Here are some details:-
An 84-year-old former Army engineer in New Jersey was charged on Tuesday with leaking dozens of secret documents about nuclear arms, missiles and fighter jets to the Israeli government during the early 1980s, federal prosecutors said.
The engineer, Ben-Ami Kadish of Monroe Township, could face life in prison or possibly the death penalty if convicted on the most serious charge, prosecutors said.
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.
...Mr. Kadish, a balding, gray-haired man wearing a hearing aid, shuffled into a federal courtroom in Manhattan on Tuesday afternoon, where he was released on $300,000 bail after a brief appearance before Magistrate Judge Douglas F. Eaton. He did not have to enter a plea because he had not been indicted.
...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.
...The Pollard case has long been a contentious issue between the United States and Israel, whose leaders have argued for his release — a proposal that has been repeatedly rebuffed by American officials.
Mr. diGenova said the Pollard and Kadish cases were strikingly similar.
“They are carbon copies of each other,” he said. “They were the same kind of people, involved the same techniques of taking material from a library and copying it, and they took place at almost exactly the same time.”
...Though Mr. Kadish is suspected of having operated at the same time as Mr. Pollard, and not afterward, another conviction would be embarrassing for Israel because its officials were supposed to have disclosed to the United States all relevant information about Israeli intelligence gathering at the time of Mr. Pollard’s arrest.
...Mr. Applebaum said that while Mr. Kadish was a Zionist and a supporter of Israel, he did not seem particularly fervent.
“He wasn’t wild-eyed and long-haired like some people are when they promote a cause,” Mr. Applebaum said. “He supported causes, but in fact I felt sometimes he should have led more.”
...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.
You know what I think?
I think that Mr. Kadish was considered more important to Israel than Jonathan Pollard. And I think that, perhaps, somehow, to keep a possible spotlight off this man, who even may have been personal friends with Rafi Eitan, Shimon Peres or Yitzhak Rabin, that Pollard was sacrificed - kicked out of the embassy, documents were handed back to the US and for a good few years, interest and concern for Jay was kept at the barest minimum.
I hope that the probe of the State Comptroller will look into this.
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