ISRAELI INTELLIGENCE is trying to recover some 2,000 documents, including hundreds classified as top secret, copied by former soldier Anat Kam, who passed them on to a journalist working for the Ha'aretznewspaper.
Yuval Diskin, the head of the Shin Bet security agency, said the information “posed a direct and real threat to the lives of Israeli soldiers and citizens”.
The Tel Aviv district court yesterday lifted a gagging order that had prevented any coverage of the case in Israel, even though details had been reported extensively abroad and on Israeli internet chat sites.
Ms Kam (23), who goes on trial next week on charges of serious espionage, copied more than 2,000 army documents during her service in the Israel Defence Forces central command headquarters between 2005-07, burning the information onto a disc and transferring it to her personal computer.
Her lawyer, Avigdor Feldman, said his client, who has been under house arrest since December, acted out of “moral concerns”, and did not intend to harm state security.
In November 2008, Ha’aretz journalist Uri Blau published an article entitled “Licence to Kill,” in which he reported that Israeli forces, with the backing of senior military commanders, ignored a 2006 supreme court ruling and shot dead Palestinian fugitives in circumstances where it might have been possible to detain them. The article was based in part on documents he had received from Anat Kam.
The journalist refused to reveal his sources, but army investigators eventually traced the documents to Ms Kam, who had since completed her compulsory military service and was working for an Israeli news internet site. She was indicted in January.
Israeli intelligence found Mr Blau in London and began contacts aimed at retrieving the sensitive documents, which included details of Israeli troop deployment, numbers and locations of soldiers and emergency contingency plans.
He handed over about 50 documents and his laptop was destroyed, with Shin Bet providing funds for a replacement computer.
Contacts between Israeli intelligence and Ha’aretz lawyers over a deal in which Mr Blau would return the rest of classified material broke down earlier this week.
“Our main goal is to see those classified documents returned, so that they do not fall into hostile hands,” Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin said in a briefing yesterday.
“It is the dream of all our enemy states to get their hands on these kinds of documents. This affair is not yet over. We are looking for the documents and waiting for them to return to the country,” Mr Diskin said.
The intelligence chief said Mr Blau was now wanted by the security service and police for questioning in Israel, accusing him of reneging on the agreement that was reached.
Mr Diskin confirmed that Israeli intelligence does not know the location of the documents, but he said every effort would be made to find them.
Lawyers representing Ha'aretzaccused the Shin Bet of backing out of the agreement, stressing that all the material published by the paper had been cleared by the censor.
Mr Feldman said his client was being treated as a scapegoat and did not represent a danger to the state.
“Where’s the intent to undermine state security? The fact that she handed the information over to a journalist for him to publish?” he asked.
“If she had been really interested to undermine state security, there would have been no shortage of hands and ears willing to accept that material and use it to hurt the state.”