After the period following his arrest, Sperber raised his head and began fiercely defending himself. He strongly denied ever belonging to any intelligence service, explaining that he could well have been in contact with secret agents, without being one himself. Yet there were still the methods that he used to pass over information, methods that only a spy could know. Sperber claimed that it was the Cold War climate and the isolation of the GDR that had forced him into it, saying that his fellow East German scientists were not able to travel freely. He therefore came to their aid by sending them documents that they could have easily obtained themselves, had they been able to travel to France. The documents were consequently not secret, but merely papers on theoretical physics.
Sperber counterattacked further by claiming that scientists had the right to communicate with their colleagues around the world: science, he said, was supranational. This still does not explain the spy methods used, but he declared that he was merely trying to prevent a possible breach of secrecy by avoiding the postal service. But if the documents were not secret, then what was there to fear?
Clearly the East German scientist's defence was not entirely convincing. In any case, both he and his supporters did not let it go, pointing out there that was no article of law that prohibiting sending a letter by post written that had been written in invisible ink. Neither was there a ban on listening to the radio! Sperber had been accused of receiving coded messages via radio, messages that had been sent by the East German secret services. Last but not least, however, Sperber loudly proclaimed that he had never harmed the interests of France.
His arguments were credible enough for hundreds of renowned scientists to come to his rescue by signing a petition calling for his immediate release and denouncing the climate of ‘spy mania' that had been generated by the whole affair. Yet Sperber remained in prison and as he continued to deny being a spy, he refused to entertain the idea of a spy exchange between France and the East.
A genuine judicial marathon now began.When Sperber was arrested the State Security Court still existed, before which he had appear. However, the court was removed in 1981 by the Left because it was considered unnecessary and so the physicist was instead to be tried before a military court. Just before its removal the State Security Court had recognised that Sperber had not divulged any national defence secrets.
Sperber avoided facing a military tribunal and was taken instead to the Court of European Justice as he had been held for more than three years without a trial. He was released on bail in 1983 and after many legal challenges, he appeared before the Penal Court in Paris in 1990, eleven years after his original arrest. He was sentenced to twelve years imprisonment, but the outcry from the scientific community was so strong that he was released after six months. The judgement was reconsidered again in late 1991, but this time Sperber was acquitted - after he had spent nearly five years in prison altogether.
Despite the urgings of Sperber's lawyers, the main accuser, Stiller, never made an appearance due to the fact that he had undergone plastic surgery and consequently no one could see his new face. The judge could have requested that he appear behind closed doors, but even if Stiller had not appeared in court itself, he may still have revealed some uncomfortable truths: his double agent situation for one, but also the fact that Sperber was not really a spy, or at least in the sense that one might generally think.
There is no doubt that Sperber had been recruited by Markus Wolf. Once he arrived in France, however, he was only concerned about his research and gave up being the spy he was supposed to be.Yet he was still being kept on by his East German employers. He therefore needed to pretend to provide them with something, which explains why he sent them non-classified documents using the full range of spy techniques that he had been taught. To the GDR it looked like he was still fulfilling his mission, without actually betraying his adopted country.
Jean Guisnel and Bernard Violet98
Since the early 1970s the DST regularly brings researchers together - 15,000 a year - in lecture halls to try and install a minimum sense of a ‘culture of secrecy’. The problem was that the scientists were reticent and conversely, demanded on their part even larger exchanges with research facilities in every field from all around the world.The heads of the intelligence services would pull their hair out when they saw scientists persisting in opening the doors of their laboratories and research centres to their foreign counterparts.
Of the 80,000 visitors and foreign trainees who came to France under this pretence in 1986, the DST controlled 34,000, with 800 coming from the USSR and 2,000 from Japan, of which 700 had shown a particular interest in the Commission for Atomic Energy.
[Later these two journalists would assign this quote to Maurice Bernard, the director of research and studies at the Polytechnic School.]
Communication was the key: you had to know what other scientists had discovered and then learn what they deemed to be important even faster. In essence, the research is transparent with a global reach.The results are that an institution such as a multinational company like IBM, or a nation such as the USSR, who both have their own strategic interest in carrying out research, have to give greater freedom of communication to their scientists, however great the risks, be they commercial or political, that that freedom poses to the corresponding entity. History has shown that the deprivation of freedom will stifle all research in years to come.
Chapter 18
Pollard: the Spy amongst friends
In 2001, an extensive Israeli intelligence network was dismantled in the United States. It comprised of more than 100 alleged fine-arts students, who were, in fact, agents with links to advanced technology companies. The fake students were quietly arrested by the FBI and the majority were subsequently expelled, with only a dozen or so remaining imprisoned in the United states.
The FBI neither confirmed nor denied the information when it was revealed by an investigator for the American Fox News channel. Naturally, the Israeli authorities vehemently denied it. However, Fox News is generally considered to be very close to the conservative Right and therefore on the side of President Bush. It may therefore be that Washington approved or even encouraged what was an embarrassing revelation for Israel. What is even more interesting is that the arrests of the Israeli agents took place during the Summer of 2001, just before the events of 11 September. Some of the agents in the Israeli network had visited the places where the suspected Al-Qaida members responsible for diverting the planes had lived. Was this just a coincidence? If not, what were the Israeli spies doing? Were they watching future terrorists? If so, did they have information about the planned attacks? Again, if this is true then why did not Israel, which is often jokingly referred to as the 51st state of the United States, warn its best friend?
There are many troubling questions that boost what is a very thorny and sensitive issue regarding Israeli spying in America. This is because there were precedents that had already caused a stir. The Pollard Affair, for example, which was revealed in 1985 by the US Secretary of Defense, Caspar Weinberger, is considered one of the most serious spy stories in US history!
If the issue of Israeli spying activity in the US is so sensitive, it is because the two countries had very close ties, not to mention the fact that there was a community of 6 million Jewish people living in North America. Israeli intelligence was often tempted to recruit from the Jewish diaspora, leading to the issue of dual loyalty: loyalty to one's country and the desire to help the Jewish state. This was a very serious question as this helped feed the suspicions of an entire community and the spread of anti-Semitism.
At least officially, the Israeli services tried to avoid appealing to American Jews for espionage matters. In reality, however, it was quite the contrary. American Jews often held prominent places in administrations, businesses and the media, not to mention the intelligence services. It was therefore tempting to offer them to put aside the American citizenship and remind them that their first priority should be to the
help Israel. Of course, this was significant for those willing to betray their true country, but the Israelis had a very strong argument to convince them: they told them that the Americans were keeping secrets from them, especially information essential for the security of Israel. It was therefore the duty of future agents to collect this information, without feeling that they were betraying anyone.
There were many examples of this. In 1960 it was discovered that the owner of a uranium treatment plant was providing information to the Israeli consulate. In 1977, the deputy director of the US Air Force was dismissed: he had been sending classified information to Israel. In the 1980s a CIA advisor was dismissed for the same reasons and a manufacturer, who was also a NATO advisor, was accused of illegally exporting atomic bomb detonators to Israel. There are at least another forty similar cases of the same.
Such acts of disloyalty were therefore not as rare as one might have originally imagined. Morality does not exist in the world of intelligence. What is more, Israel was able to make serious breaches to its alliance with the US when its own interests commanded it. In 1967, during the Six Day War, Israeli forces did not hesitate to attack a US navy ship that was sailing too close to its shores: more than thirty sailors on board perished. However, most of these cases were classified and have not been pursued further. Besides, it was important to look after the Israeli ally who was much needed in the Middle East. This why the Pollard Affair was the most spectacular, mainly because it was made public.
There was definitely an American desire behind this disclosure of information. Having said that, the case was so big that it could not be kept quiet or hidden away like so many others. It is likely that in making the affair public, the Americans wanted to send some kind of warning to the Israelis. Furthermore, even within the government, not all minsters were on the same wavelength. If President Reagan was decidedly pro-Israel (it was under his presidency that several agreements promoting military cooperation were signed, with $3.5 billion donated to Israel every year), the same cannot be said for other members of the White House administration. For example, the Secretary of State for Defense, Caspar Weinberger, was certainly not pro-Israel. He was to play a big role in this case and one might even suggest that he was not a complete stranger to the revelations made in the press.
Jonathan Pollard was an employee of the US Naval Intelligence Service and thus under the command of Weinberger. Coming from a Jewish family that had settled in Indiana, the relative affluence of his family had allowed him to study at a good university. Yet he was a very strange character and had trouble separating truth from fiction. He was an inveterate liar and a fantasist, he even told his friends at Stamford University that he had links with Mossad or that he was the son of a former CIA agent.
The young man was obviously already obsessed with the secret services. More worryingly, he also had a serious drug addiction, with those who knew him well even arguing that it was cocaine. This meant he was someone who was not only not very unbalanced mentally, but also led a lot of people to be suspicious of him.
After university, Pollard tried to join the CIA but was rejected: his lie detector test was disastrous and he had clearly underestimated his drug problem. So Pollard turned to the navy, which also had an intelligence unit. Any investigation into his personal life had to be brief, if not botched, as his application was accepted. After all, maybe the recruiting officers felt that the subordinate analyst position he was offered would not give him access to any secret data.
Yet Pollard proved to be a very good analyst. After the terrible attack on the US Marine's building in Beirut, he was promoted and transferred to a new organisation that acted as a terrorism warning centre, close to Washington, which was answerable to the US Navy.
In 1984 he was promoted again and now looked at ‘threat analysis'. This meant that he had access to terrorism information deemed ‘classified' or ‘top secret', which came from all branches of the US intelligence network. It also allowed him to see the top secret databases of these organisations. Information that would go far beyond the strict framework of terrorism...
Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman99
How Pollard's American employers could ignore his strange behaviour and his boasts and his lies as a student remains a mystery. Pollard had unsuccessfully requested to join the CIA in 1977, two years before he joined the Navy. The DIS, the investigative department of the Ministry of Defence, made its routine background checks before enlisting him in the navy intelligence: they questioned his father as well as some former classmates from Fletcher High School. But the CIA did not provide the file that they had on Pollard, which concluded by saying that he was ‘an inveterate liar, a show off, a zealous Zionist and a drug addict'. In 1981, the Navy restricted his access to secret documents due to his psychiatric problems as evidenced by his bizarre behaviour. Pollard even claimed to have a friend in South African intelligence, but his bosses soon discovered this was a lie when the man in question came on an official visit to the US. They invited Pollard to see a psychiatrist, but he spent six months battling the administration and finally had the decision annulled on the grounds that they had no concrete evidence against him.
In 1984, during a party at the home of a Jewish businessman from New York, Pollard met a colonel in the Israeli Air Force, Aviem Sella. The meeting was certainly not a coincidence. Sella was a brilliant pilot who had come to the US to study computer science. Pollard was very impressed with him, a man who had had countless military exploits in Israel. There was now a real-life hero in front of him! Yet the hero was to make him a spy: Sella, the brilliant Israeli officer, was also occasionally linked to his country's secret services. The Israelis had been keeping an eye on Pollard for many years, and now believed the time was right to recruit him.
The service behind this endeavour was at that time relatively unknown: the Lekem was a secret Israeli intelligence organisation that mainly dealt with gathering scientific information. It had been created on the initiative of Shimon Peres while he had been Defence Minister, and played a key role in the development of Israel's nuclear programme. In 1984 the Lekem was led by the legendary Rafi Eitan, or ‘Dirty Rafi' as he was familiarly known. This nickname came from when he fled through the sewers after an attack against British forces, in the war that preceded the creation of Israel. Eitan, who was also a protege of Ariel Sharon, is perhaps best-known for leading the commando group that kidnapped Eichmann.
So why was it Lekem who had to recruit Pollard? This was a secret organisation that was primarily interested in scientific research. There are two reasons: firstly, Eitan never refused the opportunity to trump another Israeli intelligence agency. Secondly, Pollard was of great interest to them: the intelligence services of the US Navy were in possession of countless bits of technological information, such as codes, procedures, trade secrets etc., as well as other valuable data.
The privileged relationship that the US shared with Israel should have piqued his conscience, but ‘Dirty Rafi' had no such qualms. For him, only the outcome mattered and he was convinced that despite the agreements reached between the two countries, they [the Americans] were continuing to hold back vital information. Eitan played on the fact that Lekem did not officially exist: only the highest Israeli authorities knew of its operations.
At the time, it was a government of national unity at the controls. Shamir was the Foreign Secretary, Rabin for defence, and Shimon Peres, who was responsible for the creation of Lekem, was Prime Minister. It is therefore likely that the Prime Minister covered up the operation and afterwards informed the other two. Of course, the Israeli government would later deny knowing anything about the whole affair. But that is the rule: whenever something goes wrong, always blame it on the lower ranks.
There is further evidence of the Israeli government's duplicity in this case: the nature of the information provided by Pollard could leave no doubt of its American origin. Yet valuable information such as this had to be communicated to the authorities, on the condition that t
hey would then exploit it to good effect. Therefore, Peres and the others could not ignore the fact that Eitan had a source in the US...
After this first contact with Sella, Pollard was put to the test and asked to prove how effective he could be and the initial information he sent to Lekem was dazzling: Pollard had gathered information on the military programmes of Israel's neighbouring Arab countries - information that the Israelis were unaware of. The most important thing the documents told them was that their suspicions had been right: the Americans were not telling them everything they knew.
Despite their links with Israel, the United States also had close relationships with a number of so-called ‘moderate' Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia, but also with Egypt and Jordan. They sold them weapons, which they clearly had no intention of informing their Israeli ally about and in a way this justified Israel's decision to spy on them. Aware of the rich harvest of information Pollard could provide, the authorities in Jerusalem authorised Lekem to continue using him, fully aware of the political risk the operation posed.
Initially, Colonel Sella continued as Pollard's case officer and the two men became friends. However, this could not have lasted as the Israeli pilot was not an expert in the world of espionage. His role was taken over by a professional intelligence officer called Yagour, who was officially a scientific attache at Israeli Consulate in New York. This also meant that he benefitted from diplomatic immunity, which Sella did not.
From now on contact with Pollard became much stricter. Aware of the rather disturbing psychological profile of their agent, the Israelis made sure that he was buttered up the right way. What a pathological liar like Pollard needed above all was recognition and so his employers never failed to let him know that he was doing them a great service. This was, of course, the absolute truth: the documents that Pollard had provided them with were genuinely of the upmost importance. He was collecting information from the databases of the US departments to which he had access, or from the secret archives that he was allowed to view and then printing them. When it came to original documents, such as satellite photos, he borrowed them long enough to show them to his case officer. This was a risky procedure as leaving the office with top secret documents meant that he was at the mercy of having to undergo an unexpected search. It was a game he would eventually lose.
Great Spies of the 20th Century Page 22