‘Renegade’ Agent Promoted : Details of Spy Case Tarnish Israeli Claim of Innocence

On about 20 Friday evenings last year, Jonathan Jay Pollard drove to a stately brick-and-marble apartment building in this town’s upscale Cleveland Park neighborhood, knocked on the door of Irit Erb, a secretary at the nearby Israeli Embassy, and handed over a suitcase stuffed with American military papers, satellite photographs, scientific documents and secret cables, federal prosecutors say.

The meetings were the focal point of a 17-month Israeli espionage operation that the Jerusalem government insists was isolated, unauthorized and fully exposed after Pollard and his wife, Anne Henderson-Pollard, were arrested last November. But details of the spying, made public in court documents, all but overwhelm Israel’s persistent claims of innocence and elevate the affair to an issue of whether the United States can trust Israeli statements on this espionage case, U.S. officials said Thursday.

It is not merely the size and lavish funding of Pollard’s work--which engaged at least six Israelis and promises of more than $345,000 in cash--that dispute the Israeli claim that it was an unapproved mission of a “renegade” intelligence office, say those officials, who asked not to be named.

Equally important, they say, are other disclosures in the still-unfolding scandal that have contradicted or pointed up blank spots in those admissions the government has made.

A U.S. inquiry panel that visited Israel last December with a promise of “full cooperation” in the spy probe, for example, was never told that a top colonel in the Israeli air force had managed Pollard’s spying, government sources say. The colonel, Aviem (Avi) Sella, was one of four Israelis named as unindicted co-conspirators when Pollard’s indictment was handed down by a federal grand jury Wednesday. “Sella was never revealed to us by anybody,” one source said.

A more telling indicator, one investigator said, is the Israeli government’s treatment this year of Rafael (Rafi) Eitan, reputed head of the “renegade” spy bureau that concocted the Pollard mission.

Last Dec. 1, a week after Pollard’s arrest, the Israeli cabinet stated publicly: “If the allegations are confirmed, those responsible will be brought to account.”

However, an American investigator said Thursday, “Look what happened to Rafael Eitan. He was made chairman of Israeli Chemicals,” Israel’s largest government-owned industry. “He wasn’t punished; he was rewarded.”

Evidence Omitted

In fact, government officials now say, the federal investigation of the case was regularly delayed by Israeli officials’ reluctance to cooperate and by omissions of critical evidence, much of which was later obtained from Pollard himself during plea-bargain negotiations.

The U.S. inquiry panel into the Pollard affair was invited to Israel last December only after Secretary of State George P. Shultz had talked to Prime Minister Shimon Peres “and leaned on him,” one source close to the case said Thursday.

Moreover, FBI agents were convinced early in the investigation that they were being deceived by some of the four Israelis later named as unindicted co-conspirators. “Evidence on the public record,” that source said, “is that (those) witnesses didn’t tell the truth.”

The United States so far has expressed no formal distress about growing evidence of Israeli stonewalling in the case, but U.S. officials privately have voiced dismay.

Despite Justice Department assurances that Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III and Shultz are “completely on board” in the Pollard investigation, two government officials predicted Thursday that “State will make every effort to stop more indictments, but Justice plans to go ahead with great vigor.”

The State Department has attempted to blunt the Pollard probe’s negative diplomatic impact, not only on Israel but on other nations as well. One department official, for instance, tried to remove references to the Peoples Republic of China in criminal charges against Henderson-Pollard, who is believed to have planned to show the Chinese secret U.S. documents obtained by her husband.

Justice Department officials, noting that the Chinese were central to that charge against her, rejected the request.

5 Classified Documents

Pollard had given his wife five classified documents on Chinese diplomatic facilities that she had used to prepare for a public-relations presentation she was scheduled to deliver to Chinese Embassy officials in Washington, prosecutors say. The documents were among those recovered after Pollard’s arrest.

Some U.S. and Israeli officials had hoped that the Pollards’ guilty pleas on espionage-related charges, offered as part of a pact in which they promised to cooperate in future investigations, would quietly end the spying issue. But, although those plea bargains avoided a public trial, the mountain of evidence released in court only raised other questions about Israeli espionage operations here.

Intelligence and law-enforcement experts alike expressed disbelief that an operation as complex and productive as Pollard’s was known only to the renegade intelligence office, in a backwater of the Israeli Defense Ministry, that was said to have been run by Eitan.

At least six Israelis were identified by a federal grand jury as known and possible Pollard contacts. They include the four alleged co-conspirators--Eitan, Sella, Erb and science consul Joseph (Yossi) Yagur, Pollard’s last “case officer”--an unnamed Israeli diplomat in Washington and a man known only as Uzi.

Not only were the Pollards given a $10,000 Paris vacation and a $10,000-plus Middle East tour for their services, officials noted, but Pollard was paid $2,500 a month for supplying documents that sometimes were classified even higher than “top secret.”

Pollard was paid $45,000 in 17 known months of spying and the Israelis had pledged to pay him an additional $300,000 over 10 years, according to court documents.

Spy Operation Impressive

The span and clockwork precision of the Israeli officials’ U.S. operations were impressive. The documents that Pollard gave Erb, for example, were dispatched to a second apartment--rented by Yagur in the same building--that was crammed with what prosecutors called “sophisticated copying and photographic equipment” set up to record the secrets.

“This is not an apparatus set up to handle one person,” one knowledgeable government source said Thursday.

“Anybody who doesn’t think intelligence of that scope and sophistication was not being run by the (Israeli) government hasn’t thought about it enough,” said another official familiar with the case.

Just as disturbing to some officials are the apparent omissions and discrepancies between early Israeli statements on the case and the facts as established by prosecutors and by Pollard.

For instance, Israel waited almost a week after Pollard’s Nov. 21 arrest to tell the United States that Yagur and another Israeli science attache, Ilan Ravid, had left the United States the day after Pollard was taken into custody. Ravid cooperated in the U.S. probe of Pollard and was cleared of wrongdoing, government sources say.

Third Key Departure

State Department records offer no indication that the United States was told of a third key departure--that of Irit Erb, Pollard’s contact. Erb left the country one day before Pollard’s arrest, shortly after failing to appear for one of their routine meetings.

Earlier, U.S. officials had appeared to believe that they had been told of everyone involved in the Pollard affair. State Department spokesman Charles Redman said Dec. 21, after the inquiry team had finished its work, that the United States had received “full cooperation” from the Israeli government and “full access” to those involved in the case.

Although U.S. officials were not told of Sella during their December inquiry, there is no proof that they were deceived with the knowledge of the Israeli government.