Spy Scandal Feared as U.S. Officer Goes AWOL

The bizarre flight to Israel of a senior U.S. Army intelligence officer earlier this month has set off a scramble to avoid a spy scandal and prevent a rupture in U.S.-Israeli relations still sensitive over the Jonathan Pollard spy case of the mid-1980s.

Lt. Col. Jeremiah Mattysse, until recently chief of the U.S. Army Reserve Southwest Intelligence Support Center, is being sought for questioning by U.S. authorities and faces charges of desertion and conduct unbecoming an officer, U.S. officials said over the weekend.

After Mattysse failed to return to his San Antonio post Aug. 7, he was branded absent without leave. By late last week, Israeli news outlets were reporting ominously that the intelligence officer, a converted Jew, had fled to the Jewish state and brought his secrets with him.

Israel and the United States are cooperating to secure Mattysse’s return amid a swirl of allegations that Mattysse, who was under Army investigation for adultery, stashed away classified documents for Israel, fell in love with a woman who has had connections to Israeli intelligence and has been spirited to Syria by rogue agents of Israel’s Mossad.

But for all the piquant details of Mattysse’s flight, officials on both sides have taken pains to portray him as a soldier on the lam from a disintegrating personal life, not a spy in the mold of Pollard. Almost 15 years after Pollard, then a civilian naval intelligence analyst, was caught slipping secrets to Israel, that spy scandal continues to roil U.S.-Israeli relations.

“This is a guy whose life was falling apart,” said an official familiar with the Mattysse case speaking on condition of anonymity. Said another: “This is a case of an individual who has failed to report for work. It’s an incredible case history of how things can spiral out of control.”

Just in case, however, Army intelligence, which granted Mattysse a top-secret security clearance, is taking “reasonable steps to ensure the continued security of the military intelligence system,” according to Paul Hanley, spokesman for the U.S. Army Reserve Command in Atlanta.

In Tel Aviv, U.S. Embassy spokesman Larry Schwartz said the Israelis have been cooperating with the United States in its effort to track Mattysse down and return him.

Hanley said Mattysse was relieved of his command in February pending the outcome of an investigation into his alleged romantic relationship with a married woman. Until then, the officer was commander of the U.S. Army Reserve Southwest Intelligence Support Center, a facility in San Antonio that trains military intelligence specialists for the Army’s reserve forces.

Between February and his unexplained disappearance, Mattysse was serving as a “special project officer” in the 90th Reserve Support Group, described by Hanley as “an administrative holding position” in which he would not have had access to military intelligence.

Noting that Mattysse appeared to be in the midst of a divorce as well as an Army investigation, Hanley issued a plea Saturday for the officer, in effect, to call home.

“We’re anxious to hear his side, to hear if there are mitigating circumstances,” Hanley said. “We’re trying to say this is not an irretrievable situation. It would be best for him to make contact with the embassy and make arrangements.”

That, according to Mattysse’s alleged Israeli paramour, could be difficult.

In an exclusive interview published this weekend by Israel’s largest Hebrew-language newspaper, Rivka Nir said that Israeli intelligence agents unhappy with the government of Ehud Barak had spirited Mattysse out of the country and helped him cross into Syria, a nation still officially at war with Israel. Nir, who said that she and Mattysse fell in love a year ago in San Antonio when she was married to a U.S. Army surgeon, claimed that Mattysse fled to Israel because he was suspected by the U.S. military of spying. Before he left the United States, Nir said, Mattysse stashed top-secret documents in safety deposit boxes registered to her in various Israeli banks.

Nir told the newspaper, Yediot Aharanot, that she and Mattysse fell in love at Rosh Hashanah, or Jewish new year, services on the base where both were living. Nir was there with her then-husband, from whom she has since been divorced. Nir said that she later persuaded Mattysse, who she said converted to Reform Judaism 20 years ago, to undergo an Orthodox conversion and that he subsequently replaced the American flag in his office with an Israeli flag, put a menorah on his office desk and changed his name to Yonatan, in honor of Jonathan Pollard.

U.S. and Israeli officials close to the case suggest that both Nir and Mattysse have lost their grip on reality. They also dismiss Nir’s story of Mattysse’s flight to Syria. Those officials said they believe that Mattysse is hiding somewhere in Israel. Acting on a request from both the U.S. Embassy and Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s office, the Israeli police launched a search for Mattysse over the weekend.

Further complicating this murky picture is an acknowledgment by Israeli intelligence officials to the Americans that the 48-year-old Nir at some point had an unspecified connection to Israeli intelligence. Israeli officials have assured the United States, however, that Nir did not recruit Mattysse for Israel.

Joseph DiGenova, the former U.S. attorney who secured Jonathan Pollard’s conviction as an Israeli spy in 1986, said that if Mattysse is in Israel, then Israel is capable of producing him in very short order.

“They can find him in five minutes if they want: it’s that kind of society,” DiGenova said. “You don’t hide in Israel. . . . They have very good block-by-block intelligence.”

DiGenova said that the Israelis’ disclaimers regarding Nir and Mattysse are meaningless if he is in the country and they do not find him and turn him over.

“We’ll find out when they find him whether they’re cooperating,” he said.

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Curtius reported from Jerusalem and Healy from Washington.