by JTA

June 4, 2009

An elderly New Jersey man who pleaded guilty to passing military secrets to Israel in the 1980s avoided a jail sentence, while a U.S. federal judge questioned the government’s handling of the case.

Ben-Ami Kadish, an 85-year-old former Army employee living in a Middlesex County retirement community, appeared May 29 in U.S. federal district court in Manhattan.

He was fined $50,000 by Judge William H. Pauley III. The judge cited Kadish’s age and infirmity as reasons for not imposing a prison sentence, but also questioned why it took the government 23 years to charge the retiree and then only indicted him on one count of conspiracy to act as an unregistered agent of Israel, The New York Times reported.

Kadish had been employed as a civilian engineer at Picatinny Arsenal in Dover. He had been free on $300,000 bail since April 2008 on charges he “borrowed” classified documents from the facility’s library between 1979 and 1985 and took them home to be copied by Israeli government agent Yossi Yagur, a diplomat at the Israeli consulate.

Yagur, now retired and living in Tel Aviv, is the same agent who obtained information from convicted Pentagon spy Jonathan Pollard, who is serving a life sentence for selling military secrets to Israel while working as an intelligence analyst for the Navy.

“I’m sorry I made a mistake,” Kadish told the judge before sentencing. “It was a misjudgment. I thought I was helping the State of Israel without harming the United States.”

Kadish was born in Connecticut and moved to what was then Palestine. He fought in World War II with both the Americans and British and later served with the Hagana in Israel.

He returned to the United States after World War II. He was employed by the army for 27 years after serving in the U.S. Air Force and had security clearance.

He is the former commander of Post 609 of the Jewish War Veterans and resident of the Ponds adult community in Monroe. The national office of JWV suspended Kadish’s membership after the charges were first announced.

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