washington-report.org
JUNE 2000, pages 6, 24
Special Report
Despite Coverup, Israel Caught Spying in Washington Again
By Richard H. Curtiss
Israel has been caught spying in Washington again, this time on
the White House and other sensitive telephone systems. But
Americans have to look and listen very hard to learn the details.
The damage could be as great as that sustained during
spy-for-pay Jonathan Jay Pollard’s blatant military codes, plans
and secret-stealing rampage of the 1980s. And probably greater
than Israel’s stealing not only of U.S. nuclear secrets in the
1960s, but even of American enriched uranium via an
Israel-controlled contracting firm in Apollo, Pennsylvania.
Predictably, on the record the White House, Department of
Justice and the FBI all are minimizing the damage, saying that
although the investigation into Israeli eavesdropping on White
House telephones “remains open,” no one has been charged
because no crime can be proved. But off the record FBI officials
have confirmed to journalists not only the espionage, but details
about the operation and the perpetrators. They are a married
Israeli couple, at least one of them a Mossad member stationed
in the Israeli Embassy in Washington and enjoying diplomatic
immunity from arrest.
The story was broken May 5 in Insight magazine, a weekly
supplement to the daily Washington Times, and on Fox News, a
national television network. The Washington Times and Insight
are controlled by the World Unification Church of the Rev. Sun
Myung Moon, and Fox News is controlled by Australian-born
media mogul and U.S. citizen Rupert Murdoch. Both are
identified with conservative causes and provide a more
hospitable platform for Republican Party ideas and personalities
than the other three major U.S. networks or the congressionally
supported Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
However, unlike Moon, Murdoch is at least as careful not to
offend Israel or to carry stories unfavorable to the Jewish state as
are the other networks. Therefore, after printing the lengthy May 5
report by journalists J. Michael Waller and Paul Rodriguez on its
Web site, it is not clear how zealously Insight or Fox News, or
any other major media organizations, plan to follow up.
Washington, DC’s other major daily newspaper, The
Washington Post, has carried only a May 6Associated Press
report quoting “two senior federal law enforcement officials…who
requested anonymity” as saying “the FBI had identified no one to
arrest during its investigation.”
Because of the Israeli involvement, “no
government official would speak for the
record.”
The AP also quoted “Capitol Hill Republican sources” as saying
the allegation centered on a telecommunications contractor. AP
reported also that spokesman Mark Regev of the Israeli
Embassy in Washington called the allegation “outrageous,”
saying, “Israel does not spy on the United States.” This is an
astonishing claim given the number of Israeli spies who have fled
Washington over the years in connection with the Pollard and
other cases.
According to the Insight report, the investigation was launched
after a local telephone company manager in the U.S. raised
suspicions in late 1996 or early 1997 about an employee of
Amdocs, an Israeli companythat sells billing software for
telephone companies. The Israeli employee worked as a
subcontractor on a program for telephone billing for the CIA, and
is married to an Israeli woman employed in a diplomatic position
in the Israeli Embassy in Washington.
The Insight reporters said it is not clear whether the husband as
well as his wife is a Mossad employee, but noted that
husband-and-wife assignments abroad by Mossad are common.
The American telephone company manager’s suspicions came
to the attention of the CIA, the reporters said, which turned the
matter over to the FBI. It was an FBI search of the husband’s
workplace that discovered in his possession what Waller and
Rodriguez called “a list of the FBI’s most sensitive telephone
numbers, including the Bureau’s ‘black’ lines that FBI
counterintelligence used to keep track of the suspected Israeli
spy operation.” In the words of the Insight investigators, “the
hunted were tracking the hunters.”
Wrote Waller and Rodriguez: “More than two dozen U.S.
intelligence, counterintelligence, law-enforcement and other
officials have told Insight that the FBI believes Israel has
intercepted telephone and modem communications on some of
the most sensitive lines of the U.S. government on an ongoing
basis. The worst penetrations are believed to be in the State
Department. But others say the supposedly secure telephone
systems in the White House, Defense Department and Justice
Department may have been compromised as well. The problem
for FBI agents in the famed Division 5, however, isn’t just what
they have uncovered, which is substantial, but what they don’t
know yet.”
Installation Assistance
According to Fox News, the Israeli Amdocs software company,
which now has a base in Chesterfield, Missouri, “helped Bell
Atlantic install new telephone lines in the White House in 1997.”
Although Fox News noted that “for the past 18 months the FBI
has been investigating Bell Atlantic and Amdocs,” Amdocs
spokesman Dan Ginsburg said the company has not been
notified of any FBI investigation and only heard of the probe from
news reporters on May 4.
Bell Atlantic officials declined comment, but Fox News reported
that “in 1997 the White House had a new, state-of-the-art phone
system installed by Bell Atlantic.” Fox News said investigators
told President Clinton “that a senior-level employee of Amdocs
had a separate T1 data phone line installed from his base
outside of St. Louis that was connected directly to Israel.”
Reported Fox: “Investigators are looking into whether the owner
of the T1 line had a ‘real time’ capacity to intercept phone calls
from both the White House and other government offices around
Washington, and sustained the line for some time, sources said.
Sources familiar with the investigation say FBI agents on the
case sought an arrest warrant for the St. Louis employee but
Justice Department officials quashed it.”
Similarly, Waller and Rodriguez noted that because of the Israeli
involvement, “no government official would speak for the record.”
They quoted “a senior U.S. official familiar with the super-secret
counterintelligence operation” as saying “we’re not even sure we
know the extent of it,” and another “senior government official
who would go no further than to admit awareness of the FBI
probe” as saying, “It is a politically sensitive matter. I can’t
comment on it beyond telling you that anything involving Israel on
this particular matter is off-limits. It’s that hot.”
The Insight reporters noted FBI dismay at learning that discovery
of the FBI phone list “called into question the entire operation.
We had been compromised. But for how long?”
Insight also quoted a former U.S. intelligence officer as
explaining: “When it has anything to do with Israel, it’s something
you just never want to poke your nose into. But this one had too
much potential to ignore because it involved a potential
system-wide penetration.”
Explained David Major, a retired FBI supervisory special agent
and a former White House director of counterintelligence, to the
Insight reporters: “The Israelis conduct intelligence as if they are
at war…There are a lot less handcuffs on intelligence for a nation
that sees itself at war. But that doesn’t excuse it from our
perspective.”
Fox reported that “the chairman of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, Richard Shelby (R-AL), was briefed along with Sen.
Richard Bryan (D-NV), a ranking Democrat on the committee,”
and that “several other lawmakers on key committees with
jurisdiction over these matters have never been briefed.”
A week after the first revelations, most Americans probably still
had not heard of either the penetration of White House and
possibly other sensitive telephones, or of the FBI investigation.
But Israeli journalists had reported it. However, instead of
describing how the perpetrators were detected, Israeli media
speculated that the news was “leaked” by the Clinton
administration and that the purpose was to send a message to
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak after his revelation that he
intended to ignore President Bill Clinton’s disapproval and
continue with the planned sale of at least one Israeli-configured
AWACs-type airborne-warning system to China.
The Tel Aviv daily Ha’aretz noted that first the Pentagon had
complained that an Israeli ballistic missile test had endangered
an American naval craft in the Mediterranean, and then “another
such leak came from the White House and Defense Department,
raising suspicions of wiretapping against Israel. The
administration is using every possible opportunity to convey its
message to Jerusalem’s policymakers.”
Whether the Clinton administration orchestrated the leak, as
Israel journalists claim, or, as it appears to this writer, is
frantically seeking to cover up in a presidential election year a
grave security breach that the Republicans could use for their
political benefit—all readers will be reminded of the telephone
tapping story that emerged from Monica Lewinsky’s testimony to
U.S. government investigators. She told them that President
Clinton had warned her that he believed “a foreign embassy” was
tapping their steamy telephone conversations.
The speed with which the contents of those calls were leaked to
Israel-friendly U.S. journalists when Clinton and then-Israeli Prime
Minister Binyamin Netanyahu clashed over a Middle East
land-for-peace agreement not only gave credence to Clinton’s
voiced suspicions at the time, but also made clear which foreign
embassy was doing the listening. What the newest revelations
add is exactly how the Israelis did it, and may still be doing it.
Richard H. Curtiss is the executive editor of the Washington
Report on Middle East Affairs. |
