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Wednesday, November 21, 2012

A new recommendation for a good read:  Circle of Treason: A CIA Account of Traitor Aldrich Ames and the Men He Betrayed....I mention the incident briefly in my next blog.
http://www.amazon.com/Circle-Treason-Account-Traitor-Betrayed/dp/1591143349

3 comments:

  1. Do you know any info re: Ames dumping his ruse on Pollard over the years?

    "On November 22, 1985, nearly 2 years after Ames had begun working for the Russians, Jonathan Pollard was arrested and charged with spying for Israel. President Reagan was on the plane heading back for America, following a summit meeting with President Gorbachev in Geneva, when he received the top-secret FBI briefing about Pollard's arrest.

    Ames received the news shortly after the President did and immediately recognized its tremendous potential and advantage. Soon thereafter Ames began assembling the file that - based on false information - was used to hold Israel responsible for leaking the data it received from Pollard to the KGB, a leak that Ames claimed blew the cover of American intelligence sources.

    During the year he worked as an agent, Pollard passed on considerable intelligence to Israel about Russia weaponry in Arab states, among other things. The data about Russian arms and instructions for their use were gleaned, at least in part, from American agents in Russia.

    In order to shift the blame onto Pollard and Israel for exposing the agents that Ames himself had delivered to the Russians, it was necessary to manufacture the story that a mole in Israel's Mossad was retransmitting Pollard's information to the Russians. According to Ames, the receipt of that information enabled the Russians to zero in on, and subsequently eliminate, all the agents who leaked out their information.

    The Defense Department bought the story. So did Justice, since Ames's allegation was the primary basis for the sentence of life imprisonment imposed on Jonathan Pollard on March 4, 1987 - an exceptionally harsh sentence when compared with those imposed on far more important and dangerous spies than Pollard.

    Panic over the mole engulfed American intelligence again. Ames exploited the information he had shared on Shabtai Kalmanowitz as a Russian agent, and leaked the news about a Russian mole in the Mossad a week before Kalmanowitz was unmasked in Israel. Yet Ames was unsure if the complete collapse of the Russian intelligence network in Moscow could be wholly attributed to Pollard's activity."

    March 18, 1994 - Chezi Carmel - Maariv Weekend Supplement: pp. 8-9

    "But the most immediate ramification of the Ames scandal concerns Jonathan Pollard's case. It is now clear even to those who have had complete faith in the American justice system that Pollard is a victim of a disinformation and vilification campaign initiated by Ames. With Soviet help, Ames managed to divert attention from his own betrayal by pointing a finger at Pollard as the source of information which fell into Soviet hands. According to this disinformation, the secrets Pollard gave Israel were transferred to the KGB by Soviet spies in the Israeli government.

    It was thus that senior administration officials, including such friends of Israel as former secretary of defense Les Aspin, were persuaded the damage Pollard did to the US was of monstrous proportions..."
    September 28, 1994 - The Jerusalem Post

    http://www.jonathanpollard.org/ames.htm
    http://www.jonathanpollard.org/1994/031894.htm
    http://www.jonathanpollard.org/1994/092894.htm
    http://www.jonathanpollard.org/2003/060003.htm

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  2. A story that sums up the CIA entirely in its depravity. On the technical/organizational/security side there is the astounding issue of how every Soviet agent could be found on any kind of "list," by ANYONE, regardless of his access [which Ames of course did not formally possess].

    On the human level the presence of someone within the ranks so indifferent to human life that he gleefully fingers anyone whose demise might help assist his own continued security.

    And at the heart of it all the degenerate ambition for the extra cash required to pacify a nagging Columbian wife and impress other women with the wad of cash, the cool safehouse, and the impressive car which obtaind by all this. All of such required for any woman to see past the coke-bottle glasses, protuding ears and phoney lines of this self-loathing toad.

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  3. My concern over this work however is that there's a lot of pressure from the Israeli lobby to assist Pollard, and I actually admire the Israeli's legendary relentlessness in never abandoning one of their own.

    However I would admire it even more if their devotion were extended to their non-Jewish well-wishers and agents as well as to fellow Jews. In my time I saw the Israelis dispose of non-Jewish agents will gleeful malice and cruelty.

    It was this kind of thing which led me regretfully to agree with those cynics who caution that to Israelis, "the only blood that matters is Jewish blood," and in the case of Pollard they take this too far.

    Netanyahu and his kind do themselves no favors when they link issues like settlements policy and the like to Pollard's case. If Netanyahu had a brain he'd realize we perceive him as equivalent to an enemy when he bargains with us for return of his state's agents here who betrayd our country.

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