herb keinon does some whining

Diplomacy : Is this any way to treat friends? (extracts)
Herb Keinon, JPost, April 24

One never hears about the US spying on Israel. Why not? Is Washington not interested in inside info on what Israel is up to? Is the CIA, with agents spanning the globe, not keen on securing pre-knowledge of Israel’s technological advances in defense and security fields? Unlikely. Rather, the more probable reason is because when US spies are uncovered here, as they surely have been over the years, it never hits the news. Yossi Alpher, a former senior Mossad officer, cited former US officials as saying that the CIA spies on Israel, just as it spies everywhere else:

But when someone is caught here, he receives a wrap on the knuckles, and is declared persona non grata. The fact that you never hear that someone was tried and put in jail for spying for the US reflects a different approach on Israel’s part. It is not that we are not worried about sensitive information falling into other hands, it’s just that when those hands happen to be friendly ones, we deal with it differently, unlike the US Justice Department. When you take this case, together with the refusal to release Pollard, even when spies working for the Soviet Union and China who caused death to other agents have been released, when you take into account the AIPAC case, and attempts to recruit Israelis, it seems the Justice Department is targeting Israel. I don’t know why, but we are being treated pretty roughly. The Justice Department is targeting Israel. They have been looking for additional Americans spying for Israel for a long, long time.

One official of a major US Jewish organization said this case should not be seen as something isolated, but rather within the context of the Pollard case, the AIPAC espionage case, and the recent anti-Israel books written by former president Carter and academics Walt and Mearsheimer. According to the official, there is a hard core of people in the State Department, Justice Ministry and intelligence agencies who don’t like Israel, not because they are anti-Semitic, but because they view Israel as a huge albatross around the US’s neck, keeping Washington from doing what it needs to do in the region to placate its own real enemies. The Kadish arrest, the official said, simply plays into those people’s hands. Nevertheless, despite the concerns, David Kimche, who during the period of Kadish’s alleged espionage was director-general of the Foreign Ministry, and a former Mossad agent who rose to become No. 2 in the agency, said

I don’t think officials will change their position because of this. It is an old episode and the US government knows very well that since those days in the 80s there have been no cases of espionage by Israel in the US.

As to how Israel should respond to the whole episode, Kimche said simply, “by saying as little as possible,” which is also the advice given to the government’s spokesmen by Raanan Gissin, Sharon’s longtime spokesman. who said the best public relations strategy to adopt at this time would be to play down the story, and that government officials should not give it oxygen by discussing it at length:

The officials should be saying that there is a need to see what the investigation produces, and that no one at this time knows anything about the facts. Israel should bide its time and find a way to lower the profile, because this story might just die because of a lack of real content.