Ben-Ami Kadish

The arrangement was almost domestic. Ben-Ami Kadish would sign classified documents out of the library at the Picatinny Arsenal in Dover, New Jersey, drive them home, and hand them to a man who photographed them in the basement. Then Kadish took the documents back to work and returned them to the shelf.

He did that on and off for six years, with somewhere between fifty and a hundred documents. He was not paid for any of it. He accepted a few small gifts and the occasional dinner out for his family.

What was in the basement

Kadish was a mechanical engineer at the Army’s Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center, where he worked from 1963 to 1990 and held authorized access to the classified library. Born in Connecticut, he had grown up in what was then British Mandatory Palestine and fought with the Haganah before returning to the United States.

Three of the documents are described in the federal complaint. One concerned nuclear weaponry and carried the Department of Energy’s “Restricted Data” designation, the marking reserved for atomic information. One described a modified F-15 that the United States had sold to another country, classified Secret and further marked Noforn, meaning not releasable to foreign nationals, which is precisely what his handler was. The third concerned the Patriot air defense system.

The same handler as Pollard

The man in the basement was Yosef Yagur, who held the post of Consul for Science Affairs at the Israeli Consulate General in Manhattan.

At the same time, Yagur was running Jonathan Pollard.

The two operations were compartmented from each other and neither agent knew about the other. Both ran under LAKAM, the Israeli Defense Ministry’s scientific intelligence unit headed by Rafi Eitan, the same organization that appears in the Milchan krytron case and whose chief turns up as a visitor at the NUMEC plant. Pollard was inside naval intelligence supplying signals intelligence and regional assessments. Kadish was inside Army weapons research supplying hardware and nuclear data. They were complementary halves of one collection effort.

When Pollard was arrested in November 1985, Yagur left the United States and never came back. Kadish went quiet.

Twenty-three years

He did not stay entirely quiet. He kept in touch with Yagur, met him in Israel in 2004, and was still speaking to him by telephone in March 2008, after the FBI had interviewed him for the first time. According to the complaint, Yagur used that call to tell Kadish to lie to American investigators. The next day, Kadish lied to the FBI about their contact.

That is what finally produced a charge, in April 2008, twenty-three years after the espionage stopped. He pleaded guilty in December to acting as an unregistered agent of Israel. He was eighty-five.

The judge did not hide what he thought of it. “Why it took the government 23 years to charge Mr. Kadish is shrouded in mystery,” said U.S. District Judge William Pauley, adding that “it is clear the government could have charged Mr. Kadish with far more serious crimes.”

Prosecutors had recommended no prison as part of the plea. Kadish paid a $50,000 fine and went home. He died in July 2012 at eighty-eight, having spent no time in custody.

Asked about the arrest, the Israeli foreign ministry said: “We know nothing about it. We have nothing to say.”

Yosef Yagur retired to Tel Aviv. He was never charged and never extradited.

Why it matters

Pollard is usually discussed as a single rogue episode. Kadish shows it was not. The same Israeli officer, working out of a consulate in New York under a science-affairs title, was running at least two agents at once inside separate branches of the American defense establishment, drawing complementary material from each.

The rest of it is the pattern this archive keeps finding. An American took the documents and answered for it, eventually, at eighty-five, with a fine and no jail. The judge who imposed that sentence said in open court that the delay was a mystery and the charges were lighter than the conduct warranted, and no explanation for either has ever been offered. The Israeli who collected the documents in a New Jersey basement went home and stayed there, beyond anyone’s reach.

Sources

• United States v. Ben-Ami Kadish, Criminal Complaint, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, April 22, 2008
• U.S. Department of Justice, “New Jersey Man Arrested for Disclosing National Defense Information to Israel,” April 22, 2008
• U.S. Department of Justice, “Former Army Employee Pleads Guilty to Acting as Israeli Agent,” December 30, 2008
• NBC News / Associated Press, “Ex-Army Engineer Pleads Guilty to Spy Charge,” December 30, 2008
• Contemporaneous reporting of the May 2009 sentencing and Judge Pauley’s remarks from the bench