Overview
Pollard Revisited: Is Mr. X back?
Pollard Revisited: Is Mr. X Spying Again in Washington?
By Yossi Melman
May 18, 1997 | Los Angeles Times
TEL AVIV — What do they mean when they say “Mega”? Is it an innocent code word used by the Israeli Mossad to describe the CIA? Or is it a sinister cipher referring to an American traitor who works for Israeli intelligence? Since last January, these uncertainties have poisoned the usually good and collaborative relations between the intelligence communities of United States and Israel. They have also revived bad memories of the Pollard affair.Ironically, the latest espionage scandal began when U.S.-Israeli relations seemed to be back on track. In January, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet signed off on a U.S.-brokered agreement with the Palestinian Authority. Israeli troops withdrew from Hebron, and handed most of the city over to Yasser Arafat’s police and security forces. As a guarantor, Secretary of State Warren Christopher gave the two sides two different letters spelling out the U.S. commitments. The Clinton administration revealed the content of the two letters in only general terms.
Eager to see the exact wording of the letter given to the Palestinians, Netanyahu asked Israeli Ambassador Eliahu Ben-Elissar to get him a copy. Newly arrived in Washington and lacking good contacts in the capital, Ben-Elissar turned to the chief of the Mossad station at the Israeli Embassy. The chief, whose name Israeli censors refuse to reveal, was reluctant to comply with his request. He called his immediate superior, a senior official and head of the Tevel (universe) unit at Mossad headquarters. Their short conversation was intercepted by listening posts of the National Security Agency. According to the Washington Post, the station chief said: “The ambassador wants me to use Mega to get the letter.” His superior replied: “We do not use Mega for this.”
As a matter of procedure, a translated transcript of the intercepted communication was disseminated by the NSA to the other U.S. intelligence agencies. FBI counterintelligence experts suspected that Mega was a code word for a senior and well-connected administration official with access to the letters, as well as to other Middle East top secrets.
For more than a decade, the bureau and officials at the Department of Justice have been obsessed with the suspicion that Israeli intelligence is running a mole inside the administration. This conviction originated in November 1986, following the arrest of Jonathan J. Pollard at the gates of the Israeli Embassy. Pollard, a U.S. citizen of Jewish origins, worked as an analyst at the counterterrorism center of U.S. Navy intelligence. He was sentenced to life in prison for spying on behalf of a secret Israeli intelligence unit called Lakam, a Hebrew acronym for Scientific Liaison Bureau.
U.S. prosecutors and investigators believed that Pollard and his Israeli handlers were helped by another American, referred to as Mr. X, who probably was a senior administration official. Mr. X provided the reference numbers that helped Pollard pull out requested files from America’s most-secret intelligence computers. But the investigators could not uncover Mr. X. Now, the FBI is eager to determine whether the old Mr. X of
the Pollard affair is Mega.
… [Deleted Israeli denials]
But the most impressive coup by the NSA was, probably unwittingly, revealed during the Mega crisis.
All Israeli diplomats and intelligence officers assigned abroad, and especially to the United States, are briefed to act as if their communication was intercepted. But now Israel knows for sure that the United States broke the Mossad code. Israeli code breakers, operating on “worst-case analysis,” assume that other codes, including those of the military and foreign ministry, have also been broken. In such circumstances, concludes an Israeli Cabinet minister, the damage to our national security is far greater than Pollard or maybe other Israeli operations might have wrought in the United States.
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Agencies targeting ex-CIA chief
Published: May 6, 2000, 12:00 a.m. MDT
By Deseret News, New York Times News Service
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department and the FBI have begun a criminal investigation to determine whether John M. Deutch, a former director of the CIA, mishandled classified material by placing it on unsecured computers in his home, government officials said Friday.
The investigation, which amounts to a change of course by the Justice Department, is the result of an internal review of the case ordered in February by Attorney General Janet Reno after criticism of the CIA’s handling of the case and of her initial decision not to prosecute Deutch for the security lapses. Reno ordered the new inquiry to determine whether her initial decision not to prosecute him was in error and whether he should now face criminal charges.
She decided against prosecution last year, officials said, without ordering any investigation by the FBI.
The investigation is the result of an internal review of the case ordered earlier by Reno.
For the new, criminal investigation, officials said, the Justice Department has assigned a prosecutor to work directly with FBI agents. They are pursuing an inquiry that focuses on whether Deutch should face criminal charges for having retained highly classified information on his unsecured home computers while he was leading the agency.
Separately, officials said, a special White House intelligence panel presented President Clinton with a toughly worded report that is critical of current and former CIA officials for failing to follow through adequately on the evidence against Deutch.
The report was presented to Clinton this week by the panel’s chairman, former Sen. Warren B. Rudman.
The report’s findings, they said, were similar to those of the CIA’s inspector general, who also found that senior CIA officials had failed to aggressively investigate Deutch when the computer lapses were discovered.
While the presidential board’s findings remain classified, officials described its report as sharply critical of the roles played by several of the agency’s most senior officials, including some who had worked closely with Deutch.
Calls to Deutch’s lawyer were not immediately returned Friday night.
In the past, Deutch has apologized for the security lapses. Critics of the Justice Department have questioned what they describe as the lenient treatment of Deutch in light of its highly publicized prosecution of Wen Ho Lee, a former Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist who has been charged with transferring and copying secret nuclear data from the laboratory.
Officials said that the board’s report was particularly critical of the roles in the investigation played by the agency’s former executive director, Nora Slatkin, and the former general counsel, Michael O’Neil.
Slatkin receives the heaviest criticism, officials said, because she was effectively in charge of the agency’s botched initial investigation. Slatkin and O’Neil had been brought to the CIA by Deutch, and had close relationships with him.
Others cited in the report included Frederick Hitz, the agency’s former inspector general, and Richard Calder, currently the deputy director for administration. Hitz began the inspector general’s investigation of the Deutch matter but it was completed last year by his successor, L. Britt Snider. The presidential board also criticized the agency’s current director, George Tenet, for allowing Slatkin to take charge of the Deutch investigation.
Slatkin, O’Neil and others criticized in the new report have previously denied that they took any actions to impede the investigation.
The presidential board began its review of how the CIA handled the Deutch matter at the request of Gen. John A. Gordon, the agency’s deputy director, who was dissatisfied with the internal efforts to review the matter, officials said.
Gordon has received a copy of the presidential board’s report and will try to determine whether the agency should take any further disciplinary action against those involved in the Deutch case.
The handling of the Deutch case has been highly controversial from the start.
The case began as Deutch was leaving office in December 1996, when an agency security specialist discovered that Deutch had placed large volumes of classified material on unsecured computers in his home, including information about some of the government’s most sensitive covert operations.
The material included detailed personal journals about Deutch’s activities at the CIA, and memos prepared for President Clinton. Placing classified material on these unsecured computers represented potential violations of both agency rules and federal law.
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Three days after the classified material was detected, Deutch deleted more than 1,000 files from his personal computers, the inspector general’s report said.
The CIA security staff began an investigation, but before long it bogged down, and some security officials became convinced that senior agency officials were trying to protect Deutch from a thorough inquiry. The security staff wrote a report on its investigation in 1997 without ever questioning Deutch.
No action was taken against Deutch for more than a year, when the agency’s inspector general was told by an employee that the earlier investigation had not been handled properly. Until the inspector general started his own investigation in early 1998, Tenet had taken no action to reprimand Deutch or discipline any other current or former agency officials.
Tenet has said there was never any attempt by anyone at the CIA to constrain the internal inquiry intentionally.
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Deutch Had Signed Plea Agreement, Sources Say
By Bill Miller and Walter Pincus
January 24, 2001
The night before he was pardoned by President Bill Clinton, former CIA director John M. Deutch agreed in writing to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge for keeping classified information on his home computers, according to authorities and documents.
Special prosecutor Paul E. Coffey, who negotiated the plea agreement, was not consulted about the pardon and was taken by surprise when it was announced, a law enforcement source said.
It is unclear whether Deutch requested clemency from Clinton, or whether the former president simply took action on his own, as he did with some of the other pardons he issued Saturday.
Deutch agreed Friday evening to plead guilty to a single charge of unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or material — a misdemeanor. The plea agreement he signed was contingent upon the judge accepting a sentence worked out by both sides, which called for no prison time and a $5,000 fine, a law enforcement source said.
Channing D. Phillips, a spokesman for U.S. Attorney Wilma A. Lewis, confirmed that prosecutors planned to file paperwork in the case Monday, scheduling a court date for the expected guilty plea.
But Clinton’s pardon of Deutch rendered the issue moot. Phillips declined further comment.
By Saturday, Clinton apparently was aware of the negotiated plea. In his “executive grant of clemency” for Deutch, he made reference to a legal document that is filed as a prelude to a plea agreement.
Coffey did not return a telephone message left at his office yesterday. Deutch’s lawyer, Terrence O’Donnell, also did not return calls.
Deutch was among 176 Americans who received pardons or commutations of their sentences from Clinton on the morning that he left office. Some of the pardons, such as the one for fugitive commodities trader Marc Rich, have generated outrage from prosecutors and others.
Following the practice of previous administrations in their closing days, the White House handled the case of Deutch and about two dozen others directly, instead of going through the customary Justice Department screening process.
Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and a former CIA operations officer, said yesterday that Clinton’s pardon of Deutch sent the wrong message to the intelligence community about the importance of safeguarding classified information.
“I don’t think he deserves to be let off the hook for what he did,” Goss said, adding it smacked of “taking care of the buddies.”
Goss said he would oppose any move by the CIA or the Defense Department to restore Deutch’s security clearances. “As long as I’m chairman of the intelligence committee, [the pardon] won’t make any difference at all,” Goss said.
Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, agreed that the Deutch pardon “sends the wrong message everywhere. The director of the CIA should be beyond reproach.”
Deutch’s security violations came to light in late 1996, after he resigned as CIA director. CIA security officials subsequently discovered that he had written and stored hundreds of highly classified intelligence reports on unsecure home computers linked to the Internet.
The Justice Department initially declined to prosecute Deutch and four months later, in August 1999, Tenet stripped him of his CIA security clearances. But in February 2000, amid congressional demands that the case be reopened, then-Attorney General Janet Reno appointed Coffey as a special prosecutor to investigate Deutch’s actions.
At that time, Deutch also was under investigation for security violations that stemmed from his tenure at the Defense Department, where he worked before the CIA.
Coffey recommended to Reno that charges be filed. For months, Deutch refused to negotiate with prosecutors, but as Clinton’s term drew to a close plea discussions began and took on a sense of urgency. Deutch’s lawyer hoped to strike a plea deal while Reno was still in office because a Bush administration attorney general might press for more serious felony charges, people familiar with the discussions said.
Although Clinton’s exact reasons for pardoning Deutch are not known, individuals in the White House believed, according to White House sources, that the former CIA director was “overly pursued” by the FBI and later the Justice Department after his situation was compared to that of former Los Alamos National Laboratory physicist Wen Ho Lee. A 59-count felony indictment was filed against Lee for allegedly downloading nuclear secrets. Lee ultimately pleaded guilty in September to a single felony count of mishandling classified information.
Prosecutors had planned to file what is known as a “criminal information” on Monday, a legal document that spells out the charges and can be submitted to the court only with the consent of both parties. A judge then would have set a date for a plea.
Staff writer Vernon Loeb contributed to this report.
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Agencies targeting ex-CIA chief
Published: May 6, 2000, 12:00 a.m. MDT
By Deseret News, New York Times News Service
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department and the FBI have begun a criminal investigation to determine whether John M. Deutch, a former director of the CIA, mishandled classified materia
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Agencies targeting ex-CIA chief
Published: May 6, 2000, 12:00 a.m. MDT
By Deseret News, New York Times News Service
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department and the FBI have begun a criminal investigation to determine whether John M. Deutch, a former director of the CIA, mishandled classified materia