Israel

By Jay Branegan

Almost a month after Jonathan Jay Pollard was convicted as an Israeli spy, the fallout from the case continued to beset the Israelis. Last week Aviam Sella, the Israeli air force colonel who has admitted enlisting Pollard, a former U.S. Navy intelligence analyst, abruptly quit his command at Israel's giant Tel Nof air base. A hero of the 1981 Israeli raid on an Iraqi nuclear reactor, Sella became a subject of U.S. outrage when he was promoted last month to command Israel's second largest air base days before he was indicted by a U.S. federal grand jury for his role in the Pollard case. In a resignation letter, Sella cited as his reasons the "deterioration in Israel- U.S. relations, and my concern for . . . relations with American Jewry."

Colonel Sella insisted that he had stepped down on his own and disclosed that he had offered to resign earlier but was rebuffed by his superiors. The Pentagon promptly lifted its ban against U.S. contact with the Tel Nof base. Israelis, officials and citizens alike, praised Sella's move. Even so, the newspaper Ma'ariv reckoned that it was a "brave and hopeless gesture that will contribute almost nothing to dulling the thorns of the Pollard affair." U.S. officials, for example, noted that Spy Chief Rafi Eitan, who ran the Pollard operation and was promoted to head Israel's largest state-run enterprise, is still in his new job. "It's like being given the golden handshake," snapped a State Department official.

Washington and Jerusalem continued to eye each other warily, and it was clear that the dispute over the Pollard affair could flare up again at any moment. Yet the U.S. seems to have known of Israeli spying longer than the indignation over Pollard suggests. A 1979 CIA report on Israel's security services, released by the Iranian government after the takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, said Israeli intelligence then targeted both secret American policies involving Israel and classified U.S. scientific data.

Nonetheless, further signs of U.S. irritation -- and Israeli reluctance to cooperate -- surfaced when the Israeli government barred the departure to the U.S. of a former deputy legal adviser to Israel's Ministry of Defense. He is Harold Katz, an attorney with dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship who has been linked by U.S. investigators to the Pollard case as the alleged owner of the Van Ness Street apartment in Washington where some of Pollard's stolen documents were routinely photocopied. Katz denied knowing about the Pollard operation, insisting that if his apartment was used, "it was without my permission or knowledge." Still, he says, Israeli officials refused to allow him to go to the U.S. to be interrogated because of his access to classified information.

There was good news for Israelis on another front last week. After meeting with Soviet officials in Moscow, Morris Abram, chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and a prominent critic of Israel's handling of the Pollard affair, and Edgar Bronfman, president of the World Jewish Congress, said that the Soviets plan to allow more than 11,000 Jews who had applied for visas to emigrate this year. Their report coincided with news that 470 Jews had been permitted to leave last month, the highest rate of departure in almost six years. But Soviet Foreign Ministry Spokesman Gennadi Gerasimov denied there was any change in Moscow's policy. Said he: "There can be no quotas." In Washington, Administration officials reacted frostily to Abram's free-lance effort to separate Jewish emigration from the overall Soviet human rights record. "We're not ecstatic that there's the appearance of a sweetheart deal with the Israelis," said an Administration official.

At the same time, Gerasimov announced that a consular delegation would soon depart for Israel from the Soviet Union, which broke off diplomatic relations after the 1967 Six-Day War. Although full diplomatic recognition is not likely anytime soon, the move was the most positive development in Soviet-Israeli relations since last August, when a meeting in Helsinki broke up after just 90 minutes in a heated dispute over Soviet Jews.

With reporting by Roland Flamini/Jerusalem