TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/102891/1028001.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.9 KB | 146 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 72

Did Shamir Give Away Secrets?


Yes, says a new book by an investigative journalist, and they
were America's top secrets: nuclear targets

By GEORGE J. CHURCH


     The story, writes investigative reporter Seymour Hersh,
"might seem almost too startling to be believed." Indeed. But
Hersh did come to believe it, and it is now surfacing in his
book The Samson Option, being published this week by Random
House. In capsule: among the American secrets stolen for Israel
by convicted spy Jonathan Pollard was some of the most vital
information the U.S. possessed: satellite pictures and data used
to aim nuclear missiles at the Soviet Union. Some of this was
relayed by Jerusalem to the Soviets. And the man who supposedly
made the decision to do it and in person passed some of the
data was none other than Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.

     Rumors have floated ever since Pollard's conviction that
some of the U.S. secrets he stole had reached Moscow, but no
one had suggested that Shamir was directly responsible. Hersh
first heard this allegation from Ari Ben-Menashe, a former
Israeli intelligence officer and veteran spinner of
stunning-if-true-but yarns. He was the teller of the October
Surprise tale about an alleged 1980 agreement between the Reagan
campaign and Iranian officials to delay the release of American
hostages until after the U.S. election. Hersh says Ben-Menashe's
account was "subsequently amplified by a second Israeli, who
cannot be named." This second source asserted, as Hersh puts it,
that the material was "sanitized" so that any damage to the U.S.
would be lessened. But, says Hersh, some of it "was directly
provided to Yevgeny M. Primakov, the Soviet Foreign Ministry's
specialist on the Middle East [now chief of foreign
intelligence for the Kremlin], who met publicly and privately
with Shamir."

     Why on earth would Shamir turn over targeting information,
sanitized or not, to the Soviets? After all, says Hersh, Israel
has trained its own nuclear weapons primarily on the Soviet
Union since it made its first warheads in 1968. His explanation:
Jerusalem thought Arab nations would not launch a concerted war
to destroy the Jewish state unless they had Soviet backing;
targeting Israeli nukes on the U.S.S.R. would deter Moscow from
offering such support. According to the book, Israel asked
Pollard to steal satellite pictures in the first place so that
it could aim its missiles at targets beyond border areas of the
Soviet Union. For that, Jerusalem needed intelligence data --
which Washington refused to share -- on how the U.S. proposed
to hit similar targets.

     As far back as December 1987, a United Press International
story quoted U.S. intelligence analysts as saying that some of
the Pollard material "was traded to the Soviets in return for
promises to increase emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel." Hersh
mentions this rationale in passing but stresses others. His
second source, who said the story is well known among Israel's
top politicians, claims that Shamir told colleagues "that his
goal was to end the long-standing enmity between Israel and the
Soviet Union and initiate some kind of strategic cooperation."

     Shamir supposedly sought Soviet goodwill "as a means of
offsetting Israel's traditional reliance on the U.S.," which
disturbed him for personal as well as diplomatic reasons.
According to Ben-Menashe, says Hersh, Shamir "viscerally
disliked the U.S." The unnamed Israeli said that "Shamir has
always been fascinated with authority and strong regimes. He
sees the U.S. as very soft, bourgeois, materialistic and
effete."

     If that tale sounds astounding, much of Hersh's book is
otherwise convincing. The reporter who exposed the full stories
of the My Lai massacre and Manuel Noriega's drug-running set out
to tell how Israel developed the Bomb. If his assertions come
as no real surprise, the evidence he brings to bear is
impressive. For years, most of the world has suspected that
Israel possessed nuclear weapons. Even Israelis coyly refer to
the "bomb in the basement." But Hersh concentrates primarily on
how the U.S. has determinedly looked the other way. American
Presidents could not condone Israel's development of nuclear
weapons, but any move to impose sanctions on Israel would
provoke the Jewish state's legion of American admirers.

     In 1967, says Hersh, Ambassador to Israel Walworth
Barbour, eager not to upset Lyndon Johnson, told his
subordinates to stop monitoring the progress of the Israeli
nuclear reactor at Dimona, where the Bomb was thought to be.
Later, during the Nixon Administration, Barbour was given a
special intelligence briefing on the Israeli weapons program and
announced he did not believe it. One of the briefers told Hersh
that Barbour gave this explanation: "If I acknowledge this, then
I have to go to the President. And if he admitted it, he'd have
to do something about it."

     Actually, according to the book, Nixon and Secretary of
State Henry Kissinger approved of Israel's weapons program, even
though they were subjected to what Hersh calls "nuclear
blackmail." When Israel feared that it was on the brink of
defeat in the 1973 October War, Jerusalem asserted that if
Washington did not immediately resupply the weapons the Israeli
armed forces had lost it would fire its nukes. Kissinger, who
had wanted to delay sending more arms in the hope of setting up
a land-for-peace settlement, quickly changed his mind.

     In September 1979, when a U.S. satellite observed an
intense flash of light over the Indian Ocean, Jimmy Carter would
have found it very embarrassing to admit that it was an atomic
test, especially an Israeli test. He would have had to "do
something strong," said one official, "but there was a large
segment of the population that Carter couldn't alienate."

     Hersh recounts story after story of deceit and willful
gullibility, nearly all as convincing as they are depressing --
with the possible exception of the tale about Shamir's giving
U.S. secrets to the Soviets. Jerusalem, Moscow and Washington
have already begun denying that one. Shamir's military aide,
Brigadier General Azriel Nevo, called it "an outright lie."
Yitzhak Rabin, who was defense minister at the time of the
Pollard affair, says Israel never received any such information.
In Moscow, Primakov dismissed the story as "utter nonsense" and
denied that anyone, American or Israeli "has ever passed such
information to me."

     A Washington official familiar with the Pollard case also
says the spy did not provide such data to Israel. The White
House declined to comment. On the face of it, the story does
sound too mind-boggling to be immediately credible. But Hersh
is a careful and seasoned reporter, and in the Middle East
there is almost nothing so bizarre as to be beyond belief.