Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May/June 1998, Pages 37, 118

Defense and Intelligence

Pressure for Pollard, More Money for the Arrow, and UAE Fighter Buy Top the News

By Shawn L. Twing

Pressure has been building for the early release of Jonathan Pollard, the American naval counterintelligence analyst currently serving a life sentence in a Butner, North Carolina prison for passing an estimated 800,000 highly classified documents to Israel in the 1980s. Prior to Vice President Al Gore’s April visit to Jerusalem for Israel’s 50th anniversary celebrations, some Israeli officials even suggested that Pollard be released as a birthday present to Israel and make a triumphal arrival in his new homeland on Air Force Two.

The campaign to free Pollard gained momentum last year when he was given Israeli citizenship, an event many interpreted as the first step in eventually securing his release. Since then he has been visited by several Israeli officials, including Minister of Absorption Yuli Edelstein, Finance Minister Yaakov Neeman and Communications Minister Livnor Livnat. The Israeli government remains unwilling to recognize Pollard publicly as having functioned as its agent, however, and Pollard refuses to accept anything less. “I did not spend 13 years in prison to endorse a lie,” Pollard told the Jerusalem Post. “The truth is simple and clear: I was an Israeli agent employed by the Lakam branch of intelligence in an operation that was fully sanctioned by the government of Israel. Anything less than that is a distortion of the truth.”

In March Israeli Minister of Industry and Trade Natan Sharansky asked Vice President Gore to intervene on Pollard’s behalf, and in April a letter from Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s cabinet urged President Clinton to release Pollard on “humanitarian grounds.” Shortly after, President Clinton received a letter from representatives of the American Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox Jewish communities also asking for a commutation of Pollard’s sentence.

“Things are happening,” Edelstein told the Forward, a Jewish community newspaper in New York. “I won’t claim that Pollard is in prison for nothing, but it’s high time for the [Clinton] administration to rethink what its position on Pollard should be.”

Despite the recent flurry of activity on Pollard’s behalf, however, there still is widespread opposition to his release, particularly within the U.S. intelligence community. “Jonathan Pollard betrayed his sworn oath to the United States by passing state secrets to a foreign government,” a Defense Intelligence Agency officer told Tim Kennedy of the English-language daily Saudi Gazette. “Pollard broke the law. He confessed to it. And now he’s in jail. And what makes Pollard’s spy activity all the more reprehensible is that it ultimately aided the Russians: 24 hours after Pollard stole a document from the Navy it was in Tel Aviv...Another 24 hours later, it was in Moscow.”

Among the most damning witnesses against Pollard was Reagan administration Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, who submitted a memorandum to the sentencing judge saying that Pollard’s theft of U.S. secrets was “the most devastating blow ever delivered by an American spy to U.S. national security interests.”

Nor are all American Jewish leaders ready to embrace efforts to free Pollard and deny the damage he inflicted on the United States. National Director Abraham Foxman of B’nai B’rith’s Anti-Defamation League told the Forward that the ADL objected to lionizing Pollard. “To fly him with the vice president would be an insult to the U.S.-Israel relationship,” Foxman said. “The arrest resulted with the activities that were contrary to the relationship....Our leadership have said this is not an issue of anti-Semitism.”

U.S. May Fund Third Arrow Missile Battery, Laser, and Boost Phase Intercept Program

Despite an earlier agreement that limits U.S. financial assistance to the Arrow anti-tactical ballistic missile program only to research and development, Israeli officials and lobbyists, with substantial congressional assistance, are pushing for a U.S. commitment to fund the procurement of a third Arrow missile battery in Israel.

Representatives Jane Harman (D-CA) and Michael Pappas (R-NJ), along with 24 colleagues on the House National Security Committee, wrote a letter to President Clinton “expressing support for building cooperation between the United States and Israel in the area of ballistic missile defense,” according to Near East Report, the biweekly newsletter of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. That support so far includes an additional $10 million for the Arrow missile added to the Iran Missile Protection Act, above the $50 million for the Arrow already in the Pentagon’s International Cooperative Programs budget and $45 million in emergency supplemental aid to purchase an Israeli-made radar, which was approved by the Senate March 23. Neither of these congressional add-ons was requested by the Pentagon, according to the U.S. trade weekly Defense News.

The $105 million in additional Arrow funding will bring total U.S. aid to the Arrow missile—a program U.S. officials repeatedly have said the United States will never use to protect its own forces—to more than $800 million since U.S. aid for the program began in 1988. (For a breakdown of U.S. assistance to the Arrow program, see the October/November 1995 Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, pp. 12, 106-107.)

During a March trip to Israel, U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen expressed the Clinton administration’s tacit approval for the additional funding. In a quote appearing in the Jewish Week of Queens, New York, Cohen said that the United States is “committed to maintaining Israel’s qualitative edge and we...concur that there is a need for Israel to acquire a third Arrow battery, and we will cooperate as best we can to see that occurs.”

Other U.S. officials are not as supportive. A Pentagon official interviewed by Defense News said that U.S. aid for the Arrow was supposed to end in 1999, but then was stretched to 2001. “Now they’re talking to us about extending the program through 2006. It’s like a car loan that we keep paying on, and just when we think we’re approaching the last payment, we get hit with another few years,” he said.

Members of Congress also plan to add more money for the Tactical High Energy Laser, formerly the Nautilus laser, and the Boost Phase Intercept program, both U.S.-Israeli projects that have received tens of millions of dollars in the past. (From 1996 to 1998, the THEL program received $116.5 million and the Boost Phase Intercept program received $62.3 million from the United States.) The Pentagon did not include funding for these programs in its draft funding request for fiscal year 1999, which may lead several members of Congress to insert funding for the programs in committee meetings as they have done repeatedly in the past.

“The White House and the Pentagon are not living up to their rhetoric,” Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA) told Defense News. “I’ve told the folks over at the Pentagon that I want to see [THEL] funded, but they’ve refused so far to provide any numbers for 1999. Can you believe I had to go to AIPAC and get a funding line for the program?” Representative Weldon’s office refused to return repeated calls by the Washington Report to request an explanation of the benefits of these programs to the United States.

In related news, Israeli officials recently denied reports that they are planning to share U.S. technology with Turkey in a joint Turkish-Israeli anti-tactical ballistic missile program based almost entirely on the U.S.-Israel Arrow missile. Israel’s Ministry of Defense denied news stories that appeared in the Turkish and Israeli media claiming that during a March 30 visit to Ankara by Israeli defense officials the two countries signed a preliminary agreement to co-develop an anti-missile system.

Because the Arrow missile is a joint project, American-made components are subject to U.S. export permission. “We’re not talking about technology transfer in a feasibility study,” a U.S. industry representative told Defense News. “There is no way the [U.S. Ballistic Missile Defense Organization] will separate between what Israel says is its own data, and what is joint Arrow data.”

Israeli officials disagree. “For Turkish presence in the project, U.S. permission might be necessary for the missile itself and the launcher,” Israeli defense specialist Gonen Ginat told Defense News. “But for the radar, developed by our Elta, and the control systems developed by our Tadiran, no such permission is required for the transfer of Israeli technology to Turkey.”

UAE To Buy F-16s

United Arab Emirates officials will announce during a May visit to Washington, DC that U.S. defense contractor Lockheed Martin has won a contract for up to 80 F-16 multi-role combat aircraft, U.S. defense officials told Defense News in April. Premature reports that the F-16 had been awarded the estimated $6 billion contract in competition with the French Rafale and multi-nation Eurofighter 2000 have appeared repeatedly during the last two years, only to be retracted later. This time, however, U.S. and other officials are confident that the decision has been made and that Lockheed Martin has won.

Many of the problems that have hindered the award to Lockheed Martin apparently have been worked out. These include an advanced avionics and electronic warfare suite, as well as the inclusion of the highly capable Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile (AMRAAM) and the High Speed Anti-Radiation Missile (HARM), which are among the most advanced weapons in the U.S. Air Force arsenal.

According to Defense News, the decision will be formalized by Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Khalifa bin Zayed Al-Nahayan, who is deputy commander of the UAE armed forces, during a May 12 visit to the United States to be hosted by Vice President Al Gore. During his visit, Sheikh Khalifa, the highest ranking official to visit the United States officially in the UAE’s 26-year history, also is scheduled to meet with President Bill Clinton.

Iran Tops Terrorism List Again

Iran was “the most active sponsor of state terrorism” in the world in 1997, killing 13 people and supporting terrorist organizations in Lebanon, Egypt and the occupied territories, according to the U.S. State Department’s annual report on terrorism released in April.

Iranian agents assassinated at least 13 people, most of them opposition members of the People’s Mojahedin of Iran, an organization that reportedly has a 30,000-strong army near the Iranian border in Iraq. Iranian agents also killed members of the Kurdish Democratic Party, the report said.

“Although the August 1997 accession of President Khatami has resulted in more conciliatory Iranian public statements...Iranian support for terrorism remains in place,” according to the State Department. Terrorist groups allegedly receiving financial and other assistance from Iran include the Lebanese Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and Egypt’s Gamaat Al-Islamiyya.

The State Department also noted, however, that Iran had condemned the November 1997 attack in Luxor that killed 57 tourists, and that President Mohammed Khatami voiced his opposition to terrorist attacks against Israeli women and children in his January 1998 interview on Cable News Network.

U.S. Denies Israeli Charge That Iran Has Nuclear Warheads

U.S. officials denied Israeli reports that surfaced in April claiming Iran received nuclear weapons and enriched uranium from the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan in the early 1990s. Under an April 9 front-page headline saying “Iran has the Bomb,” Israel’s Jerusalem Post reiterated claims first made in a Jan. 20, 1992 report by the U.S. Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare that Russian technicians were maintaining up to four tactical nuclear warheads sold to Iran by Kazakhstan with assistance from the Russian mafia.

The reports are based on documents obtained by the Post that allegedly are copies of high-level Iranian correspondence “deemed authentic” by Israeli experts and unnamed “U.S. congressional analysts.”

Following the Post story, the Pentagon denied that Iran received nuclear warheads or enriched uranium from Kazakhstan in the early 1990s. “We have no evidence that Iran has been able to purchase nuclear warheads from Kazakhstan or from other Soviet republics,” Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon said.

A spokesman for the Russian government dismissed the Israeli reports as “nonsense.” The initial reports made in January 1992 also were dismissed shortly after they were made public.

New Mossad “Tell-All” Book to be released in May

A controversial new book by an alleged former Mossad agent is scheduled for release in May by HarperCollins publishers. In Hostile Territory: Business Secrets of A Mossad Combatant reportedly is a guide to succeeding in business that uses the tactics of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency as examples.

In Hostile Territory was written under the pseudonym Gerald Westerby (a character in John Le Carre’s spy novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy), who probably is former Israeli naval commando and Mossad operative Jerry Sanders, according to an exclusive article in the Jewish Week of Queens, New York. The book recounts several alleged exploits of the Mossad in general and the author in particular, some of which have been verified and others which seem to be impossible, according to the Jewish Week.

Among the author’s claims are that he placed a homing device for Israeli missiles in Iraq’s Osiraq nuclear reactor that was bombed by the Israeli air force in 1981, that he blew up a communications link between Syria and Egypt in a Beirut harbor during the 1973 Yom Kippur war, and that he posed as a French officer to debrief a Syrian chemical weapons scientist after infiltrating NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium.

Another of the author’s claims, that a Mossad operative bribed Syrian President Hafez Assad’s son Basil with $14 million to convince his father to release Syrian Jews and that the plan died with Basil’s death in 1994, has a “problem,” according to the Jewish Week article: “Assad had already allowed most of Syria’s Jews out by then.”

Former Mossad case officer and author of By Way of Deception and The Other Side of Deception —both tell-all books about his experience in the Mossad—Victor Ostrovsky also challenged some of Sanders’ claims. The Jewish Week article quoted Ostrovsky as saying that Sanders did not speak French, which would have made it difficult for him to make a Syrian scientist believe he was a French military officer.

For his part, Sanders, who now is a partner in a medical equipment company in San Francisco, denies having written the book. Two months before the Jewish Week article appeared, however, he told Israel’s Hebrew-language newspaper Ha’aretz that he planned to write a book about his experiences in Israeli security organizations to teach business executives how to succeed with “aggressive techniques.” Subsequently Sanders’ friend and business partner confirmed that Sanders was the author in an interview with Israel’s Yediot Ahronot newspaper.