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Covert Operations: The Human Factor
An even stranger Afghanistan connection is one claimed by Jonathan Jay Pollard, the civilian naval intelligence analyst who was caught spying for Israel in 1985 and sentence to life in prison in 1987. Pollard says he was asked to help deliver arms to the mujeheddin by Kurt Lohbeck, who posed as a journalist but was involved in highly secret operations run by the national security council—by National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, claims Pollard. At his trial, Pollard says, he threatened to expose McFarlane, if the prosecutor charged him with passing secrets to Afghanistan through Lohbeck.42 (Pollard, a Jew and a Zionist, was not the aberration Israel’s supporters claimed that he was. Victor Ostrovsky, a man with a grudge over his firing from Mossad, recently revealed in a book the Israeli Government tried to ban in the United States that, to augment its small core of 1,200 employees, Mossad uses Jewish “helpers” [sayanim] in Europe and North America to obtain information and for such tasks as renting cars and apartments. Mossad also sets up and trains armed Jewish groups called “frames” [Tsafririm] in various countries around the world, Ostovsky claimed.43) If the Americans appreciated Israel’s help in Afghanistan, they may have been more ambivalent about its program of targeting cities in the Soviet Union for nuclear attack—especially when, as the Cold War thawed and the superpowers began to negotiate arms reductions, Moscow suggested that Israel’s nuclear-capable Jericho missile should be counted as part of the U.S. inventory of intermediate-range missiles.44 Early in the Reagan administration, Richard Burt, at the time the director of the State Department’s politico-military affairs bureau, told journalists Andrew and Leslie Cockburn that the U.S. believed Israel had the U.S.S.R. in its nuclear sights.45 Israeli Air Force Col. Aviem Sella, who served as Jonathan Jay Pollard’s “handler,” was “perhaps Israel’s top air force expert in nuclear targeting and the delivery of nuclear weapons,” writes Seymour Hersh in his recent book about Israel’s nuclear weapons program. Hersh writes that Sella was directing Pollard to gather information to pinpoint missile targets within the U.S.S.R.46 The idea was to deter the Soviets from joining their Arab allies in a war against Israel.47 At the same time, according to a number of sources, Israel also struck up a secret intelligence-sharing relationship with Moscow, feeding the Soviets intelligence gathered by Pollard, and hoping, in exchange, for an easing in restrictions on Jewish emigration to Israel. According to Andrew and Leslie Cockburn: It has been confirmed directly and equivocally by two very well-placed US sources with a direct interest in the Pollard case and, in a backhanded fashion, by a former Israeli intelligence officer who answered a question on this topic by saying, “The Russians didn’t get anything that was really important.”48 But a senior U.S. intelligence officer and a former CIA official told Seymour Hersh that intelligence passed by Pollard enabled the Soviet Union to “roll up” U.S. agents and had seriously impeded U.S. technical intelligence collection.49 A 1987 report (widely disbelieved at the time) said that the relationship had begun in the early 1980s.50 Ari Ben-Menashe told Hersh that in 1984 Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir approached the Soviet Union, ordering Mossad’s representative in Romania to exchange information with the Soviets. Hersh was able to confirm with another knowledgeable (although unnamed) Israeli that the relationship blossomed as Israel provided Moscow with retyped (“sanitized”) U.S. intelligence documents obtained by Jonathan Jay Pollard. Shamir, said the Israeli source, had worked for improved ties with the U.S.S.R. since his days as a Mossad officer in the 1950s and 1960s because he regarded Moscow as a good counterbalance to Washington, preferring its “toughness”sic over the “soft, bourgeois, materialistic and effete” United States.51 If the Reagan administration knew about this at the time, it was betraying the gullible voters who supposed the military build-up which beggared the U.S. economy. Ari Ben-Menashe’s claim that Moscow reciprocated late in 1984 by inviting Israel to an intelligence conference in India to talk about Pakistan’s nuclear reactor is consistent with reports that three times, the last in July 1985, Israel, armed with satellite photographs provided by Jonathan Pollard, tried to enlist India in a joint attack on the reactor. India declined,52 relieving Israel of the headache of juggling its anti-Afghanistan work in Pakistan with an attack on that country. Ari Ben-Menashe credits the late media baron Robert Maxwell with opening the doors to Eastern Europe for Israel—and also with laundering the profits of Israeli arms sales to Iran through investments in Eastern Europe.53 In “The Samson Option” Seymour Hersh (who repeated only those Ben-Menashe allegations he was able to confirm with other sources) writes that Maxwell helped the Israeli government execute a dis-information campaign to blunt revelations that Mordecai Vanunu, a former technician at Israel’s nuclear weapons reactor, was making to the Sunday Times.54
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