Did Shamir Give Away Secrets?

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

The story, writes investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, "might seem almost too startling to be believed." Indeed. But Hersh did come to believe it, and it is now surfacing in his book The Samson Option, being published this week by Random House. In capsule: among the American secrets stolen for Israel by convicted spy Jonathan Pollard was some of the most vital information the U.S. possessed: satellite pictures and data used to aim nuclear missiles at the Soviet Union. Some of this was relayed by Jerusalem to the Soviets. And the man who supposedly made the decision to do it and in person passed some of the data was none other than Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.

Rumors have floated ever since Pollard's conviction that some of the U.S. secrets he stole had reached Moscow, but no one had suggested that Shamir was directly responsible. Hersh first heard this allegation from Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli intelligence officer and veteran spinner of stunning-if-true- but yarns. He was the teller of the October Surprise tale about an alleged 1980 agreement between the Reagan campaign and Iranian officials to delay the release of American hostages until after the U.S. election. Hersh says Ben- Menashe's account was "subsequently amplified by a second Israeli, who cannot be named." This second source asserted, as Hersh puts it, that the material was "sanitized" so that any damage to the U.S. would be lessened. But, says Hersh, some of it "was directly provided to Yevgeny M. Primakov, the Soviet Foreign Ministry's specialist on the Middle East ((now chief of foreign intelligence for the Kremlin)), who met publicly and privately with Shamir."

Why on earth would Shamir turn over targeting information, sanitized or not, to the Soviets? After all, says Hersh, Israel has trained its own nuclear weapons primarily on the Soviet Union since it made its first warheads in 1968. His explanation: Jerusalem thought Arab nations would not launch a concerted war to destroy the Jewish state unless they had Soviet backing; targeting Israeli nukes on the U.S.S.R. would deter Moscow from offering such support. According to the book, Israel asked Pollard to steal satellite pictures in the first place so that it could aim its missiles at targets beyond border areas of the Soviet Union. For that, Jerusalem needed intelligence data -- which Washington refused to share -- on how the U.S. proposed to hit similar targets.

As far back as December 1987, a United Press International story quoted U.S. intelligence analysts as saying that some of the Pollard material "was traded to the Soviets in return for promises to increase emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel." Hersh mentions this rationale in passing but stresses others. His second source, who said the story is well known among Israel's top politicians, claims that Shamir told colleagues "that his goal was to end the long-standing enmity between Israel and the Soviet Union and initiate some kind of strategic cooperation."

Shamir supposedly sought Soviet goodwill "as a means of offsetting Israel's traditional reliance on the U.S.," which disturbed him for personal as well as diplomatic reasons. According to Ben-Menashe, says Hersh, Shamir "viscerally disliked the U.S." The unnamed Israeli said that "Shamir has always been fascinated with authority and strong regimes. He sees the U.S. as very soft, bourgeois, materialistic and effete."

If that tale sounds astounding, much of Hersh's book is otherwise convincing. The reporter who exposed the full stories of the My Lai massacre and Manuel Noriega's drug-running set out to tell how Israel developed the Bomb. If his assertions come as no real surprise, the evidence he brings to bear is impressive. For years, most of the world has suspected that Israel possessed nuclear weapons. Even Israelis coyly refer to the "bomb in the basement." But Hersh concentrates primarily on how the U.S. has determinedly looked the other way. American Presidents could not condone Israel's development of nuclear weapons, but any move to impose sanctions on Israel would provoke the Jewish state's legion of American admirers.

In 1967, says Hersh, Ambassador to Israel Walworth Barbour, eager not to upset Lyndon Johnson, told his subordinates to stop monitoring the progress of the Israeli nuclear reactor at Dimona, where the Bomb was thought to be. Later, during the Nixon Administration, Barbour was given a special intelligence briefing on the Israeli weapons program and announced he did not believe it. One of the briefers told Hersh that Barbour gave this explanation: "If I acknowledge this, then I have to go to the President. And if he admitted it, he'd have to do something about it."

Actually, according to the book, Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger approved of Israel's weapons program, even though they were subjected to what Hersh calls "nuclear blackmail." When Israel feared that it was on the brink of defeat in the 1973 October War, Jerusalem asserted that if Washington did not immediately resupply the weapons the Israeli armed forces had lost it would fire its nukes. Kissinger, who had wanted to delay sending more arms in the hope of setting up a land-for-peace settlement, quickly changed his mind.

In September 1979, when a U.S. satellite observed an intense flash of light over the Indian Ocean, Jimmy Carter would have found it very embarrassing to admit that it was an atomic test, especially an Israeli test. He would have had to "do something strong," said one official, "but there was a large segment of the population that Carter couldn't alienate."

Hersh recounts story after story of deceit and willful gullibility, nearly all as convincing as they are depressing -- with the possible exception of the tale about Shamir's giving U.S. secrets to the Soviets. Jerusalem, Moscow and Washington have already begun denying that one. Shamir's military aide, Brigadier General Azriel Nevo, called it "an outright lie." Yitzhak Rabin, who was defense minister at the time of the Pollard affair, says Israel never received any such information. In Moscow, Primakov dismissed the story as "utter nonsense" and denied that anyone, American or Israeli "has ever passed such information to me."

A Washington official familiar with the Pollard case also says the spy did not provide such data to Israel. The White House declined to comment. On the face of it, the story does sound too mind-boggling to be immediately credible. But Hersh is a careful and seasoned reporter, and in the Middle East there is almost nothing so bizarre as to be beyond belief.