Israeli Cabinet Minister Spied for U.S. - New U.S. Docs Reveal

Hamodia Staff - Israel News - Hamodia - June 23, 2004
[Original title: Was There An American Spy In the Israeli Government?]

Justice4JP Prefacing Note:

The article below describes newly-released American government documents which reveal, that around the time of the Six Day War, the U.S. ran a senior Israeli cabinet minister as a spy. This revelation puts the lie (once again) to America's self-righteous insistence that Israel broke a sacred trust between the two countries by running a spy in Washington. The Americans continue to use this falsehood to justify their harsh treatment of Jonathan Pollard and the grossly disproportionate sentence he is serving. In spite this and of other obvious contradictions which have surfaced over the years, such as the cases of IDF officer Yossi Amit, and Angie Kielczynski- both are Israelis who spied for the U.S. - Israel has never repudiated the American lies which keep Pollard in prison.

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With all the hubbub last week about Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his sons, Attorney General Menachem Mazuz's decision, the disengagement, and all the rest, a stormy subject that in any other country would have made headlines, was shunted aside.

It turns out that according to papers from 1967 made public recently by the U.S. Administration, the U.S. had a senior spy in the Israeli government at that time, apparently one of the ministers.

The minister in question would pass on a steady stream of information to the Americans about inside doings in Jerusalem.

In the United States, it is permitted to release old U.S. government documents after a certain number of years pass. So it is that documents from President Lyndon Johnson's administration have now been approved for release. Those sifting through the sea of papers that were made public found U.S. intelligence evidence saying that during the Six Day War the Americans knew everything the Israelis were doing, thanks to that high-ranking source, who also passed on army and government documents.

The communication between the Israeli personality who passed on the important information and the Americans went through the U.S. military attaché at the embassy in Tel Aviv. The attaché goes on at some length about the excellent material he got from his "source" naturally without mentioning his name.

That information included Israeli preparations for war, the attack on the USS Liberty, and other material. The "source" told the Americans that the Israeli bomber that flew over the ship noticed for certain that it flew an American flag and reported it, but the Israelis decided to attack anyway.

The material released in Washington shows that the Americans knew from their "source" that the Israelis were lying when they said that they had credible evidence that the Egyptians were preparing to attack and therefore Israel was seeking to launch a preemptive attack.

The documents don't shed any light on whether it was the American 'source" who told the Americans or whether it was someone else who told them that year that Israel did not yet have nuclear weapons. The Pentagon people reveal in these documents, that at the time Israel was very close to having them, and a capability of producing additional nuclear bombs every year, but it is unclear whether they learned this from the "source" they cultivated in the government or not.

Either way, most of the senior ministers from that period who could have been the "source" for the Americans are no longer living. Thirty-seven years after that war, no one in Israel is going to go looking for the American spy here who passed on firsthand material. But it's worth knowing that there was such a person.

J4JP Adds A Cautionary Note:

To conclude that such an operation was a one-shot deal which ended with the death or retirement of the Israeli "source" in question, is neither wise nor well-reasoned. If the Americans successfully recruited a "source" at such a high level of the Israeli government once, and maintained that source for years without detection, it is only a matter of course that they would do so again, and continue to do so. It should be noted (as it is in any decent spy novel) that one of the tasks of an agent before retiring or resigning is to identify likely successors to the job and to point out any potential candidates to their handlers. The handlers then make contact independently to recruit new candidates. Therefore the conclusion drawn in the article above, that the revelation of a senior cabinet minister who acted as a spy for the U.S. years ago is interesting to note but otherwise meaningless, is simply not consistent with what is essentially standard procedure for recruitment in the intelligence community.

It behooves the Government of Israel to respond swiftly and strongly to these reports and to investigate thoroughly. Only by knowing precisely where the breach occurred in the past, can the trail be traced to current potential breaches. Perhaps this may explain why the government of Ariel Sharon has been so unwilling to investigate Angie Kielczynski (a.k.a. Joseph Barak) who is now living freely in Israel, despite his own open admission that he was, for many years, a spy for the U.S. -- for fear of what such an investigation might reveal about others in government today...