Veteran Ben-Ami Kadish, 84, charged with spying for Israel released on $300,000 bond

Manhattan Federal Court ordered him to stay within New Jersey limits.
debkafile‘s intelligence sources ask which part of the US administration owned an interest in exposing this affair more than two decades after the event. And what did it hope to achieve? The material put before the court indicates that the federal authorities and CIA had long been aware that the Connecticut-born military engineer Ben-Ami Kadish was passing classified documents to the Israeli science attache at the New York consulate before his retirement at least 18 years ago.
Ever since the US Navy analyst Jonathan Pollard was arrested in 1986 as an Israeli spy, US intelligence has suspected that Israel was running a second senior spy in the American military establishment. This was always denied by Israel.
The charge is serious enough to affect President George W. Bush’s plan to attend Israel’s 60th anniversary celebrations next month.
Ben-Ami Kadish, now 84, is accused of giving an Israeli consulate employee classified documents about nuclear weapons, an F-15 fighter jet and the US Patriot system in the 1980s.
The US justice department describes Kadish’s Israeli handler as the same man who handled convicted spy Jonathan Pollard. This handler, identified only as “co-conspirator 1” left the US after Pollard’s exposure but stayed in touch with him until March of this year. Israeli cabinet minister Raffi Eytan, who headed the undercover department which ran Pollard’s handler, said he had no idea what this was about. Pollard is serving a life sentence. Kadish’s activities predated the Pollard’s exposure in 1986, after which Israel pledged to refrain from running spies in the United States.
One of the four counts against Kadish is of participating in a conspiracy to disclose documents related to national defense in the years 1979-1985
The criminal complaint says Kadish took home classified documents from the US Army’s Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center in Dover New Jersey, where he was employed. The Israeli government employee then photographed them in Kadish’s basement, says the charge.He accepted only small gifts and occasional family dinners in exchange for his services, the FBI said.