All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And I was realizing the other day, I took a couple of few weeks off there, actually had some time to think for a change, and it occurred to me, it's a real responsibility having a show called Anti-War Radio.
It precludes anyone else from having a show called Anti-War Radio, and that means if it's going to be called Anti-War Radio, it's got to be the absolute best, most informative, most hard-hitting, most professional, uh-oh, anti-war production that could possibly be done on a daily basis.
And I guess I already knew that, but I thought about it again.
So I'm going to try even harder to do my even bester for you.
Somebody who makes it easy, whoops, whoa, somebody who helps make it easy to do so on this show is Grant Smith.
Grant, is that your other phone ringing in the background?
Yeah, that's the U.S. pardon attorney.
We've got to FOIA him to get the Pollard released.
But go ahead, I'll call him back.
Okay, cool.
Yeah, we're live, so we're first.
Grant Smith is the mucky-muck, the president, the commander-in-chief, the boss of IRMEP, I-R-M-E-P.org.
That's the Institute for Research Middle East Policy, and you can find much of what he writes at antiwar.com, and just Google up Grant Smith, you'll find him.
But today, I'm looking at a piece that's not by Grant Smith, although it's been filled with evidences and proofs and documents in hypertext format by Grant F. Smith.
But it is the declassified statement on Jonathan Pollard by Casper W. Weinberger.
Hey, wait, isn't that guy a convicted felon for selling weapons to the Iranians and then using the profits to back right-wing death squads in El Salvador and Nicaragua?
Yeah, and we'll be talking about that in a couple weeks, I hope, because the Pentagon just released 50 pages on Iran-Contra, so.
Oh, good deal.
Yeah.
So this guy, this guy is a felon and a killer, just so that we're clear.
There are no good guys in this story.
Okay, good.
But now, so who's Jonathan Pollard, and what's this here?
Well, yeah, Jonathan Pollard was a Navy intelligence analyst and heavy into sort of fantasies about becoming a Mossad officer who began funneling classified information.
He worked in an anti-terrorist unit, but he took all of the codes the U.S. uses for spying on radio frequencies, the entire attack plan against the Soviet Union, information about U.S. spies that were working in the Cold War, and passed them on to Sella and Rafi Eaton, who he considered his heroes, the Israelis, basically, who began to use it to leverage up a position for their own purposes.
So the documents that we're obtaining from the District Court and the District of Columbia, few of which appear anywhere on the Internet, really document the time between his plea agreements – he pled guilty after he was caught red-handed after denying for a little bit of time that he was a spy – but documenting the period between his publicity campaign, with the help of Wolf Blitzer, to get out of jail and just simply be let free to Israel, and the time that he was sentenced to life in prison, which happened in March of 1987.
So that document that Anna Orr put up is the first of those.
All right.
So this is basically the former Secretary of Defense trying to convince the judge to go heavy on this guy, not light.
Right.
Weinberger's team at the Department of Defense was reeling, you know, because basically they thought the Israelis were their friends, so much so that they could be partners in crime in the Iran-Contra subversion of the Boland Amendment, doing all sorts of deals for Palestinian-captured arms to be shipped to the Nicaraguan countries.
So they thought they were in well with the Israelis when all of a sudden this whole scandal blows up and they find out that they've lost all of the family jewels of American intelligence.
And so Weinberger's four-pager that was released is not the real damage assessment that Americans should be able to review.
That damage assessment's 46 pages.
It was submitted to the court on January 6th.
It's classified, it's 46 pages, the court sealed it, and if anyone's going to release it it's going to have to be the Department of Defense.
But that tells their best assessment up until that point in time of what the total exposure to the United States was for Israel having gotten a hold of this.
And they make the point as well that although the Israelis were saying basically, well, we'll never give any of this away to your enemies, you know, they have spies inside of their government for foreign governments as well as the U.S. does, so there's a big argument in there as well, allegedly, about how no one could ever make a guarantee like that.
That the sanctity of intelligence should have never been violated, blah, blah, blah.
But that's the document that should really come out before...
Well, isn't that part already kind of disproven?
Because after all there were, I forget if it was Seymour Herscher who reported that dozens of CIA agents and assets were rolled up by the Soviets.
Yeah, that's what they say, but I mean, and of course the Department of Defense, you know, 15 or 20 months after the theft of the information couldn't really have probably done a damage assessment anyway.
And Pollard's defense was, hey, well, there's no harm here, nothing's happened, you know.
It's only now.
I think if anyone were going to do a big project, it would be to get the 46-pager and do the damage assessment based on that within released Soviet files, counterintelligence files, to see what really happened.
Because, yeah, Seymour Herscher wrote about that, Edwin Black, who's a really good writer...
Yeah, he wrote IBM and the Holocaust.
Yeah, he wrote a really down-to-the-nitty-gritty piece about the assorted publicity campaign and the damage assessment and all of that.
So, between the two of them, they did do a good job, but they didn't do a good job up until a certain point.
And the fact that so many, you know, Israel lobby groups in the United States are pushing for his release now, as well as the Israeli government has now filed a formal petition.
We don't know whether it's with the president only or with the pardon attorney like they're supposed to.
We'll know that soon.
But, you know, now that there's this drive, there's clearly a need to update that damage assessment.
When we come back from the break, I'll ask you to take us through this declassified statement by Casper Weinberger on Jonathan Pollard.
But I guess to wrap up this segment, the next two or three minutes here, can you tell us the most about what you already know of the damage that was actually caused?
Because on one hand, we hear that, come on, it was no big deal at all.
On the other hand, we hear that it was as bad as Aldrich Ames or Robert Hansen.
Yeah, the biggest single thing was the radio frequency theft.
I mean, it's a tragedy that agents might have been killed and all of that.
But basically, the U.S. had this multi-billion dollar investment in radio frequency policy and monitoring and usage that was all basically just rolled up and given away.
And so that not only allowed the Israelis to avoid detection by the U.S. for their own espionage activities, but, you know, in the wrong hands, it really posed a serious threat to the United States.
So that was, a lot of people who analyze this think that was probably the biggest single thing, because it had nothing to do with the Middle East.
It was kind of like the crown jewel of the United States intelligence community.
Now, when there was a lot of pressure on Bill Clinton to let Pollard go back during Oslo in the 1990s, the noise was pretty loud that you better not do this because there are so many people in the military, the FBI and the CIA who will be so mad.
You'll be betraying the entire, you know, permanent bureaucratic executive branch of America's government and making them all your enemy.
Tell me that Barack Obama is still facing that kind of pressure.
Please.
I don't think so.
I haven't heard anybody.
And the Likud is trying to tie this to the peace talks right now.
That's the only way they can, because it's not going to happen otherwise.
I'm sorry, man.
I don't have that music turned up loud enough.
All right.
So, everybody, we're talking with Grant F. Smith.
He's from IRMEP.
And here's some discharge for you.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
On the line is Grant F. Smith from the Institute for Research Middle East Policy.
And we're talking about the finally declassified statement on Jonathan Pollard by Caspar W.
Weinberger, former Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan.
But we still don't have the military damage assessment.
They're still sitting on that one.
But now, so, Grant, take us through this and talk to us about what exactly Caspar Weinberger says in here.
Right.
Well, Caspar is rebutting some responses by Pollard's defense team.
And if anything really got Pollard a life sentence, it's the fact that after his guilty plea, in his plea agreement, he promised not to talk to the media as much because the government didn't want him to relay classified information and didn't want him to, you know, take his case to the court of public attention.
So, basically, Weinberger's complaining in his statement the fact that Pollard was comparing himself to an Israeli pilot shot down behind enemy lines, with the United States being the enemy lines, hoping that somehow Raphael Eaton and his handlers, as promised, would be able to get him out of this jam and get him to simply emigrate to Israel, as had been the case with other incidents of people with official covers being caught.
And so Weinberger is basically saying here, hey, you know, you're doing this media campaign in the Washington Post, particularly Wolf Blitzer, his February 15, 1987 article, in which you're really calling out to mobilize the Israel lobby to get you off the hook, basically.
And this response, this four-page response, is basically saying you're still spilling information that can get the government in trouble, and even more so, you're sort of showing already the abusive nature of this relationship.
One of the things that's mentioned in the Wolf Blitzer article that Pollard collaborated on was the fact that, once again, by getting classified U.S. information, the Israelis were able to preempt U.S. policy by acting first.
So, in this case, the U.S. was sending a delegation to Tunisia to open relationships there, and what do the Israelis do but take the coordinates that Pollard had provided and bomb the heck out of the place, causing the U.S. tender to Tunisia to be fractured and preempted?
And so, you know, he mentions that, I think, to kind of harken back to the bigger picture of why Israel wanted all of this intelligence, and it's to be able to sort of channel and guide U.S. policies and preempt any actions by the United States that they consider not in Israel's interest.
And that's kind of been the case throughout history.
If you go back to the 1967 war, for example, the U.S. was working furiously with the Egyptians to get them to wind down, and the Israelis knew that and subsequently launched their preemptive airstrikes.
And so, you see this sort of pattern throughout history, through a combination of inside knowledge about what's going on in the United States, the Israelis are really able to subvert U.S. policies because of the inside track.
Yeah.
Hey, man, I don't know, there's so much to go over there, but I want to go a different direction, which is, what's the Levon Affair?
The Levon Affair is a reference to the 1954 Israeli agent attacks on installations in Egypt through terrorist bombings, in a failed attempt to get the United States to think the Egyptians were attacking the U.S. and the West and not withdraw and let the canal revert to Egyptian control and sovereignty.
And so that was one of the first instances of the Israelis trying to do a false flag operation against the United States to affect the policy outcome.
And it's funny you should mention that, because as you know, we've been working our way through 67 boxes of classified documents about the first Senate investigation into the Israel lobby.
And coincidentally, box one, which was just released a week ago, explains why there was a massive investigation of the Israel lobby.
There's a March 17, 1961 secret memo which mentions the Levon Affair twice, which mentions that as a reason for launching the investigation.
And it has this chilling sentence in the memo, which says, quote, there would undoubtedly, even with Caribbean instances, which would lead to foreign governmental protests, to violent attacks by special groups in the United States, unquote.
But the Senate classified that as a gray operation, and sort of leaves open the question as to whether any of the targets were picked by U.S. operators in conjunction with the Israelis.
And so there's always been this battle, and we see this battle being replayed in the 2005 AIPAC espionage indictments, where the lobby and Israel are always trying to get their hands on this sort of information so they can either front-run or preempt or move around U.S. policies that are designed in a broader interest than purely their own.
So that is, you know, we talk about the damage assessment.
It's not about the intelligence of the United States.
It really is about being able to preempt policies, which again, the policies are debatable.
Some of them are not perfect, but Eisenhower thought it was a good policy to let the Egyptians have their canal back, and the Israelis didn't.
And they were willing to attack the United States and try and pin it on the Egyptians to get the United States and, you know, the Western powers to stay in control of the canal.
And that's the kind of stuff they've been doing ever since.
So that's what makes it so interesting, as I've said often.
Well, and this is what Larry Franklin, who was the top Iran analyst at the Pentagon, was taking, was, according to his indictment, I believe, or, well, you probably got the footnote offhand better than me.
What he was getting was the internal debates, Connelisa Rice and the National Security Council talking about what are we going to do about Iran so that the Israelis would be, I guess, under Ariel Sharon's administration, would be better able to, you know, fix their talking points and their bogus intelligence and whatever they needed to be better able to get America into a war with Iran on their behalf.
Well, I tend to think it was much bigger than that.
I mean, the Israelis don't mess around with just policy.
This is the whole point of...
Oh, yeah, I guess I meant to say this was one part of what he took.
I mean, there's gas boats in the Persian Gulf coming up and attacking U.S. ships or tankers.
I mean, that's the sort of false flag opportunities, and you've mentioned this before on your show, or what led a senior official to go into the region and say, hey, you know, we don't want another USS Liberty here in the Gulf because, you know, just because you don't like U.S. policy toward Iran.
Yeah, it was Admiral Mullen that did that.
It was a constant battle, because you've got, you know, again, people like John Bolton in this country and others who, ideologically at least, would be happy to see some sort of conflagration or, you know, modern Levant Affair touch off, you know, U.S. military confrontation with Iran.
But, you know, the fact that the Israelis have so much invested in this sort of intelligence gathering and that there's almost never any sort of consequences is what's, you know, truly disturbing.
Well, and, you know, I'm kind of glad that it's 2010 now, and we can look back at the last decade, basically, of terror war, and we can see how from the very beginning, it started in the London Times, I think.
Rai from Anti-Neocon sent me this footnote.
Israeli agents say that they witnessed Iraqi intelligence hand a flask of anthrax to Mohammad Atta in Prague in the Czech Republic.
And this is where that started.
And from the very beginning, Netanyahu, you can go to AmericanRhetoric.org and read Netanyahu's first speech to Americans after September 11th.
And the entire Israeli program since then has been to try to conflate all of their enemies with ours to the point where we're not even at war with this amorphous Al-Qaeda anymore.
We're at war with Islamic extremism, which, of course, includes all of Israel's enemies.
And the neoconservatives, as you say, their friends, John Bolton, have this ideological commitment to this foreign state, which, as you've outlined over the last half hour, Grant, has very different interests than ours, that actually we're not the same as them.
Our policies, what's good for us is not necessarily what's good for Israel or vice versa.
And now we can all see that clearly, can't we?
After all this time, after all this mess, a war with Iraq, another that we might have to get into with Iran.
You still have to look pretty hard.
You still have to look pretty hard.
Yeah, well, look at IRMEP.
That's I-R-M-E-P dot org, Institute for Research Middle East Policy.
Thanks, Grant.
Thanks, Scott.
