How Jewish-American Israeli agents manipulate America's foreign policy:
Findley, Paul. They Dare to Speak Out. Chicago, IL: Lawrence Hill Books. 1989.
Chapter 5: Penetrating the Defenses at Defense – and State
Page 139-164
The Pentagon, that enormous, sprawling building on the banks of the Potomac, houses most of the Department of Defense’s central headquarters. It is the top command for the forces and measures which provide Americans with security in a troubled world. Across the Potomac is the Department of States, a massive eight-story building on Washington’s Foggy Bottom, the nerve center of our nation’s worldwide diplomatic network. These buildings are channels through which flow each day thousands of messages dealing with the nation’s top secrets. No one can enter either building without special identification or advance clearance. Armed guards seem to be everywhere, and in late 1983 concrete emplacements were added and heavy trucks strategically parked to provide extra buffers if a fanatic should launch an attack. These building are fortresses where the nation’s most precious secrets are carefully guarded by the most advanced technology.
But how secure are the secrets?
“The leaks to Israel are fantastic. If I have something I want the secretary of state to know but don’t want Israel to know, I must wait till I have a chance to see him personally.”
This declaration comes from an ambassador still on active duty in a top assignment, reviewing his long career in numerous posts in the Middle East. Although hardly a household name in the United States, his is one of America’s best-known abroad. Interviewed in the State Department, he speaks deliberately, choosing his words carefully.
“It is a fact of life that everyone in authority is reluctant to put anything on paper that concerns Israel if it is to be withheld from Israel’s knowledge,” says the veteran. “Nor do such people even feel free to speak in a crowded room of such things.”
The diplomat offers an example from his own experience. “I received a call from a friend of mine in the Jewish community who wanted to warn me, as a friend, that all details of a lengthy document on Middle East policy that I had just dispatched overseas were ‘out.’” The document was classified “top secret,” the diplomat recalls. “I didn’t believe what he said, so my friend read me every word of it over the phone.”
His comments will upset pro-Israel activists, many of whom contend that both the States Department and Defense Departments are dominated by anti-Israeli “Arabists.” Such domination, if it ever existed, occurs no longer. In the view of my diplomat source, leaks to pro-Israeli activists are not only pervasive throughout the two departments but “are intimidating and very harmful to our national interest.” He says that because of “the ever-present Xerox machine” diplomats proceed on the assumption that even messages they send by the most secure means will be copied and passed on to eager hands. “We just don’t dare put sensitive items on paper.” A factor making the pervasive insecurity even greater is the knowledge that leaks of secrets to Israel, even when noticed – which is rare – are never investigated.
Whatever intelligence the Israelis want, whether political or technical, they obtain promptly and without cost at the source. Officials who normally would work vigilantly to protect our national interest by identifying leaks and bringing charges against the offenders are demoralized. In fact, they are disinclined even to question to Israel’s tactics for fear this activity will cause the Israeli lobby to mark them as trouble-makers and take measures to nullify their efforts, or even harm their careers.
The lobby’s intelligence network, having numerous volunteer “friendlies” to tap, reaches all parts of the executive branch where matters concerning Israel are handled. Awareness of this seepage keeps officials – whatever rung of the ladder they occupy – from making or even proposing decisions that are in the U.S. interest.
If, for example, an official should state opposition to an Israeli request during a private interdepartmental meeting – or worse still, put it in an intraoffice memorandum – he or she must assume that this information will soon reach the Israeli embassy, either directly or through AIPAC. Soon after, the official should expect to be mentioned by name critically when the Israeli ambassador visits the secretary of state or other prominent U.S. official.
The penetration is all the more remarkable because much of it is carried out by U.S. citizens in behalf of a foreign government. The practical effect is to give Israel its own network of sources through which it is able to learn almost anything it wishes about decisions or resources of the U.S. government. When making procurement demands, Israel can display better knowledge of Defense Department inventories than the Pentagon itself.
Israel Finds the Ammunition – in Hawaii!
In its 1973 Yom Kippur war against Egypt and Syria, Israel sustained heavy losses in weapons of all kinds, especially tanks. It looked to the United States for the quickest possible resupply. Henry Kissinger was their avenue. Richard Nixon was entangled in the Watergate controversy and soon to leave the presidency, but under his authority the government agreed to deliver substantial quantities of tanks to Israel.
Tanks were to be taken from the inventory of U.S. military units on active duty, reserve units, even straight off production lines. Nothing was held back in an effort to bring Israeli forces back to the desired strength as quickly as possible.
Israel wanted only the latest-model tanks equipped with 90 millimeter guns. But a sufficient number could not be found even by stripping U.S. forces. The Pentagon met the problem by filling part of the order with an earlier model fitted with 90-millimeter guns. When these arrived, the Israelis grumbled about having to take “second-hand junk.” Then they discovered they had no ammunition of the right size and sent an urgent appeal for a supply of 90 –millimeter rounds.
The Pentagon made a search and found none. Thomas Pianka, an officer then serving at the Pentagon with the International Security Agency, recalls: “We made an honest effort to find the ammunition. We checked everywhere. We checked through all the services – Army, Navy, Marines. We couldn’t find any 90-milimeter ammunition at all.” Pianka says the Pentagon sent Israel the bad news: “In so many words, we said: “Sorry, we don’t have any of the ammunition you need. We’ve combed all depots and warehouses, and we simply have none.”
A few days later the Israelis came back with a surprising message: “Yes, you do. There are 15,000 rounds in the Marine Corps supply depot in Hawaii.” Pianka recalls, “We looked in Hawaii and, sure enough, there they were. The Israelis had found a U.S. supply of 90-millimeter ammunition we couldn’t find ourselves.”
Richard Helms, director of the CIA during the 1967 Arab-Israel war, recalls an occasion when an Israeli arms request h ad been filled with the wrong items. Israeli officials resubmitted the request had been filled with the wrong items. Israeli officials resubmitted the request complete with all the supposedly top-secret code numbers and a note to Helms that said the Pentagon perhaps had not understood exactly which items were needed. “It was a way for them to show me that they knew exactly what they wanted,” Helms says. Helms believed that during this period no important secret was kept from Israel.
Not only are the Israelis adept at getting the information they want – they are masters at the weapons procurement game. Les Janka, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense who is a specialist in Middle East policy, recalls Israel persistence:
They would not take no for an answer. They never gave up. These emissaries of a foreign government always had a shopping list of wanted military items, some of them high technology that no other nation possessed, some of it secret devices that gave the United States an edge over any adversary. Such items were not for sale, not even to the nations with whom we make our closest, most formal military alliance – like those linked to us through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Yet Janka learned that military sales to Israel were not bound by the guidelines and limitations which govern U.S. arms supply policy elsewhere. He says, “Sales to Israel were different. Very different.”
Janka has vivid memories of a military liaison officer from the Israeli embassy who called at the Defense Department and requested approval to purchase a military item which was on the prohibited list because of its highly secret advanced technology: “He came to me, and I gave him the official Pentagon reply. I said, ‘I’m sorry, sir, but the answer is no. we will not release that technology.’”
The Israeli officer took pains to observe the bureaucratic courtesies and not antagonize lower officials who might devise ways to block the sale. He said, “Thank you very much, if that’s your official position. We understand that you are not in a position to do what we want done. Please don’t feel bad, but we’re going over your head.” And that of course meant he was going to Janka’s superiors in the office of the secretary of defense, or perhaps even to the White House.
Asked if he could remember an instance in which Israel failed to get what it wanted from the Pentagon, Janka pauses to reflect, then answers, “No, not in the long run.”
Janka has high respect for the efficiency of Israeli procurement officers:
You have to understand that the Israelis operate in the Pentagon very professionally, and in an omnipresent way. They have enough of their people who understand our system well, and they have made friends at all levels, from top to bottom. They just interact with the system in a constant, continuous way that keeps the pressure on.
The Carter White House tried to establish a policy of restraint. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s assistant for national security, remembers in an interview Defense Secretary Harold Brown’s efforts to hold the line on technology transfer. “He was very tough with Israel on its requests for weapons and weapons system. He often turned them down.” But that was not the final words. For example, Brzezinski cites as the most notable example Brown’s refusal to sell Israel the controversial antipersonnel weapon known as the cluster bomb. Despite twice against populated areas in Lebanon, causing death and injury to civilians. Brown responded by refusing to sell the deadly replacements. But even on that request, Israel eventually prevailed. President Reagan reversed the Carter administration policy, and cluster bombs were returned to the approval list.
Others who have occupied high positions in the executive branch were willing to speak candidly, but, unlike Janka, they did so with the understanding that their names would not be published. As one explains, “My career is not over. At least, I don’t want it to be. Quoting me be name would bring it to an end.” With the promise of anonymity, he and others gave details on the astounding process through which the Israeli lobby is able to penetrate the defenses at the Defense Department – and elsewhere.
Sometimes the act is simple theft. One official says, “Israelis were caught in the Pentagon with unauthorized documents, sometimes scooping up the contents of ‘in boxes’ on desk tops.” He recalls that because of such activity a number of Israeli officials were told to leave the country. No formal charges of espionage have even been filed, and Israel covered each such exit with an excuse such as family illness or some other personal reason: “Our government never made a public issue of it.” He adds, “There is a much higher level of espionage by Israel against our government than has ever been publicly admitted.”
The official recalls one day receiving a list of military equipment Israel wanted to purchase. Noting that “the Pentagon is Israel’s stop-and-shop,’” he took it for granted that the Israelis had obtained clearances. So he followed usual procedure by circulating it to various Pentagon offices for routine review and evaluation:
One office instantly returned the list to me with a note: ‘One of these items is so highly classified you have no right to know it even exists.’ I was instructed to destroy all copies of the request and all references to the particular code numbers. I didn’t know what it was. It was some kind of electronic jamming equipment, top secret. Somehow the Israelis know about it and acquired its precise specifications, cost and top secret code number. This meant they had penetrated our research and development labs, our most sensitive facilities.
Despite that somber revelation, no official effort was launched to discover who had revealed the sensitive information.
“They Always Get What They Want”
Israel’s agents are close students of the U.S. system and work it to their advantage. Besides obtaining secret information by clandestine operations they apply open pressure on executive branch offices thoroughly and effectively. A weapons expert explains their technique:
If promised an answer on a weapon request in 30 days, they show up on the 31st day and announce: ‘We made this request. It hasn’t been approved. Why not? We’ve waited 30 days.’ With most foreign governments, you can finesse a problem. You can leave it in the box on the desk. With Israel, you can’t leave anything in the box.
He says the embassy knows exactly when things are scheduled for action:
It stays on top of things as does no other embassy in town. They know your agenda, what was on your schedule yesterday, and what’s on it today and tomorrow. They know what you have been doing and saying. They know the law and regulation backwards and forwards. They know when the deadlines are.
He admires the resourcefulness of the Israelis in applying pressure:
They may leak to Israeli newspapers details of their difficulty in getting an approval. A reporter will come in to State of Defense and ask a series of questions so detailed they could be motivated only by Israeli officials. Sometimes the pressure will come, not from reporters, but from AIPAC.
If things are really hung up, it isn’t before letters and calls start coming from Capitol Hill. They’ll ask, ‘Why is the Pentagon not approving this item?’ Usually, the letter is from the Congressman in whose district the item is manufactured. He will argue that the requested item is essential to Israel’s security. He probably will ask, ‘Who is this bad guy in the Pentagon – or State – who is blocking this approval? I want his name. Congress would like to know.’
The American defense expert pauses to emphasize his point: “No bureaucrat, no military officer likes to be singled out by anybody from Congress and required to explain his professional duty.”
He recalls an episode involving President Carter’s secretary of defense, Harold Brown:
I remember once Israel requested an item on the prohibited list. Before I answered, I checked with Secretary Brown and he said, ‘No, absolutely no. We’re not going to give in to the bastards on this one.’ So I said no.
Lo and behold, a few days later I got a call from Brown. He said, “The Israelis are raising hell. I got a call from [Senator Henry] ‘Scoop’ Jackson, asking why we aren’t cooperating with Israel. It isn’t worth it. Let it go.”
When Jimmy Carter became president, the Israelis were trying to get large quantities of the AIM 9-L, the most advanced U.S. air-to-air missile. The Pentagon kept saying, “No, no, no. It isn’t yet deployed to U.S. troops. The production rate is not enough to supply even U.S. needs. It is much too sensitive to risk being lost.” Yet, early in his administration, Carter overruled the Pentagon, and Israel got the missiles.
A former administration official recalls a remarkable example of Israeli ingenuity:
Israel requested an item of technology, a machine for producing bullets. It was a big piece of machinery, weighed a lot, and it was exclusive. We didn’t want other countries to have it, not even Israel. We knew that if we said ‘no,’ the Israelis would go over our heads and somehow get approval. So, we kept saying we were studying the request. Then, to our astonishment, we discovered that the Israelis had already bought the machinery and had it in a warehouse in New York.
The Israelis did not have a license to ship the equipment, but they had nonetheless been able to make the purchase. When they were confronted by the Defense official, they said, “We slipped up. We were sure you’d say ‘yes,’ so we went ahead and bought it. And if you say no, here’s the bill for storage, and here’s what it will cost you to ship it back to the factory.” Soon after, the official recalled, someone in the State Department called and said, “Aw, give it to them, “ adding an earthy expletive.
This sense of futility sometimes reaches all the way to the top. Unrestricted supplies to Israel were especially debilitating in the 1974 – 77 period when U.S. military services were trying to recover from the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. In that conflict the United States stripped its own army and air forces in order to supply Israel.
During this period of U.S. shortage, Israel kept bringing in its shopping lists. The official recalls that the Pentagon would insist, “No, we can’t provide what you want now. Come back in a year or so.” In almost every one of those cases, he said, the Pentagon position was overruled by a political decision out of the White House. This demoralized the professionals in the Pentagon but, still worse, handicapped national security: “Defense Department decisions made according to the highest professional standards went by the board in order to satisfy Israeli requests.”
“Exchanges” That Work Only in One Direction
The Israelis are particularly adept at exploiting sympathetic officials, as a former Pentagon officer explains:
We have people sympathizing with Israel in about every office in the Pentagon. A lot of military personnel have been in Israel, and some served there, making friends and, of course, a number of Israeli personnel study in U.S. military schools.
The guts, the energy, the skill of the Israelis are much admired in the Pentagon. Israelis are very good at passing back to us their performance records using our equipment. Throughout our military schools are always a large number of Israeli students. They develop great professional rapport with our people.
For years, the United States and Israel have exchanged military personnel. On paper, it works both ways. In practice, Israel is the major beneficiary. The process is more one of national character than anything clandestine. Israeli officers generally speak English, so it’s no problem for them to come to America and quickly establish rapport with U.S. officers. On the other hand, hardly any U.S. officers speak Hebrew.
Language disparity is not the only problem. One of equal gravity is the American laxity in enforcing its security regulations. Many Israeli officers spend a year in a sensitive area – one of the U.S. training commands, or a research and development laboratory. At the start they are told they cannot enter certain restricted areas. Then, little by little, the rules are relaxed. A former Defense Department official explains:
The young Israeli speaks good English. He is likeable. You know how Americans are: they take him in, and he’s their buddy. First thing you know, the restrictions are forgotten, and the Israeli officers are admitted to everything in our laboratories, our training facilities, our operational bases.
The former official quickly adds that rules are seldom relaxed at the other end:
This means that the officer training exchange is really a one-way street. Israel does not permit our officers, whether they speak Hebrew or not, to serve in sensitive military facilities in Israel. Many areas are totally off limits. They are very strict about that. Our officers cannot be present even when U.S. – supplied equipment and weapons are being delivered for the first time.
U.S. officers on exchange programs in Israel are, more often than not, given a desk in an office down the hall, and assigned just enough to do to keep them busy and prevent them from being too frustrated. Without knowledge of Hebrew, they have almost no way to know what is going on.
Camaraderie is also an element. Many employees in the executive branch, Jewish and non-Jewish, feel that the United States and Israel are somehow “in this together” and therefore cooperate without limit. Many also believe that Israel is a strategic asset and that weapons and other technology provided to Israel serve U.S. purposes. These feelings sometimes cause official restrictions on sharing of information to be modified or conveniently forgotten. As one Defense official puts it, the rules get “placed deeper and deeper into the file”:
A sensitive document is picked up by an Israeli officer while his friend, a Defense Department official, deliberately looks the other way. Nothing is said. Nothing is written. And the U.S. official probably does not feel he has done anything wrong. Meanwhile the Israelis ask for more and more.
Despite such openhanded generosity, Israel does not hesitate to try to get classified information by espionage, a process that the United States years ago tried unsuccessfully to halt.
Mossad’s Role in the Network
On one occasion – and only one – an employee of the U.S. government was punished for leaking classified information to Israel, and that was thirty years ago. In 1954, Fred Waller, a career foreign service officer in charge of the Israeli-Jordan desk at the State Department, read in a classified document that a friend on the staff of the Israeli embassy – under suspicion for espionage – was being recommended by the FBI for expulsion from the United States.
Waller told associates that he considered the charges “unjustified” and, according to allegations, tipped off his friend at the Israeli embassy. For this, Waller was first marked for dismissal but later permitted simply to retire. “They wanted to throw him out without a nickel,” states Don Bergus, who succeeded Waller in the State Department assignment. During those years of “McCarthyism,” Bergus recalls, “the FBI was recommending that a lot of people be declared persona non grata. They were so happy with themselves in doing this. They knew damned will their recommendations wouldn’t be acted upon.”
Bergus recalls that Israel got a lot of information without espionage activity: “A lot of the information was volunteered. The apples were put on the table, and I don’t blame Israel for taking them.”
The investigation of Waller occurred during the high point of our government’s concern over Israeli intelligence activities in the United States. Because the Eisenhower administration was trying to withhold weapons from Israel, as well as other states in the Middle East, a major attempt was made to bring leaks of classified information under control. A veteran diplomat recalls the crisis: “Employees in States and Defense were being suborned and bribed on a wide scale, and our government went to Israel and demanded that it stop.”
After high-level negotiations following the Waller affair, the United States and Israel entered into an unwritten agreement to share a larger volume of classified information and at the same time to restrict sharply the clandestine operations each conducted in the other’s territory. The diplomat explains that it was supposed to be a two-way street: “The deal provided that we would get more from them too, and it was hoped the arrangement would end the thievery and payoff of U.S. employees.”
The understanding with Israel did not end the problem, however, as the Israelis were not content to let the U.S. decide what classified information it would receive. Israel did not live up to the terms of the agreement and continued to engage broadly in espionage activities throughout the United States.
This was still true more than twenty years after the Waller episode, during the tenure of Atlanta mayor Andrew Young as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the Carter Administration. Young recalls, “I operated on the assumption that the Israelis would learn just about everything instantly. I just always assumed that everything was monitored, and that there was a pretty formal network.”
Young resigned as ambassador in August 1979 after it was revealed that he had met with Zuhdi Terzi, the PLO’s UN observer, in violation of the U.S. pledge to Israel not to talk to the PLO. Press reports on Young’s episode said Israeli intelligence learned of the meeting and that Israeli officials then leaked the information to the press, precipitating the diplomatic wrangle which led to Young’s resignation.
Israel denied that its agents had learned of the Yong-Terzi meeting. The press counselor at the Israeli embassy went so far as to tell the Washington Star, “We do not conduct any kind of intelligence activities in the United States. This denial must have been amusing to U.S. intelligence experts, one of whom talked with Newsweek magazine about Mossad’s activities here: “They have penetrations all through the U.S. government. They do better than the KGB,” said the expert, whom the magazine did not identify.
The Newsweek article continued:
With the help of American Jews in and out of government, Mossad looks for any softening in U.S. support and tries to get any technical intelligence the administration is unwilling to give Israel.
‘Mossad can go to any distinguished American Jew and ask for his help,’ says a former CIA agent. The appeal is a simple one: ‘When the call went out and no one heeded it, the Holocaust resulted.’
The U.S. tolerates Mossad’s operations on American soil partly because of the reluctance to anger the American Jewish community.
Another reason cited: Mossad is often a valuable source of information for U.S. intelligence.
Penetration by Israel continued at such a high level that a senior State Department official who has held the highest career positions related to the Middle East confides, “I urged several times that the U.S. quit trying to keep secrets from Israel. Let them have everything. They always get what they want anyway. When we try to keep secrets, it always backfires.”
An analysis prepared by the CIA in 1979, 25 years after the U.S.-Israel espionage agreement, gives no hint that Mossad had in any way restricted its operations within the United States. According to the 48-page secret document, entitled, Israel: Foreign Intelligence and Security Services, the United States continues to be a focus of Mossad operations:
In carrying out its mission to collect positive intelligence, the principal function of Mossad is to conduct agent operations against the Arab nations and their official representatives and installations throughout the worlds, particularly in Western Europe and the United States. . . .
Objectives in Western countries are equally important (as in the U.S.S.R. and East Europe) to the Israeli intelligence service. Mossad collects intelligence regarding Western, Vatican and UN policies toward the Near East; promotes arms deals for the benefit of the IDG; and acquires data for silencing anti-Israel factions in the West. [emphasis added] (by Findley in 1986)
Under “methods of operation,” the CIA booklet describes the way in which Mossad makes use of domestic pro-Israeli groups. It states that “Mossad over the years has enjoyed some rapport with highly-placed persons and government offices in every country of importance to Israel.” It adds, “Within Jewish communities in almost every country of the world, there are Zionists and other sympathizers, who render strong support to the Israeli intelligence effort.” It explains,
Such contacts are carefully nurtured and serve as channels for information, deception material, propaganda and other purposes. . . . Mossad activities are generally conducted through Israeli official and semiofficial establishments; deep cover enterprises in the form of firms and organizations, some especially created for, or adaptable to, a specific objective, and penetrations affected within non-Zionist national and international Jewish organizations . . . .
Official organizations used for cover are: Israeli Purchasing Missions and Israeli Government Tourist, El Al and Zim offices. Israeli construction firms, industrial groups and international trade organizations also provide nonofficial cover. Individuals working under deep or illegal cover are normally changed with penetrating objectives that require a long-range, more subtle approach, or with activities in which the Israeli government can never admit complicity . . . .
The Israeli intelligence service depends heavily on the various Jewish communities and organizations abroad for recruiting agents and eliciting general information. The aggressively ideological nature of Zionism, which emphasizes that all Jews belong to Israel and must return to Israel, had had its drawbacks in enlisting support for intelligence operations, however, since there is considerable opposition to Zionism among Jews throughout the world.
Aware of this fact, Israeli intelligence representatives usually operate discreetly within Jewish communities and are under instruction to handle their missions with utmost tact to avoid embarrassment to Israel. They also attempt to penetrate anti-Jewish elements in order to neutralize the opposition.
The theft of scientific data is a major objective of Mossad operations, which is often attempted by trying to recruit local agents.
In addition to the large-scale acquisition of published scientific papers and technical journals from all over the world through covert channels, the Israelis devote a considerable portion of their covert operations to obtaining scientific and technical intelligence. This had included attempts to penetrate certain classified defense projects in the United States and other Western nations. |
