04/02/14 – Philip Giraldi – The Scott Horton Show

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We've got Philip Giraldi on the show today, former CIA and DIA officer, executive director of the Council for the National Interest, and writer for unz.com and theamericanconservative.com, and author of this piece about Jonathan Pollard, the top of my Jonathan Pollard section that I have here in my tabs today.
Jonathan Pollard, again, why he must complete his time in prison at unz.com.
Welcome back to the show.
Phil, how are you doing?
I'm fine.
How are you, Scott?
I'm doing good.
Appreciate you joining us here today.
And I've been reading up on Pollard.
I went and found, it's at freerepublic.com, why Pollard should never be released, the traitor, by Seymour Hersh.
And then there's a new one at MSNBC by Daphna Linzer, a little bit of the background of the Pollard case.
And of course, actually, the most I know about this, other than your article here, is what I learned in the speech by Spike Bowman at the National Summit to reassess the American-Israel special relationship that you and Grant Smith and others held there in Washington, D.C. a few weeks back.
And Spike Bowman, correct me if I'm wrong, he was the FBI counterintelligence officer who put together the case against Jonathan Pollard, primarily, correct?
That's right.
He was the coordinator of what they call the damage assessment, which basically assessed the extent to which Pollard had done major damage to U.S. security.
And then he was also the person that worked directly with Casper Weinberger to make up a case on paper that would pull all this information together.
And then, yeah, Casper Weinberger being the Secretary of Defense at the time, and then that was the paper that the judge cited at sentencing, correct?
That's correct, yeah.
All right.
And now, so give us a little bit of background here, could you?
Who's Jonathan Pollard, what'd he do, when'd he get in trouble for it, and all that, for the newbies?
Well, the Pollard case basically was carried out on behalf of Israel.
Pollard was not an ideologue when he started.
He essentially wanted money, and he had approached a number of countries, including South Africa, to sell intelligence, and so it was actually somewhere down the road for him.
Now, pay no attention to the spy on the line, Phil, but you keep getting muted out every once in a while here.
Is that your call waiting, or is that the Israelis intercepting between here and Virginia?
I didn't see anything come up, but you never know.
FBI is active in this area.
But anyway, so Pollard, who now claims to have been a patriotic Israeli, in effect, never started out that way.
This is a point that Spike Bowman made, that Pollard was in it for the money, and he would have sold it to anybody.
He's never really expressed any remorse.
He's always claimed he didn't really do any damage at all, and his supporters essentially come out with the argument, well, gee, he was spying to help an ally, and he was only giving them information that was useful for them, for their own security, and that they should have had.
Now, Bowman went through the steps, and of course, if you go online, you can pull up more details on this to demonstrate that all these characterizations of Pollard are wrong.
They're basically made up to make a case for the guy.
The guy was an out-and-out criminal.
He stole more information than any spy in American history, a whole roomful of highly classified information.
And some of it was extremely sensitive in that it would have given the Russians, Soviets at that time, an edge in their own intelligence collection to acquire this information, and there are many in the intelligence community who believe that the Israelis did indeed pass some of this information on to the Soviets.
Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that.
How much of this information, and at what level, and then, I guess, was it just they had to assume that, and so then they had to act as if they must have given it over to the Soviets, or they really had strong indication that the Israelis were turning around and laundering this information, turning it over to the Reds, and for what purpose?
Why would they betray America like that, Bill?
Yeah, well, they had indication to this, and of course, when you do a damage assessment, you make a worst-case assessment because you have to assume that your worst nightmares are going to take place.
Now, what happened in this case was that there was evidence that the Israelis were trading intelligence that they obtained from Pollard for the Soviets, in turn, to release Russian Jews and let them emigrate, which was a big issue at that time, and people, including at that time William Casey, who was the director of CIA, believed that there was a direct connection on all this stuff, and that the Israelis had indeed traded some of this information.
What the evidence is going beyond that, I don't know, but apparently that was widely believed in the intelligence community, and was even something that we talked about in the field where I was, that this intelligence had not only been stolen, but had been given to the enemies of the United States.
All right, now, in the Hirsch piece, which was written, I think, in 1999, around the time that Bill Clinton was considering releasing Jonathan Pollard, and had to back down because George Tenet and the leadership of the CIA, and I guess some other intelligence agencies were threatening to resign over it, but in that Hirsch piece, he talks about, I think it's the book, it's called Raisin, and this is, for some reason, the NSA, at least at that time, kept one big book, or obviously there's a lot of different notebooks, but kept it kind of all together, and this was sort of the master list of everything that they'd tapped and how they tapped it, right?
In fact, the Snowden revelations, all the stuff that he gave Greenwald, that's never going to be published, right?
It's going to be, is the stuff that this guy, Pollard, was handing over to a foreign government.
Yeah, it's like this, if you took a, if you compiled a book of the most sensitive information that exists in the U.S. intelligence community, that's essentially what Pollard handed over.
It was a technical manual that told you what the U.S. capabilities were to intercept Russian communications, for example, Soviet communications at that time, and it also assessed the Soviet communications.
So if the Soviets had a copy of the book, they'd be able to tweak their system to make it impossible for the United States to access their communications more, and they would also be able to attack U.S. communications.
So it was very sensitive information.
I wonder if the listeners are getting the same idea as me, that your statements are being redacted in real time here, Phil.
The way you keep going mute on us.
I don't know what's going on, because I just checked my phone and it's not doing anything, so I mean, I don't know where that beefing is coming from.
It's a mystery.
Yeah, pay no attention, it's not a big deal, everybody, nothing to see here.
All right, so now, before we talk about the current politics of this, which are just absolutely incredible, by the way, can you take us back to 1999 and the controversy over Clinton's the Why River Accord and this and that, and the negotiations when they almost let him go before, and what happened?
Clinton, as Garrett Porter proved in his book, which you probably know as well as I do, Clinton was the one who shifted U.S. policy vis-a-vis Iran and vis-a-vis the world to the Israeli model, to what Israel was wanting.
And part of this was essentially, it turned out to be, that Clinton figured, hey, it would be a nice gesture to Bibi Netanyahu to give him Pollard.
But what happened was, as soon as he raised the issue, of course, everybody went crazy in the intelligence community, because you've got to realize what years we're talking about, this was still a pretty recent event in terms of government.
And anyway, everybody rebelled about it.
Clinton was prepared to let him go, but he had to back down.
Right.
All right, well, I'll let you go.
Go take care of your family and have a good time, Phil.
Okay, right.
Bye-bye.
Oh, man, isn't that great?
Today's just good news, kind of a show.
All right, so now more bad news.
So the thing is, is Obama's going to let him go now.
Guys, at least that's what they're, I mean, trial balloons all over the place.
They're going to, they're seeing whether people put up with it.
And, and for what?
You know, I saw only the tail end of the discussion last night on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, but they, they had Aaron David Miller on there, and he was summing up the case.
What they're leaking so far is if they release Jonathan Pollard, the guy who turned over, you know, more secrets to the Reds, even than Robert Hanson or Aldrich Ames or John Walker, if they turn over Pollard to the Israelis, then the Israelis might let some women and children out of prison that they've got no right holding in the first place, that they can just turn around and arrest 10 times as many the day after tomorrow anyway.
And then what?
That's it.
And then maybe promise to extend the talks toward the having of talks.
In other words, Obama is prepared to give up Jonathan Pollard in exchange for nothing.
In exchange for nothing.
And, you know, this is something that I am afraid I did not get a chance to go over specifically at the end of the Gareth Porter series of interviews there.
But one of the things that he wrote about is about how in 09, when Obama came in and started acting friendly toward the Iranians, the reason he backed off on that and decided to scotch all the negotiations of 09 was a compromise with Netanyahu that he would promise to freeze the settlements in the Palestinian territories.
And Obama fell for that.
The freeze that, as we all know, amounted to absolutely nothing.
In practice.
Now they're gonna do it again.
Hey, all.
Scott here.
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