An American magazine report that the U.S. intelligence community occasionally planted agents among American Jewish youth doing non-military volunteer work for the Israel Defense Force over the last 10 years was flatly denied here Thursday by “authoritative security elements.”
The report, in The New Republic, noted that thousands of Jewish youth have done clean-up and maintenance work for one-month periods at IDF camps in a program called “Volunteer Israel” which began after the Yom Kippur War.
The magazine cited two well-placed sources in the American intelligence community who said the volunteers could have picked up pieces of information about Israel’s military while performing menial chores.
The report followed by less than a week the assertion by Sen. David Durenberger (R. Minn.), former chairman of Senate Intelligence Committee, that in 1982 the CIA planted spies in the IDF. Israeli leaders and U.S. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger have denied the allegation.
As for American volunteers acting as agents, the intelligence sources here noted that all of them were members of Zionist youth movements and their backgrounds were checked by the project officers overseas. Several volunteers were rejected because they lacked appropriate documents or were not well known, the sources said.
So far, about 3,500 youths have served in the volunteer project, most of them from the U.S.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
