An elderly American Jew has managed to avoid receiving a prison sentence after being convicted of passing classified military information to Israel.
The case against 85-year-old Ben-Ami Kadish ended Friday with a guilty verdict on charges of spying for Israel, for which he received a $50,000 fine. However, he avoided the life sentence that Jonathan Pollard, convicted of passing classified information to Israel, received nearly 24 years ago.
Kadish was charged with passing to Israel information on nuclear weaponry, information about an F-15 fighter jet, and details about the Patriot missile air defense system. Kadish said that he did not ask for, nor did he receive compensation for passing documents to Yosef Yagur, an Israeli agent. Kadish said he borrowed the documents from his place of work at the U.S. Army’s Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center, located in Dover, New Jersey.
He was arrested last year on charges of passing the documents to Israel while working at a U.S. Army armaments research center. It was unclear to the judge why it took 23 years to charge Kadish. The prosecutor explained to the judge that it was not until last year that the FBI was able to “put all the pieces together.”
Kadish is known to his central New Jersey neighbors as an observant Jew who helps hospitalized veterans.
The former technician told the Manhattan District Court that he was sorry for his actions. “It was a misjudgment. I thought I was helping the State of Israel without harming the United States,” he said. The retiree had moved as a child to pre-state Palestine, where he fought in the Hagana against the British occupation before the re-establishment of the Jewish State, but he later returned to America after World War II.
Kadish was convicted of participating in a conspiracy to act as an unregistered agent of the Government of Israel. The Israeli government has denied knowing about his past activities. Another American convicted of aiding Israel, Jonathan Pollard, is well into his 24th year of a life sentence for one count of transferring classified information to an ally.
Pollard’s wife Esther has charged that the Kadish's arrest, more than two decades after the offenses, was timed to discourage efforts to free her husband.