Israeli Spying on United States

Your editorial (Dec. 3), “Trust-Busting Snoopery,” is explained in William Seaman’s article of the same date on the opposite pages, “Sneaky Suspicions in the Israeli Spy Case.”

The chief of the ABC News bureau in Tel Aviv since 1972 summed it up best in his quote of the former CIA director, Richard Helms, who said, “The only sin in spying is to get caught in the act.”

And, as Seaman suggests, even friends don’t quite trust each other in today’s mad world.

For American Jews, however, there is the comment in your editorial that we need to take to heart, and deal with: the lack of a “rational political system.”

True, we can’t affect that system directly. But as the largest Jewish community in the world, and in the forefront of support for the Jewish state, we need to use any and all influences we have to urge the leaders of Israel to move toward a more balanced political system that doesn’t allow extremists of both ends of the spectrum to have influence out of proportion to their strength, or to strangle freedom for the country’s citizens.

HYMAN H. HAVES

Pacific Palisades