Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad

by Gordon Thomas

  On October 23, 1983, monitored closely by Mossad agents, the truck was driven at full speed into the headquarters of the U.S. Eighth Marine Battalion situated near Beirut Airport. Two hundred forty-one marines died.

  The reaction in the upper echelons of Mossad, according to a former officer, Victor Ostrovsky, was, “They wanted to stick their nose into this Lebanon thing, let them pay the price.”

  That attitude had further encouraged Rafi Eitan to think seriously about targeting the United States. Its scientific community was the most advanced in the world, its military technology without equal. For LAKAM to get its hands on even some of that data would be a tremendous coup. The first hurdle to overcome would be the hardest: finding an informer sufficiently well placed to provide the material.

  Using the list of U.S. sayanim he had helped compile during his time with Mossad, he put out the word that he was interested in hearing of anyone in the United States who had a scientific background and was known to be pro-Israeli. For months it produced nothing.

  Then, in April 1984, Aviem Sella, a colonel in the Israeli air force who was on a sabbatical to study computer science at New York University, went to a party given by a wealthy Jewish gynecologist on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Sella was a minor celebrity among the city’s Jewish community as the pilot who had led an air attack three years before that had destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactor.

  At the party was a diffident young man with a shy smile who seemed ill at ease among the small set of doctors, lawyers, and bankers. He told Sella his name was Jonathan Pollard and that the only reason he had come was to meet him. Embarrassed by such obvious adulation, Sella made polite small talk and was about to move on when Pollard revealed he was not only a committed Zionist, but worked for U.S. naval intelligence. In no time the astute Sella had learned that Pollard was stationed at the Anti-Terrorist Alert Center in one of the navy’s most secret establishments at Suitland, Maryland. Pollard’s duties included monitoring all classified material on global terrorist activities. So important was the work that he had the highest possible U.S. intelligence community security clearance.

  Sella could not believe what he was hearing, especially when Pollard began to give specific details about incidents where the U.S. intelligence community was not cooperating with its Israeli counterpart. Sella began to wonder if Pollard was part of a sting operation by the FBI to try to recruit an Israeli.

  Yet there was something about the intense Pollard that rang true. That night Sella called Tel Aviv and spoke to his air force intelligence commander. The officer switched the call to the Israeli air force chief of staff. Sella was ordered to develop his contact with Pollard.

  They began to meet: at the skating rink at Rockefeller Plaza; in a coffee shop on Forty-eighth Street; in Central Park. Each time Pollard handed over secret documents to confirm the truth of what he said. Sella couriered the material to Tel Aviv, enjoying the frisson of being caught up in an important intelligence operation. He was therefore understandably stunned to be told that Mossad knew all about Pollard, who had actually offered to spy for them two years previously and had been rejected as “unstable.” A Mossad katsa in New York had also described Pollard as “lonely … with an unrealistic view about Israel.”

  Unwilling to relinquish his role in an operation certainly more exciting than sitting before a classroom computer keyboard, Sella looked around for a way to keep matters alive. During his time in New York he had come to know the science attaché at the Israeli consulate in the city. His name was Yosef Yagur. He was Rafi Eitan’s head of all LAKAM operations in the United States.

  Sella invited Yagur to dinner with Pollard. Over the meal Pollard repeated that Israel was being denied information to defend itself against Arab terrorists because the United States did not wish to upset its relations with Arab oil producers.

  That night, using a secure consulate phone, Yagur telephoned Rafi Eitan. It was in the early hours in Tel Aviv but Eitan was still at work in his study. It was almost dawn when he put down the phone. He was exultant: he had his informer.

  For the next three months Yagur and Sella assiduously cultivated Pollard and his future wife, Anne Henderson. They took them to expensive restaurants, Broadway shows, first-night films. Pollard continued to hand over important documentation. Rafi Eitan could only marvel at how good the material was. He decided it was time to meet the source.

  In November 1984, Sella and Yagur invited Pollard and Henderson to accompany them on an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris. Yagur told Pollard the vacation was “a small reward for all you are doing for Israel.” They all flew first-class and were met by a chauffeured car and driven to the Bristol Hotel. Waiting for them was Rafi Eitan.

  By the end of the night Rafi Eitan had finalized all the practical arrangements for Pollard to continue his treachery. No longer would matters continue in their free-and-easy way. Sella would fade from the picture, his role over. Yagur would become Pollard’s official handler. A proper delivery system was worked out for documents to be handed over. Pollard would deliver them to the apartment of Irit Erb, a mousyhaired secretary at the Washington embassy. A high-speed Xerox had been installed in her kitchen to copy the material. Pollard’s visits would be spaced between those to a number of designated car washes. While Pollard’s car was being cleaned, he would hand over documents to Yagur, whose own car would be undergoing a similar process. Concealed beneath the dash was a battery-operated copier. Both Erb’s apartment and the car-wash facilities were close to Washington’s National Airport, making it easier for Yagur to fly back and forth to New York. From the consulate he transmitted the material by secure fax to Tel Aviv.

  Rafi Eitan returned to Tel Aviv to await results. They exceeded his wildest expectations: details of Russian arms deliveries to Syria and other Arab states, including the precise location of SS-21 and SA-5 missiles; maps and satellite photographs of Iraqi, Syrian, and Iranian arsenals, including chemical and biological manufacturing plants.

  Rafi Eitan quickly obtained a clear picture of U.S. intelligence-gathering methods, not only in the Middle East, but in South Africa. Pollard had provided reports from CIA operatives which provided a blueprint for the entire U.S. intelligence network within the country. One document contained a detailed account of how South Africa had managed to detonate a nuclear device on September 14, 1979, in the southern end of the Indian Ocean. The Pretoria government had steadfastly denied it had become a nuclear power. Rafi Eitan arranged for Mossad to pass over copies of all material relating to South Africa to Pretoria, virtually destroying the CIA network. Twelve operatives were forced to hurriedly leave the country.

  During the next eleven months, Jonathan Pollard continued to asset-strip U.S. intelligence. Over one thousand highly classified documents, 360 cubic feet of paper, were transmitted to Israel. There Rafi Eitan devoured them before passing over the material to Mossad. The data enabled Nahum Admoni to brief Shimon Peres’s coalition government on how to respond to Washington’s Middle East policies in a manner previously impossible. One note taker at the Sunday cabinet meetings in Jerusalem claimed that “listening to Admoni was the next best thing to sitting in the Oval Office. We not only knew what was the very latest thinking in Washington on all matters of concern to us, but we had sufficient time to respond before making a decision.”

  Pollard had become a crucial factor in the mysteries of Israeli policymaking and the intricacies of choosing options. Rafi Eitan authorized an Israeli passport for Pollard in the name of Danny Cohen, as well as a generous monthly stipend. In return he asked Pollard to provide details about the electronic eavesdropping activities of the National Security Agency (NSA) in Israel and the bugging methods used against the Israeli embassy in Washington and its other diplomatic stations within the United States.

  Before Pollard could supply the information he was arrested, on November 21, 1985, outside the Israeli embassy in Washington. Hours later Yagur, Sella, and the embassy secretary in Washington had all caught an El
Al flight from New York to Tel Aviv before the FBI could stop them. In Israel they disappeared into the protective arms of a grateful intelligence community. Pollard was sentenced to life imprisonment and his wife to five years.

  In 1999, Pollard could draw comfort from the tireless way powerful Jewish groups lobbied for his release. The Conference of Major American Jewish Organizations, a consortium of over fifty groups, had launched a sustained campaign to have him set free on the grounds that he had not committed high treason against the United States “because Israel was then and remains today a close ally.” Equally influential Jewish religious groups such as the Reform Union of American Hebrew Congregations and the Orthodox Union, lent support. The Harvard Law School professor Alan M. Dershowitz, who had been Pollard’s attorney, said there was nothing to show the spy had actually compromised “the nation’s intelligence-gathering capabilities or betrayed worldwide intelligence data.”

  Alarmed at what they realized was a skilled public relations campaign orchestrated from Israel, the U.S. intelligence community took an unusual step. They moved out of the shadows into the public domain, setting out the facts of Pollard’s treachery. It was both a bold and dangerous decision. It would not only cast a light on sensitive material but also mobilize the evermore powerful Jewish lobby to attack them. They had seen what it had done to others in the frenetic atmosphere of Washington. A reputation could be discreetly tarnished over a late drink at an embassy between acts at the Kennedy Center or over a quiet Georgetown dinner.

  Those intelligence men feared that Clinton—“in one of his quixotic moments,” a senior CIA officer told me—would free Pollard before he left office if that would ensure Israel entered into a peace settlement and give Clinton a last foreign policy success. The CIA’s director at the time of writing, George Tenet, had warned the president “that Pollard’s release will demoralize the intelligence community,” Clinton was reported to have merely said: “We’ll see, we’ll see.”

  In Tel Aviv, Rafi Eitan has closely followed every move, telling friends that “should the day come when Jonathan makes it to Israel, I’d be happy to have a cup of coffee with him.”

  Meantime Eitan continued to rejoice at the success of another operation he had also mounted against the United States. It led to Israel’s becoming the first nuclear power in the Middle East.

  CHAPTER 5

  GIDEON’S NUCLEAR SWORD

  In the darkness of a Tel Aviv cinema in 1945, Rafi Eitan had watched the birth of the nuclear age over Hiroshima. While all around him young soldiers whistled and cheered at the newsreel footage of the devastated Japanese city, he had only two thoughts. Would Israel ever possess such a weapon? Suppose her Arab neighbors obtained one first?

  From time to time down the years the questions had surfaced in his mind. If Egypt had had a nuclear bomb, it would have won the Suez War and there would have been no Six Day War or Yom Kippur War. Israel would have been a nuclear desert. With a nuclear weapon, Israel would be invincible.

  In those days, for an operative whose work was primarily concerned with killing terrorists, such strategic questions were only of academic interest and answering them was the province of others. However, when he took command of LAKAM, he began to seriously consider the matter. He now only had one question: Could he help to provide Israel with a nuclear shield?

  Reading long into the night, fueled by the forty vitamin capsules he swallowed each day, he discovered how Israel’s politicians and scientists had initially been divided over “going nuclear.” In the files were details of angry exchanges within cabinet meetings, the bitter monologues of scientists, and always the overpowering voice of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion cutting through the anguish, protests, and long-winded arguments.

  Trouble had begun in 1956, when France had sent a twenty-four-megawatt reactor to Israel. Ben-Gurion announced its purpose was to provide a “pumping station” to turn the desert into an “agricultural paradise by desalinating a billion cubic gallons of seawater annually.” The claim promptly led to the resignation of six of the seven members of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, protesting the reactor was actually intended to be the precursor of “political adventurism which will unite the world against us.” Israel’s leading military strategists supported them. Yigal Allon, a hero of the War of Independence, roundly condemned the “nuclear option”; Yitzhak Rabin, who would soon become the IDF chief of staff, was equally vocal in his protest. Even Ariel Sharon, then Israel’s leading hawk, vehemently opposed a nuclear arsenal. “We have the best conventional forces in the region.”

  Ignoring all opposition, Ben-Gurion gave the order for the reactor to be sited in the Negev Desert, close to the bleak, sand-blown settlement at Dimona. Once a staging post on the camel caravan route between Cairo and Jerusalem, Dimona had long become a place time had passed by. Few maps marked its position in the desert south of Tel Aviv. But from now on no mapmaker would be allowed to pinpoint the location of Israel’s first faltering steps into the nuclear age.

  Dimona’s silver dome—beneath which was the reactor—rose above the desert heat. Kirya le Mehekar Gariny, Dimona’s Hebrew name, employed over 2,500 scientists and technicians. They worked within the most fortified plant on earth. The sand around the perimeter fences was continuously checked for signs of intruders. Pilots knew that any aircraft flying within a five-mile air exclusion zone could be shot down. Engineers had bulldozed an eighty-foot-deep chamber to house the reactor, part of an underground complex known as Machon Two. At its core was the separating/reprocessing plant that had been labeled “textile machinery” when shipped from France.

  By itself the reactor could not provide Israel with a nuclear bomb. To produce one required fissionable material, uranium or plutonium. The handful of nuclear powers had agreed among themselves never to provide as much as a gram of either substance to all those outside their exclusive “club.” Imposing though it was, the reactor at Dimona was little more than a showpiece until it received fissionable materials.

  Three months after the reactor had been installed, a small nuclear material processing company opened for business in a converted World War II steel plant in the unappealing town of Apollo, Pennsylvania. The company was called the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation, Numec. Its chief executive was Dr. Salman Shapiro.

  On LAKAM’s computer database of prominent American Jews with a scientific background, Shapiro was also listed as a prominent fund-raiser for Israel. Rafi Eitan knew he had found a potential answer to how to provide the Dimona reactor with fissionable material. He ordered a full check made into the background of Shapiro and every member of the plant staff. The investigation was entrusted to the katsa in Washington.

  The inquiry launched, Rafi Eitan continued to immerse himself in a story that had switched from the desert heat of Dimona to the cool corridors of the White House.

  Among the data the Washington katsa had sent was a copy of a memo written on February 20, 1962, by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission to Shapiro, bluntly warning that the company’s “failure to comply with security regulations may be punishable as provided by law, including the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 and by the espionage laws.”

  The threat increased Rafi Eitan’s feeling he may have found a way into the U.S. nuclear industry. Numec appeared to be a company not only with poor security, but also lax bookkeeping and a management that left a great deal to be desired by America’s nuclear watchdog. Those very deficiencies made the company an attractive target.

  The son of an Orthodox rabbi, Salman Shapiro’s brilliance had already carried him far. At Johns Hopkins University he had obtained his doctorate in chemistry by the age of twenty-eight. His capacity for hard work had seen him become an important member of the nuclear research and development laboratory at Westinghouse; the corporation was contracted to the United States Navy to develop submarine reactors. Checks on Shapiro’s personal background revealed some of his relatives had been Holocaust victims and Shapiro, in “his typical discreet
way,” had provided several million dollars for the Technion Institute in Haifa that offered tuition in science and engineering.

  In 1957 Shapiro had left Westinghouse and set up Numec. It had twenty-five stockholders, all openly sympathetic to Israel. Shapiro found himself head of a small company in an aggressive cutthroat industry. Nevertheless, Numec had won a number of contracts to recover enriched uranium, a process that usually led to the loss of a quantity of uranium during the salvage operation. There was no way of telling how great or when the loss had taken place. The revelation made Rafi Eitan pop his vitamins with even more satisfaction.

  He continued to read how the already uneasy relationship between Israel and the United States over the desire of the Jewish state to become a nuclear power increased when Ben-Gurion traveled to Washington in 1960. At a series of meetings with State Department officials, he was bluntly told that for Israel to possess nuclear weapons would affect the balance of power in the Middle East. In February 1961, President John F. Kennedy wrote to Ben-Gurion suggesting that Dimona should be regularly inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

  Alarmed, Ben-Gurion flew to New York to meet with Kennedy at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. The Israeli leader was “very worried” about what he saw as “relentless American pressures.” But Kennedy was firm: there had to be an inspection. Ben-Gurion gave in with what little grace he could muster. He returned home convinced “a Catholic in the White House is bad news for Israel.” The prime minister turned to the one man in Washington he could trust, Abraham Feinberg, a Zionist supporter of Israel’s nuclear aspirations.