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."