Israel Flatly Denies Report of Spying on U.S.

JERUSALEM —  The Israeli government on Wednesday asserted that the Jewish state does not spy on its prime ally, the United States.

In response to an American newspaper report that a senior U.S. official may have passed highly sensitive information to Israel, officials here suggested that it was leaked with the intention of smearing Israel.

They charged that the account of an FBI investigation into the alleged spying seemed timed to put the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the defensive during a crisis in peace negotiations with the Palestinians.

“Israel does not use intelligence agents in the United States. Period,” said a high-ranking official in the prime minister’s office.

Netanyahu spokesman David Bar-Illan said stories about Israeli spying or intelligence gathering arise “whenever Israel seems vulnerable to pressure. . . . There is an intention to make Israel feel defensive. A defensive Israel is not a strong Israel at a crucial moment in negotiations.”

He was referring to media reports in February that a civilian employee of the U.S. Army, Michigan engineer David Tenenbaum, was under investigation by the FBI for allegedly having given Israeli liaison officers classified information for 10 years.

“That story disappeared into the vast wastebasket of history. The appearance made big news; the disappearance did not,” Bar-Illan said.

Behind the government’s blanket denials, however, lurked the case of Jonathan Jay Pollard, a U.S. naval intelligence officer who was caught passing information to Israel 12 years ago. Pollard pleaded guilty to spying charges in 1986 and is serving a life sentence for what Israelis insist was a rogue intelligence operation.

Pollard has been fighting ever since to get Israel to take responsibility for what he says was an official operation.

The Washington Post reported Wednesday that the latest FBI inquiry began in January after the National Security Agency intercepted a secure communication between a senior Israeli intelligence officer in Washington and a superior in Tel Aviv.

The communication referred to someone code-named “Mega” and an attempt to obtain a sensitive American document, according to the report.

The Post said U.S. officials believe that Mega may be someone in the U.S. government who had provided information to the Israelis in the past and who would have had access to the document in question--a secret letter of assurances that then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher gave to Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat to secure an agreement for the withdrawal of Israeli troops from most of the West Bank city of Hebron.

In the intercepted conversation, according to the Post, the Israeli intelligence officer informed his superior that Israeli Ambassador Eliahu Ben-Elissar had asked him if he could obtain a copy of the letter given to Arafat by Christopher on Jan. 16. The intelligence officer said: “The ambassador wants me to go to Mega to get a copy of this letter.” The supervisor rejected the request, saying: “This is not something we use Mega for.”

Ben-Elissar spent much of the day on Israeli radio and television denying any wrongdoing.

“This is first-rate nonsense, something dumped on us by some sick imagination,” he told Israel Radio. “And this is a terrible report whose purpose is to accuse Israel of spying against the U.S. This is unimaginable and terribly severe.”

Dore Gold, Netanyahu’s foreign policy advisor, rejected the view that the report was meant to push Israel into making concessions to the Palestinians during a renewed shuttle mission by U.S. peace envoy Dennis B. Ross.

“We have excellent relations with this administration, and we have no indication there is any political motivation behind this false leak,” Gold said.

White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry, traveling in Mexico with President Clinton, said Wednesday that he was “not going to comment in any way, shape or form” on the Post report.

“It contains information that you know that we routinely do not comment upon in any setting,” McCurry said. “The national security advisor, who has had discussions at senior levels of our government, is confident the president has the information he needs to conduct foreign policy.”

The Clinton administration has been one of the friendliest American governments toward Israel, but it has been frustrated with Netanyahu’s lack of progress in peacemaking.

Peace talks collapsed in March after Netanyahu gave the go-ahead for construction of a new Jewish neighborhood in traditionally Arab East Jerusalem.

The U.S. government opposes Israeli settlement expansion in East Jerusalem and the West Bank and tried unsuccessfully to get Netanyahu to stop the building project. But the United States also vetoed two U.N. Security Council resolutions condemning the construction.

Israel’s previous government had many run-ins with President George Bush and his secretary of State, James Baker III, over settlements.

“This is not like with Baker, who used to play leaks like a church organ,” an Israeli official said.

But Israeli officials clearly were worried about the political damage the spying story could cause.

They insisted in the Israeli media that Netanyahu had no need to search for Christopher’s letter to Arafat in January because the prime minister already knew what it said and was discussing its contents with his Cabinet ministers at the time.

Government officials also responded anonymously that their agents would not have been so stupid as to discuss an intelligence request over the telephone--had such a request existed.

Bar-Illan said he believed that the recorded conversation was “some kind of innocent communication awkwardly translated into English” and misunderstood.

“It was discarded or put away for all these months” because there was nothing to it, he said.

Times staff writer Elizabeth Shogren in Mexico City contributed to this report.