Stewart Nozette: Latest Israeli Spy Sentenced to 13 Years for Betraying America

This month’s sentencing of a former scientist who worked for the US government on charges of spying has brought new focus on what must but be an exceptional relationship between the US and Israel when it comes to intelligence gathering.

In 1986, the US government discovered that navy analyst Jonathan Pollard was a spy and had handed over sensitive documents to Israel, which in turn gave the information to the then Soviet Union in return for data on Arab defence capabilities and permission for thousands of Jews to migrate to Israel.

Washington, which sought to hush up the affair although Pollard was sentenced to life in prison, issued a warning to Israel and the two sides agreed that they will not engage in spying on each other’s territory. It is an agreement that neither side has kept, intelligence experts say.

“The Israeli government didn’t even honour its commitments in the aftermath of the Pollard case, failing to return the ... stolen information to enable the US to conduct a damage assessment,” says Justin Raimondo, an author and contributing editor for the American Conservative. “The United States, for its part, continued to recruit and run agents inside Israel throughout the 1980s and 1990s. And it was known within the intelligence and counterintelligence communities that Israel did the same in the United States.”

According to Raimondo, David Szady, the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) assistant director for counterintelligence, “was so dismayed by the level of Israeli spying in the late ’90s that he called in the head of the Israeli embassy’s Central Institute for Intelligence and Special Activities (Mossad) office and told him, ‘Knock it off’.”

This month, Stewart Nozette, 54, a former scientist at the National Aerospace and Scientific Administration, was sentenced to 13 years in jail for trying to sell top secret information on US military satellites to federal agents posing as Israel’s super secret Mossad operatives. The sting operation was prompted by suspicious financial transactions carried out by Nozette.

“I accept full responsibility for this error” of falling into the FBI trap, Nozette told the court.

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