Israel Tensions Without and Within

By William E. Smith.

The strange case of Jonathan Pollard, the U.S. Navy counterintelligence analyst accused of spying for Israel, continued to unfold last week, as an eight-member U.S. Government team arrived in Tel Aviv to question Israeli officials suspected of involvement in the affair. At the same time, the government of Prime Minister Shimon Peres wrestled with another problem: a rise in tension between Israel and Syria over the Israeli downing of two Syrian MiG fighter planes a month ago. Though some Israeli officials described the matter as a "crisis," to the U.S. Government the danger appeared to have subsided by the time the Israeli public got wind of the impasse. The trouble began Nov. 19 when Israeli jet pilots, accompanying a pair of reconnaissance planes making a routine sweep over Lebanon, shot down the Soviet-made MiG-23s in Syrian airspace. The Israeli pilots said later that they had thought the MiGs were heading directly toward them. The Syrians immediately began to bring SA-2 missile batteries into positions along their border with Lebanon. Even more ominous, they transported SA-6 and SA-8 mobile missile batteries into Lebanon to positions along the Damascus-Beirut Highway and around Baalbek. The Israelis, concerned that the Syrian reinforcements would make Israeli reconnaissance flights exceedingly dangerous, asked the U.S. for help. Acknowledging to U.S. Envoy Richard Murphy that Israel had erred in firing at the Syrian planes, Peres persuaded the American, who was in Damascus at the time, to urge President Hafez Assad to withdraw the missile batteries.

After reportedly receiving from Murphy vague Israeli assurances that such air clashes would be avoided in the future, Assad withdrew the mobile missile batteries from Lebanon. That gesture eased tensions somewhat, but Assad left the SA-2s in place within Syria along the Lebanese border, perpetuating Israeli fears that the reconnaissance flights would still be threatened.

At first the Israelis tried to keep the whole affair secret, even to the point of asking newspaper editors not to print stories about it. Foreign observers concluded from this that the Israelis, though they later leaked some of the details of the Syrian missile emplacements to reporters, were trying hard to avoid a confrontation. As for Assad, he had obviously felt obliged to respond to the loss of his planes. But he knows the limitations of his air force, and seemed unlikely to risk an open fight with the Israelis. Overall, the U.S. felt that whatever tension had existed earlier was easing.

The same could not be said about relations between Israel and the U.S., which have been seriously strained by the Pollard case. Both sides were keeping quiet about the U.S. mission to Israel, which was headed by Abraham Sofaer, the State Department's legal adviser. "All I can tell you is that I can tell you nothing," said an Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman. With such an effective news blackout in place, journalists speculated that the U.S. team was probably focusing on three Israelis: Rafi Eitan, the security official who headed the secret unit that controlled Pollard, and Ilan Ravid and Yosef Yagur, the two science attaches abruptly removed last month from diplomatic assignments in the U.S. The Americans were said to be concentrating on two basic points: the extent of the damage Pollard may have caused, and whether he was operating in isolation or as part of a broader spy network.

From the beginning, the Israelis insisted that the U.S. team should conduct a fact-finding mission, not a judicial interrogation. The Israeli side was led by Hanan Bar-on, a Foreign Ministry official with diplomatic status equal to Sofaer's. The Israelis were torn between wanting to minimize the damage by appearing to be cooperative and at the same time not contributing too substantially to the U.S. case against Pollard. Said one Israeli official: "We feel deeply humiliated by all this."

The Reagan Administration seemed to view the case as a betrayal by a friend, an act unnecessary and inappropriate even in the amoral world of espionage. There were indications that the Administration had temporarily reduced the level of intelligence information it shared with Israel. Moreover, it did not let the matter rest with the U.S. mission to Israel. Late in the week federal investigators armed with court warrants raided the offices of three U.S. companies in an attempt to establish whether the firms had illegally shipped to Israel the technology and equipment for an improved process of producing tank cannon barrels.

Israel maintained that it had contracted legally with one of the firms, Napco Inc. of Terryville, Conn., to build a chrome-plating plant for the government-owned Israeli Military Industries. Only last May, a federal grand jury indicted a California businessman on charges of illegally exporting to Israel 800 devices of a kind that could be used to trigger nuclear weapons. Whatever emerges from last week's raids, some Israelis saw in them a veiled U.S. threat: Cooperate in the Pollard case or face a continuing flow of damaging information.

While some Israelis complained that the U.S. was being high-handed in its demands, others rejected the idea advanced in Israel that the Pollard spying mission had been conducted without the knowledge of present or former high- ranking officials. Declared the Jerusalem Post: "One of Israel's top political leaders is obviously responsible for either horrendous judgment . . . or political irresponsibility in failing to supervise the extremely sensitive intelligence agency that carried out the spying operation in Washington." Or perhaps even both.

With reporting by William Stewart/Washington and Ron Ben Yishai/Jerusalem