Pentagon Spy Flap Isn’t Open-and-Shut Case

Not just in espionage thrillers, but in real life as well, it can be difficult to tell trusted friend from double-crossing spy.

That’s especially true between close allies such as Israel and the United States, in a world where government officials, lobbyists, diplomats, think-tank analysts and intelligence veterans from both sides often move in overlapping political and social circles -- a pattern that can blur the line between cordially informal exchanges of information and espionage.

After U.S. authorities disclosed that a Pentagon analyst specializing in Iranian affairs is under investigation for possibly spying for Israel, the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon flatly denied that it had illicitly acquired any classified American material.

But cases such as these are not always open and shut. Longtime observers of the intelligence scene note that the U.S. and Israel often share sensitive data, particularly when one has assets the other lacks.

For example, the ranks of Israel’s diplomatic and intelligence corps are honeycombed with native Arabic speakers, many of them Jews whose families emigrated from elsewhere in the Middle East. They are in many cases far better equipped than their relatively sparse U.S. counterparts to carry out sophisticated analyses of political and military developments in the region, and the fruits of such labors are routinely handed over to America.

Before and during the war in Iraq, Israel and the United States engaged in intensive sharing of intelligence -- some of which turned out to be tainted, military and intelligence officials on both sides have said.

Among American Jews, the subject of Israeli spying is fraught with tension because of fears of being tarred as a “fifth column” that puts Israel’s interests ahead of America’s. Some activists for Jewish and Israeli causes believe that it took years to recover from the damage done by the case of U.S. naval intelligence analyst Jonathan Jay Pollard, who was convicted of spying for Israel and sentenced in 1987 to life in prison.

In the current case, such concerns are complicated by investigators’ suspicions that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the foremost lobby group in Washington for Israeli causes, may have served as a conduit for information improperly passed to the Israeli government. AIPAC has denied any wrongdoing.

For Israel, part of the problem when confronted with a spy scandal like this is that in the past, its protestations of innocence sometimes proved less than credible.

In recent years, under the watches of several prime ministers, Israel has antagonized a string of friendly nations, including Switzerland, Cyprus, Jordan and Canada, either by using their soil as a staging ground for spy activity or by having Mossad agents pass themselves off as these countries’ nationals.

Israel suffered one of its worst cases of “blowback” -- espionage parlance for unanticipated and highly unwelcome consequences -- when Mossad agents tried, ineptly, to assassinate Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Jordan in 1997 by injecting him in the ear with poison.

To retrieve its disgraced agents, Israel was forced to free Hamas leader Sheik Ahmed Yassin, who returned to the Gaza Strip in triumph and was a driving force behind the campaign of Palestinian suicide bombings until he was assassinated by Israel in March.

Authorities in New Zealand were infuriated last spring when two Israelis were caught trying to fraudulently procure a New Zealand passport. Prosecutors said a disabled New Zealand man was unwittingly used as the phony passport applicant.

Israel has not acknowledged that its nationals were spies, but New Zealand says there is little room for doubt.

Bungles such as these have done much to dent the Mossad’s image as a skilled and subtle practitioner of the art of espionage, and high-profile errors have prompted calls in Israel to rein in the spymasters.

In the aftermath of the Pollard case, Israel made strenuous pledges to refrain from spying on the United States. Senior diplomatic sources and analysts interviewed Saturday expressed doubt that Israel would have risked involving itself in such an operation at this juncture.

“Israel is not spying on American soil, full stop, in the sense that it’s not trying to locate potential agents, it’s not approaching them, it’s not recruiting them, it’s not running them, and it’s not paying money for information,” said Yossi Melman, an author who specializes in Israel’s intelligence community.

“And it very much depends on the extent and detail of the information involved,” Melman added. “If someone at the Pentagon actually passed a confidential document directly to Israel, it would be very, very serious, but if someone simply tells a third party, ‘Well, it seems the American thinking on this subject is such and such,’ then it’s all much more murky.”

In Washington, the reports of the FBI investigation also raised questions about why Israel might be willing to risk a major spy scandal involving its closest ally. After all, Sharon’s government can open doors even at the highest levels of the Bush administration, Washington-based diplomats and Middle East experts noted.

“It would be kind of reckless for Israel to do this considering the access they have within this administration,” said William B. Quandt, a Middle East specialist at the University of Virginia who served under President Carter.

But others noted that the investigation comes at a time of tensions between the two allies on an issue vital to Israel’s security: Iran’s nuclear weapons capabilities. Israeli intelligence estimates have consistently concluded that Tehran is much closer to building a nuclear weapon than Washington believes.

Earlier this year, senior Israeli officials predicted that Iran could gain nuclear weapons capability by next year, and some hinted that Israel would be prepared to attack facilities at the Iranian port of Bushehr if Tehran achieved that capacity. Iran has threatened Israel as well.

“If the Zionist entity attacks us, we are capable of striking its nuclear reactors,” Iranian news reports quoted Gen. Yedalla Jawani, a senior commander in the Revolutionary Guard, as saying recently.

A U.S. intelligence estimate this year suggested that Iran was still several years away from building a nuclear bomb.

“Some Israelis have recently adjusted to a prediction of two to three years, but they have taken a much more alarmist position on this [than the U.S.] all along,” said Joseph Cirincione, senior associate and director of the nonproliferation program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. “There are clearly differences.”

Understanding details of the U.S. assessment of Iran’s nuclear program or gaining inside knowledge of how America might react to a possible Israeli preemptive military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities would be extremely valuable for the Jewish state, regional experts say.

The subject of the FBI’s investigation is believed to have dealt with Iran policy in a part of the Pentagon that has had considerable influence on U.S. policy in the region.

Almost no one in the Israeli leadership echelon believes that intelligence-gathering in and of itself is necessarily a hostile act, even when conducted in friendly countries. Part of any diplomat’s job is to read the newspapers, talk to politicians and policymakers, visit military and industrial installations when invited to do so -- and report back.

“All over the world, in the embassies of any country, you have people with job titles like cultural attache or agricultural liaison, and in reality, they gather information of use to their home country’s intelligence apparatus,” said a former Israeli diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Everyone does it.”

Israel has dozens of military and military intelligence officials, and at least two ranking Mossad agents, as part of its overt operations in the United States. The Mossad has a liaison to the CIA, who also acts on behalf of Israel’s domestic security agency, the Shin Bet, in dealings with the FBI.

Because Israel is such a melting pot, with immigrants from all over the world, it has many citizens who hold dual nationality. When smart, multilingual young Israelis holding foreign passports are ready to enter the job market, they sometimes find themselves approached -- albeit discreetly -- by Mossad recruiters. Separately, the Mossad is known to seek out foreign Jews to serve informally as volunteer tipsters, known in Hebrew as sayanim, or “helpers.”

Whatever its outcome, the spy flap comes at an awkward time for both Sharon and President Bush. The Israeli prime minister is on far friendlier terms these days with Washington than he is with members of his own party and has no wish to jeopardize that. And in an election season, no U.S. leader would court a public spat with Israel.

Bush has lately gone far out of his way to support Sharon.

Four months ago, he reversed decades of U.S. policy to support to the prime minister’s plan to eventually annex large Jewish settlement blocs in the West Bank in exchange for Israel relinquishing settlements in the Gaza Strip.

Washington also refrained from public criticism this month of Israel’s issuing of tenders to build nearly 2,000 homes in the West Bank, even though long-standing U.S. policy explicitly opposes settlement expansion.

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King reported from Jerusalem and Marshall from Washington.