All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast fee.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
Hey, guys, on the line, I've got the great Grant Smith, and he writes lots and lots of books about the Israel lobby in America, including the Israel Lobby Interstate Government, which is just a riot.
I swear to God, you'll laugh your ass off all Sunday afternoon reading that thing.
And before that, Big Israel, and how they stole weapons-grade uranium from us, and everything, man.
Welcome back to the show.
Oh, and I forgot to say, IRMEP, I-R-M-E-P, that's where he keeps all his PDF files for you.
I-R-M-E-P, the Institute for Research Middle Eastern Policy.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Hey, I'm doing great, Scott.
Thanks for having me on again.
I'm happy to have you here.
It turns out that Jonathan Pollard has been set free, and he's going to Israel.
And I have lots of questions, such as, I thought that Joe Biden abolished federal parole, and there was no such thing as federal parole.
Is it only if you're a trader for Israel you get parole?
Or did they repeal that law, and I just totally missed it?
Or what's going on?
Yeah, I don't know.
I think the interesting piece of this particular parole is, he could have stayed under supervised release, and monitoring, and the wrist bracelet, and no access to computers.
But before Joe Biden had a chance to do anything in particular, it looks like the Trump administration just said, no, no, you've done enough, you can go.
So it was really their call on this particular ability of his to now travel overseas.
And of course, Netanyahu's been working to get him out forever.
He's been cleared now to go to Israel, is that right?
Yeah.
But he hasn't gone yet, or he's already gone?
You know, I don't know where he is right now.
But the latest is, they said he can go ahead and leave the country.
Yeah, he can return, and he's been in touch with Netanyahu, and Netanyahu's been tweeting out all sorts of stuff from the Office of Prime Minister about how excited they are, and how they've talked to him, blah, blah, blah.
You know, of anyone, Netanyahu's certainly worked the hardest to get this guy to Israel.
And he's failed, which is pretty rare.
Netanyahu's been very good getting what he wants from many administrations.
But I think, you know, again, what makes this exceptional, this is an exceptional case, is number one, that Pollard did a full, you know, 30-year sentence and, you know, supervised release, and that he hasn't been pardoned, that he hasn't had his sentence commuted.
Although it's too early to say, in fact, when you called in, I was just responding to William Taylor II, the executive officer at the Office of Pardon Attorney, to try and get a little more clarity around any recent filings about Pollard's potential full pardon from the Trump administration.
So, you know, I can't say for certain that his record won't be expunged at this point, because unlike more than a decade of FOIA releases to us, which allowed me to write that overly long article at antiwar.com this week, full of details that nobody else has ever reported, the pardon attorney saw the importance of releasing documents, and they've released other documents that were pardon-related.
But now they've clammed up, so that triggers a little suspicion in my mind as to whether he may, in fact, receive a full pardon for his activities.
There are plenty of people who are not like the Dick Cheneys of the world, who are not like the George Tenets, who really do have a mindset that, you know, this guy was in a position to help the Israelis.
He made an independent judgment call that they should have access to any intelligence they wanted, and that when they were tasking him to grab stuff, that he should indeed have been allowed to forward that on to his handlers.
There are people in government who think that he didn't do anything wrong, basically.
So it could actually be, and Trump is obviously no, you know, he's not a huge fan of the intelligence community writ large.
I could see him, potentially, issuing a full pardon to Pollard.
Yeah.
Yeah, why not?
That's really the only thing that's been stopping them all this time, is that the CIA, I forgot how I know this anymore, but I used to know this, that the CIA threatened to just scream to high heaven and figure out a way to take revenge against any president who would dare pardon this guy, because the line that he crossed was too far.
Right, right.
George Tenet threatened to resign, and, you know, again, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were against it, and so, you know- You know what, I should have asked you first.
Who the hell's Jonathan Pollard, and what did he ever steal and give to Israel anyway?
What the hell are we even talking about, Grant, now that we're six minutes into this thing?
Jonathan J. Pollard was a, he rose to become a Naval Investigative Service Command analyst, so NCIS.
He was there after a number of extremely curious incidents where, you know, he was losing his security clearance, and he threatened to sue if he couldn't get it back, and he was telling his buddies that he wanted to be a spy for Israel, that he had grown up and had all sorts of strange people passing through his household on secret missions to get things for Israel when he was young.
So, he was a bit of a, you know, he was ready to be what he became from a very young age.
Anyway, he got himself into a position where he had courier status to go and check out particularly DIA documents, but all sorts of documents, which he then brought home to his apartment and used high-speed photocopiers to copy, and then he would go back to the office and check them back in, only to check out, you know, hundreds of more highly sensitive files the next day.
So he was being tasked.
He had met Avi Sella, the famous pilot who bombed the Osirak nuclear reactor.
He came into the hands of Rafi Itan, who was the top intelligence master who had kidnapped Eichmann in Buenos Aires, and he had visited the NUMEC plant that lost more uranium weapons grade than any other plant in the U.S., so that's who was handling Pollard, and they were tasking him by file number to get the best, most sensitive stuff from the U.S. and sell it to Israel, which he did, and they paid Pollard with trips and cash and jewelry and honeymoons and anything you can imagine.
Pollard was basically, you know, as much of a driver of what eventually happened as the Israelis, but they were definitely a match made in heaven, and he was finally caught in a sting with surveillance video, and they had such a huge case against him that he basically pled guilty to espionage in June of 1986, but he had really, I guess you could say, he had really thought that by pleading guilty, he thought he had a plea deal in which he would get a slap on the wrist sentence, subject to some limitations on his behavior, which he quickly broke, but anyway, that's who Jonathan J. Pollard was, ideologically committed Zionist who always wanted to be a spy for Israel, who purposely wheedled his way into a highly sensitive position, oddly by making threats whenever his security clearances were being threatened for his drug use or some of the other things that would have ruled him out of being in the CIA and other places at the time.
All right, well, so I just want to make a note here to make sure that Sam links to it so people can look in the show notes to The Traitor by Seymour Hersh, and if you're paywalled at the New Yorker, you can find it in other places.
It used to have a byline that said, why Pollard should never be released, I think is what it was called, but it's almost as good as your article, I just want to make sure it's for background reading here, but I'm really curious about, and I'm sorry, you can say whatever you want to, but I'm really curious about the discrepancy here.
You talk about, and this is a whole other subject of discussion we'll get to in just a second, but you talk about how the Israelis have a get out of jail free card to spy on America always.
That's why Pollard thought he would get a slap on the wrist.
All Israeli spies in America get a slap on the wrist.
We know from Jeff Stein and other reporting that nobody spies on America more than the Israelis other than maybe the Russians, and it's always been that way.
It's not a problem, and yet in this case, not only is it a problem, it's so much a problem that the Secretary of Defense signed some secret thing to the judge saying give this guy life, and George Tenet threatened that he would resign over it at the CIA, and even Dick Cheney said absolutely not to this, so what was it that this guy did?
He gave him the nuclear codes, or what exactly line did he cross that makes him absolutely the exception of the rule up until now anyway?
Yeah, I think there were two things.
One of them true, and the other possibly not true, but the thing that was absolutely true was that he did hand over the famous RAISIN, R-A-S-I-N, which was a highly sensitive set of radio intercept and electronic intelligence code book that the US was using to spy on the Soviet Union and all of the radio transmissions to have countermeasures during the Cold War in the Middle East.
He just blithely handed that over, and the people who knew what it really was, like Marion Bowman and the guy who debriefed him, and ultimately the Secretary of Defense and the judge and Ron Olive, another investigator, they all knew that that thing was going to cost billions of dollars to replace, and that he severely compromised that system because they couldn't be sure that it wouldn't get back into Russian hands or that the Russians would realize that their radio communications and their encoded transmissions had all been compromised.
So that was some pretty severe damage.
The other thing, though, does get back to the Seymour Hersh traitor story, I guess you'd call it.
There was the idea, and this is still floating around there, in terms of potential damage assessment that what Pollard handed over to the Israelis, it also included the US and particularly the CIA human intelligence network behind the Iron Curtain.
And a lot of people were blaming and thinking that his release of sensitive classified information allowed the Soviet Union to roll up a lot of those agents, and in fact, kill a lot of them.
But one of the things that's possibly wrong about the Seymour Hersh analysis is that you have another spy, Aldrich Ames, who was also captured, arrested in 1994, and he had been also spying for the Soviets, also had access to a lot of classified information, particularly he was focused on Russia and the Russian intelligence services, the KGB and all sorts of other networks, and he was being paid by the Russians, the KGB, for information.
So the potential rollup- So he might have blamed it on Pollard, huh?
Yeah.
So Pollard might have taken the rap for that, although Pollard did more than enough to get himself a life sentence for what he did release, which was volume-wise, what they say, an entire room full of documents.
So I think Seymour Hersh is great, love his stuff.
It's not like he goes back and updates any of it.
He also kind of, and I hate to say this, this is not Slam Seymour Hersh Day, but he also took Zalman Shapiro's word for it, that all the uranium that disappeared from Numic had just been lost to the environment and the air and water, and few people but Seymour Hersh believe that anymore, given some of the materials that were picked up outside of Dimona.
So I think he gets stuff wrong, and this is the problem with doing this sort of reports.
You write the classic book, Israel and the bomb in his case, and then it's not like you're going back and updating it every week as new information comes out.
So love Seymour Hersh, and he's just invaluable, but I think he gets things wrong at times, just like anybody.
Yeah.
Well, and also, I mean, there's certainly new things that come out, like, hey, guess what?
Aldrich Ames is a traitor.
Yeah.
And then, you know, we got to point out, too, that the FBI counterintelligence division, supposedly this is their job, and they let Ames get away with this for, what, decades?
And then their head anti-Russia guy was a traitor, too, Robert Hansen.
For years and years and years and years and years, he was the one in charge of finding the traitor.
It's amazing, and they just hate it when that happens, and they do everything they can to cover it up.
I got to tell you, you know, I worked hard to get NCIS documents, you know, out of the U.S. Navy on Pollard, and they just hate releasing stuff because this was their trusted guy who, you know, caused more damage than any good that they probably actually achieved through all their intelligence work.
Maybe not, but it's just, you know, they have these guys, and they're in the key position, and then they sell out.
Yeah.
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All right.
Well, you do it in the article.
So remind us here about Project Pinto.
Yeah, Project Pinto.
So I really link- Well, actually, you know what?
Go back.
Do NUMEC first and then Pinto because it's really a one-two kind of thing, right?
Yeah.
So there are four people other than Pollard who I kind of profile a little bit, but there's this idea that the U.S. doesn't really prosecute Israeli espionage, and it's true.
You had this case back in the 1960s where a top naval nuclear engineer, Zalman Shapiro, set up a ramshackle facility in Apollo, Pennsylvania, and started receiving massive quantities of highly enriched uranium to process into naval fuel and other types of fuel.
And as I said, was visited by all these Israeli spies.
The plant was run by a bunch of Zionist Organization of America executives highly devoted to Israel.
They were setting up joint ventures with Israel.
They were shipping all sorts of giant sealed containers over there on LL flights, the radiators that could not be opened by customs and any other officials.
So the FBI got all sorts of information, including eyewitness reports that they were diverting massive quantities of bomb-grade materials to Israel.
And the Tel Aviv station chief, John Haddon, upon doing some field investigations, picked up samples of the very unique signature uranium outside of Dimona, which could have either been manufactured into gun-type devices or used to fuel their plutonium-based Dimona nuclear weapons facility production.
So pretty obvious that Zalman Shapiro was involved in all of this.
He was meeting with the top Israeli nuclear weapons development team.
And yet the Atomic Energy Commission did everything they could to keep him from getting into trouble.
Like Pollard, they wouldn't yank his security clearances when the FBI director demanded that he stop having access to sensitive material.
Instead, they moved him to another high-paying government job and basically had Atlantic Richfield, which is a big government contractor, buy NEWMEC and slowly wind it down.
It's still the site of a $500 million cleanup that taxpayers have to cover.
But this is the sort of story that the United States, the FBI, the CIA, everyone fights not to release any information.
The Justice Department, they won't release files on why they never prosecuted this.
They had a whole study group on it.
The GAO had a giant report on it.
All of these incidents involving Israel quickly develop an internal lobby of officials and champions of Israel and people in Congress who just say, no, shut it down, shut it down.
We can't investigate this.
Make it go away, make it go away.
And so Zalman Shapiro died in peace in Pennsylvania, in Pittsburgh, and he never faced any consequences for the diversion.
I've got Al Schwimmer there who got a pardon, Arnon Milchan, the big Hollywood producer who helped smuggle nuclear triggers out through his companies.
That's Pinto, right?
That's Project Pinto.
And it's funny because you watch a movie and you see this guy's name, produced by Arnon Milchan, and then it's great trivia for your friends, like, hey, that guy's a traitor.
Yeah.
I mean, everybody who's looked at the papers and the network of companies that was released that we've put up and virtually no one else, but NPR of all places, and a couple of authors over in Israel who wrote about him, it's clear that this guy has been recruited by Benjamin Blumberg and other Mossad operatives.
He's been on their payroll for years, and yet he's allowed to make hundreds of millions of dollars in the U.S. on his movies because it would be a serious rupture of this country's entire establishment, seemingly, if he ever faced any consequences for targeting the U.S. in his smuggling and espionage operations.
So he's- Well, you bring up Larry Franklin and others, too.
I mean, this is an ongoing thing.
I was talking before about how, yeah, Pollard is the one that got nailed, but that's in stark relief to all the other Israeli spies, including Jane Harman.
I couldn't fit Larry Franklin onto the lineup there, but Larry Franklin- Oh, you mentioned Steve Rosen.
I conflate the two, but yeah.
Well, I mean, Franklin is ...
He actually was prosecuted, but the argument with Franklin was that he should have gotten some prison time, and of course he didn't.
And then his henchmen, Stephen J. Rosen and Keith Weissman from AIPAC, who were the recipients and traffickers of a lot of the classified information, didn't do any time.
The judge just went through incredible contortions and was being slammed by various media reporting groups, which by the way, would never take up Julian Assange as a victim of anything, but slamming the judge for not letting Rosen and Weissman walk free.
And what happens?
The Obama administration comes in and basically shuts down the case.
So it really is ...
And then Franklin, who again, he was allowed to just be on sort of a supervised release, and now he's trying to get a pardon and trying to get his government pension back.
And he may well get it back.
I mean, again, it may be that with this mentality of Pompeo and Trump and Jared Kushner and all the rest who are handling Middle East policy, that you can never really hold any of these people to account if what they thought they were doing was not illegal.
And that's actually a standard the judge used in trying to get Rosen and Weissman out of his court.
That if they're not in a state of mind where they think they're committing espionage, why just let them go?
It doesn't matter what they really did.
So Franklin, he had some support to get sprung during the Obama administration.
It looked pretty solid.
You had members of Congress, not as many as have signed up for a Pollard pardon, but members of Congress saying, yeah, let this guy walk.
This has destroyed his life and he's innocent.
So he may get a pardon.
So Americans that aren't agents of a foreign power, can they invoke that precedent at their trials for things that in the case of America versus these Israeli fifth columnists, the judge ruled that if they didn't know that what they were doing was wrong, then it's cool?
Because that sounds like a great precedent for Americans being unfairly prosecuted.
I was down at the courthouse both for Rosen's defamation suit and also Weissman and Rosen's defense.
And they they created a loophole which said they weren't in a state of mind in which they thought they were doing anything wrong.
The judge invented it.
He let them off for that.
And then it just as quickly as it arose, it went away.
And so nobody else gets to use that as a precedent.
It's kind of like precedents only narrow your options if if you're not part of the government.
They never seem to expand them.
So unfortunately, a Julian Assange or somebody else making the state of mind claim are not going to be able to do that.
So it's kind of another part of this whole exception story.
But you know, the real argument is all of these people listed in profile did real harm, whether it was Al Schwimmer who violated the Neutrality Act and the Arms Export Control Act, or Zalman Shapiro, who I believe could have received the death penalty for violating the Atomic Energy Act, or Arnon Milchan, who certainly violated the Arms Export Control Act through his company activity, or Stephen J. Rosen, who was involved not only in the most recent 2005 espionage caper to try to get intelligence out there that would support a case for pivoting out of Iraq and into Iran.
But he was also involved in the 1985 theft of U.S. trade secrets in conjunction with an Israeli entity that got all of that out to form counter arguments to the virtual unanimous opposition to signing a one sided set of trade concessions with Israel.
He never paid any price for that.
The FBI could have referred it for prosecution and they could have.
They had a certainly a strong case.
They had everybody lined up, but they just didn't do it.
So that's what you get.
And so, you know, the weird thing about all of this is the thing that it really tells me is just like the lobby will hammer members of Congress through threats and primary challengers and withholding or giving coordinated campaign contributions.
And then when they pass some horrendous thing like the Jerusalem Embassy Act of 1995, they'll just point to Congress and say it was the will of Congress.
This is what they wanted to do for Israel.
They did it on their own and sort of deny their own role.
There are similar things going on from the beginning where major Israel lobby figures would spend all sorts of cash trying to get inside the Justice Department and inside the offices of prosecutors just to squash prosecutions of the original conventional weapons smugglers successfully.
And it would all go away and the claim would be made, well, there was really nothing to these Neutrality Act and Arms Export Control Act prosecutions because there were so few of them.
So it couldn't possibly have hurt the United States.
So there's this real strange thing where people say, well, there have been so few prosecutions and that means that there was no injustice.
And I say there's been major injustice because there have been so few prosecutions.
Yeah, exactly.
All right.
Listen, I'm so sorry.
I'm late as hell.
The next one is of me.
So I'm really late.
But thank you so much, Grant.
You're great.
Thank you.
Talk to you soon.
All right, guys.
Grant Smith, please go read this thing.
You'll really like it.
It's great.
