, November 23, 1985. Washington Post, June 5, 1986. iii Edward Epstein, Deception (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 182. iv Washington Inquirer, June 2, 1989. v Christian Science Monitor, May 22, 1989. vi UPI, December 13 and 27, 1987. For a longer analysis of these revelations, see Jonathan Marshall, No Secrets Between Friends? City Paper, January 15, 1988. vii Blitzer, 12. For more details on the Sharon/Eitan connection, see New York Times, December 1, 1985; Amos Perlmutter, What the Pollards Did to Israel, Newsday, December 11, 1985. viii Davar, November 29, 1985. For more on the Sharon/Hammer connection, see Village Voice, January 29, 1985. For an extremely critical look at Hammer's alleged ties to Soviet intelligence, see New York Times Magazine, November 29, 1981. ix Blitzer, 99. (Nimrodi was famous for having sold Israel's Uzi submachine gun to Iran's army under the shah.)Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dales Scott and Jane Hunter, The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 170. x Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, November 1987 (Washington: US Government Printing Office, 1987), chapter 10; Blitzer, 169-170. xi Jerusalem Post, July 5, 1988.
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