180. Have the US and Israel Always Spied on Each Other? (Ep 2)

17:58Gordon:It's got the Navy. It's got the IRA. And it's got the IRA and Mossad. So, I mean, we're just, you know, we're all over the place. We're ticking all the boxes. So the FBI gets involved on the 15th of November, 1985, begins conducting interviews. And the appeals court will later recount that there were FBI agents and also naval investigators who stopped Pollard as he's leaving work and questioned him about the unauthorized removal of classified information.

18:27David:I like the idea that it's as he's pushing a handcart of classified material. Mr. Pollard, what's in that large handcart you're pushing towards your car?

18:39Gordon:Yes, your duties, is it all Caribbean intelligence reports? Oh, wait a minute. The intercepts capabilities in the Mediterranean. So Pollard is understandably alarmed by this by this questioning. And that day he makes two calls home to Anne and he he uses the code word cactus in in these phone calls, which is the signal that he is in trouble. And I should say, I can't imagine a less natural word to use if you're standing in the parking lot of a naval facility in Suitland, Maryland, and you're calling your wife and you're using the word cactus. I mean, how would you, if you were doing that, Gordon, how would you use the word cactus to signal that you were in trouble?

19:31David:Because it's not like you're in Texas. It's not like, you know, there's, I don't know, do you have any cacti, cactus?

19:37Gordon:We do have cactus, but why would I be talking about them over the phone?

19:41David:I think you could be like, oh, I pricked my finger on the cactus that is kept in the bathroom of the library of the US Naval Institute. But that's not exactly the kind of thing you'd tell your wife. I must call you immediately, my darling, to tell you that I touched a cactus.

20:00Gordon:I fell, I touched a cactus. I fell on a cactus. I don't know. So he somehow uses the word cactus to signal that there are problems. And then Anne phones Colonel Sella, who is not handling him, but is still sort of involved in the case and is a friend, to say that we've got trouble. Now, Pollard himself will call his handler, Yosef Yegor, on the 19th of November and explain how alarmed he is. And Yegor says, chill out and just stall for time. And then something very, I think this is quite poor form here, Gordon. The Israelis that are involved in the case begin to leave the country. So the embassy secretary who had helped with the photocopying leaves the country on the 20th of November.

20:51Gordon:Yosef Yegor, the handler, is going to leave on the 22nd of November. That's never good. It's not a good sign. But on the 21st, this is before the handler leaves, Pollard sits down for another FBI interview about the removal of classified documents. And after that, he basically, he and Ann get in the car and they drive straight to the Israeli embassy in Washington. They go inside. They stay for about 20 minutes and they request political asylum in Israel. And this is the crazy thing. But they are unsuccessful, Gordon, in an attempt to get asylum. And Pollard apparently panics and he actually drives into the, he goes into the basement of the embassy in an attempt to seek refuge, but they're turned out.

21:37Gordon:And as he leaves the building, Pollard is arrested by the FBI and Anne is arrested the next day.

21:44David:So maybe there with Pollard having failed to get any political asylum and having been turfed out the embassy as his handlers make a run for it, basically, to get out the country. Let's take a break and we'll see what happens to Polar afterwards. This episode is brought to you by Facebook. So you were scrolling on Marketplace and there it was, the bike you'd been searching for. You sent a message and it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny, and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew. Well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for.

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22:34David:So welcome back. Jonathan Pollard has tried and failed to start an escape plan involving going to the Israeli embassy. I mean, David, what's happened there? I mean, do you think he was supposed to do that to pitch up at the embassy and be somehow smuggled out? It all sounds pretty desperate, doesn't it?

22:53Gordon:It's interesting because Rafi Etan, who's the head of the COM, this unit that's running Pollard, has basically said, and maybe, I don't know, you should have brought this up when you were meeting him about his pensioners party, Gordon. But Rafi Etan says this was not the plan and the operation was undone by an unspecified mistake on the part of one of the Israelis involved. Pretty murky. Like Rafi Etan hasn't clearly said the way it was supposed to go down. Now, I mean, as I dug into this, I thought, you know, you kind of assume, especially if you're an aficionado of spy fiction and television shows and movies, you kind of assume, oh, doesn't everybody, oh, every service has some kind of sexy exfil plan for its agents.

23:39Gordon:And I think the answer is oftentimes no. I mean, obviously, it depends on the agent. But in a case where you're potentially having to get someone out of a friendly country like the US, maybe you don't actually have a plan. Now, whatever plan, if they did have one, and they might have, I can't imagine a world where the plan is to go and hole up in the Israeli embassy. Because then you're talking about a potential political issue between the two countries.

24:12David:Yes, it becomes very public. Yeah, that is not a clandestine way of getting someone out of the country. I mean, yeah. So I agree. It sounds like desperation from Pollard, just pitching up at the embassy as he knows he's under pressure and just thinking, I've got to do something. And the Israelis by this point are like, I think they've realised, haven't they? The fact that they're leaving the country, they realise this is going to be an absolute disaster. You know, this has the, the Americans have found out about it. This is going to go south and this is going to cause us lots of problems. At that point, the last thing you want is the guy in the embassy.

24:46David:So you can see why they've turfed him out. And it means Pollard is going to be arrested. I mean, he's got no way out, has he?

24:55Gordon:But this gets at the fascinating, I guess maybe theme in the series of what do you, if you're the US government, what do you do? because he's been arrested. But you don't really want a trial that's going to put Israeli espionage in the US front and center in newspapers, and you're going to have to comment on it. And you don't want that. So what happens is Pollard is offered a plea bargain in which he'll plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit espionage, waive his right to a jury trial, And then in exchange, the prosecution says, look, we will seek a substantial prison term, but not life.

25:36Gordon:And we'll give Anne, your accomplice and wife, a lesser term because she's not the primary agent in this relationship. The deal is only offered after Pollard will submit to polygraphs and interviews and critically agree to help the damage assessment. Because that is a big question that investigators have is what did you actually compromise so we can go and fix it and plug the leak if you did?

26:06David:I mean, it's very similar to when you have some of the Cambridge spies, like you think of Anthony Blunt, who's confronted and the Brits realize he's bad. And they think we don't want a trial for publicity. But, you know, the deal is you tell us everything, everything you did so we can know what happened and what the damage was and what the kind of, you know, what the techniques and tactics of the other side were. And then we'll keep quiet. And it sounds like, I mean, it's not quite keeping quiet, but you can see that there's a deal there to be done. But it's not going to quite go to plan, is it?

26:35Gordon:Two major things happen that will sink this deal. The first one, which I think his legal team probably advised him against or discouraged, but he's a fabulous and is emotionally unstable, as we've said. Pollard goes to the press. Go to the press. So between the plea and the sentencing, which is looming, Pollard gives two exclusive interviews to Wolf Blitzer, who is then the Washington correspondent for the Jerusalem Post. I had no idea that that was his previous job before CNN. Interesting. Okay. Wolf Blitzer has written extensively about Pollard because he met him and interviewed him after he was caught.

27:21Gordon:And in these interviews, Pollard presents himself as a Jewish hero, an Israeli hero, a kind of master spy. Pollard compares himself to a downed Israeli pilot who's been captured behind enemy lines. And Pollard writes a public letter, which is printed in the Jerusalem Post, in which he calls his plea bargain a judicial crucifixion, insists his actions - Which is an interesting choice of words.

27:49David:Which is an inflammatory choice of words.

27:52Gordon:Yeah, it suggests perhaps not the right choice of words. And he argues that the Jewish community should put a stop to the ordeal that he is experiencing. to add more fuel to the fire days before the sentencing his wife and goes on 60 minutes says the couple has no regrets because their actions were the result of their moral obligation as jews now you could imagine that the prosecution which has said look you're we're gonna make this quiet you're gonna tell us exactly what you what you gave them and in exchange for your cooperation you're not gonna get life you're gonna get whatever 10 years, and then it's done.

28:28Gordon:It's quiet. It's done. It's over. And you get to have a life beyond this. You could imagine why the prosecution or how the prosecution would be somewhat frustrated by your wife going on 60 Minutes and you having all these conversations with Wolf Blitzer. And what they end up doing, what they will end up doing, is asking the court to give him a life sentence. Now, the second thing that Pollard does, which is a no-no, is that he lies to the FBI. So on the 15th of February in 1987, Wolf Blitzer publishes a piece in the Washington Post, which runs with the headline, Pollard, not a bumbler, but Israel's master spy.

29:11Gordon:And in it, Blitzer describes six categories of classified information that Pollard provided to Israel. Now, the prosecutors who were, again, still trying to get a handle on the damage assessment, they confront Pollard with this and say, did you tell, did you actually give this stuff to the Israelis and why in the world are you talking about this with Wolf Blitzer? Pollard denies it, says Wolf Blitzer's lying. And the prosecutors say, well, we're going to put you on the polygraph and get to the bottom of it. Pollard continues to say, you know, it's false. Wolf Blitzer's making it up. He's kind of slandering Wolf Blitzer in a way.

29:47David:Yeah, bad things.

29:48Gordon:Then on the polygraph, Pollard says, okay, I am now ready to at last to tell the truth. And he says, he says, because I imagine him actually just hooked up. He's got the, you know, sort of thing around his vest for the breathing. And he's got the things on his fingers for the sweat. And he's got the heartbeat monitor, you know, all this stuff. Right. And he says, okay, I'm going to come clean now. He says, yes, I did walk Wolf Blitzer through each of those six categories of information that I provided to the Israelis. And yes, it included satellite photos of chemical warfare facilities, U.S. assessments on the Palestine Liberation Organization, Soviet arms shipments to Syria, lots more.

30:26Gordon:And Pollard, so he lied to investigators about what he told Wolf Blitzer. He's also caught in a tangle of smaller lies. He told, Pollard told at least three contradictory versions of a story about offering to repay the Israeli money that he had been provided. He decided he Pollard said he was going to endow a mysterious intelligence chair somewhere with the money that the Israelis had provided him, but he had repaid none of it. So and then this is and this is the kicker Gordon. Pollard also apparently told the FBI that he would commit espionage for Israel again, if given the chance.

31:05David:I mean, this guy is about as dumb as you get in terms of like, you know, lying to the FBI, changing your story, talking to the journalists, then going and saying, yeah, do it all again. I mean, yeah. You turn me loose.

31:22Gordon:I'm going to do it again. It's not a good look. Now, into this mess, the Secretary of Defense at the time, Casper Weinberger, his staff writes up a memo, which is in part to correct what the Department of Defense saw as the sentencing judge's erroneous assumption that Pollard's espionage for an ally had not done any harm to the US. And it's very interesting because I actually don't think there's certainly other Israeli espionage cases where there's been a desire on the part of all parties to keep things quiet, right? And to just kind of minimize the public affair and be done with it. because it's kind of an embarrassing aspect of this otherwise friendly relationship.

32:07Gordon:But it's so fascinating in this case that I think because Pollard had taken so much stuff, because Pollard had gone to the press and made this a massive political issue, and because he had lied to investigators over and over again, so the US is struggling to get a handle on the damage assessment, Casper Weinberger, the Secretary of Defense, basically says, look, I'm worried that you, the judge, are going to go too easy on Pollard because he was spying for Israel. And Weinberger makes clear in a number of memos that it is difficult for me, even in the so-called year of the spy, to conceive of a greater harm to national security than that caused by the defendant, referring to Pollard.

32:52David:I mean, it's so interesting, isn't it? Because Pollard will get life in prison. And you do feel like, I mean, he brought it upon himself because he could have got a much easier deal if he had not played the games that he plays of lying and going to the press. He almost invites this. I mean, the US government did not want this to be a big deal. And, you know, there were lots of other cases, as you mentioned, you know, last time, in which people are, you know, discovered maybe passing things to the Israelis, in which it's played very quietly. But Pollard is the one who they really go for and go for life.

33:24David:But it is partly due to the damage and it's partly due to the way he plays it. And I mean, I guess he got life and that sounds like what they wanted and what he deserved for, frankly, stupidity as well as espionage.

33:37Gordon:Yeah. There was a very interesting, I think it was a New York Times piece that came out around the time of the Pollard trial. And And there was an FBI official quoted in there saying, yeah, you know, we've looked at about a dozen Israeli espionage cases over the past few years. You know, he's talking about the mid 80s. And this is the only one where this has happened. Usually, you know, charges are dropped or in a worst case, someone gets a few years in prison after submitting a plea deal to cooperate. But Pollard, I think because of the circus around this and because of the damage he did, he becomes this very awkward and tangled link in the U.S.-Israel relationship from that point forward.

34:25David:The legacy of this case is going to stretch on for decades right through to today, isn't it? Because you get, of course, the initial fallout because it's so public and U.S. officials are obviously going to talk about how angry they are. We're shocked. We're shocked. there's gambling in this casino there's spying amongst spies i mean you're right so there's there's the performative bit which is you know which we often see actually when spies get caught where politicians have to go up you know this is terrible i'm outraged and you know things basically keep going as they were but actually the pollard case is going to be different isn't it

35:00Gordon:because of the legacy yeah it is it is interesting i mean for example to compare it to a Russian espionage case where, you know, when Pollard is caught, there's no expulsion of Israeli diplomats. There's no sanctions. There's no cuts to economic or military aid. You know, if you read the accounts from the time, it does seem like there was obviously frustration inside the U.S. intelligence community with the Israelis, but it doesn't seem to have led to any rollback.

35:35David:Yeah. It doesn't change the relationship.

35:37Gordon:There's no reports on this. I could definitely see, look, if the US is sharing a number of human intelligence streams with the Israelis, maybe for six months, all of a sudden, they'll stop getting shared to register that you're frustrated. But there's no structural tap that gets turned off. There's no attempt to really punish the Israelis for what they've done. Now, Washington does demand an apology. I also found this interesting that there was a demand that the Israelis return the documents that they stole. They hand back some, but not all of them. And the Israelis characterized the operation as this kind of rogue.

36:15Gordon:Yeah, of course they do. Lakam is this rogue outfit run by Rafi Aitan. I can't believe that Rafi Aitan.

36:21David:What was he doing? Right. I can't believe he did that. The whole of the Israeli intelligence community having been probably in on it. I mean, but that's what you do. That's the game, isn't it? You get caught and you say, that guy.

36:33Gordon:That guy. That guy's a bad guy. He's up to no good. The stinker. So they do shut down the comm in 1986 in the aftermath of this. The Colonel Sella, who had been the initial contact for Pollard, he's indicted in the US. Israel does not produce him. He's actually promoted to the command of an airbase. Rafi Aitan goes on to run the pensioners party in Israel.

36:55David:Correct.

36:55Gordon:And the intel relationship, as you said, it motors on and deepens significantly in the 1990s and early 2000s, particularly when we're talking about signals intelligence. But through all of this, Pollard is this constant kind of pebble in the shoe of the relationship because he's just languishing in a U.S. prison. He's got that life sentence. But in 1995, he's granted Israeli citizenship. Several Israeli prime ministers in the 1990s, including Rabin and Netanyahu, press President Clinton for clemency for Pollard. At the 1998 Y River talks, then Prime Minister Netanyahu basically insists that Pollard's release, this is crazy, be part of the price for concessions to the Palestinians, which allegedly led CIA Director George Tenet to tell Clinton that he would resign if Pollard were freed.

38:04David:I mean, it's so interesting, firstly, that the Israelis want him out so much that they are going to tie it to the big negotiations at a presidential prime ministerial level. That's how significant they see it, which I think is, you know, it's interesting, you know, what it tells you about kind of Israel and maybe the way they see him as an agent. You know, and there is that thing, you want to get your agents out and, you know, it's good for business if you're an intelligence agency. Again, suggests perhaps it wasn't a rogue operation.

38:33Gordon:Well, in 98, Netanyahu comes out and admits for the first time that Pollard actually was an agent. So I think the idea that it was this rogue outfit, by the late 90s, the Israelis have dropped that entirely. And they're trying to negotiate to get him out.

38:48David:But it's also interesting, isn't it, that, you know, CIA Director Tenet says, you know, he's going to resign if Pollard is freed. And I think it's because you could see that psychologically within the US intelligence community, if the idea is you can betray a ton of secrets, and then get away with it. It's not a great look, is it?

39:05Gordon:So it doesn't happen. So what happened to Pollard? Well, he divorces Anne after her release. She did five years and then was divorced by Pollard. He marries a Canadian school teacher in prison who winds up waging a very tireless campaign for his release. A square in Jerusalem is named in his honor. And over time, it never becomes, I think, a major political issue in Israel, but a majority of the members of the Knesset in Israel eventually start to back calls for clemency for Pollard. Now, his sentence had a mandatory parole clause after 30 years. And so he is released in November of 2015. I actually found this shocking that he stays in the US for five years after his release.

39:57Gordon:But then he moves to Israel in 2020, where he is greeted on the tarmac upon arrival by Benjamin Netanyahu. and what else Gordon I feel like this is absolutely where this story was always going to end Jonathan Pollard has become a far right commentator and a potential far right member of the Knesset because just this year in May Pollard announced that he is entering politics he is I think to the right of Netanyahu he's been critical of Netanyahu for being too soft.

40:35David:Yeah, I mean, there is space there.

40:38Gordon:It's wild.

40:39David:Believe it or not, there is space to the right of Netanyahu, and he's there. I mean, it's wild, isn't it?

40:46Gordon:But lest any listeners think that Pollard has a strong chance of actually being elected, I did kind of go down the rabbit hole on this, Gordon. I found an Israeli political commentator who said that Pollard had about the same odds of joining the Knesset as he would if he were running to be the Pope. So he may continue to be no more than sort of a political talking head in Israel until the end of his days.

41:14David:What a fascinating story. And it is interesting on a human level. But I mean, in terms of what it all means, I think what it tells you is, I find it interesting that the Israelis did it and the consequences and the costs were quite high. but you know intelligence and running agents is a kind of cost benefit decision isn't it and and you're constantly thinking well what are the what are the benefits i get from running this agent and what are the costs if he gets caught you know and it gets discovered and the israelis clearly felt at this time that it was worth the cost or the risk of getting caught because what

41:56Gordon:he was providing them was so good and he and he volunteered and he volunteered you're right

42:00David:If you translate it to other countries as well, and you think, let's say you're the UK, where we don't spy on the US, of course we don't. Obviously. But there are things that you could imagine, a bit like Israel and the US, where we'd love to know, like, what is Donald Trump going to do in terms of tariffs? Or what's the real plans for Iran? Or what's likely to happen here or there? But if you were to speak hypothetically, as I may not have done to British intelligence officials about such a possibility, I think hypothetically they would suggest that the risks of getting caught and the fallout of doing something like that would be so great and so damaging that why would you do it?

42:38David:You know, yeah, there's a benefit in terms of knowing maybe this or that, but the costs in terms of breaking the trust of a relationship would be damaging. But it's maybe a different calculation if you're the Israelis.

42:50Gordon:Because the Israelis sit outside the structure of the five eyes, I think there is a there's a sense that even though the relationship is exceptionally close from an intelligence and security standpoint, it's not as close as the relationship between Washington and London or Washington and Canberra. So there's a there's a segment of information that the Israelis are not receiving and and a desire, I think, to fill those gaps that they occasionally meet with with espionage. I think it matters that he volunteered because it's almost like you could, if you're Rafi Etan or you're Colonel Sela or you're Yosef Yagor, any of the people involved in the case, if you have someone show up on your doorstep and say, I am totally ideologically motivated.

43:46Gordon:I love Israel. I want to work for Israel. And you have to pay me a little bit because I got money problems, but I'm your man and I want to do this. I want to work for you as a penetration inside Navy intelligence. And here's all the stuff I can give you. In some ways, it's like malpractice if you're an intelligence officer to turn that person away. I mean, Aitan actually said this. He's like, it was so good that I couldn't say no. There was just the information was too good. And there's something to that. If someone shows up on your doorstep, you might say, look, we'll deal with the politics come what may.

44:27Gordon:This stuff is so useful to us. We're going to take the risk. I also think, as we talked about in the first episode, the Israelis are continuing to spy on us. Yeah. And we spy on them. But I think it's become, like so much of the spy world, probably a little bit less human. and there's much more spying that's happening in the world of signals intelligence and digital collection and sort of technical stuff, right? That's happening more.

44:57David:Which is less emotional, isn't it? It's less emotional if you get caught, less personal. It's less about one person betraying their country and their secrets to another. It's a kind of, it's different, isn't it? It's not going to excite the passions in the same way as something like a Pollard case.

45:14Gordon:We mentioned in the first episode, the incident where, I think it was in 2019, when the Israelis got caught putting signals intelligence collectors, they're called stingrays. They basically spoof a cell phone tower and allow you to, there are ways you can use those to collect a huge amount of phone numbers, but also data off of some of the phones in some cases. The Israelis were putting those in Washington. They got caught doing it. And it's an incident that most people, even who are following this closely wouldn't know about because to your point you know if you're the fbi well you just you confiscate the equipment and you you sort of work backward to maybe what's been compromised but there isn't a human at the center of it that makes it this embarrassing affair that has political consequences you can just kind of sweep it under the rug and and move on um you know i also think the other angle here is that as cover has become harder you know that this world of ubiquitous technical surveillance we've talked about makes it harder to have a credible cover inside an embassy or a consulate.

46:22Gordon:The Israelis are probably using non-official cover, commercial covered officers all over the US to go after sensitive, whether it's tech stuff out in Silicon Valley, whether it's financial stuff in New York, whether it's politics in DC. I mean, you have a host of sort of exotically covered intelligence officers you can use to collect sensitive information or even secrets in ways where the people providing it don't even think they're committing espionage. And so I'm sure that is happening at a massive scale, but it's just not something that we see and it's not something that bubbles up to the surface because they don't get caught.

47:02David:No, that's right. And you don't have that embarrassing problem that they had in this case, where they suddenly have to clear people out of the embassy, you know, who've been running Pollard.

47:10Gordon:Nobody's driving into the basement of the Israeli embassy and asking for asylum.

47:15David:It does make you kind of realise, I think, you know, to that point, that running agents like that is very risky. But, you know, technical collection is just less emotional. And so there are kind of almost unwritten rules about what's acceptable and what's not. And I guess Pollard crossed the line, you know, and it happened, as you said, almost by accident because he was a volunteer. But it did cross a line and the consequences were serious. I think a lot of what we might think of as kind of spying or something that's at least adjacent to it, with allies, I think that the mechanism for dealing with it is oftentimes basically

47:55Gordon:accusing someone in the States of not having registered as a foreign agent. Right. Whether that's for, you know, Qatar, the UAE, South Korea, a bunch of recent cases where American officials or former officials have been caught doing something that is quite close to espionage, but isn't quite and ends up being prosecuted under the far less kind of stringent rules of the I think it's the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Right. As opposed to the Espionage Act, which is what Pollard was prosecuted under.

48:29David:Yeah, it's the difference between kind of influence and interference and espionage. So you get people who are trying to influence politics and interfere sometimes even, or push political debate, but it's not quite the same as the handcart of files.

48:43Gordon:The handcart of files, you get the book thrown at you for that. Yeah.

48:49David:Well, I mean, I guess as we end, we should say that it is very fortunate that the US and UK will never have this problem and that we don't spy on each other because, of course, we are entirely aligned as allies, never having any issues between us. And we are part of the Five Eyes and we are going to be looking, I think, coming up at the Five Eyes and at the roots of the US-UK relationship, Bletchley Park and how it all began. So it's a chance to maybe raise that question about how does that really work and do friends really never spy on friends and how do those relationships and how does the trust work deep in that really special relationship?

49:27David:so uh those episodes i think are coming up so do join the declassified club if you want to get early access to those and to everything else we've got coming up in the next few months got a lot of interesting stuff uh in the pipeline so uh do join at the rest is classified.com but otherwise we'll see you next time we'll see you next time