The timing on this story is odd, given the piece the Times did in its Week in Review section on Sunday on the changing motivations for spying. According to a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s office for the southern region of New York and various press reports, Ben-Ami Kadish of Monroe Township, an 84-year-old former Army engineer, was charged Tuesday with espionage for leaking secret defense documents to the Israeli government in the 1980s and “could face life in prison or possibly the death penalty if convicted on the most serious charge,” according to The New York Times. He was released on $300,000 bail.
His case is linked to that of Jonathan Jay Pollard, the naval analyst serving a life sentence for leaking documents to Israel around the same time. An Israeli official who came to Mr. Kadish’s house to photograph documents also received information from Mr. Pollard, prosecutors said. Federal officials said authorities became aware of what they called Mr. Kadish’s spying activities only in recent months but would not say how they learned of his efforts more than 20 years later.
Mr. Kadish admitted to an F.B.I. agent last month that he had shown 50 to 100 classified documents to the Israeli official, according to prosecutors’ court filings on Tuesday.
The case is troubling because it involves nuclear weapons and missile systems, according to the U.S. Attorney.
The complaint specifically mentions three documents that Mr. Kadish is accused of leaking — one “concerning nuclear weaponry” containing “atomic-related information”; one regarding a modified version of an F-15 fighter jet that the United States sold to another country; and one containing information about the Patriot missile system.
Mr. Kadish told the F.B.I. agent that he had not received money from the Israeli official, only small gifts and the occasional dinner, the complaint said.
The Times also said that
Prosecutors declined to provide details on what was in the documents and would not say what harm, if any, had come to American interests as a result. According to court papers, Mr. Kadish’s crimes occurred between 1979 and 1985, when he worked as a mechanical engineer at Picatinny Arsenal in Morris County, N.J., an Army research and development center. He would sign secret documents out of the library and take them to his home in New Jersey — prosecutors would not say in which town — where the Israeli official, a science adviser at the Israeli consulate in New York, would photograph them in the basement, according to court papers.
What links this story to the Week in Review piece, however, is this sentence down near the end — a sentence that raises the specter of dual-loyalties:
According to the article, Mr. Kadish grew up in Palestine, fought for the creation of Israel and served in both the British and American military during World War II.
Reread that sentence and then read this section from the Week in Review:
A new study by a Defense Department contractor shows that divided loyalty, usually on the part of naturalized Americans with roots in a foreign land, has become the dominant motive.
From 1947 to 1990, the study found, fewer than 1 in 5 Americans charged with spying were acting solely or primarily out of patriotic, as opposed to ideological, loyalty to a foreign country. Since 1990, according to the study’s author, Katherine L. Herbig, divided loyalty has been the sole or primary motive in about half of all cases.
“Dual loyalty is a problem we haven’t seen on such a scale since the Revolution,” when many colonists swore allegiance to the British king, said Joel F. Brenner, the top counterintelligence official in the office of the director of national intelligence.
Dual loyalty. It is a question that has dogged immigrant groups since the earliest days of the Republic, with various pieces of legislation and executive orders targeting everyone from new immigrants and oppositions parties in the late 1700s, to second- and third-generation Japanese-Americans during World War II to Jews to Muslims now.
Consider the questions surrounding John F. Kennedy’s presidential run, the overt and covert arguments surrounding his loyalty to the pope.
And then there is the Pollard case. In 1999, several American Jewish organizations were lobbying for his release on humanitarian grounds —
Here is part of a response to the effort that ran in The New York Times:
The real crux of the Pollard defense is not that his crime was minor because of the number and type of stolen documents, but that it was minor because of the country for which he stole them: Israel. And this is what makes the Jewish groups’ argument so problematic. The United States and Israel have been allies since Israel gained independence, and that longstanding alliance may have lulled some into the belief that the two countries’ interests are the same. But they are not; no two countries’ are.
When Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union in 1950, some on the left argued that they were legitimately sharing information with America’s wartime ally. Others charged anti-Semitism. But Jewish groups led by the American Jewish Committee, citing patriotism, steadfastly refused to call for clemency. (The committee has not called for Mr. Pollard’s release, though it has urged the President to formally review the case.)
Indeed, the American Jewish community’s traditional response to the ugly charge of dual loyalty has been: there is none, we owe our sole national allegiance to the United States. In arguing that spying for Israel is a lesser offense than spying for other countries, Jewish groups appear now to have strayed from that position. To apologize for an American official’s decision to put another country’s interests ahead of his own can be seen as essentially defending dual loyalty.
Peter Beinart, author of the piece, hits on something very real, but also raises the spector of something very dangerous. Pollard — and allegedly Kadish — certainly was guilty of placing the interests of another country above his own nation’s, as do his defenders.
The problem is that the charge of dual loyalty tends to become amorphous, as it did with the Nissei during World War II and American Muslims now. The limited occurrences of spying or terrorism on the part of a Japanese-American or an Arab-American become justification for profiling — or imprisoning — entire groups. This danger is absent from the Week in Review piece, but it is very real. It goes to the heart of what it means to be an American, what patriotism means and what hold our ethnic, racial and religious backgrounds have on our sense of selves and our sense of others’ loyalties.
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