As the case was making international headlines, tension between the United States and Israel flared. Israeli officials strongly denied any knowledge of Jonathan Pollard’s espionage. They called it a rogue operation run by Rafael Eitan with the help of Yosef Yagur, the Israeli attaché in New York, Ilan Ravid, the scientific consular at the Israeli embassy in Washington, and Irit Erb, a secretary in the embassy. The name Aviem Sella wasn’t mentioned, nor had it surfaced in Pollard’s initial interviews. By 30 November 1985, the Israelis offered to return the documents Pollard had passed to the conspirators, but they wouldn’t allow Yagur and Ravid to be questioned in Washington. An Israeli official told the Washington Post his country would “retain diplomatic immunity and that the principle of international diplomacy would not be surrendered under pressure from Washington.”1 The Israelis did promise, however, to undertake a separate investigation of their own.
Furious, U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz fired off a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres demanding to know whether Israel was conducting espionage operations in the United States, what documents had been sent to Israel, and what his country intended to do about the two recalled diplomats, Yagur and Ravid. Members of Congress also demanded answers.
Eventually, through diplomatic channels, the two countries decided that an American delegation headed by Abraham Sofaer, a retired judge acting as a legal adviser for the Department of State, would travel to Israel. There the delegation would retrieve the classified materials and interview Pollard’s handlers.2 The Justice Department agreed not to prosecute them if they were fully debriefed and filed court documents identifying them as unindicted coconspirators.
The delegation, put together by the Justice and State departments, included U. S. Attorney Joseph diGenova, two members of Pollard’s prosecution team—Charles Leeper and Stephen Spivack—two people from the Department of Justice, and FBI representatives. No one from the navy was invited. This promised to be a grave mistake. The navy was cataloguing the materials Pollard had passed to the Israelis, which put it in the unique position of being able to grasp the scope of the damage he had inflicted on the defense intelligence community.3 According to Jerry Agee, commander of the ATAC as well as Pollard’s boss, the Department of Justice blamed the Israelis for the exclusion of navy personnel, claiming they had put a cap on the number of people allowed to enter Israel.
When the Justice Department informed Judge Sofaer that no one from the navy would be going, he was puzzled. He called up NIS headquarters and requested a representative from the navy, someone who knew about the classified information to which Pollard had access and who could give him a feel for the analyst and his background. Commander Agee being the obvious candidate, the NIS sent him to the State Department to meet with Sofaer. Agee impressed Sofaer, and the judge included him in his official State Department entourage.
In early December 1985 the delegation left for a ten-day stay in Israel. Agee traveled with Judge Sofaer and his assistant on a separate aircraft, apart from the Department of Justice group. When their plane arrived in Tel Aviv, it was mobbed by journalists waiting for them to deplane. While Sofaer was going through the fanfare of giving statements to the press, a reporter spotted Agee standing in the background. Suddenly, the media descended on him, shoving microphones in his face and taking pictures. One photographer walked right up and snapped a picture just inches from his face, then began taking additional shots from different angles. What the hell is he doing? Agee wondered, guessing the guy thought he was CIA. But no one asked him his identity, and he didn’t offer it.
Shortly afterward, a limousine arrived to take them to their hotels. Agee was dropped off at the Jerusalem Hilton, where he would be staying with members of the delegation from the Department of Justice, while Judge Sofaer and his assistant were whisked off to the King David. Reporters were milling around the lobby, and when Agee walked up to the desk and produced his passport to show the clerk, they swarmed around him with their cameras clicking, evidently trying to get a close-up of the inside of his passport. When Agee saw what was happening, he promptly pocketed the passport and told the clerk he would provide it later.
Israeli security, eyeing the delegation warily and suspecting them of mischief at every turn, kept track of their comings and goings at all times. On one occasion, Agee walked into the hotel gift shop, bought a newspaper, and decided to look around outside. The shop had a second door leading to the street and Agee exited that way, not thinking twice about it, to do some sightseeing in the area. After walking two blocks he returned to a chaotic scene. The area outside the hotel was overrun with police cars and plainclothes security personnel—Mossad agents, Agee believed. What on earth is going on? he wondered. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw one officer elbow another and point at him. The second man, glaring at Agee, came up and barked, “Don’t you ever do that again!” Nothing more was said.
On another occasion, FBI Special Agent Eugene Noltkamper, Agent Joe Johnson, and Commander Agee went into the gift shop in the hotel lobby, and when they finished, they exited through two different doors. Agee went his own way, not intending to confuse anyone. When Johnson and Noltkamper got up to their rooms a few minutes later, there was a knock on the latter’s door. It was the same two security people who had been sitting in the lobby logging the delegation members’ comings and goings. They said they wanted to make sure he had a fire exit sticker on the inside of his door. They both came in, and he believed they might have actually put another sticker over the one already on the door. He said it was obvious they were confused as to who went into which room and apparently were trying to account for everyone.4 The Israelis didn’t seem to understand they were dealing with U.S. counterintelligence experts who viewed their phony ploys as bordering on the ridiculous.
Agee didn’t take part in interviewing the coconspirators, but from those who did he heard about the roadblocks thrown in their way. Every day the delegation was wakened long before dawn and driven from the hotel in Jerusalem to the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv, about ninety minutes away. The interviews were arranged on Israeli terms. The first several days were spent doing nothing but working out ground rules—what the Americans could and could not ask the Israeli suspects.
The delegation would wait at the embassy all day before being herded onto a bus in which the shades had been drawn. They were then transferred to a van with darkened windows and later switched to yet another van. They were driven to an installation in the middle of nowhere that resembled, not a military base, but a civilian-run facility.
The interviews, according to Noltkamper, were all conducted late at night, in the basement, with the Americans sitting on one side of a big conference table and each coconspirator—one at a time, with his Israeli legal team—on the other.
Compounding the frustration of FBI Agent Noltkamper and the other Americans was the ritual that every time they asked a question, the Israelis would translate it into Hebrew, then the coconspirator would respond in Hebrew, and they would translate the answer back into English. The most annoying part was that the coconspirators spoke perfect English and everybody knew it. But rules were rules.
Needless to say, the delegation would arrive back at the hotel in the wee hours, exhausted, and fall into bed to catch a few short hours of sleep. It was obvious the Israelis had decided not to cooperate fully.
According to Noltkamper, when they interviewed Rafael Eitan, the leader of the spy ring, he immediately began to lie. The U.S. delegation got up and told the Israelis that the interview was over. After a day or two of negotiations, they resumed the interview and this time Eitan was much more straightforward.5
Commander Agee had with him a list of classified documents Pollard had passed to his handlers. It was just a preliminary list, for over the course of eighteen months the analyst had taken such a huge volume of material that it would take more than a year to compile a complete list. At first the Israelis handed over sixty-three documents to the Justice Department, saying that was all the analyst had provided. This was a blatant falsehood. The entire delegation knew Pollard had turned over thousands of documents and classified pages, a vast amount of them classified TS/SCI. They could prove this from a cursory check they had done before the trip, and back it up with Pollard’s confessions.
When pressed for the return of all the classified material in their possession, including the TS/SCI documents, the Israelis insisted that was all they had. The Americans pushed the issue, showing them Agee’s short list of classified information. After continued denials, the Israelis finally conceded and relinquished additional documents.
Fed up with the long travel hours, the Americans decided to move into a hotel in Tel Aviv to be closer to the interview site. When Judge Sofaer informed the Israelis of the planned switch, they said they didn’t want the team to change hotels. Rather, they would arrange for future interviews to be conducted closer by, outside of Jerusalem. The Israelis never made good on their promise.
By now the lack of cooperation was so exasperating that Judge Sofaer called Prime Minister Peres and informed him that he was releasing a statement to the press and pulling his team out of Israel. The Israelis backed off somewhat, appeasing the delegation rather than fully cooperating. They still didn’t mention Aviem Sella or his involvement in the operation, apparently relying on Pollard’s silence.
One day at the Hilton, Agee called up from the lobby to Charlie Leeper’s room, which happened to be to the right of Agee’s. A stranger with an Israeli accent answered the phone. When Agee asked for Leeper, the person said, “He’s in the conference room downstairs having a meeting.” This struck Agee as odd. Thinking he might have dialed the wrong room, he took the elevator up to check the number on Leeper’s door. Agee was correct—he had dialed the wrong room, the one to the left of his. Who, then, was in the room he had dialed—and how did that person know Leeper was in a meeting in the basement? It dawned on him then that all of their rooms might be bugged.
This was a strong possibility. The U.S. intelligence community knew that hotel rooms where State Department and high-ranking military officials stayed when visiting the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv were routinely bugged. In fact, official travelers to the embassy received briefings warning them not to discuss classified information in their hotel rooms and not to leave classified documents unattended.
Alarmed, Agee hurried down to the conference room where the interview team was having a strategy session, scribbled a note on a pad, and handed it to Leeper: “Your meeting is being monitored.”
The United States kept its agreement not to prosecute Pollard’s connections, and despite all the obstacles thrown into the Americans’ way, his coconspirators ultimately did for the most part reveal their involvement. But the delegation still knew nothing about Aviem Sella, and they left Israel with just a small fraction of the documents they had received from Pollard—about 163, none classified higher than secret. The FBI’s Johnson and Noltkamper carried the recovered documents in two orange diplomatic bags. The two agents had to fly back first class and buy three seats, one for the two diplomatic bags, which they couldn’t put in the cargo hold of a commercial plane.6
Before the delegation left, the Israelis decided to give them the machine they claimed had been used to copy the documents. It came, they said, from the surplus inventory of the Israeli consulate in New York. There was no way of telling because the serial number had been removed. The FBI later said that the machine was not one of those used to copy the documents.
Agee experienced one last glitch as he was leaving Israel. During his stay he had purchased gifts for his family and copies of several Israeli-English newspapers. Agee recalled that one newspaper featured a full front-page picture of his face with a question mark over it. As Agee was going through the tight airport security, a uniformed security guard asked him if he had enjoyed his stay. Agee replied that he did enjoy his stay “for the most part.”
The guard, in a cold, hard voice, stated, “Good, because you will never be coming back here again.”
Agee didn’t say another word to the guard and moved on to his gate. When he arrived home in Virginia and opened his suitcase, Agee found that its contents had been ransacked: all his gifts were gone, and so were the newspapers he had purchased that told about the Pollard case.7
The Israelis must have thought they were being clever, withholding the most highly classified materials, along with Sella’s name, from the U.S. delegation. If so, they badly miscalculated the disenchantment Jonathan Jay Pollard felt over being abandoned and left in such a fix.