Dagan knew the reason for this harsh sentence was the forty-sixpage affidavit Caspar Weinberger, then secretary of defense, had made for Pollard’s trial in 1987. It was so secret that it had never been made public. Every attempt to do so had been blocked by federal lawyers in various Washington courts. In April 2004, the affidavit was still classified “Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information” (SCI). This is a restriction to protect the most sensitive data in the U.S. intelligence community.
Dagan believed the affidavit contained crucial details about how Promis software—developed by the specialist Inslaw computer company in Washington and later stolen by Mossad—had been adapted to fit into the artificial intelligence on board U.S. nuclear submarines. The resulting capability was known as “over-the-horizon accuracy,” enabling a submarine to hit targets far within the then Soviet Union and China. The Promis software could program details of the defenses around a target along with the advanced physics and mathematics needed to ensure a direct hit from huge distances.
Dagan also feared the affidavit outlined how Israel had developed its own over-the-horizon accuracy for three German-built nuclear-powered submarines it had bought, based on what Pollard had stolen. Dagan further suspected the affidavit contained details of joint U.S.-British listening posts on Cyprus and in the Middle East, which Pollard had compromised, and revealed how Pollard had also compromised CIA-MI6 operations in the Soviet Union and the former East Germany.
While this had led to a considerable change in U.S. intelligence, the data in the Weinberger affidavit was deemed to be still so ultrasensitive that its publication would provide valuable information to foreign intelligence services—including Mossad.
So important was Pollard to Israel that Dagan had sent a Mossad lawyer to attend Pollard’s first public appearance since he was sentenced. The case was heard in the Washington District Court in September 2003. Pollard looked older than his forty-seven years, his skin paler, his eyes occasionally glancing round the packed courtroom. He wore wire-rimmed spectacles, an embroidered yarmulke, and a green prison overshirt. He had a gray-brown beard and shoulder-length hair, giving him the appearance of an Old Testament prophet. Some forty relatives and supporters packed the small courtroom. They included several rabbis, among them Israel’s former chief rabbi, Mordechai Eliahu. His wife, Esther, and his father were also present. Pollard closely followed the legal arguments. The Mossad lawyer, a slim, middle-aged man, sat at the back of the court, taking notes in Hebrew.
The nub of Pollard’s case was that he should be allowed to appeal his sentence because his then attorney, Richard Hibney, had failed to file a notice of appeal when the prosecution asked the trial judge, Aubrey Robinson, for a life sentence without parole after “inducing Pollard to plead guilty by promising the State would not ask for life.” A further argument centered around the claim that Pollard’s then defense team had been refused access to the Weinberger affidavit “because they did not have the requisite security clearance.” Pollard’s new lawyers told the court they were also “seeking a pardon or sentence commutation” from the Bush administration. That part of the argument was “based on Pollard’s rights as an American citizen to due process.”
Over the years, Pollard’s attorneys had had meetings with Israeli prime ministers Benyamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, and Ariel Sharon. They had also met with Mossad intelligence chiefs Nahum Admoni, Shabtai Shavit, Danny Yatom, Efraim Halevy, and more recently, Meir Dagan. There had been a carefully orchestrated campaign in Israel to bombard the U.S. embassy with requests for Pollard’s freedom. Top Jewish lawyers had traveled from Israel to meet with equally renowned lawyers in the United States to plan legal moves. No defendant had had such a powerful support system. At every opportunity, the all-powerful Jewish lobby in Washington had battled tirelessly.
The Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, a consortium of fifty-five groups, continued to argue in 2004 that whatever Pollard had done could not be called treason “because Israel was and remains a close ally.” Further pressure constantly came from many leading Jewish religious organizations. The most vociferous was the powerful Reform Union of American Congregations. Harvard Law School professor Alan M. Dershowitz, who had served as Pollard’s lawyer, had said. “There is nothing in Pollard’s conviction to suggest that he had compromised the nation’s intelligence-gathering capabilities or betrayed world-wide intelligence data.”
But Pollard still had an equally powerful opponent: George Tenet, director of the CIA. In 1998, Tenet had said he would resign if Pollard was released. That still remained his position in 2004. Ted Gunderson, a top FBI agent at the time Pollard was arrested, said “Pollard stole every worthwhile intelligence secret we had. We are still trying to recover from what he did. We had to withdraw dozens of agents in place in the former Soviet Union, in the Middle East, South Africa, and friendly nations like Britain, France, and Germany. The American public just doesn’t know the full extent of what he did.”
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 travel
ed 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.
By April 2004 the sayanim had been fully mobilized. Eitan made no secret of their role. Quoting Meir Amit, he confirmed (to the author): “Sayanim fulfill many functions. A car sayan, running a rental agency, lets his handler know if any suspicious person has rented a car. A Realtor sayan provides similar information on anyone seeking accommodation. Sayanim also collect technical data and all kinds of overt intelligence. A rumor at a cocktail party, an item on the radio, a paragraph in a newspaper, a story overheard at a dinner party.”
It was a sayan in Phoenix, Arizona, who discovered in the spring of 2004 that one of the most notorious figures in the history of the Catholic church, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, had kept his undertaking never to divulge what he knew about Mossad’s role in the disappearance of $200 million. It had been sent to the Polish Solidarity movement by the Vatican Bank when Marcinkus had been its president.
By the early 1980s, Marcinkus was implicated in massive financial scandals and a stunning list of other crimes, including “being involved in arms smuggling, trafficking in stolen gold, counterfeit currencies, and radioactive materials,” according to an indictment lodged by the Rome public prosecutor in 1989. The charges were still on the open file in April 2004. Marcinkus was never interviewed or arrested. Pope John Paul II allowed him to remain in the Vatican so that he could be protected under the city’s sovereign immunity, which had been granted to the Holy See in 1929 by Benito Mussolini.
Then one night—the date remains one of the Vatican’s many secrets—Marcinkus was quietly driven out of the Vatican in a car bearing diplomatic plates. Next day he arrived in Chicago. From there he was flown to Sun City, a satellite town in Phoenix. Close by lived another colorful character, Victor Ostrovsky. The former Mossad officer was a whistleblower. Like Ari Ben-Menashe, Ostrovsky had revealed many of Mossad’s secrets in interviews. Both men in 2004 still lived comfortable lives. But Marcinkus, at eighty years of age, was living out his closing years in a modest white-painted cinder-block house close to a country club fairway in Sun City. Unlike the two Mossad officers, he had still kept the silence when he was known as God’s banker and a confidant of popes—Paul VI, John Paul I, and his now dying successor, Pope John Paul II. The Polish pope, the supreme pontiff to the Catholic world, was the one man, apart from Marcinkus, who could answer the question: What was Mossad’s role in the mystery of the missing $200 million?
The mystery can properly be said to have begun when another limousine arrived at the Vatican.
Close to midnight the dark blue limousine, with its diplomatic plates, stopped before the wrought-iron gates of the Arch of the Bells, the gateway to the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican. It was the prelude to a sequence of events that to this day cast a dark shadow over the pontificate of John Paul. Now, as he waits to die, the answer to questions that will form the final judgment on his long rule is a deeply troubling one for all those who care about the church and what was done in its name.
Did the pope allow himself to be moved from his own personal moral standards to help Solidarity because of his passionate and abiding commitment to Poland? Was he purely an innocent and unsuspecting victim of what was about to transpire once that limousine entered the Vatican?
In the judgment of David Yallop, the English financial investigator long recognized as the bête noir of the secret financial world of the Vatican, John Paul allowed his papacy “to become a triumph for wheeler-dealers and the international financial thieves. The pope also gave his blessing for large quantities of U.S. dollars to have been sent, secretly and illegally, to Solidarity.”
Christopher Story, the publisher of the International Currency Review, the journal of the banking world, called it “one of the great black hole mysteries of modern-day financing.”
Certainly on that April night in 1983 when the Renaissance-costumed Swiss Guard, caped against the cold, stepped forward to salute the Fiat’s passenger, it signaled the start of a chain of staggering events. They began at a period John Paul had called “a very dark time in the history of the world.” Two years before, the KGB—through its surrogate, the Bulgarian secret service—had tried to assassinate him in St. Peter’s Square. To further distance itself, Moscow had allowed a Muslim fanatic, Mehmet Ali Agca, to carry out the attempt. Until his death in April 2005, the pope felt the pain from the shrapnel still in his body. But his defiance of Communism had led to the creation of the Solidarity movement in Poland. In Washington, President Ronald Reagan had called its birth “an inspiration to the free world. We shall support it.”
How he did so has remained secret. Now the extraordinary and, at times, bizarre story can be told of how the CIA and the Vatican Bank created that $200 million secret fund for Solidarity. In 1983, the CIA maintained a well-developed slush fund to mount “no-questions-asked black operations” all over the world.
Richard Brenneke, a mild-mannered man with the careful speech pattern of an accountant, was the senior CIA operative in charge of the agency’s secret funding for those operations. He worked sixteen-hour days juggling covert funds in and out of Swiss banks, like Credit Suisse in Geneva, and sending them on complex transfers around the banking world. With the full authority of CIA director William Casey, Brenneke had started to use the Vatican Bank for money laundering. Casey had introduced Brenneke to Bishop Paul Marcinkus. Brenneke had since made a number of visits to Marcinkus’s office in a seventeenth-century tower inside the Vatican walls. “On a good day $400 million was laundered,” Brenneke recalled. A substantial portion of the money came from the CIA’s ultrasecret operations.
“Like other intelligence agencies, the CIA had established backdoor links with the mafia. The CIA, like the Vatican, had a very real fear Italy could fall into the hands of the Communists. The CIA saw the mafia as a bulwark against that happening. Consequently, the CIA took the view that the mafia’s activities in Italy were to be tolerated if they helped to ensure that NATO member Italy did not fall into Moscow’s hands at the polling booths,” said David Yallop (to the author).
By 1983, the CIA had extended its secret links to international crime to include arming Iran and the contras in Nicaragua. Brenneke said: “Money from guns sold to the Iranians was used by the agency to buy drugs in South America. Cocaine was shipped back to the States and sold on to the mafia. That money was then used to buy weapons for the contras in Nicaragua. It got so out of hand I told President Reagan’s national security adv
iser, Don Gregg. I was told to forget it.” By then, Brenneke said, he had laundered $10 billion. A considerable portion of the money came from the Gotti mafia family of New York. The Gotti family, like the Gambino and Columbo crime families, were devout Catholics. FBI intercepts show the bosses gave generously to the church. Another mafia chief, Salvatore “Lucky” Luciano, boasted of visiting the Vatican before his death.
“By 1983 the Vatican Bank was being routinely used by the mafia to move money both into and out of Italy. The money came from drugs, prostitution, and a variety of other crimes that the Vatican officially condemned,” said Yallop.
Did the $200 million earmarked for Solidarity come from the mafia? Twenty-one years would pass after that Fiat limousine drove on through the Arch of the Bells gateway before those and other questions would be asked.
The solitary passenger on that April night in 1983 was Archbishop Luigi Poggi. He was the pope’s diplomatic troubleshooter, a nuncio extraordinary and a seasoned operator in the world of very secret papal politics. Among the direct-line numbers in his briefcase were those of CIA director Casey—a devout Catholic himself—Lech Walesa of Solidarity, and the foreign ministers of half a dozen European nations. The most recent addition to the list was that of Nahum Admoni, then the director general of Mossad. The archbishop and spy chief had met in Paris during the latest journeying around Europe that Poggi had just completed. Poggi knew that with Admoni’s Polish background—his parents had been middle-class immigrants to Israel from Gdansk—the spy chief had more than a passing curiosity about the church.
In Warsaw, Poggi had conferred as usual with Cardinal Josef Glemp in his palace. They had spoken in a lead-lined room to overcome the surveillance of Poland’s intelligence services. Even so, the two men had spoken in Latin. A clue to what followed is provided by Admoni, who lives today in the United States.
Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad Page 49