Jewish-American Israeli agents--Part III
The employee guilty of leaking the cable to Solarz worked under Ed Sanders, Carter’s official liaison with the Jewish community, who then had an office in the State Department as well as the White House. No punishment was imposed; the employee was simply transferred to a different job.
The leak confirmed the fears of diplomats who had strongly opposed locating a Jewish liaison office in the State Department. One diplomat of the period describes Sanders as “a very decent human being, and he was there to do his job at the request of the president. At the same time, some of the stuff we were doing should not get out of the building to anybody.”
Harold Saunders, a scholarly career Middle East specialist who occasionally got in hot water by noting Arab concerns, was then assistant secretary of state and voiced his feelings to Vance: “How would you like having someone from U.S. Steel sitting in our Economic Bureau’s tariff office”” Vance too opposed the arrangement, but Sander’s State Department office was not closed for months.
Seelye pinpoints a very mundane reason for the wave of leaks: the prevalence of copying machines. He says that as ambassador to Syria he operated on the assumption that the Israelis would learn everything he sent to Washington. He says, “The trouble with our system of classification is that even when we limit distribution, say, to just twenty copies for the whole government, one of the offices on the list will make a dozen extra copies for their own use, and so on. It’s hard to control.”
Veterans in government lay the blame for much of the leaking on political appointees hold important positions in the state Department and not on career diplomats. In the early months of the Reagan Administration, National Security Adviser Richard Allen was viewed as highly sympathetic to Israeli interests and, in fact, as the de facto clearance officer, encouraging the placement of personnel acceptable to the state of Israel in key positions. After Allen’s departure from government, a senior officer of the State Department recalls, “No one was needed to replace him, as people with pro-Israeli interests - we called them mail carriers – are spotted in every important office.”
A senior diplomat, now on leave, says: “The leaks are almost never traced to professional foreign service officers. In my experience, leaks are normally by staff members brought in by political appointees, and every administration brings in a lot of them. They seem to be all over the place.” He says these “loose-tongued amateurs” are prominent on the seventh floor, where offices of senior State Department officials are located, and on the staff for policy planning, as well as in the White House. This gives them ready access to sensitive material. “Unfortunately,” he adds, “they do not have the same idea of discipline and sense of loyalty as the professionals.”
Some leaks originate from a few members of Congress and their staff. A former Defense Department official recalls,
There were individuals on Capitol Hill that the Pentagon viewed as conduits to Israel. No question about it. A number of times we would get requests from Congressmen or Senators for intelligence materials. We knew damn well that these materials were not for their own edification. The information would be passed to Israel.
For example, we would get a letter from a Congressman, stating he had heard the Pentagon had done a study on the military balance between Israel and its Arab neighbors. He would like to have a copy of it. We would respond, “We can’t give you a copy, but we can give you an oral briefing.’ The usual answer is, “Sorry, we are not interested in an oral briefing.’
The Case of Stephen Bryen
In the opinion of all these sources, Israeli penetration of State and Defense has reached an all-time high during the Reagan administration. In 1984 people known to have intimate links with Israel were employed in offices throughout the bureaucracy and particularly in the Defense Department, where top-secret weapons technology and other sensitive matters are routinely handled.
The bureaucracy is headed by Fred Ikle, undersecretary of defense for international security. The three personalities of greatest importance in his area are Richard Perle, Idle’s assistant for international security policy; Stephen Bryen, Perle’s principal deputy, whose assigned specialty was technology transfer; and Noel Koch, principal deputy to Richard Armitage, assistant secretary for international security affairs. Koch was formerly employed by the Zionist Organization of America. Perle previously served on the staff of Democratic Senator henry Jackson of Washington, one of Israel’s most ardent boosters, and had the reputation of being a conduit of information to the Israeli government. Stephen Bryen came to the administration under the darkest cloud of all.
Bryen’s office is represented on the inter-agency unit, known as the National Disclosure Policy Commission, which approves technology transfers related to weapons systems. The commission includes representatives of State, National Security Council and the intelligence services, as well as Defense. Bryen was publicly accused in 1978 of offering a top-secret document on Saudi air bases to a group of visiting Israeli officials.
The accusation arose from an incident reported by Michael Saba, a journalist and former employee of the National Association of Arab Americans. Saba, who readily agreed to a lie detector test by the FBI, said he overheard Bryen make the offer while having breakfast in a Washington restaurant. At the time, Bryen was on the staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. A senior career diplomat expresses the problem State Department officials encountered during that period: “Whenever Bryen was in the room we always had to use extreme caution.” During the controversy, Bryen was suspended from the commit staff but later reinstated. He later left the committee position and became executive director of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), an organization founded – according to The Jewish Week – to “convince people that the security of Israel and the United States is interlinked.” When Bryen moved to a position in the Defense Department, his wife, Shoshona, replaced him at JINSA.
After nine months the investigating attorneys recommended that a grand jury be empanelled to consider the evidence against Bryen. According to the Justice Department, other witnesses testified to Bryen’s Israeli contacts. Indeed, a Justice Department memorandum dates January 26, 1979, discussed “unresolved questions thus far, which suggest that Bryen is (a) gathering classified information for the Israelis, (b) acting as their unregistered agent and (c) lying about it. . . .” The Justice Department studied the complaint for two years. Although it found that Bryen had an “unusually close relationship with Israel,” it made no charges and in late 1979 closed the file. Early in 1981 Bryen was hired as Richard Perle’s chief deputy in the Pentagon. He remains in this highly responsible position today.
Perle himself was also the subject of an Israel-related controversy. An FBI summary of a 1970 wiretap recorded Perle discussing classified information with someone at the Israeli embassy. He came under fire in 1983 when newspapers reported he received substantial payments to represent the interests of an Israeli weapons company. Perle denied conflict of interest, insisting that, although he received payment for these services after he had assumed his position in the Defense Department, he was between government jobs when he worked for the Israeli firm.
Because of these controversies both Perle and Bryen were given assignments in the Reagan administration which – it was expected – would keep him isolated from issues relating to Israel. But, observes a State Department official, it has not worked out that way. Sensitive questions of technology transfer which affect Israeli interests are often settled in the offices of Perle and Bryen.
Despite the investigation, Bryen holds one of the highest possible security classification at the Department of Defense. It is a top secret/code word classification, which gives him access to documents and data anywhere in government, almost without limit. A high official in the Department of State explains the significance of his access: “With this classification, Bryen can keep up to date not only on what the United States has in the way of technology, but on what we hope to have in the future as the result of secret research and development.
“I’ll Take Care of the Congress”
Admiral Thomas Moorer recalls a dramatic example of Israeli lobby power from his days as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At the time of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war Mordacai Gur, the defense attaché at the Israeli embassy who later became commander-in-chief of Israeli forces, came to Moorer demanding that the U.S. provide Israel with aircraft equipped with a high technology air-to-surface anti-tank missile called the Maverick. At the time, the U.S. had only one squadron so equipped. Moorer recalls telling Gur:
I can’t let you have those aircraft. We have just one squadron. Besides, we’ve been testifying before the Congress convincing then we need this equipment. If we gave you our only squadron, Congress would raise hell with us.
Moorer looks at me with a steady piercing gaze that must have kept a generation of ensigns trembling in their boots: “And do you know what he said?” Gur told me, “You get us the airplanes; I’ll take care of the Congress.’” Moorer pauses, then adds, “And he did.” America’s only squadron with Mavericks went to Israel.
Moorer, speaking in his office in Washington as a senior counselor at the Georgetown University Center for Strategic and International Studies, says he strongly opposed the transfer but was overruled by “political expediency at the presidential level.” He notes President Richard Nixon was then in the throes of Watergate. “But,” he adds,
I’ve never seen a President – I don’t care who he is – stand up to them [the Israelis]. It just boggles the mind.
They always get what they want. The Israelis know what is going on all the time. I got to the point where I wasn’t writing anything down.
If the American people understood what a grip those people have got on our government, they would rise up in arms. Our citizens don’t have any idea what goes on.
On another occasion, fear of lobby pressure caused a fundamental decision on further military sales to Israel to be deliberately pigeonholed. It involved the general consensus of professionals in the Pentagon that Israel had enough military power for any need as of 1975. By then it had reached a level of superiority that was overwhelming. In December 1976 the Middle East Arms Transfer Panel wrote a report to Secretary of Defense Ronald Rumsfeld, concluding that no additional arms sales to Israel were necessary. However, Rumsfel did not send the report to the State Department. It was the closing days of the Ford administration, and its transmission as an official document and subsequent leakage would have given the Democrats a partisan edge with the Israeli lobby.
Jewish groups in the United States are often pressed into service to soften up the secretary of state and other officials, especially in advance of a visit to the United States by the Israeli Prime Minister. A senior Defense official explains, “Israel would always have a long shopping list for the prime minister to take up. We would decide which items were worth making into an issue and which were not. We would try to work things out in advance.” There was the constant threat that the prime minister might take an arms issue straight to the president, and the tendency was to clear the agenda of everything possible. “We might decide that we don’t want this chicken shit electronic black box to be an issue between the president and prime minister, we would approve it in advance.”
On one such occasion, Ed Sanders, President Carter’s adviser on Jewish affairs, brought a complaint to the National Security Council offices: “I’m getting a lot of flack from Jewish Congressmen on the ALQ 95-J. What is this thing? And why are we being so nasty about it? Shouldn’t we let Israel have it? The president is getting a lot of abuse because the Pentagon won’t turn it loose.” It was a high technology radar jamming device, and soon it was approved for shipment to Israel.
In advance of Carter’s decision to provide a high technology missile to Israel, a procession of Jewish groups came, one after another, to say:
Please explain to us why the Pentagon is refusing to sell AIM 9-L missiles to Israel? Don’t you know what this means? The missile is necessary so the Israelis will be able to shoot down the counterpart missile on the Mig 21 which carries the Eight Ball 935.
A former high-ranking official in security affairs cites the intimidating effect of this procession on career specialists:
When you have to explain your position day after day, week after week to American Jewish groups – first, say, from Kansas City, then Chicago, the East Overshoe – you see what you are up against. These are people from different parts of the country, but the come in with the very same information, the same set of questions, the same criticism.
They know what you have done even in private meetings. They will say, ‘Mr. Smith, we understand that in interagency meetings, you frequently take a hard line against technology transfers to Israel. We’d like you to explain yourself.’ They keep you on the defensive. They treat you as if you are the long pole in the anti-Israel tent no matter how modest the position you have taken.
Jewish groups in turn press Capitol Hill into action:
We’ll get letters from Congressmen: ‘We need an explanation. We’re hearing from constituents that Israel’s security is threatened by the refusal of the Pentagon to release the AIM 9-L missile. Please, Mr. Secretary, can you give me your rationale for the refusal?’
The certainty of such lobby pressure can be costly to taxpayers. In one instance it kept the U.S. from trying to recover U.S.-supplied arms which Israel captured from Lebanon. During Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, its forces overran and captured tons of equipment of all sorts, including weapons supplied by the United States to the government forces in that country. Knowledge of this came to light in an unusual way a year later.
During a visit to Lebanon, the Reverend George Crossley, of Deltona, Florida, was shown cases of U.S.-made M-16 rifles which Israel officials said were captured from Palestinian forces. Crossley noted they carried a Saudi insignia and wrote down the serial numbers. Saudi Arabia, of course, had no forces involved in the fighting in Lebanon, and the clergyman jumped to the conclusion that rifles the U.S. had sold to Saudi Arabia were turned over to the PLO forces in Lebanon, then captured by the Israelis. If true, this would have been a violation of a U.S. law which prohibits transfer of U.S.-supplied weapons to another country without permission.
Crossley wrote to his Congressman, Bill Chappell, Jr. who asked the State Department to explain. A check of records showed the U.S. had never sold M-16 rifles to the Saudis, who prefer a German make. The rifles in question were provided directly to forces of the Lebanese government.
The episode got public attention at a time when the U.S. government, at great expense, was once again equipping Lebanese forces. A White House official, reading accounts of the Crossley affair, asked the desk officer at the Pentagon why the U.S. didn’t demand that the Israelis give back these rifles and all other equipment they had taken from the Lebanese army. The Pentagon had an accurate list of what the U.S. had supplied. Surely, he argued, the Israeli government could be forced to cooperate, and this would ease U.S. costs substantially.
The desk officer exploded: “Are you kidding? No way in hell! Who needs that? I answer maybe one hundred letters a month for the secretary of defense in reply to Congressmen who bitch and complain about our mistreatment of Israel. Do you think that I want to increase my work load answering more shitty letters? Do you think I am going to recommend action that will increase the flow of problem letters to my boss? Be serious.”
Every official of prominence in the State and Defense Department proceeds on the assumption-and certainty – that at least once a week he will have to deal with a group from the Jewish community. One of them summaries,
One has to keep in mind the constant character of this pressure. The public affairs staff of the Near East Bureau in the State Department figures it will spend about 75 percent of its time dealing with Jewish groups. Hundreds of such groups get appointments in the executive branch each year.
In acting to influence U.S. policy in the Middle East, the Israeli lobby has the field virtually to itself. Other interest groups and individuals who might provide some measure of counterbalancing pressure have only begun to get organized.
Americans of Arab ancestry, for example, remain divided. A diplomat who formerly served in a high position in the State Department gives this example:
When a group concerned about U.S. bias favoring Israel would come in for an appointment, more often than not those in the group start arguing among themselves. One person will object to a heavy focus on Palestinian problems. Another will want Lebanon’s problems to be central to the discussion. I would just sit back and listen. They had not worked out in advance what they wanted to say.
Les Janka had similar experiences. In a commentary at a gathering sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute, he recalled visits by groups sympathetic to Arab problems:
Their complaints tended to be fairly general. They would say, ‘We want the U.S. to be more even-handed, more balanced,’ or ‘We want you to be more interested in the Palestinians.’ Nothing specific. In contrast the Jewish groups come in with a very specific list of demands.
On all kinds of foreign policy issues the American people just don’t make their voiced heard. Jewish groups are the exceptions. They are prepared, superbly briefed. They have their act together. It is hard for bureaucracies not to respond. |
