Israeli Intelligence and the CIA: Secret Trouble Among Old Friends

American recognition of the Palestine Liberation Organization last month placed new strain on the troubled intelligence relationship between the Central Intelligence Agency and Israel’s foreign intelligence organization, the Mossad. President Reagan’s agreement to talk to the PLO was his last important decision before leaving the White House, a direct reward for Yasser Arafat’s much-promised but much-delayed pledges to concede Israel’s right to exist and to renounce terrorism--a promise it will now be the CIA’s job to monitor.

The new strain comes from the fact that the CIA’s single most important ally in keeping track of Middle Eastern terrorist groups has been the Mossad--Arafat’s mortal enemy. The CIA’s intimate relationship with the Mossad will now be threatened by the sort of conflict that poisons objective intelligence reporting--the political need for facts to buttress a case. Unlike President Bush, hard-line Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir refuses to concede the PLO is out of the terrorism business--which suggests that Israeli and U.S. intelligence officers will soon be arguing heatedly over the correct interpretation of facts gathered in the field. When politics colors the intelligence process, two things happen--inconvenient facts get ignored and convenient “facts” are sometimes created. National leaders, not just the public, can find it hard to tell one from the other.

The potential for bruising disagreement was demonstrated last week when the chief of staff of the Israeli army, Lt. Gen. Dan Shomron, told a committee of Parliament that Palestinian groups under Arafat’s control had apparently abandoned--that is, the Mossad could find no signs of--terrorist activity since last November. Shamir immediately rejected Shomron’s conclusion in a rare public break with the army. The sticking point is not hard to find: If Shamir conceded that the PLO is out of the terrorism business, he would then be under great pressure to join the United States in its decision to talk to the PLO--something Shamir and his party, the conservative Likud, have sworn never to do.

An official disagreement like Shamir’s with Shomron cannot endure. One or the other must come round, and it will be difficult for the general to take back his claim without citing some new information to support the change in his views. But any Israeli claim of having intelligence to prove the PLO is still planning or conducting terrorist operations will generate pressure in official U.S. circles for confirmation by the CIA. Thus a small event of the sort routinely picked up by intelligence agencies watching the shadowy world of terrorists--an intercepted phone message, a stolen document, the identification of a man with a bomb in a suitcase--could have great political consequence.

The CIA’s working relationship with Israeli intelligence is one of the agency’s oldest and closest, rivalled only by its ties to the British Secret Intelligence Service. For decades, the “Israeli account” was part of the secret kingdom ruled by James J. Angleton, the chief of counterintelligence for the CIA whose fixation with the KGB’s clandestine abilities bordered on paranoia. It has sometimes been said that Angleton got the job as the result of the close working relationship he had developed just after World War II with Jews in Italy, who were organizing secret transportation across the Mediterranean. They were helping survivors of Hitler’s Holocaust trying to reach what was then still British-controlled Palestine.

Angleton formed other ties with the new state of Israel after its founding in 1948, including a friendship with Teddy Kollek, now mayor of Jerusalem. In the summer of 1951, he asked the director of the CIA, Gen. William Bedell Smith, for authority to establish formal liaison with the new Israeli intelligence service.

For years, Angleton ran the U.S. end of this relationship from his hip pocket. Both sides had much to offer: The Americans spent a fortune the Israelis could never hope to equal on gathering information worldwide, much of it by expensive technical means, while the Israelis had unparalleled agent nets in the Middle East and often captured the latest Soviet military equipment. Even more important from Angleton’s point of view, but rarely talked about, was Israel’s access to the large and increasingly restive Jewish population in the Soviet Union. But over time Angleton developed a reputation for sympathy with Israel of the sort sometimes described in diplomatic and intelligence circles as “going native.” Angleton shared the Israeli conviction, for example, that the PLO was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Soviet Union under direct KGB control--a claim eventually rejected by most CIA analysts. Soon after William E. Colby took over the CIA in 1973, Angleton lost the Israeli account and two years later, in December, 1975, he was forced to retire following bitter disagreement over the way he ran his principal fiefdom, counterintelligence.

During the two decades Angleton was in charge of liaison with the Israelis, the Mossad won a reputation as perhaps the world’s best intelligence service--not the biggest certainly, but it was superbly efficient, imaginative, aggressive and blessed with full political support at home. This meant it could be trusted to keep the secrets. One result was a growing readiness among Washington officials to let, and sometimes to ask, the Israelis to do things Washington dared not do for fear of congressional opposition. The Iran-Contra affair was one example of this intermingling of U.S and Israeli actions.

Recent news stories suggest this bilateral cooperation went even further: In 1985, Reagan reportedly approved new “terms of reference” for a U.S.-Israeli pact on intelligence exchanges that included proposals for a jointly run counterterrorism program. At about the same time, Reagan allegedly approved “intelligence findings” that authorized aggressive counterterrorism operations including assassination--in effect, overriding his own executive order of Dec. 4, 1981, prohibiting assassination. Israel has denied the existence of any such agreement, while U.S. officials have withheld comment.

But this long history of trust and cooperation between the CIA and the Mossad has also been shadowed by an element of doubt on the U.S. side that borders on anti-Semitism. From its beginning the agency was reluctant to give American Jews responsibility for intelligence on the Middle East in general, and on Israel in particular. Some years ago I was told that no Jew had ever served as Israeli desk officer in the Directorate of Intelligence, the analytical side of the agency, and no Jew had ever been responsible for Middle Eastern estimates on the Board of Estimates, which produced annual reports on various areas of the world. Whether this is still the case I do not know. But it is not hard to find CIA intelligence officers who believe that the agency has sometimes served Israeli interests at the expense of its own; that Israel has hard-to-explain access to U.S. intelligence secrets, and that domestic U.S. political pressures have prevented the FBI and the CIA’s own counterintelligence officers from monitoring Israeli intelligence efforts in the United States.

The close U.S.-Israel relationship makes the question a sensitive one, but U.S. intelligence officers are increasingly ready to discuss it. They say the wholesale plundering of U.S. secrets by Jonathan Jay Pollard--now serving a life sentence for espionage for Israel--would never have been possible if senior U.S. officials had not denied frequent requests for permission to watch Israeli officials suspected, in government parlance, of “activities incompatible with diplomatic status.”

Intelligence services have their own priorities and often find ways to cooperate even when their respective governments are locked in disagreement. Years ago, the CIA hired, and sometimes even protected, former Nazis, and it now maintains a close working relationship with South African intelligence despite Washington’s hostility to apartheid. It has shared intelligence on the Soviet Union with China, provided arms and information to both sides in the Iran-Iraq War, given tactical intelligence to the British in the Falklands War, even while Washington was pressing the British to negotiate, and once cooperated with Soviet intelligence in preventing the open test of an atomic bomb by South Africa.

The CIA and Mossad both value their working relationship, and will take care to preserve it. But the Pollard case planted seeds of doubt, and Washington’s willingness to talk to the PLO poses fundamental political problems for the Israeli government. Only one thing can make these problems disappear, however temporarily--evidence that Arafat has broken his promise to abandon terrorism. Intelligence agencies will be the first to know what is really happening in this new situation, while the public, as usual, will be the last.