A New Twist on an Old Spy Case

In a bizarre postscript to a two-decade-old spy scandal, the FBI on Tuesday arrested an 84-year-old former U.S. Army civilian engineer and charged him with providing classified defense documents to Israel.
 
The alleged crimes that led to the arrest of Ben-Ami Kadish took place between 1979 and 1985, when Kadish, a U.S. citizen, worked at the Army's Picatinny Arsenal—a weapons research center in northern New Jersey. But the most intriguing part of the case may have less to do with Kadish, the accused octogenarian American spy, than his alleged Israeli "handler."

According to court documents unsealed Tuesday, Kadish's alleged handler turns out to be the same Israeli consular official in New York who also allegedly served as a "control" agent for Jonathan Pollard, the notorious former Navy intelligence analyst and convicted spy whose case cast a cloud over U.S.-Israeli relations for years.

The arrest of Kadish indicates that the long-term fallout from the Pollard case may not be over. A senior U.S. intelligence official (who asked not to be identified talking about sensitive matters) told NEWSWEEK that Kadish's alleged activities were first discovered within the last few years—more than 20 years after they occurred. The official said the information that identified Kadish came from supersecret intelligence monitoring related to ongoing inquiries about the Pollard case. Spokesmen for the Justice Department and the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan, where the case was brought, declined to comment on the origins of the case. Kadish's defense lawyer, Bruce Goldstein, did not respond to requests for comment.

Just what those continuing inquiries might be about is far from clear, given that Pollard was first arrested in 1985 and convicted (and sentenced to life) the next year. But former U.S. officials—including one who wrote a book on the Pollard case—noted that some investigators have believed for years that there was a high-level mole inside the U.S. government assisting the Israelis in identifying classified documents they wanted Pollard to obtain for them. The existence of an ongoing Pollard-related inquiry suggests that the FBI's counterintelligence agents are still trying to find this unidentified mole—much in the same way FBI and CIA agents during the Cold War spent decades trying to find supposed high-level spies inside the U.S. intelligence community.

Ironically, the charges against Kadish come just as federal prosecutors are also preparing to begin the long-delayed trial of two former officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman—a case that has generated fierce controversy. The two men are accused of violating the "Espionage Act" for allegedly sharing classified information they received from U.S. government officials with members of the news media and the Israeli government. Rosen and Weissman pleaded not guilty and deny any wrongdoing.

The surprise connection between the Pollard affair and the arrest of Kadish is partly spelled out in an FBI complaint filed Tuesday in U.S. court in Manhattan. The document says that between the late 1970s and 1985, Kadish, a Connecticut-born American citizen, worked as a mechanical engineer at the Picatinny Arsenal. While working there he allegedly passed classified material to a man identified in the FBI complaint only as "CC-1" (Co-Conspirator No. 1)—an Israeli who was then working for Israeli Aircraft Industries, a large defense contractor. The complaint alleges that Kadish's brother had introduced him to the Israeli in the early 1970s, before Kadish began working at Picatinny.

Initially, the FBI document says, the Israeli handler did not ask Kadish to provide him with any classified material. But subsequently, according to the FBI document, CC-1 started providing Kadish with lists of specific documents that the Israelis were interested in seeing. According to the FBI, Kadish would then go to a secret documents "library" at the Picatinny Arsenal, fill out a form requesting access to the specific documents and take them back to his office. At the end of the workday, the FBI says, Kadish would put the secret papers into his briefcase and take them to his home, where CC-1 would photograph them in Kadish's basement. The next morning Kadish would return the papers to the documents library.