WTCD Investigation: The Pentagon Renovation Project

gretavo's picture

It's becoming more clear as time passes that the planes on 9/11 were secondary to the destruction they are alleged to have been solely responsible for. Since we at WTCD know very well that in the case of the World Trade Center the destruction was the result of pre-planted explosives, it stands to reason that we should consider that the same might be true for the Pentagon.

That just as with the WTC, the "planes narrative" in the case of the Pentagon--including the alleged hijackings and the subsequent debates about every other aspect of their flight--were intended all along to serve as a distraction from the much more salient question of what (non-plane stuff) was destroyed. In the case of the WTC we know of the various case files stored in building 7 by the SEC, and in the case of the Pentagon we have briefly touched on the fact that the destruction (and deaths) disproportionately affected auditors and accountants. We also know that:

More than half of the people listed as missing in the aftermath of the attack worked in the Pentagon's Naval Command Center, the enlarged rectangle above. Personnel were moved into this facility shortly before the attack. Were personnel in the Naval Command Center targeted by the attack?
http://911research.wtc7.net/pentagon/analysis/location.html

In his book 9-11--Coup Against America author Peter Tiradera suggests that the Navy Command Center may have been targeted to destroy evidence of U.S. Navy spy for Israel Jonathan Pollard's crimes, particularly those linked to prominent neocons. Interestingly, Jonathan Pollard's defense attorney was none other than Ted Olson, husband of AA77 "victim" Barbara Olson.

It is clear that the renovation of Wedge 1, completed in February 2001, would have provided an ideal cover for the placement of explosives throughout the part of the structure that would be hit on 9/11. It is imperative therefore for the truth movement to learn as much as possible about this renovation--who exactly was involved? What kind of security protocols were in place?

UPDATE (copied from original comment below)

This is from 2004, but it looks like the original project was also a joint venture of 3D/International which was acquired by Parsons Commercial Tech Group, Inc. (http://www.parsons.com/infra/education/default.asp) on June 8, 2006 and DMJM Harris, which was acquired by AECOM (http://www.aecom.com/)on January 26, 2010.

----------------------------------------------------

3D/I Names Sacco to Key Pentagon Renovation Post.
Publication: Business Wire
Date: Tuesday, March 30 2004
You are viewing page 1

Business Editors

WASHINGTON, D.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 30, 2004

3D/I today announced that Joseph J. Sacco, AIA, has been named Deputy Director for the DMJM-3D/I Joint Venture supporting the Pentagon Renovation and Construction Program Office (PenRen) in Arlington, Va.

Mr. Sacco comes to the Pentagon with first hand PenRen experience. Prior to serving the last few years in the Office of the Architect of the Capitol as the Project Manager for the new Capitol Visitor Center in Washington, D.C., Sacco was a Project Administrator for PenRen. While there, he distinguished himself as a leader in acquisition reform efforts holding open discussions with industry and establishing a new design-build delivery system using true performance based requirements, commissioning, award fee incentives and cost indexing.

Jerry Raeder, AIA, 3D/I's East Regional Manager and Chairman of the Joint Venture, noted "The Pentagon Renovation Program is one of 3D/I's most significant program management projects. Selecting the right person for the Deputy role was critical. Joe will be a terrific asset to PenRen and to 3D/I."

The DMJM-3D/I Joint Venture has provided supporting leadership and management to the Pentagon Renovation Program and Construction Management Office since 1992. That office is responsible for all planning, budgeting, design, construction, swing space management, personnel moves, furniture, demolition, abatement, and other activities involved with the total renovation of the 6.5M square foot historic Pentagon building. 3D/I, in joint venture with DMJM, provides design, program and construction management support to the Pentagon Renovation Program, delivering the efficient and effective performance of these activities.

About 3D/I

3D/International was founded in 1953. Its architects, engineers, environmental specialists and construction managers design, build and manage projects and programs for governmental, corporate, hospitality, commercial, institutional and industrial clients worldwide. For more information, log on to www.3di.com.

http://www.allbusiness.com/construction/building-renovation/5586833-1.ht...

--------------------------------------------------------

The Pentagon Project

by Lester M. Hunkele, III, P.E., M.ASCE, (Vice Pres., Program Mgr. of the DMJM-3D/I joint venture, DMJM), Julian Sabbatini, P.E., M.ASCE, (Assoc. Vice Pres., DMJM), and Gary Helminski, (Sr. Vice Pres., 3D/I)

Civil Engineering—ASCE, Vol. 71, No. 6, June 2001, pp. 38-45

Document type: Feature Article
Errata: (See full record)
Abstract: The renovation of the Pentagon, now under way, is one of the most ambitious, complex, and challenging construction undertakings in contemporary history. It entails the equivalent of demolishing the interiors of three buildings the size of the Empire State Building, refurbishing them from top to bottom without disturbing the occupants or disrupting their work, and completing the renovation on a strict budget of $1.2 billion. The initial phases of the renovation were addressed using standard design/bid/build (D/B/B) contracting. This method proved inefficient in the face of the logistical challenges of a project of this magnitude; there were about 800 change orders for the first section of the basement renovation alone. It became clear that a major shift in government construction stance and practices was needed, and design-build practices were instituted for the remainder of the renovation. As the renovation of the Pentagon progressed, new design elements and unforeseen site conditions surfaced, including more than 75,000 mi (120,675 m²) of largely undocumented wiring, piping, and cables. The construction is progressing wedge by wedge through the structure. The tenants of the first renovated wedge moved in on February 22, 2001; the rest of the renovation will span 20 years.

http://cedb.asce.org/cgi/WWWdisplay.cgi?0103508

--------------------------------------------------------

3D/International, Inc.
SnapshotPeople
Company Overview

3D/International, Inc. operates as a program management, condition assessment, design, construction, and information technology company in the United States and internationally. It provides architecture, interior design, construction management, facilities master planning, project management, graphics, and procurement services for public and private sector clients. The company designs and builds science and technology buildings, hotels, industrial buildings, schools, higher education facilities, courthouses, police facilities, laboratories, and healthcare facilities, as well as corporate offices for law firms, financial institutions, energy companies, and tenant finish-outs. It also develops...

3D/International, Inc. operates as a program management, condition assessment, design, construction, and information technology company in the United States and internationally. It provides architecture, interior design, construction management, facilities master planning, project management, graphics, and procurement services for public and private sector clients. The company designs and builds science and technology buildings, hotels, industrial buildings, schools, higher education facilities, courthouses, police facilities, laboratories, and healthcare facilities, as well as corporate offices for law firms, financial institutions, energy companies, and tenant finish-outs. It also develops software applications and tools that help users to plan, assess, design, and manage their facility and capital programs. In addition, the company develops online procedure manuals and Web sites, as well as implements management controls systems. It serves higher education, K-12, government, military, commercial, and housing market segments, as well as the State of California, the State of New Mexico, and the United States Air Force. The company has operations in the Middle East and the Southeast Asia. 3D/International, Inc. was formerly known as Diversified Design Disciplines and changed its name in 1974. Prior to that, 3D/International, Inc. was known as Neuhaus+Taylor. The company was founded in 1953 and is headquartered in San Antonio, Texas. As of June 8, 2006, 3D/International, Inc. is a subsidiary of Parsons Commercial Tech Group, Inc.
Hide Detailed Description

219 East Houston Street

Suite 350

San Antonio, TX 78205-1801

United States

Founded in 1953

http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?p...
-------------------------------------------------------

DMJM Harris, Inc.
SnapshotPeople
Company Overview

As of January 26, 2010, DMJM Harris, Inc. was acquired by AECOM Technology Corporation. DMJM Harris, Inc. operates as a transportation and infrastructure company. The company specializes in design and construction, transit and rail, highways and bridges, aviation, marine, planning, energy and power, and environmental services. The company was founded in 1927 and is headquartered in New York, New York with an additional office in Los Angeles, California.

605 Third Avenue

New York, NY 10158

United States

Founded in 1927

http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?p...

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.
casseia's picture

And that's the wedge that was done blowed up...

I think we're looking at a parallel to the WTC: plane(s) were the sideshow. Is arguing about flight paths and flyovers akin to all the crap about pods and flashes (i.e. may have validity or not, but ultimately small potatoes significance-wise?)

gretavo's picture

more info on Pentagon renovation

http://cmaanet.org/files/pentagon.pdf

Copyright ©2002 by the Construction Management Association of America Page 1
PROJECT CONTROL MECHANISMS
ON THE
PENTAGON RENOVATION PROGRAM
(EXPECTATIONS ARE HIGH—AND THE WORLD IS WATCHING)
BY LESTER M. HUNKELE III AND W. LEE EVEY

INTRODUCTION
Four years ago, Lee Evey, Program Manager for the Pentagon Renovation Project, took on a project whose scope he could never have imagined at the time. Nor could he have imagined the events of Sept. 11 that destroyed so much of the four years of work he and his team poured into the Pentagon Renovation Project.

The article that follows was written well before the Sept. 11 unprecedented terrorist attacks against our nation. Most of the work completed in the Wedge 1 phase of the project was utterly destroyed—work that Evey and the members of his team had spent four years completing, at a cost of $258 million.

Facts are now emerging on how the renovations withstood the inferno that resulted when a hijacked airliner slammed into the Pentagon. Steel framing that had been added gave extra support to the concrete, holding up the Pentagon’s outer ring for approximately 30 minutes before it finally collapsed. This time allowed many personnel on the 3rd, 4th, and 5th floors—directly above the area of impact—to escape their offices unharmed. Blast-resistant windows—at $10,000 apiece—limited razor-sharp flying glass; and Kevlar-like cloth, applied between steel beams, caught fragments that imploded.

While a significant portion of Wedge 1 is beyond repair, literally hundreds of people are working around the clock right now to make areas suitable for occupancy in the very near future. And although Wedge 1 suffered water damage that requires significant recovery and restoration efforts, many of the areas are salvageable after carpets and drywall are replaced.

Program Manager and the Defense Acquisition University do not consider this story overcome by events. Indeed, we believe it has a message for our readers—a message that those of us who work for the government would do well to remember. Here, it’s a message DAU President Frank Anderson Jr., doesn’t let us forget: It’s about making a difference. And the Pentagon Renovation Program Team—in a place and time of history’s choosing, where the day-to-day suddenly became the unthinkable—truly made a difference.

gretavo's picture

Lee Evey

Lee Evey was a participant or observer in the following events:

The “exit hole” in an inner wall of the Pentagon.The “exit hole” in an inner wall of the Pentagon. [Source: Public domain]Various explanations are offered for the “exit hole” that appeared in an internal wall in the Pentagon following the attack on 9/11 (see May 3, 2002):
bullet As the hole is near the end of the plane’s trajectory through the building, it is suggested it was made by a piece of the plane. Pentagon Renovation Program spokesman Lee Evey explains on September 15, “the nose of the plane just barely broke through the inside of the C Ring, so it was extending into A-E Drive a little bit.” [US Department of Defense, 9/15/2001]
bullet Eleven days later, another military source claims that an engine of the plane was responsible for creating the hole. [MDW News Service, 9/26/2001]
bullet Photos, video, and some eyewitness accounts agree on landing gear elements at or near the hole, indicating one of the three sets of landing gear may have been responsible. Sergeant First Class Reginald Powell recalls seeing “a big 8 by 10… hole in the wall. You could see the tire, the landing gear, were just forward of it.” [Office of Medical History, 9/2004, pp. 118] The book Debunking 9/11 Myths by Popular Mechanics magazine will say in 2006 that the density of the landing gear means it was “responsible for puncturing the wall in Ring C.” The book cites Air Force Surgeon General Paul Carlton Jr. and Paul Mlakar, lead author of the American Society of Civil Engineers’ (ASCE) Pentagon Building Performance Report, who says “he saw the landing gear with his own eyes.” [Dunbar and Reagan, 2006, pp. 70] A wheel hub is found outside the hole in the A-E Drive service roadway and photographed there. [Jeff Scott and Joe Yoon, 1/21/2007]
bullet Another theory put forth in a 2004 National Geographic program is that reverberating shockwaves from the plane’s impact were responsible for the hole. [National Geographic Channel, 2004]
bullet Shortly after the attack, rescue workers reportedly “punched a hole” somewhere in the Pentagon “to clean it out,” although there are no sources that say that this was the reason for the hole to the A-E Drive. [US Department of Defense, 9/15/2001] Some accounts refer to the hole as a ‘punch out’ hole, due to the words “punch out” spray painted near it after 9/11. [Mlakar et al., 1/2003, pp. 30 pdf file] However, punch out appears to be a construction term referring to a list of problems to be corrected. In this case it may be a call for assessment of the damage inside. [Home Building Manual, 8/25/2007]
bullet French author Thierry Meyssan claims that the unusual nature and shape of the hole indicates it was made by a missile, not an airliner (see Early March 2002). [Meyssan, 2002, pp. 55-63]
bullet The 2008 book Firefight: Inside the Battle to Save the Pentagon on 9/11, by Patrick Creed and Rick Newman, will offer a description of the hole and how it was created that is strikingly similar to Meyssan’s earlier observations but without questioning the official account that Flight 77 crashed into the building. In its photo-insert, the book shows a photograph of the exit hole and comments: “The ‘punch-out’ hole blown into a wall where Flight 77 finally came to rest. The hole was created by explosive energy; the plane’s soft aluminum nose and fuselage crumpled the instant it struck the building.” The book also says in its description of the crash, “The 182,000-pound aircraft was morphing into an enormous mass of energy and matter, plowing forward like a horizontal volcanic eruption.” It continues, “As the mass traveled through the building, it began to resemble a shaped charge, a form of explosive that funnels its force into a small, directed area—like a beam of energy—in order to punch holes through armor or other strong material.” [Creed and Newman, 2008, pp. 27]
In addition, the ASCE team’s photo of the hole, and its assessment of the damaged support columns nearest to it, are provided by the FBI, suggesting the bureau has special jurisdiction at the exit hole. [Mlakar et al., 1/2003, pp. 30 pdf file]

The 9/11 attacks result in significant extra funding for the Pentagon. Since 1993, the building has been undergoing major renovations. These were scheduled to be complete by 2014. But in October 2001 this is declared to be too long to leave major areas of the building unprotected, and Congress soon appropriates $300 million so the renovations will be finished four years sooner. Also that month, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz approves a $15 million package to protect command centers and other critical areas of the building against chemical, biological, and radiological attack. A road, Route 110, had been considered a security threat, as it ran within 40 yards of some of the most sensitive areas of the Pentagon. Previously, the possibility of moving it had been dismissed as too expensive, but now $40 million is promptly found to cover the cost of rerouting it, along with making other road-security improvements. Before 9/11, the renovation of the Pentagon was already the largest reconstruction project in the world, costing $2.1 billion. But, as the Washington Post reports in September 2003, following the attack on the Pentagon, “the renovation mushroomed and now encompasses about $5.3 billion worth of projects in and around the Pentagon.” In an e-mail on October 1, 2001, Pentagon Renovation Program manager Lee Evey writes, “Recent events have shaken up complacency and there is unprecedented willingness” among the services to do whatever Paul Wolfowitz and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld want. [Washington Post, 9/7/2003; Vogel, 2007, pp. 472-473]

gretavo's picture

what is "design build"?

You are here: DBIA » About DBIA » Leadership & Staff » Board of Directors » Walker Lee Evey
Walker Lee Evey
President of the Design-Build Institute of America. Lee brings a personal commitment to design-build project delivery coupled with an extraordinary and varied background in both the public and private sectors. He has been an outspoken advocate of integrated project delivery, demonstrating the effectiveness of innovative partnering and teaming approaches.

Lee was most recently senior vice president of 3D/International, Inc., a design, management, and construction company that employs 600 professionals in 18 offices nationwide. While at 3D/International, he took a leave of absence to serve as senior advisor to the Iraqi Ministry of Housing and Construction in their rebuilding efforts. Before coming to 3D/International, Lee was the program manager for the 10-year, $4 billion Pentagon Renovation Program. He was responsible for development and control of budgets, work schedules, acquisition strategy, and plans and programs for use of swing space and for coordination and control of all office movements within the Pentagon involving renovation activities. He served as the principal advisor to the Secretary of Defense and the Deputy Secretary of Defense for all matters relating to the Pentagon Renovation Program. In that capacity, Lee championed the use of design-build delivery, achieving significant cost savings and rapid project completion.

Lee was recently honored with the Presidential Distinguished Executive Rank Award for "sustained extraordinary accomplishment in management of programs of the United States Government and for leadership exemplifying the highest standards of service to the public, reflecting credit on the career civil service." He served as an infantry platoon leader and company commander in Vietnam, participating in numerous combat operations. Lee entered federal service in January 1974 as a member of the Air Force Copper Cap Training Program at Patrick Air Force Base. He is a member of the Senior Executive Association, the Air Force Association, and the National Contract Management Association.

You are here: DBIA » About DBIA » What is Design-Build?
What is Design-Build?
Design-Build is a method of project delivery in which one entity (the design-builder) forges a single contract with the project owner to provide both architectural/engineering (A/E) design services and construction services. Design-build is also known as design/construct and single-source responsibility. From Hawaii to Florida, design-build successfully delivers office buildings, schools, stadiums, transportation and water infrastructure projects with superior results.

Design-build is an alternative to design-bid-build. Under the latter approach, the owner selects and commissions an architect or engineer to prepare drawings and specifications under a design contract and subsequently selects a construction contractor to build the facility under a construction contract.

Design-build, design-bid-build, and construction management are the three project delivery systems most commonly employed in North America. Over the past 15 years, use of design-build has greatly accelerated in the United States, making this delivery method one of the most significant trends in design and construction today.

One Contract / One Integrated Team
Design-build streamlines project delivery through a single contract between the owner and the design-build team. This simple but fundamental difference saves money and time by transforming the relationship between designers and builders into an alliance which fosters collaboration and teamwork. United from the outset of every project, an integrated team readily incorporates BIM and LEED certification goals.

The Design-Build Advantage:
Owner/Agency Benefits
Faster Delivery — collaborative project management means work is completed faster with fewer problems.

Cost Savings — an integrated team is geared toward efficiency and innovation.

Better Quality — design-builders meet performance needs not minimum design requirements.

Singular Responsibility — one entity held accountable for cost, schedule, and performance.

Decreased Administrative Burden — owners can focus on the project rather than managing disparate contracts.

Reduced Risk — the design-build team assumes additional risk.

Reduced Litigation Claims — by closing warranty gaps owners virtually eliminate litigation claims.

Practitioner Benefits
Higher Profit Margin — an integrated team is fully and equally committed to controlling costs.

Decreased Administrative Burden — design-build streamlines communication between designers and builders.

Reduced Litigation — a Victor O. Schinnerer benchmarking and claims study shows that from 1995-2004, only 1.3% of claims against A/E firms were made by design-build contractors.

Increased Market Share— more and more owners choose design-build.

gretavo's picture

it was green!

February 22, 1995
What Has 5 Sides and Is Turning Green?
By KEITH SCHNEIDER,
Correction Appended
WASHINGTON— The way things are going at the Pentagon, the military brass will soon be treading on carpets made of natural fibers, with nontoxic backing. Energy-efficient lights will brighten the dim halls. And trees and green spaces will be carved out of the vast parking lots to help filter the water running off into creeks and streams.

Engineers are beginning a $ 1.25 billion reconstruction of the Pentagon -- military spending that the editors of the Whole Earth Catalog might well approve of.

The project, being discussed at the top levels of the Defense Department, calls for nontoxic paints; insulation made of natural materials; coated, tinted, double-paned windows; energy-efficient computers; the use of natural light where possible, and reorganized space to cut energy consumption.

All this is to be done without altering the outside appearance of the Pentagon, a national historic landmark, which at 6.5 million square feet is the largest low-rise office building in the world.

Built in 16 months during World War II, it was made of concrete to save steel. Today the cold, uninsulated walls, 17.5 miles of poorly lit corridors, malfunctioning heating and cooling systems, paint-sealed windows and crammed work spaces make the Pentagon not only expensive to operate but also one of the most uncomfortable Federal office buildings.

A requirement of the remodeling, said Kathleen McGinty, the White House director of environmental policy, is that the "green" materials and design pay for themselves in about three years, largely through savings in energy costs.

"The idea is to save money and gain environmental benefits all at the same time," she said in an interview.

This will be no easy task. The Pentagon is in continuous use and is wrapped in tight security. The work, which has already begun and is expected to last a decade, will be done in five phases, with thousands of people moved around first for demolition work and then for construction.

The Clinton Administration hopes the project at the Pentagon and a similar, smaller project at the White House will promote building technologies that use less energy and produce less pollution.

"We've seen technological advances over the last decade in building products, in design and in our understanding of how buildings function," said William D. Browning of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit research center in Snowmass, Colo., which is consulting on the Pentagon project.

"We can make extremely efficient buildings that cut operational costs and improve productivity," Mr. Browning continued. "This is not a return to the boxy, solar buildings of the 1970's."

Congress authorized the $ 1.25 billion to modernize the Pentagon five years ago. With the arrival of the Clinton Administration, Vice President Al Gore was eager to try out environmental ideas from his 1992 book, "Earth in the Balance."

The result is that the Pentagon reconstruction, which was planned as a complicated but conventional remodeling, has become quite unconventional.

President Clinton announced on Earth Day in 1993 that he was going to promote the new technologies with a $ 65 million remodeling of the White House, its grounds and the adjacent Old Executive Office Building.

Using the White House as a guide and with encouragement from Vice President Gore and Ms. McGinty, the Pentagon incorporated the same goals in its ambitious plans.

Defense Department planners now joke that about the only ideas they did not accept from the White House consultants were skylights in the stairwells and atriums in the Pentagon's inner courtyards. (The skylights are not feasible because of the building's design, officials say, and atriums would appear extravagant in these tight-budget times.)

Though the project's manager, Jerry Shiplett, the director of Pentagon renovation and planning, and other officials make light of some of the new ideas, they say they approve of the White House's interest in saving money by operating more comfortable, less-wasteful buildings.

For several years, a number of big companies have incorporated energy-efficient changes in their stores and offices. Sony Studios, the Gap, Wal-Mart and NMB Bank among others have used nontoxic materials to reduce indoor air pollution, and installed new lighting and advanced heating and cooling systems, among other improvements.

One of the first Federal agencies to try this green technology was the Postal Service, which installed $ 300,000 worth of energy-efficient lighting in its Reno office in the early 1980's. Postal officials say that office has saved $ 52,000 a year in electricity bills in the years since, more than covering the initial costs.

Moreover, a study of the Reno office in the late 1980's found that the better lighting helped make the mail sorters there the most productive in the Western United States.

The officials said that the better lights helped reduce the errors the workers were making, allowing them to achieve a productivity gain that the Postal Service calculated to be worth $ 400,000 to $ 500,000 a year.

Photo: Renovation was already under way yesterday at the Pentagon, where workers reinforced basement walls. (Karin Anderson for The New York Times) Chart: "IN THE WORKS: Operation Efficiency: Renovating the Pentagon" As part of its renovation, the Pentagon is exploring ways of making the 6.5-million-square-foot building more energy efficient and confortable for the more than 25,000 people who work there. This effort is complicated by the fact the the building is a historic landmark with strict limits on changes that might alter its appearance. Replacing the Windows The Pentagon plans to replace thousands of single-paned windows with more efficient ones with two tinted panes. In the new double-paned windows, the pocket of air between the panes acts as an insulator, greatly reducing the loss of heat or gain of unwanted heat. Tinting will also help block solar heat from entering. Replacement windows will resemble existing windows as closely as posible. A few windows will not be replaced because of their historical value, but storm windows wil be mounted behind them. Other Changes Walls -- Insulation and dry wall will be added to increase energy efficiency. Rest Rooms -- Automatic sensors will be used to save water. Building Materials -- nontoxic points and carpeting made of natural fibers will be used. Computers -- New energy-efficient systems will be installed. Access for Disabled -- The Pentagon is not accessible for the disabled and has only freight elevators. Ramps will be built on the exterior of the building, and elevators will be added inside. (Source: Pentagon Renovation and Planning Office, Rocky Mountain Institute)

gretavo's picture

hmmm still no ID of the contractor...

more on Evey though, and this book would seem to be useful...

http://books.google.com/books?id=Dr0UIZJw58YC&printsec=frontcover&dq=the...

gretavo's picture

early NYT article after 9/11

October 12, 2001
A NATION CHALLENGED: THE ATTACK ON THE PENTAGON
A NATION CHALLENGED: THE ATTACK ON THE PENTAGON; The Military Bounds Back From Sept. 11, and Does It Double-Quick
By ELIZABETH BECKER
WASHINGTON, Oct. 11— Master Warrant Officer Craig Sincock finished his counseling duties for the families of victims on Wednesday. Today he was part of the throng praying outside the Pentagon in a final memorial to the 189 people who died on Sept. 11.

On Friday he will bury his wife, Cheryle.

Her office was directly in the path of the hijacked American Airlines jet that slammed into the newly renovated west wedge of the huge building, and although he feared the worst, Mr. Sincock volunteered for stretcher duty. He recalls watching the building ''burn and burn and burn, knowing I was looking at Cheryle's office.''

When he received the call one day later notifying him that his 53-year old wife, a Pentagon secretary, had been declared missing, he knew she was dead, he said.

Unable to go back to his job as a chief strategist for the Army's knowledge management office, he volunteered to help other families at the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, one of more than a dozen organizations set up by the Pentagon in a nearby hotel that became a sanctuary for the families.

''This is where I needed to be,'' Mr. Sincock said this week.

After one month, the Pentagon has completed the job of providing assistance -- financial, legal, medical, emotional -- to the relatives of the dead and missing. It has cleared the rubble, met its budget deadlines though the Army's budget office was decimated and relocated the Navy's destroyed Command Center, and is now rebuilding the damaged portion of the building.

And it did the job with the same discipline and esprit de corps that enabled it to be back in business within 72 hours of the attack.

Standing outside the damaged building today, President Bush paid homage to the victims in a somber ceremony and then praised the spirit of the survivors.

''I have seen this spirit at the Pentagon before and after the attack on this building,'' he said. ''You've responded to a great emergency with calm and courage, and for that, your country honors you.''

From the first explosion to the final good-bye today, the civilians and military members who work in the world's largest office building fell back on years of training to both follow orders and improvise with extraordinary courage in an emergency.

The discipline was evident in the evacuation of 20,000 people within minutes after the attack.

''Our side of the building was hit bad, but there was no pushing, no panic, no shoving, just some bunching up,'' said Adm. Stephen R. Pietropaoli, the Navy's chief spokesman. ''What was extraordinary was how people would shush for quiet whenever there were new announcements over the P.A. system.''

The heroics were hidden. Sgt. Maj. Tony G. Rose of the Army was at his desk on the C ring, fourth corridor, where he worked under the command of Lt. Gen. Timothy J. Maude, the highest ranking officer to be killed in the attack.

The room shook like an earthquake and a wall of black smoke rolled over everyone, Sergeant Major Rose, 47, recalled. He heard people screaming above the roar of the explosive fire. ''Come to my voice,'' he answered back. Firewalls were starting to close. But the sergeant major, who had never seen combat, slithered along the floor over broken glass until he found first one, then two, then three and four colleagues, shepherding them to safety on the first floor.

Then he heard more cries for help, this time from a utility closet. A Navy SEAL used his massive body to hold up a supporting wall while the sergeant major and five buddies tunneled their way to the closet, using their wet T-shirts as masks against the smoke. They saved three more people.

It is impossible to estimate how many people were saved in that first hour, but within the halls of the Pentagon it is taken as a given that few other groups of people were better prepared to take care of their own in such an unimaginable attack.

''While no one could have conceived that that kind of catastrophic incident could happen here, there is a military mindset that says you have to be prepared, to recognize you're a potential target and act,'' said Col. Stephanie Hoehne, the deputy chief of Army public relations.

The military may be accustomed to war and losing comrades, but the civilians who work at the Pentagon had not expected to find themselves in a combat zone. More civilians perished than military members.

When the terrorist hijackers steered the jet into the Pentagon, they managed to kill more accountants than special operations commandos. The worst hit was the budget office of the Army headquarters, which lost all 32 budget analysts and accountants.

''We were utterly decimated,'' said Robert Jarowski, director of resource services for the office of administrative assistant to the secretary of the Army.

The office had two weeks to close the books on the Army's annual $3 billion budget, a major feat any time but nearly impossible with so many colleagues missing. It did so just in time, using a makeshift crew of temporary accountants and former employees who came out of retirement.

After four weeks of cleaning up debris, searching for bodies and combing the wreckage for evidence, the Pentagon belongs to the Defense Department once again. Gone are the F.B.I. agents, the Red Cross workers, the tents with food for fire and rescue workers.

Diane Stephens of the Red Cross said the Pentagon had created one of the best organized relief efforts she had seen. ''Normally we have to do nearly everything, but with all the resources they command we were more like guests here,'' Ms. Stephens said.

For all of the talk of business as usual, the building is not the same. The halls are infused with the acrid smell of war, not of a simple fire. The famously long corridors are now a sea of camouflage. With the building on alert, the military have been ordered to wear their battle uniforms and give up their dress uniforms and chests of medals. Cordoned off indefinitely is the destroyed west face, which was only five days from completion of a three-year, $258 million renovation.

The officials put in charge of repairing and rebuilding that wedge of the building recently came up with an eerie piece of historic trivia: ground was broken for the original building on Sept. 11, 1941 -- 60 years to the day before the only attack on the nation's center of military power.

Photo: People attending a ceremony at the Pentagon yesterday for those killed on Sept. 11. ''You've responded to a great emergency with calm and courage,'' President Bush told them. (Luke Frazza/Agence France-Presse)

gretavo's picture

even earlier

September 16, 2001
AFTER THE ATTACKS: THE OVERVIEW
AFTER THE ATTACKS: THE OVERVIEW; LONG BATTLE SEEN
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
WASHINGTON, Sept. 15— President Bush told the American military today to get ready for a long war against terrorism, and vowed to ''do what it takes to win.''

In a brief appearance with his senior advisers at Camp David, where they met to plan the new offensive, Mr. Bush said point-blank: ''We're at war. There's been an act of war declared upon America by terrorists, and we will respond accordingly.''

''My message is for everybody who wears the uniform to get ready,'' Mr. Bush said.

Shortly afterward, in his weekly radio address, he warned that ''those who make war on the United States have chosen their own destruction.'' He told Americans to steel themselves for ''a conflict without battlefields or beachheads.''

Victory, he said, ''will not take place in a single battle, but in a series of decisive actions against terrorist organizations and those who harbor and support them.''

While some of his remarks were scripted and others were delivered off the cuff, they demonstrated an escalation of harsh words that Mr. Bush used Tuesday night in an address to the nation after the terrorist attacks in New York and at the Pentagon. His language was backed up by a resolution passed overwhelmingly by Congress on Friday approving the use of force in response to the terrorist attacks. And the words and tone reflected the national mood.

Americans say overwhelmingly that the nation should take military action against those responsible for the terrorist attacks, the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll shows. [Page 6.]

Mr. Bush identified Osama bin Laden, a Saudi-born millionaire harbored in Afghanistan by its radical fundamentalist government, as a ''prime suspect'' in the attacks that may have killed more than 5,000 people.

But Mr. Bush would not describe the administration's intelligence or its plans.

The administration also pressed ahead on the diplomatic front, campaigning through its envoys around the world to build a solid international coalition of friends and isolate foes in waging what Mr. Bush is bluntly calling war.

In an unusually strong diplomatic intervention, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell has asked Saudi Arabia, America's closest ally in the Persian Gulf, and the United Arab Emirates to sever diplomatic relations with the Taliban in Afghanistan, senior administration officials said today.

The Taliban, the extremist Sunni Muslim group that rules most of Afghan territory, has given refuge to Mr. bin Laden and has allowed him to maintain military training camps on Afghan soil.

The State Department directed its envoys in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to deliver the request, the officials said. The Bush administration does not yet have ambassadors in place in either country.

As terrified Afghan citizens began leaving their country and neighboring Iran began to seal its borders against a wave of refugees, the Taliban leaders threatened a holy war against all those who helped in an American-led military campaign against their country.

But Pakistan today offered the United States the support it was seeking. Mr. Powell told reporters at Camp David that Pakistan agreed ''to assist us in whatever might be required'' in retaliating.

The United States has asked Pakistan to allow American access to Pakistani airspace, a vital consideration in any air strike on bordering Afghanistan; grant access to information from Pakistani intelligence on Mr. bin Laden; help track Mr. bin Laden's Al Qaeda organization and close off the organization's financial assets; and tighten the illegal flow of fuel and other supplies over the rugged mountainous border.

Pakistan's foreign minister, Abdul Sattar, today pledged cooperation but said that any military action would have to be supported by the United Nations.

''The government will discharge its responsibilities under international law,'' Mr. Sattar said in Islamabad, adding that he did not expect Pakistan to take part in military operations outside its borders.

Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was at Camp David with Mr. Bush, confidently said that the investigation was proceeding ''with reasonable success'' and that investigators were ''beginning to understand the ways in which this terrible crime was committed.''

After passing the resolution on use of force on Friday, Congress was out of session for the weekend. Members predicted that when they returned they would swiftly resolve the remaining budget issues before the fiscal year ends on Sept. 30. Many also predicted that Congress would put aside most of the domestic agenda until next year so as not to engage in partisan debate over issues like health care and campaign finance revisions.

In the skies of Washington, New York and other cities, F-15 and F-16 fighter jets continued to fly patrols they began on Tuesday after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The fighter jets are supported by AWACS surveillance aircraft. Coast Guard cutters cruised ports and waterways on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, where only essential cargo vessels were allowed to dock.

The cockpit voice recorder from the hijacked jet that left Newark and crashed in western Pennsylvania on Tuesday was brought to Washington overnight, to a specially equipped laboratory of the National Transportation Safety Board, where technicians were examining it this morning under the supervision of agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The Federal Aviation Administration said that Logan International Airport, where the two planes that hit the World Trade Center on Tuesday took off, reopened at 5 a.m. today. That left Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington as the last major airport in the country still closed to all flights. Airplanes landing and taking off there fly along the Potomac River very close to Capitol Hill, the White House and the Pentagon, which was hit by the fourth hijacked jet. That one had left Dulles International Airport, in Virginia, which has reopened.

The aviation agency said that at 1:50 this afternoon, there were 4,950 planes in the skies nationwide. That is about 10 percent more than were flying when the hijackings occurred last week.

In the first weekend after the bombing, Washington was making its best attempt to move closer to normalcy, with the police retreating from heavy security and office buildings glinting with American flags draped informally, passionately from office windows. The Humvee roadblocks near the White House were gone, and there were no longer troops in combat fatigues controlling traffic at nearby intersections. A few early risers returned down Pennsylvania Avenue to get a good look at the president's home, which officials have said might have been an intended target in the coordinated attacks by hijacked jets.

''It's kind of solemn to see how few people have been in the streets,'' said Krista McFaren, a jogger who bounded by from DuPont Circle. ''Everybody's been glued to the TV, feeling a kind of a sense of helplessness, spreading the sadness.''

On the White House lawn, a television reporter talked into the camera, his words sounding lost and weary. A homeless man sipped morning coffee on a park bench facing the White House.

As construction crews prepared to remove heavy debris from damaged sections of the Pentagon today, Defense Department officials announced that they had awarded a $145 million contract to begin renovation on the rest of the 6.5-million-square-foot building. Those improvements, which are intended to protect against terrorist attacks, will include installation of blast-resistant windows, fire sprinklers and new steel columns. Similar renovations that were recently completed on the western side of the Pentagon, where hijackers crashed a jetliner into the building, helped save hundreds of lives by preventing damaged areas from collapsing and fire from spreading, Pentagon officials said.

In the seclusion of Camp David, in a remote part of Maryland, Mr. Bush woke up at 5:30 a.m., walked his dogs, went for a run, called the leaders of Spain and Mexico, attended his daily intelligence briefings, and gave his radio address. The meeting of the National Security Council began at 9:30 and ran until noon. The president and his advisers had lunch together, and planned to dine with their spouses this evening. No formal meetings were scheduled for the afternoon.

On Wall Street in New York, leading executives from exchanges and trading houses found success in testing whether the electrical and telecommunications systems were sufficiently repaired to allow the stock exchange to reopen on Monday. As Mr. Bush ordered flags to be flown at half-staff for another week, federal agencies continued to expand their contribution to rescue efforts in New York. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was sending 35 members of its Epidemic Intelligence Service to assist the New York City Health Department in the monitoring of public health matters.

But the biggest question continued to be the nature of the military campaign that the administration is putting together.

''Victory against terrorism will not take place in a single battle but in a series of decisive actions against terrorist organizations and those who harbor and support them,'' Mr. Bush said. ''We are planning a broad and sustained campaign to secure our country and eradicate the evil of terrorism.''

He called those responsible for the terrorist attacks ''barbarians.''

The United States has not specifically asked Pakistan to allow the deployment of American troops on Pakistani soil, but it is understood by the Pakistani leadership that it might have to do so, senior administration officials said. Such a move is likely to be opposed by Pakistan's military, Pakistani officials said.

''We have never had foreign forces operating from our soil,'' a senior Pakistani official said in a telephone interview from the region. ''A foreign military presence could cause serious domestic problems for our leadership and and could create a serious backlash.''

Pakistan is the only other country, other than Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, to recognize the Taliban as the legitimate leader of Afghanistan. The United States has not asked Pakistan to cut ties with the Taliban -- at least not yet -- recognizing that Pakistan has steadfastly maintained relations with the government in Kabul even when it helped the United States and Afghan rebels fight a covert war for years after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979.

The request could put both countries, but particularly Saudi Arabia, in a delicate position. Saudi Arabia's cooperation is crucial in mounting any military response in the region.

Saudi Arabia rescinded Mr. bin Laden's citizenship in 1994 because of concerns about his mounting appeal and his wealth. But for years it turned a blind eye to the financing of Mr. bin Laden by wealthy Saudi businessmen.

gretavo's picture

Eureka!

EDIT: deleted and copied to post

gretavo's picture

The Pentagon Renovation Program

http://www.dtic.mil/ref/html/Welcome/renovations.html

The Pentagon Renovation Program

The Pentagon, designated a National Historic Landmark in 1992, has never undergone a major renovation and, after more than 55 years, renovation is essential in order to meet current health, fire, and life safety codes and provide reliable electrical, air conditioning, and ventilating services. Absent a major renovation, the building infrastructure will become increasingly unreliable and soon unable to effectively support the headquarters and nerve center of the national military establishment. Major building systems have deteriorated to such an extent that repairs are no longer effective and entire systems need replacement. The presence of asbestos in the ceiling plaster, ventilating ducts, pipes, and floor coverings is a hazard that makes repairs or alterations extremely disruptive and expensive.

From 1982 through 1990, the Department of Defense discussed with the General Services Administration (then owner of the building) renovation of the Pentagon and, in the mid 1980’s, GSA supported the concept of transferring the building to the DoD.

The Transfer

Based on consultation within the Administration and with Congressional Committees, legislation was prepared to transfer the Pentagon from the Administrator of General Services to the Secretary of Defense so that the renovation of the Pentagon could be undertaken.

The Defense Authorization Act of FY 1991 transferred control of the Pentagon Reservation from the Adminsistrator of General Services to the Secretary of Defense. Under the same Act, Congress established the Pentagon Reservation Maintenance Revolving Fund for the expressed intent of renovating the Pentagon. This Act allows the Secretary of Defense to establish rent rates for the tenants to support the renovation.

The Program

In 1990, a Concept Plan for the Pentagon Renovation was approved based on renovating the building in five 1,000,000 gross-square-foot "wedges" with renovation of the basement as a separate endeavor. The plan envisioned the complete removal of all support systems (mechanical, electrical, plumbing) down to the base structure and then construction of all new systems. This full-scale removal is dictated by the wide-spread presence of asbestos throughout the building. Removal of plumbing systems is based on the high probability of catastrophic failure.

The Renovation Program provides all new mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems, sprinkler systems, vertical transportation, cable management systems, improvements in fire and life safety systems, and flexible ceiling, lighting, and partition systems. The renovation will also provide accessibility throughout for persons with disabilities and will include the addition of over 50 elevators. It will preserve historic elements, upgrade food service facilities, construct co-located operation centers, install modern telecommunications support features, comply with energy conservation and environmental requirements, reorganize materials handling, and provide safety improvements in vehicular and pedestrian traffic.

Renovations Begin

The renovation concept for the Pentagon includes, as a first phase, a new Heating and Refrigeration Plant (H&RP), which has been constructed. In conjunction with construction of the H&RP, a Center Courtyard Utilities Tunnel was constructed. The tunnel houses piping and conduit, which will distribute building utilities provided by the new plant. The utilities tunnel will be connected as each wedge is renovated.

The second phase of the Program involves the renovation of the Basement and Mezzanine, which started in September 1994. One third of the Basement has been renovated with many areas now occupied. The original basement slab was lowered in order to accommodate an entirely new level between the basement and the first floor. When completed, this new Mezzanine level will add close to 320,000 square feet of office space to the Pentagon.

The third through seventh phases of the program are the five wedges of the building from the first floor to the fifth floor. These areas have been determined to be the optimum divisions for renovation while continuing operations. In order to vacate each wedge prior to renovation, tenants will be moved either to nearby leased office space or to space identified within the Pentagon.

Wedge I, the area served by Corridors 3 and 4, was completely vacated by January 1999 as more than 5,000 personnel were relocated to leased office space or elsewhere in the Pentagon. Demolition and abatement activities began in January 1998 and will be completed by mid 1999. The construction contractor is installing all new utilities and will build up the wedge. Tenants may begin moving back into the wedge as early as the summer of 2000. Construction in Wedge I is expected to be completed in December 2000.

Another major project underway is the South Terrace Pedestrian Bridge structure. This renovation activity involves the construction of two pedestrian bridges that will link the Pentagon directly to the South Parking Lot. The Corridor 2 Bridge is nearing completion and has provided safe access for pedestrians since the spring of 1999. Two elevators in each bridge will provide accessibility for persons with disabilities. Once the bridges are completed, the 7,000 personnel that enter and exit the Pentagon along the South Terrace each day will no longer compete with three lanes of traffic when entering or exiting the Pentagon.

Status

On January 15, 1997, as required by Congress, the Pentagon’s Director for Administration and Management certified that the design, construction, and installation of (building) equipment would not exceed $1,118,000,000.

Overall, the impact of the Pentagon Renovation Program can now be seen throughout the building. When completed, all of the Pentagon’s 23,000 military and civilian personnel will be able to work in a safe, professional, and flexible office environment that is being built to endure well into the 21st century. For the most up-to-date information about renovation activities, please visit our website at http://renovation.pentagon.mil/.

Annoymouse's picture

Check out Jerry Mazza's new

Check out Jerry Mazza's new article on Dov Zakheim. He knows who the real "Bin Laden" is and why the Pentagon was "hit" where it was:

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/212216-Dov-Zakheim-retires-from-Booz-A...

Jerry Mazza is an unsung hero in the 9/11 truth movement.

Annoymouse's picture

"Apart from the question of

"Apart from the question of whether it was F 77 that struck the Pentagon, it is more than ironic that accountants, bookkeepers and budgets analysts, the very people who could pick up the financial frauds were targeted and struck. Especially since the hit was directed supposedly at the Office of Naval Intelligence."

Returning to the present

Bottom line, Mr. Zakheim was never questioned by the 911 Commission on his activities and beliefs, nor by the Department of Justice or any other government law enforcement or intelligence agency to the best of my knowledge. But one of the websites (located in the UK) in the article that showed the 767 aircrafts was asked by Mr. Zakheim's lawyers to take down the link. The lawyers said that "the information offended Mr. Zakheim." Well, his actions offend me.

Unfortunately, libel laws in England favors the complainant versus the USA's, where the burden of proof of libel rests on the accuser. Even then, Zakheim would need to prove that this was done out of malice rather than informing the public of important information.

So, there sits Mr. Zakheim now, freed of his BAH responsibilities but not of the stigma of this information. And my concern still remains. When is the Department of Justice or a new 911 Commission, the FBI, the CIA, DOD, or someone in any position of power going to sit down and ask Mr. Zakheim about his involvement in the masterminding of 9/11?

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/212216-Dov-Zakheim-retires-from-Booz-A...

gretavo's picture

Office of Naval Intelligence...

...also suggests something Pollard-related. Who knows if the talk of accountants and bookkeepers is meant to distract us from that...

Why Pollard Should Never Be Released (The Traitor)
The New Yorker Magazine | :January 18, 1999, pp. 26-33 | SEYMOUR M. HERSH

Posted on Thursday, November 22, 2001 10:32:44 PM by blackbag

The Case Against Johnathon Pollard

In the last decade, Jonathan Pollard, the American Navy employee who spied for Israel in the mid-nineteen-eighties and is now serving a life sentence, has become a cause celebre in Israel and among Jewish groups in the United States. The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, a consortium of fifty-five groups, has publicly called for Pollard's release, arguing, in essence, that his crimes did not amount to high treason against the United States, because Israel was then and remains a close ally. Many of the leading religious organizations have also called for an end to Pollard's imprisonment, among them the Reform Union of American Hebrew Congregations and the Orthodox Union.

Pollard himself, now forty-seven, has never denied that he turned over a great deal of classified material to the Israelis, but he maintains that his sole motive was to protect Israeli security. "From the start of this affair, I never intended or agreed to spy against the United States," he told United States District Court Judge Aubrey Robinson,Jr., in a memorandum submitted before his sentencing, in 1986. His goal, he said, was "to provide such information on the Arab powers and the Soviets that would permit the Israelis to avoid a repetition of the Yom Kippur War," in 1973, when an attack by Egypt and Syria took Israel by surprise. "At no time did I ever compromise the names of any U.S. agents operating overseas, nor did I ever reveal any U.S. ciphers, codes, encipherment devices, classified military technology, the disposition and orders of U.S. forces . . . or communications security procedures," Pollard added. "I never thought for a second that Israel's gain would necessarily result in America's loss. How could it?"

Pollard's defenders use the same arguments today. In a recent op-ed article in the Washington Post, the Harvard Law School professor Alan M. Dershowitz, who served as Pollard's lawyer in the early nineteen-nineties, and three co-authors called for President Clinton to correct what they depicted as "this longstanding miscarriage of justice" in the Pollard case. There was nothing in Pollard's indictment, they added, to suggest that he had "compromised the nation's intelligence-gathering capabilities" or "betrayed worldwide intelligence data."

In Israel, Pollard's release was initially championed by the right, but it has evolved into a mainstream political issue. Early in the Clinton Administration, Yitzhak Rabin, the late Israeli Prime Minister, personally urged the President on at least two occasions to grant clemency. Both times, Clinton reviewed the evidence against Pollard and decided not to take action. But last October, at a crucial moment in the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations at the Wye River Conference Centers, in Maryland, he did tentatively agree to release Pollard, or so the Israeli government claimed. When the President's acquiescence became publicly known, the American intelligence community responded immediately, with unequivocal anger. According to the Times, George J. Tenet, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, warned the President that he would be forced to resign from the agency if Pollard were to be released. Clinton then told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that Pollard's release would not be imminent, and ordered a formal review of the case.

The President's willingness to consider clemency for Pollard so upset the intelligence community that its leaders took an unusual step: they began to go public. In early December, four retired admirals who had served as director of Naval Intelligence circulated an article, eventually published in the Washington Post, in which they argued that Pollard's release would be "irresponsible" and a victory for what they depicted as a "clever public relations campaign." Since then, sensitive details about the secrets Pollard gave away have been made public by CBS and NBC.

In the course of my own interviews for this account, the officials who knew the most about Jonathan Pollard made it clear that they were talking because they no longer had confidence that President Clinton would do what they believed was the right thing -- keep Pollard locked up. Pollard, these officials told me, had done far more damage to American national security than was ever made known to the public; for example, he betrayed elements of four major American intelligence systems. In their eyes, there is no distinction between betraying secrets to an enemy, such as the Soviet Union, and betraying secrets to an ally.

Officials are loath to talk publicly about it, but spying on allies is a fact of life: the United States invests billions annually to monitor the communications of its friends. Many American embassies around the world contain a clandestine intercept facility that targets diplomatic communications. The goal is not only to know the military and diplomatic plans of our friends but also to learn what intelligence they may be receiving and with whom they share information. "If a friendly state has friends that we don't see as friends," one senior official explained, sensitive intelligence that it should not possess -- such as that supplied by Pollard -- "can spread to others." Many officials said they were convinced that information Pollard sold to the Israelis had ultimately wound up in the hands of the Soviet Union.

JONATHAN JAY POLLARD was born in 1954 and grew up as the youngest of three children in South Bend, Indiana; his father, Dr. Morris Pollard, was an award-winning microbiologist who taught at Notre Dame. The young boy did not fit in well in South Bend, and members of his family have described his years in public school there as hellish:

he made constant complaints of being picked on and, in high school, beaten up, because he was Jewish. One of the boy's happiest times, the family told journalists after his arrest, came when, at the age of sixteen, he attended a summer camp for gifted children in Israel. He talked then of serving in the Israeli Army, but instead he finished high school and went on to Stanford University. His Stanford classmates later recalled that he was full of stories about his ties to Israeli intelligence and the Israeli Army. He also was said to have been a heavy drug and alcohol user.

He graduated in 1976, and in the next three years he attended several graduate schools without getting a degree. He applied for a Job with the C.I.A. but was turned down when the agency concluded, after a lie-detector test and other investigations, that he was "a blabbermouth," as one official put it, and had misrepresented his drug use. Pollard then tried for a job with the Navy, and obtained a civilian position as a research analyst in the Field Operational Intelligence Office, in Suitland, Maryland. The job required high-level security clearances, and the Navy, which knew nothing about the C.I.A.'s assessment, eventually gave them to Pollard. His initial assignments dealt with the study of surface-ships systems in non-Communist countries, and, according to Pollard's superiors, his analytical work was excellent. While at Suitland, however, he repeatedly told colleagues far-fetched stories about ties he had with Mossad, the Israeli foreign-intelligence agency, and about his work as an operative in the Middle East.

Pollard's bragging and storytelling didn't prevent his immediate supervisors from recognizing his competence as an analyst. He was given many opportunities for promotion, but at least one of them he sabotaged. In the early nineteen-eighties, Lieutenant Commander David G. Muller, Jr., who ran an analytical section at Suitland, had an opening on his staff and summoned Pollard for an interview. "I had respect for him," Muller recalled recently. "He knew a lot about Navy hardware and a lot about the Middle East." An early-Monday-morning interview was set up. "Jay blew in the first thing Monday," Muller recounted. "He looked as if he hadn't slept or shaved. He proceeded to tell me that on Friday evening his then fiancee, Anne Henderson, had been kidnapped by I.R.A. operatives in Washington, and he'd spent the weekend chasing the kidnappers." Pollard said that he had managed to rescue his fiancee "only in the wee hours of Monday morning" -- just before his appointment. Of course, Pollard did not get the job, Muller said, but he still wishes that he had warned others. "I ought to have gone to the security people," Muller, who is retired, told me, "and said, 'Hey, this guy's a wacko.' "

A career American intelligence officer who has been actively involved for years in assessing the damage caused by Pollard told me that Pollard had been desperately broke during this period: "He had credit-card debts, loan debts, debts on rent, furniture, cars." He was also borrowing heavily from his colleagues, in part to forestall possible garnishment of his wages -- an action that could lead to loss of his top-secret clearances. Despite his chronic financial problems, the intelligence officer said, Pollard was constantly spending money on meals in expensive restaurants, on drugs, and on huge bar bills.

In late 1983, shortly after the terrorist bombing of a Marine barracks in Beirut, the Navy set up a high-powered Anti-Terrorist Alert Center at Suitland, and in June, 1984, Pollard was assigned to that unit's Threat Analysis Division. He had access there to the most up-to-date intelligence in the American government. By that summer, however, he had been recruited by Israeli intelligence. He was arrested a year and a half later, in November of 1985.

Pollard was paid well by the Israelis: he received a salary that eventually reached twenty-five hundred dollars a month, and tens of thousands of dollars in cash disbursements for hotels, meals, and even jewelry. In his pre-sentencing statement to Judge Robinson, Pollard depicted the money as a benefit that was forced on him. "I did accept money for my services," he acknowledged, but only "as a reflection of how well I was doing my job." He went on to assert that he had later told his controller, Rafi Eitan, a longtime spy who at the time headed a scientific-intelligence unit in Israel, that "I not only intended to repay all the money I'd received but, also, was going to establish a chair at the Israeli General Staff's Intelligence Training Center outside Tel Aviv."

Charles S. Leeper, the assistant United States attorney who prosecuted Pollard, challenged his statement that money had not motivated him. In a publicly filed sentencing memorandum, Leeper said that Pollard was known to have received fifty thousand dollars in cash from his Israeli handlers and to have been told that thirty thousand more would be deposited annually in a foreign bank account. Pollard had made a commitment to spy for at least ten years, the memorandum alleged, and "stood to receive an additional five hundred and forty thousand dollars ($540,000) over the expected life of the conspiracy."

There was no such public specificity, however, when it came to the top-secret materials that Pollard had passed on to Israel. In mid-1986, he elected to plea-bargain rather than face a trial. The government agreed with alacrity: no state secrets would have to be revealed, especially about the extent of Israeli espionage. After the plea bargain, the Justice Department supplied the court with a classified sworn declaration signed by Caspar W. Weinberger, the Secretary of Defense, which detailed, by categories, some of the intelligence systems that had been compromised. Judge Robinson, for his part, said nothing in public about the scope of the materials involved in the case, and merely noted at the end of a lengthy sentencing hearing, in March, 1987, that he had "read all of the material once, twice, thrice, if you will." He then sentenced Pollard to life in prison. Pollard's wife, Anne (they had married in 1985), who had been his accomplice, was convicted of unauthorized possession and transmission of classified defense documents and was given a five-year sentence.

Once in jail, Pollard became increasingly fervent in proclaiming his support for Israel. In the Washington Post last summer, the journalist Peter Perl wrote that even Pollard's friends saw him as "obsessed with vindication, consumed by the idea that he is a victim of anti-semitism and that Israel can rescue him through diplomatic and political pressure." Pollard has also turned increasingly to Orthodox Judaism. He divorced his wife after her release from prison, in 1990, and in 1994 proclaimed that, under Jewish law, he had been married in prison to a Toronto schoolteacher named Elaine Zeitz. Esther Pollard, as she is now known, is an indefatigable ally, who passionately believes that her husband was wrongfully accused of harming the United States and was therefore wrongfully imprisoned. "This is the kind of issue I feel very strongly concerns every Jew and every decent, law-abiding citizen," she told an interviewer shortly after the marriage. "The issues are much bigger than Jonathan and myself.... Like it or not, we are writing a page of Jewish history."

ESTHER POLLARD and her husband s other supporters are mistaken in believing that Jonathan Pollard caused no significant damage to American national security. Furthermore, according to senior members of the American intelligence community, Pollard's argument that he acted solely from idealistic motives and provided Israel only with those documents which were needed for its defense was a sham designed to mask the fact that he was driven to spy by his chronic need for money.

Before Pollard's plea bargain, the government had been preparing a multi-count criminal indictment that included-along with espionage, drug, and tax-fraud charges -- allegations that before his arrest Pollard had used classified documents in an unsuccessful attempt to persuade the governments of South Africa, Argentina, and Taiwan to participate in an arms deal for anti-Communist Afghan rebels who were then being covertly supported by the Reagan Administration. F.B.I. investigators later determined that in the fall of 1985 Pollard had also consulted with three Pakistanis and an Iranian in his efforts to broker arms. (The foreigners were quietly deported within several months of his arrest.)

Had Pollard's case gone to trial, one of the government's major witnesses would have been a journalist named Kurt Lohbeck, who had a checkered past. He had served seven months in prison after being convicted of passing a bad check in New Mexico in 1977, but by 1985 he was under contract to the CBS Evening News. Lohbeck, who now lives in Albuquerque -- (he received a full pardon from the governor of New Mexico two years ago), acknowledged in a telephone interview that he was prepared to testify, if necessary, about his involvement in Pollard's unsuccessful efforts in 1985 to broker arms sales for the rebels in the Afghan war. At one meeting with a foreign diplomat, Lohbeck said, Pollard posed as a high-level C.I.A. operative. Lohbeck, who was then CBS's main battlefield correspondent in the Afghan war, told me that Pollard had provided him, and thus CBS, with a large number of classified American documents concerning the war. He also told me that Pollard had never discussed Israel with him or indicated any special feelings for the state. "I never heard anything political from Jay," Lohbeck added, "other than that he tried to portray himself as a Reaganite. Not a word about Israel. Jay's sole interest was in making a lot of money."

Lohbeck went on to say that he had also been prepared to testify, if asked, about Pollard's drug use. "Jay used cocaine heavily, and had no compunction about doing it in public. He'd just lay it in lines on the table." In 1985, Lohbeck made similar statements, government officials said, to the F.B.I.

Pollard, told by me of Lohbeck's assertions, sent a response from a jail cell in North Carolina: "My relationship with Lohbeck is extremely complicated. I was never indicted for anything I did with him. Remember that."

The documents that Pollard turned over to Israel were not focussed exclusively on the product of American intelligence -- its analytical reports and estimates. They also revealed how America was able to learn what it did -- a most sensitive area of intelligence defined as "sources and methods." Pollard gave the Israelis vast amounts of data dealing with specific American intelligence systems and how they worked. For example, he betrayed details of an exotic capability that American satellites have of taking off-axis photographs from high in space. While orbiting the earth in one direction, the satellites could photograph areas that were seemingly far out of range. Israeli nuclear-missile sites and the like, which would normally be shielded from American satellites, would thus be left exposed, and could be photographed. "We monitor the Israelis," one intelligence expert told me, "and there's no doubt the Israelis want to prevent us from being able to surveil their country." The data passed along by Pollard included detailed information on the various platforms -- in the air, on land, and at sea -- used by military components of the National Security Agency to intercept Israeli military, commercial, and diplomatic communications.

At the time of Pollard's spying, select groups of American sailors and soldiers trained in Hebrew were stationed at an N.S.A. listening post near Harrogate, England, and at a specially constructed facility inside the American Embassy in Tel Aviv, where they intercepted and translated Israeli signals. Other interceptions came from an unmanned N.S.A. listening post in Cyprus. Pollard's handing over of the data had a clear impact, the expert told me, for "we could see the whole process" -- of intelligence collection -- "slowing down." It also hindered the United States' ability to recruit foreign agents. Another senior official commented, with bitterness, "The level of penetration would convince any self-respecting human source to look for other kinds of work."

A number of officials strongly suspect that the Israelis repackaged much of Pollard's material and provided it to the Soviet Union in exchange for continued Soviet permission for Jews to emigrate to Israel. Other officials go further, and say there was reason to believe that secret information was exchanged for Jews working in highly sensitive positions in the Soviet Union. A significant percentage of Pollard's documents, including some that described the techniques the American Navy used to track Soviet submarines around the world, was of practical importance only to the Soviet Union. One longtime C.I.A. officer who worked as a station chief in the Middle East said he understood that "certain elements in the Israeli military had used it" -- Pollard's material -- "to trade for people they wanted to get out," including Jewish scientists working in missile technology and on nuclear issues. Pollard's spying came at a time when the Israeli government was publicly committed to the free flow of Jewish emigres from the Soviet Union. The officials stressed the fact that they had no hard evidence -- no "smoking gun," in the form of a document from an Israeli or a Soviet archive -- to demonstrate the link between Pollard, Israel, and the Soviet Union, but they also said that the documents that Pollard had been directed by his Israeli handlers to betray led them to no other conclusion.

High-level suspicions about Israeli-Soviet collusion were expressed as early as December, 1985, a month after Pollard's arrest, when William J. Casey, the late C.I.A. director, who was known for his close ties to the Israeli leadership, stunned one of his station chiefs by suddenly complaining about the Israelis breaking the "ground rules." The issue arose when Casey urged increased monitoring of the Israelis during an otherwise routine visit, I was told by the station chief, who is now retired. "He asked if I knew anything about the Pollard case," the station chief recalled, and he said that Casey had added, "For your information, the Israelis used Pollard to obtain our attack plan against the U.S.S.R. all of it. The coordinates, the firing locations, the sequences. And for guess who? The Soviets." (boldface mine - Ronin)Casey had then explained that the Israelis had traded the Pollard data for Soviet emigres. "How's that for cheating?" he had asked.

In subsequent interviews, former C.I.A. colleagues of Casey's were unable to advance his categorical assertion significantly. Duane Clarridge, then in charge of clandestine operations in Europe, recalled that the C.I.A. director had told him that the Pollard material "goes beyond just the receipt in Israel of this stuff." But Casey, who had many close ties to the Israeli intelligence community, hadn't told Clarridge how he knew what he knew. Robert Gates, who became deputy C.I.A. director in April, 1986, told me that Casey had never indicated to him that he had specific information about the Pollard material arriving in Moscow. "The notion that the Russians may have gotten some of the stuff has always been a viewpoint," Gates said, but not through the bartering of emigres. "The only view I heard expressed was that it was through intelligence operations" -- the K.G.B.

In any event, there was enough evidence, officials told me, to include a statement about the possible flow of intelligence to the Soviet Union in Defense Secretary Weinberger's top-secret declaration that was presented to the court before Pollard's sentencing. There was little doubt, I learned from an official who was directly involved, that Soviet intelligence had access to the most secret information in Israel. "The question," the official said, "was whether we could prove it was Pollard's material that went over the aqueduct. We couldn't get there, so we suggested" in the Weinberger affidavit that the possibility existed. Caution was necessary, the official added, for "fear that the other side would say that 'these people are seeing spies under the bed.' "

The Justice Department further informed Judge Robinson, in a publicly filed memorandum, that "numerous" analyses of Soviet missile systems had been sold by Pollard to Israel, and that those documents included "information from human sources whose identity could be inferred by a reasonably competent intelligence analyst. Moreover, the identity of the authors of these classified publications" was clearly marked.

A retired Navy admiral who was directly involved in the Pollard investigation told me, "There is no question that the Russians got a lot of the Pollard stuff. The only question is how did it get there?" The admiral, like Robert Gates, had an alternative explanation. He pointed out that Israel would always play a special role in American national security affairs. "We give them truckloads of stuff in the normal course of our official relations," the admiral said. "And they use it very effectively. They do things worth doing, and they will go places where we will not go, and do what we do not dare to do."

Nevertheless, he said, it was understood that the Soviet intelligence services had long since penetrated Israel. (One important Soviet spy, Shabtai Kalmanovitch, whose job at one point was to ease the resettlement of Russian emigrants in Israel, was arrested in 1987.) It was reasonably assumed in the aftermath of Pollard, the admiral added, that Soviet spies inside Israel had been used to funnel some of the Pollard material to Moscow.

A full accounting of the materials provided by Pollard to the Israelis has been impossible to obtain: Pollard himself has estimated that the documents would create a stack six feet wide, six feet long, and ten feet high. Rafi Eitan, the Israeli who controlled the operation, and two colleagues of his attached to the Israeli diplomatic delegation -- Irit Erb and Joseph Yagur -- were named as unindicted co-conspirators by the Justice Department. In the summer of 1984, Eitan brought in Colonel Aviem Sella, an Air Force hero, who led Israel's dramatic and successful 1981 bombing raid on the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak. (Sella was eventually indicted, in absentia, on three counts of espionage.) Eitan's decision to order Sella into the case is considered by many Americans to have been a brilliant stroke: the Israeli war hero was met with starry eyes by Pollard, a chronic wannabe.

Yagur, Erb, and Sella were in Washington when Pollard was first seized by the F.B.I., in November, 1985, but they quickly left the country, never to return. During one period, Pollard had been handing over documents to them almost weekly, and they had been forced to rent an apartment in northwest Washington, where they installed a high-speed photocopying machine. "Safe houses and special Xeroxes?" an American career intelligence officer said, despairingly, concerning the Pollard operation. "This was not the first guy they'd recruited." In the years following Pollard's arrest and confession, the Israeli government chose not to cooperate fully with the F.B.I. and Justice Department investigation, and only a token number of the Pollard documents have been returned. It was not until last May that the Israeli government even acknowledged that Pollard had been its operative.

In fact, it is widely believed that Pollard was not the only one in the American government spying for Israel. During his year and a half of spying, his Israeli handlers requested specific documents, which were identified only by top-secret control numbers. After much internal assessment, the government's intelligence experts concluded that it was "highly unlikely," in the words of a Justice Department official, that any of the other American spies of the era would have had access to the specific control numbers. "There is only one conclusion," the expert told me. The Israelis "got the numbers from somebody else in the U.S. government."

THE men and women of the National Security Agency live in a world of chaotic bleeps, buzzes, and whistles, and talk to each other about frequencies, spectrums, modulation, and bandwidth -- the stuff of Tom Clancy novels. They often deal with signals intelligence, or SIGINT, and their world is kept in order by an in-house manual known as the RASIN an acronym for radio-signal notations. The manual, which is classified "top-secret Umbra," fills ten volumes, is constantly updated, and lists the physical parameters of every known signal. Pollard took it all. "It's the Bible," one former communications-intelligence officer told me. "It tells how we collect signals anywhere in the world." The site, frequency, and significant features of Israeli communications -- those that were known and targeted by the N.S.A. -- were in the RASIN; so were all the known communications links used by the Soviet Union.

The loss of the RASIN was especially embarrassing to the Navy, I was told by the retired admiral, because the copy that Pollard photocopied belonged to the Office of Naval Intelligence. "He went into our library, found we had an out-of-date version, requested a new one, and passed it on," the officer said. "I was surprised we even had it."

The RASIN theft was one of the specifics cited in Defense Secretary Weinberger's still secret declaration to the court before Pollard's sentencing hearing. In fact, the hearing's most dramatic moment came when Pollard's attorney, Richard A. Hibey, readily acknowledged his client's guilt but argued that the extent of the damage to American national security did not call for the imposition of a maximum sentence.

"I would ask you to think about the Secretary of Defense's affidavit, as it related to only one thing," Judge Robinson interjected, "with reference to one particular category of publication, and I fail to see how you can make that argument." He invited Hibey to approach the bench, along with the Justice Department attorneys, and the group spent a few moments reviewing what government officials told me was Weinberger's account of the importance of the RASIN. One Justice Department official, recalling those moments with obvious pleasure, said that the RASIN was the ninth item on the Weinberger damage-assessment list. After the bench conference, Hibey made no further attempt to minimize the national-security damage caused by its theft. (Citing national security, Hibey refused to discuss the case for this article.)

The ten volumes of the RASIN were available on a need-to-know basis inside the N.S.A. "I've never seen the monster," a former senior watch officer at an N.S.A. intercept site in Europe told me, but added that he did supervise people who constantly used it, and he described its function in easy-to-understand terms:

"It is a complete catalogue of what the United States was listening to, or could listen to -- information referred to in the N.S.A. as 'parametric data.' It tells you everything you want to know about a particular signal -- when it was first detected and where, whom it was first used by, what kind of entity, frequency, wavelength, or band length it has. When you've copied a signal and don't know what it is, the RASIN manual gives you a description." A senior intelligence official who consults regularly with the N.S.A. on technical matters subsequently told me that another issue involved geometry.

A senior intelligence official who consults regularly with the N.S.A. on technical matters subsequently told me that another issue involved geometry. The RASIN, he explained, had been focussed in particular on the Soviet Union and its thousands of high-frequency, or shortwave, communications, which had enabled Russian military units at either end of the huge land mass to communicate with each other. Those signals "bounced" off the ionosphere and were often best intercepted thousands of miles from their point of origin. If, as many in the American intelligence community suspected, the Soviet communications experts had been able to learn which of their signals were being monitored, and where, they could relocate the signal and force the N.S.A. to invest man-hours and money to try to recapture it. Or, more likely, the Soviets could continue to communicate in a normal fashion but relay false and misleading information.

Pollard's betrayal of the RASIN put the N.S.A. in the position of having to question or reevaluate all of its intelligence collecting. "We aren't perfect," the career intelligence officer explained to me. "We've got holes in our coverage, and this" -- the loss of the RASIN -- tells where the biases and the weaknesses are. It's how we get the job done, and how we will get the job done."

"What a wonderful insight into how we think, and exactly how we're exploiting Soviet communications!" the retired admiral exclaimed. "It's a how-to-do-it book -- the fireside cookbook of cryptology. Not only the analyses but the facts of how we derived our analyses. Whatever recipe you want."

Pollard, asked about the specific programs he compromised, told me, "As far as SIGINT information is concerned, the government has consistently lied in its public version of what I gave the Israelis."

In the mid-nineteen-eighties, the daily report from the Navy's Sixth Fleet Ocean Surveillance Information Facility (FOSIF) in Rota, Spain, was one of America's Cold War staples. A top-secret document filed every morning at 0800 Zulu time (Greenwich Mean Time), it reported all that had gone on in the Middle East during the previous twenty-four hours, as recorded by the N.S.A.'s most sophisticated monitoring devices.

The reports were renowned inside Navy commands for their sophistication and their reliability; they were based, as the senior managers understood it, on data supplied both by intelligence agents throughout the Middle East and by the most advanced technical means of intercepting Soviet military communications. The Navy's intelligence facility at Rota shared space with a huge N.S.A. intercept station, occupied by more than seven hundred linguists and cryptographers, which was responsible for monitoring and decoding military and diplomatic communications all across North Africa. Many at Rota spent hundreds of hours a month listening while locked in top-secret compartments aboard American ships, aircraft, and submarines operating in the Mediterranean.

The Navy's primary targets were the ships, the aircraft, and, most important, the nuclear-armed submarines of the Soviet Union on patrol in the Mediterranean. Those submarines, whose nuclear missiles were aimed at United States forces, were constantly being tracked; they were to be targeted and destroyed within hours if war broke out.

Pollard's American interrogators eventually concluded that in his year and a half of spying he had provided the Israelis with more than a year's worth of the daily FOSIF reports from Rota. Pollard himself told the Americans that at one point in 1985 the Israelis had nagged him when he missed several days of work because of illness and had failed to deliver the FOSIF reports for those days. One of his handlers, Joseph Yagur, had complained twice about the missed messages and had asked him to find a way to retrieve them. Pollard told his American interrogators that he had never missed again.

The career intelligence officer who helped to assess the Pollard damage has come to view Pollard as a serial spy, the Ted Bundy of the intelligence world. "Pollard gave them every message for a whole year," the officer told me recently, referring to the Israelis. "They could analyze it" -- the intelligence -- "message by message, and correlate it. They could not only piece together our sources and methods but also learn how we think, and how we approach a problem. All of a sudden, there is no mystery. These are the things we can't change. You got this, and you got us by the balls." In other words, the Rota reports, when carefully studied, gave the Israelis "a road map on how to circumvent" the various American collection methods and shield an ongoing military operation. The reports provide guidance on "how to keep us asleep, thinking all is working well," he added. "They tell the Israelis how to raid Tunisia without tipping off American intelligence in advance. That is damage that is persistent and severe."

NOT every document handed over by Pollard dealt with signals intelligence. DIAL-COINS is the acronym for the Defense Intelligence Agency's Community On-Line Intelligence System, which was one of the government's first computerized information-retrieval-network systems. The system, which was comparatively primitive in the mid-nineteen-eighties -- it used an 8088 operating chip and thermafax paper -- could not be accessed by specific issues or key words but spewed out vast amounts of networked intelligence data by time frame. Nevertheless, DIAL-COINS contained all the intelligence reports filed by Air Force, Army, Navy, and Marine attaches in Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East. One official who had been involved with it told me recently, "It was full of great stuff, particularly in HUMINT -- human intelligence. Many Americans who went to the Middle East for business or political reasons agreed, as loyal citizens, to be debriefed by American defense attaches after their visits. They were promised anonymity -- many had close friends inside Israel and the nearby Arab states who would be distressed by their collaboration -- and the reports were classified. "It's who's talking to whom," the officer said. "Like handing you the address book of the spooks for a year."

Government investigators discovered that one of the system's heaviest users in 1984 and 1985 was Jonathan Pollard. He had all the necessary clearances and necessary credentials to gain access to the classified Pentagon library; he also understood that librarians, even in secret libraries, are always eager to help, and in one instance he relied on the library security guards. With some chagrin, officials involved in the Pollard investigation recounted that Pollard had once collected so much data that he needed a handcart to move the papers to his car, in a nearby parking lot, and the security guards held the doors for him.

Pollard also provided the Israelis with what is perhaps the most important day-to-day information in signals intelligence: the National SIGINT Requirements List, which is essentially a compendium of the tasks, and the priority of those tasks, given to various N.S.A. collection units around the world. Before a bombing mission, for example, a United States satellite might be re-deployed, at enormous financial cost, to provide instantaneous electronic coverage of the target area. In addition, N.S.A. field stations would be ordered to begin especially intensive monitoring of various military units in the target nation. Special N.S.A. coverage would also be ordered before an American covert military unit, such as the Army's Delta Force or a Navy Seal team, was inserted into hostile territory or hostile waters. Sometimes the N.S.A.'s requests were less comprehensive: a European or Middle Eastern business suspected of selling chemical arms to a potential adversary might be placed on the N.S.A. "watch list" and its faxes, telexes, and other communications carefully monitored. The Requirements List is "like a giant to-do list," a former N.S.A. operative told me. "If a customer" -- someone in the intelligence community -- "asked for specific coverage, it would be on a list that is updated daily." That is, the target of the coverage would be known.

"If we're going to bomb Iraq, we will shift the system," a senior specialist subsequently told me. "It's a tipoff where the American emphasis is going to be." With the List, the specialist added, the Israelis "could see us move our collection systems" prior to military action, and eventually come to understand how the United States Armed Forces "change our emphasis." In other words, he added, Israel "could make our intelligence system the prime target" and hide whatever was deemed necessary. "The damage goes past Jay's arrest," the specialist said, "and could extend up to today."

Israel made dramatic use of the Pollard material on October 1, 1985, seven weeks before his arrest, when its Air Force bombed the headquarters of the Palestine Liberation Organization in Tunisia, killing at least sixty-seven people. The United States, which was surprised by the operation, eventually concluded that the Israeli planners had synergistically combined the day-to-day insights of the SIGINT Requirements List with the strategic intelligence of the FOSIF reports and other data that Pollard provided to completely outwit our government's huge collection apparatus in the Middle East. Even Pollard himself, the senior official told me, "had no idea what he gave away." The results of President Clinton's requested review of the Pollard case by officials in the intelligence community and other interested parties were to be presented to the White House by January 11th. A former Justice Department official told me, "Nobody can believe that any President would have the gall to release this kind of spy." But as the report was being prepared the nature of the questions that the White House was referring to the Justice Department convinced some intelligence officials that Clinton was considering a compromise, such as commuting Pollard's life sentence to twenty-five years in prison.

The queries about commutation were coming not from Roger Adams, the President's pardon attorney, but from Charles F. C. Ruff, the White House counsel. "Pollard would get half a loaf," one distraught career intelligence official told me. The deal believed to be under consideration would provide for his release, with time off for good behavior, in the summer of 2002. The solution had a certain "political beauty," the official added -- in the eyes of the White House. "Pollard doesn't get out right away, and the issue doesn't cause any trouble. And getting the United States to bend would be a serious victory for Israel."

A senior intelligence official whose agency was involved in preparing the report for the White House told me, somewhat facetiously, that he would drop all objections to Pollard's immediate release if the Israeli government would answer two questions: "First, give us a list of what you've got, and, second, tell us what you did with it." Such answers are unlikely to be forthcoming. The Israeli government has acknowledged that Pollard was indeed spying on its behalf but has refused -- despite constant entreaties -- to provide the United States with a complete list of the documents that were turned over to it.

Some members of the intelligence community view themselves today as waging a dramatic holding action against a President who they believe is eager to split the difference with the Israelis on Pollard's fate. They see Bill Clinton as a facilitator who would not hesitate to trade Pollard to the Israelis if he thought that would push Israel into a peace settlement and result in a foreign-policy success. The officials emphasize that they support Clinton's efforts to resolve the Middle East crisis but do not think it is appropriate to use Pollard as a bargaining chip.

Adding to their dismay, some officials made clear, is the fact that Clinton himself, having studied the case years ago, when he was considering Yitzhak Rabin's request for clemency, knows as much as anyone in the United States government about the significance of Pollard's treachery. One informed official described a private moment at the Wye peace summit when George Tenet, the C.I.A. director, warned the President that Pollard's release would enrage and demoralize the intelligence community. "What he got back," the official told me, "was 'Nah, don't worry about it. It'll blow over.' "

Chris's picture

2 birds one stone(bomb)

2 birds one stone(bomb) maybe? Thats a surprisingly not bad article from the New Yorker though. Hersh is ok for a mainstream media guy(which isn't saying much obviously). Anyway, is there a reason I can copy/paste links as annoymouse but not as myself when I'm signed in? I should probably be more proficient on computers by now....

gretavo's picture

enable rich text maybe?

not sure what ur saying u can't do...

Chris's picture

I think I need a better web

I think I need a better web browser. It just seems weird that it would allow me to post links before I sign in but not when I'm actually signed in(when I try to paste a link it says-"copy/cut/paste is not available in mozilla and firefox) . No big deal, Ive been in need of an update for some time now anyway, apparently youtube is too advanced for my pos computer now(I can still watch, its just a really shitty experience).

gretavo's picture

oh i get the same thing...

started getting it when i started using firefox... and it only happens when I have rich text enabled.  you may have rich text enabled by default as part of your profile, which is why it doesn't happen when you aren't logged in...

Chris's picture

testing...

Chris's picture

That did it!

Thanks for the fix, I can post links now. I probably should have picked a better one though...

gretavo's picture

ok, i just changed your default

to rich text NOT enabled...

gretavo's picture

what is significant to me...

...is that Jonathan Pollard has not been released. It suggests that there are in fact limits to what Israel can get away with. Not many, but the Pollard case seems pretty unique as an example of an Israel lobby failure...

Chris's picture

I would like to think that

I would like to think that there are limits but considering some of Israels other crimes(and how they were covered up) I'm skeptical. Clinton was apparently pretty close to letting him go numerous times,if you believe the stories, so for him at least it seems he was just bargaining chip. Though considering Bush failed to pardon him as well your guess is as good as any. The only guess I have is that it would just look too bad, the guy really did some major damage and regardless of him being from our "friends" in Israel it would be pretty fucking difficult, even for our slavishly devoted to Israel press to justify it. (FYI-check out jonathanpollard.org for some creepy reading)

casseia's picture

alternatively....

are they concerned about what might be revealed if he was sprung? And moved to Israel to enjoy his retirement? Isn't he incommunicado in SuperMax?

Chris's picture

Thats a good theory too, but

Thats a good theory too, but apparently Netanyahu himself was among those who have visited him in jail. Pollard probably does have a lot he could spill though, in a non-prison setting.

I wonder if Obama will free him? I know some people have been suggesting that Obama is more even handed when it comes to Israel, and I guess he slightly is(for one example, I cannot recall any other president asking Israel to sign the NPT.) but overall he seems just as afraid to stand up to Israel as most. Obama has like a 9% approval rating in Israel, freeing Pollard would turn that around pretty sharply.

gretavo's picture

and those who object would be branded right wing loons

But... not only would releasing Pollard be a travesty of justice, it would further compromise American security.  Read below... Hacked PROMIS software with an Israeli backdoor used at Los Alamos, home of nanothermite?  Hmmm...

 

"Much of what he knows is still in his head. And some of what he stole is still in use by us," 'Seeds of Fire' reveals. "The reasons the key was thrown away to his cell is because until he died he would be useful to Israel. They would just have to show him something and he would know how to extrapolate from it. A man like that doesn't lose his touch because he is locked away." Yet the lobbyists are now arguing that Pollard has to be seen within the context of the "big picture, in the Middle East," says Gordon Thomas. A former FBI officer who had been involved in tracking Pollard told the author he would have no objection to a deal over Pollard "providing Israel listed everything Pollard had stolen and what they have done with the materials in terms of all their friends in Beijing".

http://www.rense.com/general19/pol.htm

36 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars The Secret Mysteries Chronicled in Seeds of Fire, January 13, 2002
By  Mark Dankof (Philadelphia, PA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Seeds of Fire: China And The Story Behind The Attack On America (Paperback)

Gordon Thomas's Seeds of Fire is a thorough and frightening expose of Israeli and Communist Chinese intelligence operations against the United States. Thomas documents the role of the Israeli Mossad and LAKAM intelligence agencies in stealing the PROMIS computer software program from Inslaw, Inc., doctoring the program with a backdoor computer microchip, and subsequently employing British media magnate and Mossad asset, Robert Maxwell, to sell the pirated copies to intelligence agencies and commercial banks worldwide, including the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Communist Chinese CSIS. This operation enabled Israeli and Chinese intelligence to siphon American nuclear secrets from the Los Alamos computers, courtesy of the PROMIS computer software. Establishment Republican figures like Ed Meese and former Texas United States Senator John Tower also play a disturbing role in the PROMIS tragedy, chronicled in detail by Seeds of Fire.

Thomas also provides over 300 pages of eyewitness accounts and original documents pertaining to the events at Tiananmen Square in China in June of 1989, with a disturbing analysis of the compromising character of the political and business relationship of key figures in the American corporate and governmental establishment to the Communist Chinese government. He follows this with disquieting information about the links of Communist Chinese intelligence to both Osama bin Laden and the Taliban.

This book is to be particularly valued for the reprints of original investigative documents, including the account of the Israeli theft of the PROMIS software by the Inslaw company, redacted FBI documents pertaining to the investigation of Robert Maxwell, original foreign correspondent dispatches from Tiananmen Square in June of 1989, and excerpts from the official CIA document used by CIA Director George Tenet to brief incoming President George W. Bush at the beginning of his current term.

The reader will be amazed at the comprehensive information presented by Seeds of Fire, along with the absence of this information in the mainstream American media up to the present time. It is a must buy-and-read.

http://www.amazon.com/Seeds-Fire-Behind-Attack-America/dp/1893302547/

gretavo's picture

I don't have this book...

...so I don't know what exactly this means:

"He follows this with disquieting information about the links of Communist Chinese intelligence to both Osama bin Laden and the Taliban."

It's obviously a red flag if it means to imply that China knew about or was involved in the planning of 9/11 (per the OCT version). On the other hand it could simply be that China cultivated these relationships as a way of dealing with their own "muslim problem" the Uyghurs of Xinjiang province...

Annoymouse's picture

Didn't Mike Ruppert imply

Didn't Mike Ruppert imply that Osama got his hands on PROMIS? It's ashame that guy didn't just stick to exposing the phony war on drugs, but then I guess he wouldn't have been serving his actual purpose had he done that. And yeah, the China thing is hilarious, almost as funny as the U.N. being behind 9/11(I actually heard this BS the other day).

Chris's picture

that was me^^^

Not sure why when I posted the comment it automatically signed me out and caused the comment to be queued up.

gretavo's picture

Penetrating the Defenses at Defense and State

Is the title of chapter 6 of former congressman Paul Findley's They Dare Speak Out. Highly recommended reading provided here for educational and research purposes only.