(May 18, 1997)

For more than a decade, the bureau and officials at the Department of Justice have been obsessed with the suspicion that Israeli intelligence is running a mole inside the administration. This conviction originated in November 1986, following the arrest of Jonathan J. Pollard at the gates of the Israeli Embassy. Pollard, a U.S. citizen of Jewish origins, worked as an analyst at the counterterrorism center of U.S. Navy intelligence. He was sentenced to life in prison for spying on behalf of a secret Israeli intelligence unit called Lakam, a Hebrew acronym for Scientific Liaison Bureau.

U.S. prosecutors and investigators believed that Pollard and his Israeli handlers were helped by another American, referred to as Mr. X, who probably was a senior administration official. Mr. X provided the reference numbers that helped Pollard pull out requested files from America’s most-secret intelligence computers. But the investigators could not uncover Mr. X. Now, the FBI is eager to determine whether the old Mr. X of the Pollard affair is Mega.

(May 18, 1997)

IS THERE AN ISRAELI SPY ATthe heart of the U.S. government? In January the National Security Agency decrypted a phone call between the Israeli Embassy in Washington and Tel Aviv talking of „“Mega,“ in a context suggesting Mega is a highly placed spy. Since then, the FBI has been hunting for Mega, even starting surveillance of top National Security Council and State Department officials. The FBI is also revisiting the last U.S./Israel spy scandal, in which navy intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard was found guilty of passing top-secret documents to Israel. Agents on that case never cracked a bigger mystery: who told Pollard‘s Israeli handlers which documents to ask for? The FBI is wondering if it was Mega and is irate that word of its hunt has leaked. Some agents suspect the leak was meant to warn Mega to lie low.