Israel has long acknowledged that Jonathan Pollard spied for Israel. Seymour Hersh claimed in the New Yorker that Israel traded these secrets to the USSR in exchange for the USSR permitting the continued emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel. Eric Margolis makes a similar claim in the Toronto Sun. Both claim that many US covert agents lost their lives as a result.
My question: is there any truth to this claim? Did Israel in fact barter US secrets to the USSR?
And let’s try to keep this thread on track, people (a tall order, I know, in any thread dealing with Israel, but hey, a guy can hope, can’t he?)
It was my impression that the vast majority of the information passed on by Pollard was material the U.S. *would * have given Israel anyway if it hadn’t severely limited intelligence cooperation as a result of Israel’s bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1982 (which, if you’ll recall, the U.S. condemmed at the time). In other words, it was information of interest to Israel - satellite photos of Syrian military facilities, Soviet weapon specs and so forth - and not, generally speaking, anything damaging to America.
Still, that doesn’t neccesarily contradict the point of the OP. Pollard may have stolen compromising information, and I wouldn’t put it past Yitzhak Shamir to pass it on to the Soviets. Shamir was a bit of a weasel.
Dunno. Most thing Seymour H prints seems to be true. Further, there is no reason why they would not have. Israel is in the business of supporting its own interests after all.
As for what Pollard turned over, the common characterization of the stuff seems to serve Israel’s interests too. The guy needs to rot forever.
what Pollard turned over severely compromised several friendly intelligence sources in the ME (these are people like military attaches, who could be trusted to give the US accurate force assessments). Once these people’s names were revealed to the KGB, they promptly shut up-as they had good reason to fear retaliation. Pollard was and is a scumbag-he took an oath, and betrayed it.
Of more importance is the israelis selling of re-engineered missile guidance systems to the Chinese-who resold the technology to the Iranians (think "SHAHAB III missiles)-these can hit tel Aviv.
So the Isaraelis have some cause to be concerned :eek:
According to this article, Seymour Hersh was making this allegation in a book published in 1991. Supposedly the Israeli contact serving as a source for the information was later exposed as a con man. The article (whose reliability you can judge for yourself - I am not a big fan of The American Spectator) notes that Hersh’s book claimed that Israel turned American secrets over to the Soviet Union, but said elsewhere that Israel was using the purloined intelligence to target the Soviets.
Incidentally, I’m in the “Let Pollard Rot In Prison” camp.