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Israeli Spying in the Nixon Administration
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KISSINGER AND NIXON IN THE WHITE HOUSE BY SEYMOUR M. HERSH (Note: Kissinger, Perle and Sonnenfeldt share a long history, predating their membership in the Defense Policy Board by 30+ years. As Seymour Hersh showed in 1982, the three of them were involved in the passing of classified information to Israel. Sonnenfeldt provided the information, Perle passed it to the Israeli Embassy, and Kissinger ran interference. I leave the reader to draw their own conclusions.) http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/82may/hershwh2.htm ...The stream of secrets was intense. There were the bad secrets, dealing with the continuing White House wiretaps. There were the good secrets, such as the backchannel negotiations with China and with the Soviet Union that would lead to breakthroughs-without any State Department involvement-before the year was out. And there were the routine secrets, the enormous flow of documents and cables that were handled by Kissinger and his staff as he continuously expanded his influence. As the flow of secrets intensified, so did Kissinger's concern about the security of his immediate office. His telephones were still being repeatedly swept for signs of wiretapping, but Kissinger insisted that such surveillance not be placed on a routine basis with any single agency. Special teams from the Secret Service, CIA, FBI, or National Security Agency would be summoned to his office at random and on short notice to inspect the telephones, raising the inevitable question among Kissinger's staff: Who was the enemy? One aide, asked why Kissinger did not simply permanently assign the FBI to monitor his phones, responded: "Who trusted Hoover?" In 1974 testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kissinger repeatedly sought to minimize his interest at this period in the White House wiretap program. "After May of 1970," he said, "I had no basis for knowing whether a tap had been initiated or was continuing.... I construed my instructions from Mr. Haldeman to mean that my tangential connection with the program was being terminated." Kissinger testified that in mid-October of 1970, when a second wiretap was authorized for Hal Sonnenfeldt, who was then Kissinger's closest personal friend on the NSC staff, his role was even more tangential. " ... it is hard to imagine the flood of material that goes across my desk. I am apt to look at something and say this is for somebody else and throw it into my out basket. Most of these documents are not noted for extraordinary precision." The less-than-precise document in question in Sonnenfeldt's case, however, was an FBI summary of a wiretap on the Israeli Embassy in which Richard N. Perle, an aide to Senator Henry Jackson, was overheard discussing classified information that had been supplied to him by someone on the National Security Council staff. Hoover, following normal practice with sensitive materials from embassy wiretaps, had sent the document to Kissinger. Kissinger hesitated a few days. Then, despite his insistence that he was out of the internal-security business after May of 1970, he forwarded the material to Haldeman, who immediately telephoned Hoover, according to FBI documents, and ordered that the FBI be assigned to determine which NSC staffer was in contact with Richard Perle. Haldeman and Nixon must have hit the roof. In a telephone call on October 15, 1970, to Hoover, Haldeman invoked the name of Henry Kissinger in asking for another wiretap on Sonnenfeldt. Kissinger had to realize that Haldeman and Hoover would suspect Sonnenfeldt, who was known from previous wiretaps to have close ties to the Israelis as well as to Perle. Sonnenfeldt, a former State Department intelligence official, had been repeatedly investigated by the FBI for other suspected leaks early in his career, and Kissinger, as he told the Senate committee, was aware that Sonnenfeldt had "been the subject of a malicious campaign by a group of individuals who had been out to get him for a long time." But Al Haig was now part of that group-another fact Kissinger surely knew. Sonnenfeldt had been among Haig's early rivals in 1969 for the job as assistant to Kissinger; that, plus Sonnenfeldt's continued closeness to Kissinger-despite the mistreatment Kissinger handed out-was enough for Haig to mark him permanently as the enemy. It was inconceivable that Kissinger would not realize the consequences of his act in turning over the Israeli Embassy wiretap to Haldeman, who would inevitably link Sonnenfeldt, a Jew, to the intercepted conversation. Kissinger was, in essence, turning in his closest remaining friend on his staff. It had to be, at best, a painful moment. Kissinger handled questions about the Sonnenfeldt wiretap from the Senate committee in his usual fashion: he dissembled. "I have no recollection of this at all," he testified. "All that could have happened is that the FBI sent over something off a tap on the Israeli Embassy which I did not think was relevant to my concern and on which I wrote, 'Give this to Haldeman.'" The committee members apparently accepted that explanation
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