[U.S. Department of Justice/Newsweek] Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball - In a bizarre postscript to a two-decade-old spy scandal, the FBI on Tuesday arrested an 84-year-old former U.S. Army civilian engineer and charged him with providing classified defense documents to Israel. The alleged crimes that led to the arrest of Ben-Ami Kadish took place between 1979 and 1985, when Kadish, a U.S. citizen, worked at the Army's Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey. According to court documents unsealed Tuesday, Kadish's alleged handler turns out to be the same Israeli consular official in New York who allegedly served as a "control" agent for Jonathan Pollard, the former Navy intelligence analyst arrested in 1985 and convicted the next year whose case cast a cloud over U.S.-Israeli relations for years. Kadish told the FBI that he did not operate after 1985. A senior U.S. intelligence official said Kadish's alleged activities were first discovered within the last few years, more than 20 years after they occurred, as a result of supersecret intelligence monitoring related to ongoing inquiries about the Pollard case. On March 20, 2008, Kadish and the Israeli "control" agent held a telephone conversation which was monitored and recorded.
2008-04-23 01:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive