Los Angeles Times
September 3, 2004
WASHINGTON — Despite its fervent denials, Israel secretly maintains a
large and active intelligence-gathering operation in the United States that has
long attempted to recruit U.S. officials as spies and to procure classified
documents, U.S. government officials said.
FBI and other
counterespionage agents, in turn, have covertly followed, bugged and videotaped
Israeli diplomats, intelligence officers and others in Washington, New York and
elsewhere, the officials said. The FBI routinely watches many diplomats
assigned to America.
Officials said FBI surveillance of a senior Israeli
diplomat, who was the subject of an FBI inquiry in 1997-98, played a role in the
latest probe into possible Israeli spying. The bureau now is investigating
whether a Pentagon analyst or pro-Israel lobbyists provided Israel with a highly
classified draft policy document. The document advocated support for Iranian
dissidents, radio broadcasts into Iran and other efforts aimed at destabilizing
the regime in Tehran , officials said this week.
The case is
unresolved, but it has highlighted Israel's unique status as an extremely close
U.S. ally that presents a dilemma for U.S. counterintelligence
officials.
"There is a huge, aggressive, ongoing set of Israeli
activities directed against the United States," said a former intelligence
official who was familiar with the latest FBI probe and who recently left
government. "Anybody who worked in counterintelligence in a professional
capacity will tell you the Israelis are among the most aggressive and active
countries targeting the United States."
The former official discounted
repeated Israeli denials that the country exceeded acceptable limits to obtain
information.
"They undertake a wide range of technical operations and
human operations," the former official said. "People here as liaison …
aggressively pursue classified intelligence from people. The denials are
laughable."
Current and former officials involved with Israel at t he
White House, CIA, State Department and in Congress had similar appraisals,
although not all were as harsh in their assessments. A Bush administration
official confirmed that Israel ran intelligence operations against the United
States. "I don't know of any foreign government that doesn't do collection in
Washington," he said.
Another U.S. official familiar with Israeli
intelligence said that Israeli espionage efforts were more subtle than
aggressive, and typically involved the use of intermediaries.
But a
former senior intelligence official, who focused on Middle East issues, said
Israel tried to recruit him as a spy in 1991.
"I had an Israeli
intelligence officer pitch me in Washington at the time of the first Gulf War,"
he said. "I said, 'No, go away,' and reported it to counterintelligence."
The U.S. officials all insisted on anonymity because classified
material was involved and because of the political sensitivity of Israeli
relations with Washington. Congress has s hown little appetite for vigorous
investigations of alleged Israeli spying.
In his first public comments
on the case, Israel's ambassador, Daniel Ayalon, repeated his government's
denials this week. "I can tell you here, very authoritatively, very
categorically, Israel does not spy on the United States," Ayalon told CNN. "We
do not gather information on our best friend and ally." Ayalon said his
government had been "very assured that this thing will just fizzle out. There's
nothing there."
In public, Israel contends it halted all spying
operations against the United States after 1986, when Jonathan Jay Pollard, a
former Navy analyst, was convicted in U.S. federal court and sentenced to life
in prison for selling secret military documents to Israel.
U.S.
officials say the case was never fully resolved because a damage-assessment team
concluded that Israel had at least one more high-level spy at the time,
apparently inside the Pentagon, who had provided serial numbers of classified
docu ments for Pollard to retrieve.
The FBI has investigated several
incidents of suspected intelligence breaches involving Israel since the Pollard
case, including a 1997 case in which the National Security Agency bugged two
Israeli intelligence officials in Washington discussing efforts to obtain a
sensitive U.S. diplomatic document. Israel denied wrongdoing in that case and
all others, and no one has been prosecuted.
But U.S. diplomats,
military officers and other officials are routinely warned before going to
Israel that local agents are known to slip into homes and hotel rooms of
visiting delegations to go through briefcases and to copy computer
files.
"Any official American in the intelligence community or in the
foreign service gets all these briefings on all the things the Israelis are
going to try to do to you," said one U.S. official.
At the same time,
experts said relations between the CIA and Israel's chief intelligence agency,
the Mossad, were so close that analysts sometimes shared highly classified
"code-word" intelligence on sensitive subjects. Tel Aviv routinely informs
Washington of the identities of the Mossad station chief and the military
intelligence liaison at its embassy in America.
"They probably get 98%
of everything they want handed to them on a weekly basis," said the former
senior U.S. intelligence officer who has worked closely with Israeli
intelligence. "They're very active allies. They're treated the way the British
are."
Another former intelligence operative who has worked with
Israeli intelligence agreed. "The relationship with Israeli intelligence is as
intimate as it gets," he said.
Officials said Israel was acutely
interested in U.S. policies and intelligence on the Middle East, especially
toward Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia.
"They are sophisticated enough to
want to know where the levers are they can influence, which people in our
government are taking which positions they can try to influence," said a former
high -ranking CIA official.
But the official said the relationship
between the U.S. and Israel, at least in intelligence circles, "is not one of
complete trust at all."
The latest counterintelligence investigation
began more than two years ago, and initially focused on whether officials from a
powerful Washington lobbying group, the American Israel Political Action
Committee, passed classified information to Israel, officials said.
Several months later, the FBI conducted surveillance of Naor Gilon, chief of
political affairs at the Israeli Embassy, meeting with two AIPAC officials. The
arrival of a veteran Iran analyst at the Pentagon, Larry Franklin, sparked a new
line of FBI inquiry.
In 1997 and 1998, the FBI had monitored Gilon as
part of an investigation into whether Scott Ritter, then a U.S. intelligence
official working with U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq, was improperly
delivering U.S. spy-plane film and other secret material to Israeli
intelligence. Gilon was posted in Ne w York at the time and operated as liaison
between Israel's Anan, or military intelligence service, and the U.N. teams,
several officials said.
"Naor was the focus of FBI surveillance into
allegations that I was a mole," said Ritter, who was never charged in the case.
"They suspected Naor was working me to gain access to U.S. intelligence, which
was absurd."
In an e-mail message this week, Gilon said he was under
orders not to talk to the media about the current case. He has denied any
wrongdoing in interviews with Israeli newspapers.
Franklin has not
responded to requests for comment, and officials said he was cooperating with
authorities. The FBI interviewed several AIPAC officials last Friday and copied
the contents of a computer hard drive. AIPAC has denied any wrongdoing and said
it was cooperating fully with investigators.
In a statement released
Thursday, AIPAC said the group's continued access to the White House, senior
administration officials and ranking members of Congress during the two-year
probe would have been "inconceivable … if any shred of evidence of
disloyalty or even negligence on AIPAC's part" had been discovered.
AIPAC, has especially close ties to the Bush administration. Addressing the
group's policy conference on May 18, President Bush praised AIPAC for "serving
the cause of America" and for highlighting the nuclear threat from Iran.
Washington and Tel Aviv differ on their assessments of Iran's nuclear weapons
development. Israel considers Iran's nuclear ambitions its No. 1 security
threat, and the issue is the top priority for AIPAC. The Bush administration
takes the Iran nuclear threat seriously, but its intelligence estimates classify
the danger as less imminent than do the Israeli assessments.
What
mystifies those who know AIPAC is how one of the savviest, best-connected
lobbying organizations in Washington has found itself enmeshed in a spy
investigation.
Although never previously implicated in a potential
espi onage case, AIPAC has frequently been a subject of controversy. Its close
ties to Israel and its aggressive advocacy of Israeli government positions has
drawn criticism that it should be registered as an agent of a foreign country.
Others, noting its ability to organize significant backing for or against
candidates running for national office, have demanded that it be classified as a
political action committee.
So far the group has avoided both
classifications, either of which would impose major restrictions on its
activities.
Three years ago, Fortune magazine ranked AIPAC fourth on its
list of Washington's 25 most powerful lobbying groups — ahead of such
organizations as the AFL-CIO and the American Medical Assn.