Gideon's Spies полностью

In prison, Pollard divorced his first wife, Anne (who had been sentenced to five years imprisonment for being his accomplice), and converted to Orthodox Judaism. In 1994 he married, in prison, a Toronto schoolteacher named Elaine Zeitz. Esther Pollard, as she was from then on known, became the spearhead of the campaign to have her husband freed. In April 2004, she repeated a familiar theme. “The issue of Jonathan concerns every Jew and every law-abiding citizen. The issues are much bigger than Jonathan and myself. We are writing a page of Jewish history.”

An indication of how much more was written on that page of history has surfaced. Ari Ben-Menashe, a former intelligence adviser to the Israeli government who is now a Canadian citizen running a political consultancy in Montreal, strongly opposes Pollard’s gaining his freedom. “The still unresolved question is whether Pollard’s thefts were also passed to China,” said Ben-Menashe. “Much of what Pollard knows is still in his head. A man like that doesn’t lose his touch because he is locked away.”

But in April 2004, Meir Dagan had learned that the U.S. deputy attorney general, Larry Thompson, had suggested Pollard’s freedom should be seen in the context of the “big picture” in the Middle East. It was an argument that did not go unnoticed by Pollard supporters. Recently, 112 out of 120 members of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, signed a petition demanding Pollard’s release on “humanitarian grounds. Washington has double standards, releasing dangerous Palestinian prisoners while keeping Pollard incarcerated.”

Pollard was granted Israeli citizenship in 1996 to enable the Tel Aviv government to bring further pressure to bear. Two years later, a U.S.brokered peace accord between Israel and the PLO nearly foundered when the then Israeli prime minister, Benyamin Netanyahu, tried to link the agreement with the release of Pollard. President Clinton held firm, Israel backed off.

A stumbling block to any new move to obtain Pollard’s freedom could be a statement Bill Hamilton, president of Inslaw—the creators of the Promis software—made. “Judge Hogan should also be made aware that the FBI office in New Mexico conducted a foreign counterintelligence investigation of Robert Maxwell in 1984 for selling Promis in New Mexico, which is the headquarters for the two main U.S. intelligence agencies on nuclear warfare, the Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories. Although the copy of the FBI Investigative Report that Inslaw obtained under the Freedom of Information Act was heavily redacted by the government for national security reasons, the text that is still able to be read reveals that the FBI investigation was based on a complaint from two employees at the Sandia National Laboratory.”

Hamilton’s claims are said by Gunderson to be “the real smoking gun that will put the whole Pollard business into its proper context.” They will also bring Rafi Eitan’s latest activities into the spotlight.

By April 2004, Israel’s legendary spymaster had made several secret trips to the United States. FBI agents tracking him admitted they were unable to question Eitan, who had been Jonathan Pollard’s controller, because he now traveled on an Israeli diplomatic passport. His visits had been to supervise the mobilization of thousands of sayanim—the name comes from the Hebrew for “to help”—many of whom received weapons training during their military service. Others had worked in U.S. military intelligence. A number were currently employed by police forces across the country. They had been briefed by Eitan on how to update the defense systems of Jewish banks, synagogues, religious schools, and other Jewish-owned institutions.

“While their allegiance to their birth country cannot be doubted, each sayan recognizes a greater loyalty: the mystical one to Israel and a need to help protect it from its enemies,” Meir Amit, a former Mossad chief, has said. He created the sayanim secret force. Known as Israel’s “invisible army,” its members are vetted by professional Mossad intelligence officers, katsas, before being recruited to protect Israel’s many interests in the United States. But the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI have seen it as a vote of no confidence in their ability to protect those interests.

On his trips, Eitan traveled as “adviser on security and counterterrorism” to Israel’s prime minister, Ariel Sharon, a longtime friend. In early 2004, Eitan had visited the Los Alamos area, home of America’s cutting-edge nuclear technology. In 1985, he had arranged to sell to Los Alamos’s Sandia Laboratories a copy of the Israeli version of Promis software. The program’s “trapdoor” enabled Israel to learn something of Sandia’s work in providing U.S. nuclear submarines with the latest computer technology. Pollard provided further details, which are contained in Caspar Weinberger’s still secret affidavit.