cont'd HIGH TREASON of TRAITOR Jonathan Pollard Re:[We

Important intelligence all Americans should know of the continuing massive damage to these united States of America's National Security:

cont'd

ANNALS OF ESPIONAGE
THE TRAITOR

During one period, Pollard had been handing over documents to them almost weekly, and they had been forced to rent an apartment in northwest Washington, where they installed a high-speed photocopying machine. "Safe houses and special Xeroxes?" an American career intelligence officer said, despairingly, concerning the Pollard operation. "This was not the first guy they'd recruited." In the years following Pollard's arrest and confession, the Israeli government chose not to cooperate fully with the F.B.I. and Justice Department investigation, and only a token number of the Pollard documents have been returned. It was not until last May that the Israeli government even acknowledged that Pollard had been its operative.

In fact, it is widely believed that Pollard was not the only one in the American government spying for Israel. During his year and a half of spying, his Israeli handlers requested specific documents, which were identified only by top-secret control numbers. After much internal assessment, the government's intelligence experts concluded that it was "highly unlikely," in the words of a Justice Department official, that any of the other American spies of the era would have had access to the specific control numbers. "There is only one conclusion," the expert told me. The Israelis "got the numbers from somebody else in the U.S. government."

THE men and women of the National Security Agency live in a world of chaotic bleeps, buzzes, and whistles, and talk to each other about frequencies, spectrums, modulation, and bandwidth -- the stuff of Tom Clancy novels. They often deal with signals intelligence, or SIGINT, and their world is kept in order by an in-house manual known as the RASIN an acronym for radio-signal notations. The manual, which is classified "top-secret Umbra," fills ten volumes, is constantly updated, and lists the physical parameters of every known signal. Pollard took it all. "It's the Bible," one former communications-intelligence officer told me. "It tells how we collect signals anywhere in the world." The site, frequency, and significant features of Israeli communications -- those that were known and targeted by the N.S.A. -- were in the RASIN; so were all the known communications links used by the Soviet Union.

The loss of the RASIN was especially embarrassing to the Navy, I was told by the retired admiral, because the copy that Pollard photocopied belonged to the Office of Naval Intelligence. "He went into our library, found we had an out-of-date version, requested a new one, and passed it on," the officer said. "I was surprised we even had it."

The RASIN theft was one of the specifics cited in Defense Secretary Weinberger's still secret declaration to the court before Pollard's sentencing hearing. In fact, the hearing's most dramatic moment came when Pollard's attorney, Richard A. Hibey, readily acknowledged his client's guilt but argued that the extent of the damage to American national security did not call for the imposition of a maximum sentence. "I would ask you to think about the Secretary of Defense's affidavit, as it related to only one thing," Judge Robinson interjected, "with reference to one particular category of publication, and I fail to see how you can make that argument." He invited Hibey to approach the bench, along with the Justice Department attorneys, and the group spent a few moments reviewing what government officials told me was Weinberger's account of the importance of the RAISIN. One Justice Department official, recalling those moments with obvious pleasure, said that the RASIN was the ninth item on the Weinberger damage-assessment list. After the bench conference, Hibey made no further attempt to minimize the national-security damage caused by its theft. (Citing national security, Hibey refused to discuss the case for this article.)

The ten volumes of the RASIN were available on a need-to-know basis inside the N.S.A. "I've never seen the monster," a former senior watch officer at an N.S.A. intercept site in Europe told me, but added that he did supervise people who constantly used it, and he described its function in easy-to-understand terms: "It is a complete catalogue of what the United States was listening to, or could listen to -- information referred to in the N.S.A. as 'parametric data.' It tells you everything you want to know about a particular signal -- when it was first detected and where, whom it was first used by, what kind of entity, frequency, wavelength, or band length it has. When you've copied a signal and don't know what it is, the RASIN manual gives you a description."

A senior intelligence official who consults regularly with the N.S.A. on technical matters subsequently told me that another issue involved geometry. The RASIN, he explained, had been focussed in particular on the Soviet Union and its thousands of high-frequency, or shortwave, communications, which had enabled Russian military units at either end of the huge land mass to communicate with each other. Those signals "bounced" off the ionosphere and were often best intercepted thousands of miles from their point of origin. If, as many in the American intelligence community suspected, the Soviet communications experts had been able to learn which of their signals were being monitored, and where, they could relocate the signal and force the N.S.A. to invest man-hours and money to try to recapture it. Or, more likely, the Soviets could continue to communicate in a normal fashion but relay false and misleading information.

Pollard's betrayal of the RASIN put the N.S.A. in the position of having to question or reevaluate all of its intelligence collecting. "We aren't perfect," the career intelligence officer explained to me. "We've got holes in our coverage, and this" -- the loss of the RASIN -- tells where the biases and the weaknesses are. It's how we get the job done, and how we will get the job done."

"What a wonderful insight into how we think, and exactly how we're exploiting Soviet communications!" the retired admiral exclaimed. "It's a how-to-do-it book -- the fireside cookbook of cryptology. Not only the analyses but the facts of how we derived our analyses. Whatever recipe you want."

Pollard, asked about the specific programs he compromised, told me, "As far as SIGINT information is concerned, the government has consistently lied in its public version of what I gave the Israelis."

IN the mid-nineteen-eighties, the daily report from the Navy's Sixth Fleet Ocean Surveillance Information Facility (FOSIF) in Rota, Spain, was one of America's Cold War staples. A top-secret document filed every morning at 0800 Zulu time (Greenwich Mean Time), it reported all that had gone on in the Middle East during the previous twenty-four hours, as recorded by the N.S.A.'s most sophisticated monitoring devices. The reports were renowned inside Navy commands for their sophistication and their reliability; they were based, as the senior managers understood it, on data supplied both by intelligence agents throughout the Middle East and by the most advanced technical means of intercepting Soviet military communications. The Navy's intelligence facility at Rota shared space with a huge N.S.A. intercept station, occupied by more than seven hundred linguists and cryptographers, which was responsible for monitoring and decoding military and diplomatic communications all across North Africa. Many at Rota spent hundreds of hours a month listening while locked in top-secret compartments aboard American ships, aircraft, and submarines operating in the Mediterranean.

The Navy's primary targets were the ships, the aircraft, and, most important, the nuclear-armed submarines of the Soviet Union on patrol in the Mediterranean. Those submarines, whose nuclear missiles were aimed at United States forces, were constantly being tracked; they were to be targeted and destroyed within hours if war broke out.

Pollard's American interrogators eventually concluded that in his year and a half of spying he had provided the Israelis with more than a year's worth of the daily FOSIF reports from Rota. Pollard himself told the Americans that at one point in 1985 the Israelis had nagged him when he missed several days of work because of illness and had failed to deliver the FOSIF reports for those days. One of his handlers, Joseph Yagur, had complained twice about the missed messages and had asked him to find a way to retrieve them. Pollard told his American interrogators that he had never missed again.

The career intelligence officer who helped to assess the Pollard damage has come to view Pollard as a serial spy, the Ted Bundy of the intelligence world. "Pollard gave them every message for a whole year," the officer told me recently, referring to the Israelis. "They could analyze it" -- the intelligence -- "message by message, and correlate it. They could not only piece together our sources and methods but also learn how we think, and how we approach a problem. All of a sudden, there is no mystery. These are the things we can't change. You got this, and you got us by the balls." In other words, the Rota reports, when carefully studied, gave the Israelis "a road map on how to circumvent" the various American collection methods and shield an ongoing military operation. The reports provide guidance on "how to keep us asleep, thinking all is working well," he added. "They tell the Israelis how to raid Tunisia without tipping off American intelligence in advance. That is damage that is persistent and severe."

NOT every document handed over by Pollard dealt with signals intelligence. DIAL-COINS is the acronym for the Defense Intelligence Agency's Community On-Line Intelligence System, which was one of the government's first computerized information-retrieval-network systems. The system, which was comparatively primitive in the mid-nineteen-eighties -- it used an 8088 operating chip and thermafax paper -- could not be accessed by specific issues or key words but spewed out vast amounts of networked intelligence data by time frame. Nevertheless, DIAL-COINS contained all the intelligence reports filed by Air Force, Army, Navy, and Marine attaches in Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East. One official who had been involved with it told me recently, "It was full of great stuff, particularly in HUMINT -- human intelligence. Many Americans who went to the Middle East for business or political reasons agreed, as loyal citizens, to be debriefed by American defense attaches after their visits. They were promised anonymity -- many had close friends inside Israel and the nearby Arab states who would be distressed by their collaboration -- and the reports were classified. "It's who's talking to whom," the officer said. "Like handing you the address book of the spooks for a year."

Government investigators discovered that one of the system's heaviest users in 1984 and 1985 was Jonathan Pollard. He had all the necessary clearances and necessary credentials to gain access to the classified Pentagon library; he also understood that librarians, even in secret libraries, are always eager to help, and in one instance he relied on the library security guards. With some chagrin, officials involved in the Pollard investigation recounted that Pollard had once collected so much data that he needed a handcart to move the papers to his car, in a nearby parking lot, and the security guards held the doors for him.

POLLARD also provided the Israelis with what is perhaps the most important day-to-day information in signals intelligence: the National SIGINT Requirements List, which is essentially a compendium of the tasks, and the priority of those tasks, given to various N.S.A. collection units around the world. Before a bombing mission, for example, a United States satellite might be redeployed, at enormous financial cost, to provide instantaneous electronic coverage of the target area. In addition, N.S.A. field stations would be ordered to begin especially intensive monitoring of various military units in the target nation. Special N.S.A. coverage would also be ordered before an American covert military unit, such as the Army's Delta Force or a Navy Seal team, was inserted into hostile territory or hostile waters. Sometimes the N.S.A.'s requests were less comprehensive: a European or Middle Eastern business suspected of selling chemical arms to a potential adversary might be placed on the N.S.A. "watch list" and its faxes, telexes, and other communications carefully monitored. The Requirements List is "like a giant to-do list," a former N.S.A. operative told me. "If a customer" -- someone in the intelligence community -- "asked for specific coverage, it would be on a list that is updated daily." That is, the target of the coverage would be known.

"If we're going to bomb Iraq, we will shift the system," a senior specialist subsequently told me. "It's a tipoff where the American emphasis is going to be." With the List, the specialist added, the Israelis "could see us move our collection systems" prior to military action, and eventually come to understand how the United States Armed Forces "change our emphasis." In other words, he added, Israel "could make our intelligence system the prime target" and hide whatever was deemed necessary. "The damage goes past Jay's arrest," the specialist said, "and could extend up to today." Israel made dramatic use of the Pollard material on October 1, 1985, seven weeks before his arrest, when its Air Force bombed the headquarters of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Tunisia, killing at least sixty-seven people. The United States, which was surprised by the operation, eventually concluded that the Israeli planners had synergistically combined the day-to-day insights of the SIGINT Requirements List with the strategic intelligence of the FOSIF reports and other data that Pollard provided to completely outwit our government's huge collection apparatus in the Middle East. Even Pollard himself, the senior official told me, "had no idea what he gave away."

THE results of President Clintons requested review of the Pollard case by officials in the intelligence community and other interested parties were to be presented to the White House by January 11th. A former Justice Department official told me, "Nobody can believe that any President would have the gall to release this kind of spy." But as the report was being prepared the nature of the questions that the White House was referring to the Justice Department convinced some intelligence officials that Clinton was considering a compromise, such as commuting Pollard's life sentence to twenty-five years in prison. The queries about commutation were coming not from Roger Adams, the President's pardon attorney, but from Charles F. C. Ruff, the White House counsel. "Pollard would get half a loaf," one distraught career intelligence official told me. The deal believed to be under consideration would provide for his release, with time off for good behavior, in the summer of 2002. The solution had a certain "political beauty," the official added -- in the eyes of the White House. "Pollard doesn't get out right away, and the issue doesn't cause any trouble. And getting the United States to bend would be a serious victory for Israel."

A senior intelligence official whose agency was involved in preparing the report for the White House told me, somewhat facetiously, that he would drop all objections to Pollard's immediate release if the Israeli government would answer two questions: "First, give us a list of what you've got, and, second, tell us what you did with it." Such answers are unlikely to be forthcoming. The Israeli government has acknowledged that Pollard was indeed spying on its behalf but has refused -- despite constant entreaties -- to provide the United States with a complete list of the documents that were turned over to it.

--clip--

http://www.jya.com/tr