Spy report card: Russian official rates Mossad above CIA

MOSCOW -- A leading Russian defense official has termed Israel's Mossad as one of the three best espionage agencies in the world.

National Security Council secretary Lt. Gen. Sergei Ivanov said the Mossad's strength is that it can recruit Jews around the world. He said no other intelligence agency can command such loyalty from foreigners, according to a report by Middle East Newsline.

"As for the Israeli intelligence, the most important role is played by the ethnic factor, which no other country shares to such an extent," Ivanov told an interviewer. "If an Israeli agent asks a Jew for help, at least he can be confident that his contact will not betray him."

Ivanov, who was deputy director of the FSB, or the successor agency to the Soviet KGB, listed Russia and Britain as having the leading intelligence agencies. "British intelligence has an excellent school and traditions," he told Argumenty i fakty on April 26. "They give superb training to their agents."

The Russian security chief played down U.S. intelligence, saying the CIA buys its information and informants. "Americans have got too much money," Ivanov said. "Hence their idea that anything can be bought and that you don't need to exert your brain. I must say that an intelligence agent is typically slowed down by too much money and comfort. Our native operative is accustomed to using his brain rather than money, to keep himself in shape and to do twenty things at once."

In Jerusalem, however, Israeli officials said the Mossad has long stopped using Jews to spy on their native lands. They said the ban was stressed in the wake of the 1985 arrest and subsequent conviction of Jonathan Pollard. Pollard, an American Jew and then a U.S. naval intelligence analyst, was sentenced to life in prison for passing military secrets to Israel.

Successive Israeli governments said the recruitment of Pollard was a rogue operation but U.S. officials have privately maintained that he was a Mossad agent.

"The state of Israel, since its inception, was careful, particularly since the Pollard chapter, not to be helped by Jews around the world in Mossad activities," said Likud parliamentarian Moshe Katsav, who served as minister in several governments. "From the Pollard chapter, we learned this lesson well. The Pollard chapter was a great mistake."

Israel has officially recognized Pollard as an agent. But Pollard has accused the government of Prime Minister Ehud Barak of not doing enough to win his release.