‘Where’s the Beef?’ Washington Post Reporting About Israel’s Ambassador Smacks of Propaganda

(Washington, D.C.): The front page of
today’s Washington Post featured
an extraordinary, above-the-fold article
entitled, “A Top U.S. Official May
Have Given Sensitive Data to
Israel.” It suggests that the
Israeli Ambassador to the United States,
Eliahu Ben Elissar was personally
involved in tasking an agent in the
senior ranks of the American government
to obtain documents that were presumably
highly classified and that would
otherwise be unavailable to Israel. In
some editions, the article featured a
photograph of Jonathan Pollard, a
convicted spy who is serving a life
sentence for revealing U.S. defense and
intelligence secrets to the Israeli
government eleven years ago.

Even more ominous is a companion
article about Ambassador Elissar. It
described him with ill-concealed scorn as
a member of the “hardest-core
ideological wing of [Prime Minister
Benjamin] Netanyahu’s Likud Party, well
to the right of the prime minister and
unreconciled personally to the peace
accords signed with Yasser Arafat since
1993.” The Post also
reported that Amb. Ben Elissar
“spent more than a decade in the
Mossad,” Israel’s famed intelligence
service.

‘Just the Facts, Ma’am’

The clear implication of these two
juxtaposed articles is that the Israeli
ambassador is still a spy and is
actively engaged in running hostile
intelligence operations against Israel’s
most important and reliable ally. This
insinuation is, however, wholly
unsubstantiated by the content of the Post‘s
reporting. There may be more to
this story than has been published so
far. If so, it behooves the Washington
Post and/or the U.S. government to
make it public promptly.

If not, the Post may
be seen as the functional equivalent of
an organ of anti-Israel propaganda.
It has not only smeared a senior diplomat
from a friendly nation; it has also
implicated an unnamed, ranking American
official — and compromised a critical
U.S. intelligence capability to boot! And
the Post has done so with little
more to go on than a second-hand report
of a transcript of a highly classified
National Security Agency (NSA) intercept.

According to the newspaper’s account,
NSA broke the code of a secure
communication between an Israeli
intelligence officer in the Washington
embassy and his Mossad superior in Tel
Aviv. It indicated that the former
reported to the latter that “The
ambassador wants me to go to Mega to get
a copy” of a letter of assurances
Warren Christopher had given Arafat on 16
January 1997 in the wake of the
PLO-Israeli accord on Hebron. The
superior in Israel reportedly said,
“This is not something we use Mega
for.”

Unfortunately, the word that appears
to animate this whole story is the word
“use,” which connotes an
ongoing and covert relationship with
“Mega.” Since the Post
notes that “the source [concerning
the transcript] said [it]…was
translated from Hebrew to English
‘awkwardly,'” however, it is far
from clear that such an inference can
actually be drawn from the remark. If the
intercepted conversation ensued from a
request from the Ambassador to see if a
document (whose counterpart sent by
Secretary Christopher to Mr. Netanyahu
was treated as an unclassified
document and publicly released by Israel)
could be obtained from a U.S. official
identified in Israeli intelligence
circles by the moniker “Mega,”
and the correct translation of the verb
employed in response was not
“use” but “ask,”
the implications of this exchange could
be far less ominous, if not actually
quite benign.

The Bottom Line

Espionage against the United States is
a matter of serious concern — even if
conducted by friendly governments.
Security-minded individuals must,
accordingly, take seriously credible
reports of efforts by foreign nationals
to penetrate or otherwise improperly to
secure sensitive U.S. data.

As of this writing, the Washington
Post‘s reporting concerning an
alleged Israeli operation do not meet
this standard. They appear to resemble
far more a malicious hatchet job on a
representative of an allied government
under circumstances that seem, at best,
unclear — and that may themselves have
compromised important American
intelligence capabilities.

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