“I Prevented Pollard Deal”: Excerpt from Ex-CIA Chief Tenet’s Book

Ex-CIA Chief: I Prevented Pollard Deal in 1998, by Gil Ronen

Malcolm: What About Jonathan Pollard?

How Former CIA Chief Foiled Pollard’s Release, Yitzhak Benhorin (Ynet)

Excerpts;

Former CIA chief George Tenet claims, in a new book, that he was the person who prevented the release of Jonathan Pollard during the Wye Plantation talks in October of 1998. The talks, between then-Prime Minister of Israel Binyamin Netanyahu and then-head of the Palestinian Authority Yasir Arafat, were brokered by President Bill Clinton and focused on an Israeli withdrawal from most of the biblical city of Hevron.

In his book “At The Eye of the Storm,” Tenet says that Israel had demanded that Jonathan Pollard – who had been convicted of spying for Israel in 1985 – be released from jail, as part of a deal in which Netanyahu agreed to the Hevron withdrawal.

According to Tenet, the senior American staff at Wye Plantation, including Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, held a meeting on the evening before the signing of the accords. In that meeting, Berger told Tenet – “you should know that Netanyahu has put [the matter of] Pollard on the table.”

Tenet says he got up and stormed out of the room at that point, saying “you are wrong, Pollard is not on the table.” Berger ran out after him, but Tenet was adamant, calling the idea “ridiculous” and insisting that the Pollard issue had nothing to do with the matters being discussed at Wye. Berger then told him, according to Tenet’s account, that President Clinton had not yet agreed to anything.

Tenet claims he spent the next hours choosing his course of action. “If Pollard was in the final package deal, no one at CIA headquarters would believe I had nothing to do with it,” he thought. He concluded that his career as the head of the CIA would be destroyed if he agreed to the deal.

Commentary:

What’s the truth on this one? Read another side to this story here.

The above-linked piece, indicates the following;

Malcolm Hoenlein, Executive Vice-Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, has provided further proof that Clinton might not have been speaking the truth regarding Tenet. Hoenlein told a JTA interviewer that he received a phone call from Tenet immediately after the Wye Summit, in which Tenet denied that he had ever threatened to resign if Jonathan Pollard were freed.

And what is this about Hevron and the Wye Agreement? The fact is that 80% of Hevron was ceded to the Pa between January 15 to January 17, 1997, some 20 months before the Wye River Memorandum.

So, who’s zoomin’ whom? And the question arises yet again, WHY did National Council of Presidents mogul Malcolm Hoenlein choose to keep secret for over 6 years that phone call from Tenet “immediately after the Wye Summit?” And how complicit is one of the most powerful of American Jewish leaders in the government of Israel’s benign neglect of Jonathan Pollard? MB