Allegations of Israeli Spying Usually Disappear — Eventually

Reports that the FBI suspects a mid-level Pentagon employee specializing in Iranian affairs of conveying classified documents to the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, and further that two of the lobby’s employees may have passed those documents to Israel, have led to a predictable storm of press coverage, much of it overheated. CBS, for example, led its Nightly News on Friday with its “scoop,” and ABC’s Nightline replaced its scheduled program with coverage of the spy story. For some unexplained reason the Nightline program included a segment on the USS Liberty incident and an interview with discredited Israel-basher and conspiracy theorist James Bamford.

Israeli officials and AIPAC have strongly denied any involvement in spying on America, and it is far too early to say whether anyone will be arrested or convicted of anything in this case, or whether any sensitive information was compromised. But there is no doubt that in its coverage of the affair the media has forgotten two fundamental facts:

? There have been entirely similar charges in the past of alleged spying for Israel which ended up being dropped for lack of evidence or merit.

? Countries don’t just spy on their enemies, they also spy on their friends. It is well known, for example, that Israel has spied on America at least once in the past, in the Jonathan Pollard affair, which Israel apologized for. Less well known, however, is the fact that the United States has also spied on Israel, even recruiting Israeli military officers and politicians.

Israel’s Alleged Spies

Supposed spies for Israel have included David Tenenbaum, an Orthodox Jew and engineer who worked at the U.S. Army Tank Automotive and Armaments Command in Warren Michigan. Tenenbaum was charged with passing sensitive information on the Patriot missile and advanced armor to Israel. (Detroit Free Press, Feb. 20, 1997) More than a year later the case was quietly dropped, with the FBI stating only that “The case is closed. No criminal charges have been filed.”

After the case was dropped, Tenenbaum got his job back, but he has filed a lawsuit against the government claiming that he was singled out for scrutiny and prosecution solely for his religious beliefs. (Detroit Free Press, Oct. 13, 2000)

Also suspected of spying for Israel was CIA employee Adam Ciralsky. According to an internal CIA memo, Ciralsky was guilty of “deliberately compromising U.S. government classified information to an Israeli national, accepting compensation from an Israeli national in exchange for U.S. government classified information, and deliberately concealing from the U.S. government a relationship with an Israeli national.” (Associated Press, Feb. 7, 2000)

Despite the seemingly serious charges against Ciralsky, he has to this date not been charged with any wrongdoing, and he has filed his own lawsuit against the U.S. government, charging that he was:

“unjustly singled out for investigation and subsequently interrogated, harassed, surveilled and terminated from employment with the CIA solely because he is a Jew and he practices the Jewish religion. Moreover, this ultra vires and constitutionally repugnant conduct was knowingly undertaken by defendants in conformance with a custom, policy and practice of both the CIA and FBI. Here, Mr. Ciralsky seeks damages to compensate for him for his injuries, and injunctive relief to prevent further harm to himself and other Jewish-Americans who work or seek to work in the federal government in so-called intelligence agencies. Indeed, damages and injunctive and other equitable relief are being sought pursuant to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 …”

In addition, because of the anti-Semitic language used in many of the CIA’s memos on Ciralsky (references to his “rich Jewish friends” and “wealthy daddy”) , the agency arranged to have the ADL provide sensitivity training to its internal investigators. (U.S. Newswire, Apr. 14, 1999, letter from CIA Director George Tenet to the ADL)

Perhaps the most serious instance of supposed spying by Israel against the United States involved a person code-named “Mega,” who may well not have existed. As reported by the Washington Post on May 7, 1997:

“The FBI has opened an investigation to determine whether a senior U.S. government official has been passing highly sensitive information to the Israeli government, according to sources with direct knowledge of the inquiry.

“The investigation was launched in January after the National Security Agency intercepted a secure communication between a senior Israeli intelligence officer in Washington and a superior in Tel Aviv that referred to someone code-named ‘Mega,’ and an attempt to obtain a sensitive American document, U.S. government officials said.”

Israeli officials strongly denied that they were spying against the United States, and also denied that they were familiar with anyone code-named “Mega.” As the officials explained, however, the Hebrew term for the CIA sounded something like “Mega,” perhaps explaining the confusion. In any event, no one was ever charged with being “Mega,” and it seems the investigation was, again, quietly dropped. Though, of course, not before Israel’s reputation was again dragged through the mud.

Despite the nonexistence of “Mega,” the Post story certainly did reveal spying – on Israel by the United States. For as the report indicated, the NSA monitored a secure communication between Israeli intelligence officials. Just monitoring the conversation, whether it was secure or not, is spying. But a secure communication would be encrypted, and because Israel is one of the world’s leaders in the science of cryptography, there is no chance that even the NSA’s supercomputers could have cracked the Israeli code. The only other possibility is a U.S. mole within Israeli intelligence who passed on to the U.S. the key to the Israeli code.

In other words, the “Mega” case proved beyond any doubt that the United States was spying on Israel. Nor was it an isolated incident – there have been previous cases of such spying by the U.S.

America’s Spies in Israel

Yosef Amit was an intelligence officer in the Israel Defense Forces, responsible for running agents in Arab countries, who eventually rose to command an intelligence base on the border with Lebanon. While there, Major Amit ran into difficulties with the law in 1978, and was discharged from the IDF. Eventually going to work as a private investigator, he was recruited into the CIA by Tom Waltz, a Jewish CIA officer based at the American embassy in Tel-Aviv.

The Americans were supposedly especially interested in information on Israeli troop movements and plans in Lebanon and the territories, which Amit provided. He also apparently passed to the Americans secret documents from Israel’s internal security service, the Shin Bet, which he got from a friend who worked there.

The Shin Bet eventually caught up with Amit in 1986, when he was secretly arrested for espionage. The trial was also secret, though it is known that Amit received a long prison sentence. (Ha’aretz, Dec. 12, 1997)

Another U.S. spy was the Israeli politician Andrzej Kielczynski, a friend of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and also a member of the Likud Central Committee. Kielczynski was recruited into the CIA in 1985 by the same Mr. Waltz who recruited Yosef Amit, and he allegedly turned over to the Americans information on where Israel based nuclear weapons, and also helped to uncover Jonathan Pollard’s spying against America. (Ha’aretz, May 18, 2001)

Kielczynski later sued the CIA, claiming breach of contract – supposed promises of money and American citizenship having not been forthcoming. In contesting the suit, the CIA did not deny that Kielczynski was a CIA asset. Instead, it won the case by citing a 125-year-old precedent (Totten v. United States, 92 U.S. 105 [1875]) to the effect that “secret information agreements to which a United States government agency is a party cannot be enforced in the courts … because its litigation could jeopardize confidential information.” ( New York Law Journal, Feb. 27, 2001)

In other words, the CIA’s own legal defense confirmed that it had recruited Kielczynski as a spy against Israel.

Conclusion

Spy stories and allegations always garner banner headlines and television “exclusives” if Israel is involved, but the reality is that most such cases fade away for lack of any credible evidence. Many seem to be the result of overzealous investigators, some of whom may harbor unfriendly attitudes towards Jews or Israel (witness, for example, the anti-Semitic language in the Ciralsky memos).

The media, and the public, should remember this when new spy allegations crop up. The media should also remember that spying is a two way street — and while Israel has spied on America in the past, so has America spied on Israel.

And your attempt to skate the edge of Godwin’s Law is unimpressive.

You really think I’d let this bull **** fly?

If you are advocating that Israel either ethnically cleanse part of the West Bank or set up a society with two classes of people in which one basically lives in a concentration camp (what any objective person would call apartheid) with no right of citizenship but under the sovereignty of Israel then you can be sure it will be in a state of war for a long time to come and you can forget about my ever supporting Israel.

A) It will “be a war for a long time to come” and anyone Arab or not that lives in Israel and enjoys their citizenship, many of whom I know, realize this. The only ones that don’t are delusional “leftists” who march to peace.

B) You mean the way the Palestinians want to ethnically cleanse Jews from Hebron? where they’ve lived for 3000 years? or from the rest of Israel?

C) Or do you mean the way they’ve quietly cleansed Christians from the West Bank in the last 10 years? or Xtians from the Middle East altogether in the last 30 years?

D) I guess the “Zionists” “quietly encouraged the Xtian Arabs to leave too? LOL!!!

Wait let me finish shoveling out from under your bull **** before finishing…… ok 1 sec..

Palestinians were living in the area between the Jordan and Mediterrainian for centuries and do not deserve to be shoved off just because Jews in Iraq (greatly “encouraged” by Zionists in Israel) left / felt threatened / were shoved out.

You have to excuse Raincoat he’s all wet listening to typical leftist dripping PROP maybe listening to Normy Finkelstein tapes.

Let’s get this straight -

Raincoast “infers” that the Zionists helped cause a WHOLE CIVILIZATION that predate Arabs in Babylonia to all line up and board planes for a land they’d never been to, speak a language they didn’t know and live among people of a different culture?

Boy life must have been fin grand for them in Dhimmiland? EH? BUT WE KNOW WHY THE MOSSAD ZIONISTS “encouraged them to leave” LOL!!

Not the Nazi 3rd Reich situation their lives had become in Iraq….0

I suppose your next argument will be the Serbian nationalist one that “those Muslims have too many babies.”

I could say that one who purposely has 10 babies with 3 different wives and keeps them chattled up for the purpose of Jihad and the future great Victory of Islam is even beyond Serbian or Nazi ideologies.

And one wonders if Raincoat’s town, like Lebanon, had 20,000 Muslims move in and quadruple in 15 years and the complete culture of his town become dominated, if he’d take this tack. Real easy for him to expound his “liberal” ideals living in his safe environment.

THE SHITS PILING UP AGAIN….

Mike

Holdfast, do you realize how remarkably Islamist your opinion sounds? Just replace group X with group Y. Palestinians were living in the area between the Jordan and Mediterrainian for centuries and do not deserve to be shoved off just because Jews in Iraq (greatly “encouraged” by Zionists in Israel) left / felt threatened / were shoved out. As you know, right now in Greater Israel there are about 5 million Jews, 1.2 million Arab Israelis, and about 3.5 Arabs who consider themselves Palestinians in occupied territories. Forcibly sending the latter to other nations, were that even feasible, would be *just* as unjust. If the 2.5 million in the West Bank are given only about half the WB, long-lasting trouble would be a logical consequence. All of these 9.5+ million people have a right to this land and all of these people’s lives and rights are important. My apologies if I don’t pay much deference to ethnic chauvinism.

I suppose your next argument will be the Serbian nationalist one that “those Muslims have too many babies.”

Sign I saw today in Union Sqaure

NO WAR FOR PROFIT

(Bomb Israel)

If more American Jews saw these signs there’d be a lot fewer Jewish votes for Kerry – Ttank the MSM for covering it up.

“The loss of enormously rich Jewish communities all over the Middle East is a tragic story largely forgotten and ignored in the wake of the European Holocaust. It does not justify denying Palestinians the right to live on lands their families have lived on for centuries. ”

-Well, they’re not going back to Iraq, Yemen, Libya etc – they sucked it up and built new lives in Israel. Did the Israeli gov’t keep them in camps while they waited for a return to they’re ancestral lands? No – so why didn’t the Arab states resettle the Palestinians in Egypt, Jordan, Lebannon, Syria etc (the camps in the OT are, admittedly, more complex and justifiable)? Why is that the Jews have to “move on” and make the best of the situation, but the entire Arab world is willing to go to war with Israel but won’t (with the exception of Jordan) make these people into citizens? Why do the Palestinians have their very own UN agency, if the purpose? The purpose is to maintain them as pawns, as irritants, as a weapon to use against Israel. Why are there more resolutions against Israel than Sudan, Zimbabwe, Syria, Iran, North Korea and Cuba – is Israel really worse than all those regimes combined? No – then why place ANY value on those resolutions.

Furthermore, all of you BS ignores the historic settlement offer at Camp David – and Arafat’s reponse (Intafada II) – if the deal wasn’t good enough, he ought to have made a counter-offer. That’s what a serious negotiator would do. Israel is, rightly, not going to give the Palestinians jack-sh*t until they replace Arafat. He proved that he’d rather be a terrorist than a president, and that’s really all she wrote. Sharon will give them Gaza, and they’ll turn it into even more of a hellhole than it already is. Eventually they’ll probably get a good chunk of the West Bank, which will also become a sh*tpit, depite all the EU $$ that will be poured in. And who will they blame – the Jews. As long as there is one Jew in Israel, the entire Arab world will blame him for the fact that their so-called governments couldn’t organize a circle jerk at a masturbators anonymous conference. Once all the Jews are gone, they’ll blame the Americans, and then someone else. Jordan and Kuwait are probably the best of the lot, and they still suck compared to states with similar potential in east asia.

Why does everyone care so much about the Palestinians – what makes them so much more worthy than the Kurds, the blacks of the South Sudan, the Tamils, the Urghurs, the Tibetans, the N’debele, and probably half a dozen more I can’t remember – the ONLY thing that I can think of is that the Palestinians’ “oppressors” are white (well, not really) Jews. What else makes them so special, besides perhaps the psychotic viciousness with which they conduct their campaign?

So you’re in favor of the Israeli plan to build a wall between its territory and the PA’s?