CIA Aims at Pollard for Scapegoating

November 12, 1998

PREFACING NOTE:
THIS ARTICLE, WRITTEN SEVERAL YEARS AGO, IS AS RELEVANT TODAY AS IT WAS WHEN IT WAS WRITTEN. THE POLITICALLY-DRIVEN SCAPEGOATING OF JONATHAN POLLARD HAS INTENSIFIED IN RECENT DAYS AND CONTINUES UNABATED.

THROUGHOUT THE YEARS, THE CIA HAS REPEATEDLY SCAPEGOATED JONATHAN POLLARD TO DEFLECT ATTENTION FROM ITS GROSS INCOMPETENCE IN WEEDING OUT DOUBLE AGENTS AND MOLES FROM ITS OWN RANKS.

MOREOVER, TO THIS DAY, JONATHAN POLLARD CONTINUES TO BE THE SINGLE MOST EFFECTIVE PROPAGANDA TOOL FOR THOSE ELEMENTS WITHIN THE AMERICAN ADMINISTRATION WHO SEEK TO UNDERMINE THE US-ISRAEL SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP BY CALLING INTO QUESTION ISRAEL'S RELIABILITY AS AN ALLY.

November 25, 1994 - Arnold Forster and David Kirschenbaum - Heritage Southwest

The case of Aldrich Ames, the Soviet mole working as the chief of the CIA's Soviet counterintelligence units, reads like a spy novel. It is therefore not surprising that Ames continues to be the subject of tremendous media coverage and public interest. After all, how could Ames have caused such horrendous damage for so many years without being caught?

One possible explanation and - a fascinating and critically important aspect of the Ames case - has, thus far, largely been overlooked. It concerns a campaign of disinformation that, for years, was aimed at shifting the blame away from Ames for the arrest and execution of at least a dozen U.S. informants in the Soviet Union.

Although Ames, of course, eventually was caught,

the person rumored to be responsible for the deaths is still paying the consequences.

In November of 1985, Jonathan Pollard was arrested for passing to Israel classified materials concerning various Arab states, such as Iraq, Syria and Libya. In March of 1987,

Pollard became the only American ever to be sentenced to life for spying for an ally.

Just a few months before Pollard's arrest, Ames has now admitted, he transmitted to the Soviet Union the names of virtually every American and foreign operative in the Soviet Union known to him. The consequences of this treacherous act only recently became known to the general public. But the tragic results of Ames's betrayal were already being felt by the intelligence community at the time of Pollard's arrest.

As Ames told the New York Times, "In '85, '86, as a result of the information I sold to the Soviets, it was as if neon lights and search lights lit up all over the Kremlin, shone all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, saying There is a penetration.' No reasonable counterintelligence officer, FBI or the CIA, was under any doubt by the spring of '86 that a penetration of S/E (the CIA's Soviet/Eastern Europe operations division headed by Ames) was the single, most logical reason for the disaster that had occurred."

In this type of atmosphere, with the intelligence community in a panic over its inability to locate the source of the penetration, and with Ames clearly quite interested in deflecting attention away from himself and focused elsewhere, the arrest of Jonathan Pollard must have been for Ames and others in the CIA like manna from heaven.

Somebody made sure to capitalize on the opportunity.

There was

never

did not even allege

Indeed, nine years after Pollard's arrest, nobody has yet to cite

one credible example

But those who needed or found it convenient to place the blame on Pollard for our intelligence failures in the Soviet Union were not going to let the facts get in their way.

What followed was a campaign of

rumors, planted stories and outright lies

Hersh cites an anonymous "senior American intelligence official" who "confirmed that there have been distinct losses of human and technical intelligence collection ability inside the Soviet Union that have been attributed, after extensive analysis, to Pollard." Hersch quotes another CIA official as saying, "Where it hurts us is our agents being rolled up and our ability to collect technical intelligence being shut down." When the Soviets found out what Pollard was passing to the Israelis, "they shut down the source."

The disinformation intensified at the end of last year, just when it appeared that President Clinton was about to respond favorably to Pollard's petition. The president had stated publicly that he was waiting for the recommendation of the Justice Department, but then added that, "I do not have to follow that recommendation." An obviously planted and well-timed story in the Dec. 6 issue of Time magazine soon followed.

Time's "Inside Washington" column that week reported that, "as Israel pressures the Clinton administration to free Jonathan Pollard Time has learned that one document Pollard is believed to have slipped to the Israelis - thought to have landed in Soviet hands, was a huge national security agency compendium of frequencies used by foreign military and intelligence services officials fear that data in this book was so specific that its discovery may have cost informants their lives" (italics added).

It would, of course, be interesting to know from whom Time learned this, and on the basis of what evidence was it "thought" by its source that this compendium "believed" to have been passed to the Israelis, unintentionally ended up in Soviet hands.

And finally, what was the logical rationale that would explain the "fear" of a linkage between Soviet knowledge of U.S. awareness of those frequencies and the deaths of informants?

After all, frequencies used by intelligence services are changed on a regular basis, it being generally assumed that it is only a matter of time before the frequencies they are transmitting on will be discovered. It would therefore be ludicrous to think that it would have come as any surprise to the Soviets that the United States was aware of radio frequencies used by other intelligence services.

It is noteworthy that these rumors and the accusations made against Pollard all suffer from fatal flaws.

As Jerry Agee, Pollard's superior in Naval Intelligence told Wolf Blitzer, Agee and another colleague were suspicious of the number of classified documents Pollard was taking home with him. Eventually they concluded that the information was almost certainly going to Israel. They reasoned that in light of the fact that the materials dealt with Soviet weapons systems and Arab military capabilities, it was not something the Soviets would be interested in.

As Agee put it to Blitzer:

"It didn't take a fool to find out that the Soviets were not buying back all their own information."

Unfortunately, the absence of any foundation or credible evidence to support the suggestion that Pollard was responsible for the deaths of informants did not hinder the effectiveness of the vicious out-of-court accusations leveled against him. One reason for this is the tendency among many to unquestionably accept whatever information is supplied by the intelligence community. And, for others,

the more sensational the accusations, the better.

In considering who was behind this disinformation campaign, there are at least three possibilities:

1. Ames was directly and primarily responsible.

2. Ames had one or more collaborators, who either knowingly acted on his behalf or was unwittingly being maneuvered by him.

3. The campaign was a group effort within the CIA designed to either slander the reputation of Israeli intelligence and/or take the heat off U.S. intelligence for the series of unexplained intelligence mishaps which had been occurring in the Soviet Union.

The time has certainly come for the Senate and House Intelligence Committees to investigate not only why it took

nine years

It may be that much time will pass before we find out the answers to these questions. Whatever the explanation and whoever was responsible,

Pollard continues to pay a terrible and excessively harsh price for his actions.

Pollard fully cooperated with the Government, he has expressed deep and genuine remorse for what he did and has acknowledged that, not withstanding his motives of trying to protect an ally from dire dangers, his actions could not go unpunished.

But Pollard has already served far longer than any other American who passed classified data to an ally or neutral country, and longer than many spies for enemies of the United States.

Pollard's continued incarceration for crimes he did not commit and was not charged with

is a travesty of justice

Arnold ForsterEsq. is the former legal counsel for the ADL. He is a practising attorney in New York.

David Kirshenbaum Esq. is and American attorney. He now lives and practises in Jerusalem.

See also 1998 articles: