Word: pollarding
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...Seymour Hersh, "might seem almost too startling to be believed." Indeed. But Hersh did come to believe it, and it is now surfacing in his book The Samson Option, being published this week by Random House. In capsule: among the American secrets stolen for Israel by convicted spy Jonathan Pollard was some of the most vital information the U.S. possessed: satellite pictures and data used to aim nuclear missiles at the Soviet Union. Some of this was relayed by Jerusalem to the Soviets. And the man who supposedly made the decision to do it and in person passed some...
Rumors have floated ever since Pollard's conviction that some of the U.S. secrets he stole had reached Moscow, but no one had suggested that Shamir was directly responsible. Hersh first heard this allegation from Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli intelligence officer and veteran spinner of stunning-if-true- but yarns. He was the teller of the October Surprise tale about an alleged 1980 agreement between the Reagan campaign and Iranian officials to delay the release of American hostages until after the U.S. election. Hersh says Ben- Menashe's account was "subsequently amplified by a second Israeli, who cannot...
...since it made its first warheads in 1968. His explanation: Jerusalem thought Arab nations would not launch a concerted war to destroy the Jewish state unless they had Soviet backing; targeting Israeli nukes on the U.S.S.R. would deter Moscow from offering such support. According to the book, Israel asked Pollard to steal satellite pictures in the first place so that it could aim its missiles at targets beyond border areas of the Soviet Union. For that, Jerusalem needed intelligence data -- which Washington refused to share -- on how the U.S. proposed to hit similar targets...
...back as December 1987, a United Press International story quoted U.S. intelligence analysts as saying that some of the Pollard material "was traded to the Soviets in return for promises to increase emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel." Hersh mentions this rationale in passing but stresses others. His second source, who said the story is well known among Israel's top politicians, claims that Shamir told colleagues "that his goal was to end the long-standing enmity between Israel and the Soviet Union and initiate some kind of strategic cooperation...
...life sentence has evidently given JONATHAN JAY POLLARD, who pleaded guilty in 1986 to selling U.S. secrets to Israel, plenty of time to ponder his deeds. "Dear Mom and Dad," he wrote in a lawyerly burst of remorse, "I regret the adverse effect which my actions had on the U.S. and the Jewish community . . . I have also reflected on how and why, despite my idealism about the world and Israel's place in it, I was capable of taking the actions I did." During an 18-month spying binge, the former Navy counterintelligence analyst gave hundreds of classified documents...