December 1989, Page 48, 49

Books

Territory of Lies

By Wolf Blitzer

Harper & Row, 1989. 336 pp. List: $22.50; Available from the AET Book Club for $17.95 for one, $22.50 for two.

Reviewed by Russell Warren Howe

Frank Carlucci, the former defense secretary, Alexander Haig, the former secretary of state, and Lord Carrington, who held the equivalent of both posts in Britain, have all told this reporter recently of their opposition to total nuclear disarmament. All said that the East-West nuclear stalemate had prevented World War III.

Where does this put treason, if we owe our lives to those who made the stalemate possible-the Rosenbergs, Klaus Fuchs, et al.? Philip Knightley's new book, Master Spy, on "Kim" Philby, makes it clear that Philby felt he had saved the world from fascism by scotching a 1943 British plan to help overthrow Hitler and join Germany in a march on Moscow. Treason is a complex subject. As Knightley points out, those Britons who supported the settler rebellion against the Crown in Rhodesia were traitors too, and there is a difference between opposing the Vietnam War and giving "aid and comfort" in Hanoi.

What of Jonathan Jay Pollard, the traitor and mole within US naval intelligence who spied for Israel and who is now doing "life" in Marion Prison? Pollard, the subject of Wolf Blitzer's book, has blood on his hands. He provided the information which made possible the rogue Israeli air raid on Hamman-Plage in Tunisia, in which 61 Tunisian and Palestinian noncombatants of all ages and both sexes were senselessly killed and over 150 wounded. He was similarily an accessory in the murder in Tunisia of "Abu Jihad," the PLO's No. 2, whom veteran Ambassador John Gunther Dean recalled recently had been the man most responsible for the safety of American diplomats and correspondents in Lebanon.

In little more than a year, Pollard supplied Israel with about 75,000 documents-enough to fill his present six by ten foot cell to the ceiling. These exposed Arab defenses throughout the region and the Pakistani nuclear facility to potential Israeli aggression. But the single brightest jewel in Pollard's treachery chest was a communications manual which, when passed on to Moscow by KGB moles in the Mossad, revealed that the NSA had broken the codes of its Russian counterparts.

Despite the Pollard perfidy, the US still shares intelligence with Israel, but it is edited to remove indications of sources and methods and sensitive data on countries friendly to the US but to which Israel is hostile. Pollard sent his paymasters everything they asked for-unredacted. Small wonder that Caspar Weinberger, as Blitzer reports, told Israeli Ambassador Meir Rosenne that Pollard "should be shot."

Yet Pollard was no master spy. He broke all the rules. To begin with, he established a recognizable pattern: He collected materials from the Naval Intelligence Support Center, where he worked, every Friday afternoon-to be photocopied by an Israeli Embassy secretary over the weekend-and took them back on Monday. The conspicuously fat mole would waddle to his car, carrying the stuff with the "Secret" covers showing. He told his mistress (who became his wife and is now doing five years for complicity) all about his work as a mole. He entertained one of his controllers, Col. Aviem Sella of the Israeli air force, to meals in conspicuous restaurants. He drank too much and boasted that he was a Mossad colonel.

Inevitably, in 1986, he was caught. Again. breaking the most elementary rules of the game (Remember, I don't know you and you don't know me.), he identified his controllers by fleeing to the Israeli Embassy with a convoy of FBI agents in pursuit. The embassy guards pushed him (screaming "You can't do this! I'm an Israeli spy!") back into the street.

Israel is now paying $60,000 a year into a Swiss account for him, for the duration of his sentence, which must make it difficult for Pollard to demonstrate convincingly that remorse which is a prerequisite for parole (since "life" means 30 years, he is entitled to a parole hearing two months after completing 20 years). Blitzer doesn't say so, but the dollars presumably come from US aid to Israeli-a sort of chutzpah fund.

Blitzer, a well-respected correspondent for The Jerusalem Post, gives a detailed portrait of a "troubled man" who was a misfit from the start. An "obnoxious" boy, once nearly expelled from an Israeli youth camp as a troublemaker, he was disliked at college, where he became addicted to drugs and chainsmoking, and by colleagues in naval intelligence, who joked about his boastful know-it-all fantasies.

At university, he became an admirer of the Bureau of State Security (BOSS), South Africa's equivalent of the KGB, and taught himself Afrikaans. Seeking a mission in South Africa, he told his Naval Intelligence Support Center supervisor that he had lived there in his childhood. He said his father (a professor of medicine) had been the "CIA station chief" in Pretoria. He described a young South African student friend as the "deputy head of BOSS." When none of these fantasies checked out, he was suspended and given psychiatric counseling, then put in a low-key job studying. "Caribbean terrorism." But this still gave him access to information having nothing to do with Rastafarians.

After his arrest, the bumbling Pollard ensured that an angry judge should throw the book at him by telling Blitzer in interviews that his first loyalty was to Israel and that he regretted not having been a better spy.

This is an entertaining and readable book but, as Pollard's Boswell, Blitzer is not evenhanded. He implies that Israel should have helped the turncoat escape. Does he really feel that people called Pollard, or Blitzer, can be less exclusive in their loyalties than people called Washington or Wang? Philby was a flawed idealist, and people such as Graham Greene, Miles Copeland and Peter Wright still speak of him with respect. It is hard to see any positive side at all to the treachery of Pollard, the pitiful victim of his own disturbed imagination.

E.M. Forster, the mild-mannered creator of A Passage to India, is best remembered at Cambridge for his bold statement that "If I ever have to choose between betraying my friend and betraying my country, I hope I have the guts to betray my country." Pollard, rightly or wrongly, boldly crossed that Rubicon-and now whines that Israel betrayed him.

Fellow convicts are traditionally harsh on two categories of prisoners-child abusers and traitors-and both Pollards (Jay's wife Anne is due for parole next April) spend most of their time in solitary confinement for their own safety. Jay is back where he started-a misfit, even in prison.

Russel Warren Howe is a Washington-based free-lance journalist who writes regularly for newspapers in the US and abroad and is the author of numerous books and articles on the influence of special interest groups on American politics.

Men in the Sun

By Ghassan al-Kanafani. Three Continents Press, 1987. 90 pp. List price: $7.00; AET: $5.95 for one, $7 for two.

Reviewed by Uzra Zeya

For many Americans, Palestinian self-expression represents a threatening prospect; distortion of the Arab-Israeli conflict has spread the notion that Palestinians, as a rule, express their views from the barrel of a gun (or possibly with a Molotov cocktail). Such misconceptions are an affront to the generations of poets, thinkers and novelists who have translated the hopes and despairs of the Palestinian people into works of great literary importance and universal appeal. One prominent Palestinian artist whose works certainly deserve further recognition in this country is the late Ghassan al-Kanafani, an author of novels, short stories, dramas, and literary criticism. The collection of stories Men in the Sun provides an excellent introduction to the works of this prolific writer, as the lives of Palestinian refugees at all levels of society are examined.

Most compelling among the works presented in the collection is the title story. Kanafani depicts the desperate decision of three Palestinian men to migrate illegally, at the risk of their lives, to a land of greater opportunities. Faced with the prospect of a desolate future in the refugee camps of the West Bank, the men enlist the services of a fellow Palestinian, who offers a hazardous plan to smuggle them into Kuwait.

Risking Lives for Opportunities

Each of the three protagonists has his own motivations for choosing to undertake the treacherous journey. For Abu Qais, the eldest, the choice to migrate to Kuwait is a final attempt to bring dignity to the lives of his wife and children. The prospect of working in Kuwait represents the opportunity to send his son to school, build a simple shack for his family, and perhaps buy an olive tree to replace those he owned before the 1948 war.

The remaining two men are far younger than Abu Qais, but no less willing to risk their lives for the sake of the journey. The most impressionable is Marwan, a young man still on the edge of boyhood. After his father and older brother desert the family, Marwan undertakes the responsibility of supporting his mother and younger siblings. Unable to continue his education, he pins his hopes on obtaining a well-paying job in Kuwait in order to care for his family.

The least developed character among the three men is Assad, who emerges as leader of the group due to his experience in dealing with smugglers. Assad's desire to migrate to Kuwait is depicted largely as an expression of his own independent nature, as little of his personal background is revealed. In contrast to his traveling companions, Assad seems unfettered by family obligations, going so far as to repudiate a marriage arranged for him by his uncle.

Unlike these three, who are willing to risk their lives for a better future, Abul Khaizuran, the Palestinian smuggler who leads the men on their journey, is a shell of a human being, a man without hope. He remains scarred, physically and mentally, from his experience as a soldier in the 1948 war. The legacy of that defeat has left him only the lonely, futile pursuit of money, with his moral values in a state of disarray.

The interplay of these four men takes place against the backdrop of an unrelenting and merciless desert sun. Kanafani is masterful in his depiction of this setting; the stifling atmosphere of the desert through which the men travel embodies all the adversity which confronts Palestinian refugees. Even in such a hostile environment, Abu Qais, Marwan and Assad choose to persist in their quest, although the possibility of death or capture is ever present. An analogy can be made to the plight of all Palestinians who continue in the struggle for an independent state, at the risk of their own lives. Kanafani seems to view such sacrifices as a bitter necessity of Palestinian life.

This story was first published in 1962, when control of the West Bank still rested in Jordanian hands. It is obvious from the author's descriptions of refugee life that Palestinian suffering in the West Bank predated the onset of Israeli occupation in 1967. Kanafani's portrayel of the indifference of other Arabs to the plight of his characters seems to be a direct criticism of the conduct of Arab governments in regard to the Palestinian cause. Even Kuwait, which is shown as a sort of economic promised land, can offer nothing as a homeland for Palestinians.

While the story "Men in the Sun" explores the lives of Palestinians, it retains a universal appeal. The sacrifices made by Abu Qais, Marwan and Assad are familiar to displaced persons from East Germany, Kampuchea, Bulgaria, El Salvador or any other homeland to which they can't or won't return. Kanafani depicts the adversity that faces all refugees.

Other stories included in the collection, while not as lengthy, provide further insights into the lives of Palestinians. The short piece "If You Were a Horse" explores the conflict between older and younger generations, as a young man's faith in science is challenged by his father's superstitions. The excerpt "Um Saad" portrays the perspective of a strong-willed older woman on the choice of her son to go to war. In "Letter from Gaza," Kanafani presents the dilemmas facing educated Palestinians, who choose the possibility of a confortable life abroad at the expense of deserting their families.

In all, seven stories are presented in this collection, although it numbers fewer than a hundred pages. Kanafani's work is both readable and informative for those not yet acquainted with Palestinian literature.

Uzra Zeya is a program coordinator at the American Educational Trust specializing in Islamic affairs.