US man charged with disclosing nuclear information to Israel

New York: US authorities announced Tuesday the arrest of a US Army veteran on charges he disclosed secret defense information, including on nuclear weapons and Patriot missiles, to Israel for more than 20 years.

Ben-Ami Kadish, now 84, worked as a mechanical engineer at a US Army weapons center in New Jersey, from where he provided classified documents over several years to Israel's consul for science affairs in New York, the Justice Department said.

US authorities also accused Kadish of illegally acting as an agent for Israel from 1979 to 2008 without notifying the US Attorney General's office.

Some of the espionage allegedly occurred at the same time that convicted Pentagon spy Jonathan Pollard passed thousands of secret documents to Israel in 1984 and 1985, and the State Department acknowledged Tuesday that the two cases were "in some ways connected."

Tuesday's complaint alleges that an Israeli consular official, identified in the indictment as co-conspirator "CC-1," gave Kadish lists of classified defense documents to obtain from the US Army's Armament Research, Development, and Engineering Center at the Picatinny Arsenal in Dover, New Jersey, where Kadish worked.

Between 1979 and 1985, Kadish took between 50 and 100 classified documents to his home in New Jersey, where CC-1 would photograph them, US prosecutors charged.

One of the documents Kadish provided to CC-1 "contained information concerning nuclear weaponry and was classified as 'restricted data'" -- a specific designation by the US Department of Energy for documents containing atomic-related information -- according to the complaint filed in a Manhattan federal court.

Other documents passed on by Kadish and classified as "secret" by the Pentagon contained information on a modified version of an F-15 fighter jet as well as the Patriot missile air defense system.

The State Department said Washington would express concern to its key Middle East ally over the fresh espionage case.

"These kinds of activities, whether they occurred long in the past or present time, are not the kind of actions we would expect from a friend and ally and we would expect that Israel would not be engaged in such activities," said State Department spokesman Tom Casey.

"We will be discussing, if we haven't already, this issue with the Israelis."

Casey also said Kadish's case was "in some ways connected" to that of US-born Pollard, who is serving a life term after being convicted on a charge of spying for Israel in the mid-1980s.

The Israeli government publicly admitted in 1998 that Pollard had been their agent and awarded him Israeli citizenship, reports have said.

Kadish, who worked at the arsenal from 1963 to 1990, kept in touch with CC-1 via telephone and email and met the consular official in Israel in 2004, authorities said.

CC-1 left the United States in 1985 and has never come back, they said.

On March 20 this year, CC-1 called Kadish to tell him to lie to US officials who had begun investigating him over the documents, according to an FBI wire-tap cited by authorities.

"Don't say anything. Let them say whatever they want. You didn't do anything," CC-1 was quoted as telling Kadish. "What happened 25 years ago? You didn't remember anything."

US officials said the Israeli diplomat worked during the 1970s for Israel Aircraft Industries (IAI), which during the time of the espionage was making weapons for Israel.

Kadish was charged with conspiring to disclose documents related to the US national defense to the Israeli government and conspiring to act as an Israeli agent.

He was also charged with conspiring to hinder communication to a law enforcement officer and one count of conspiring to make a materially false statement to an officer.