CRANBURY: Local man pleads guilty to spying

By Maria Prato-Gaines, Staff Writer
   MONROE — An active member of the community and a World War II veteran pleaded guilty to conspiracy to act as an unregistered agent in mid-December.
   Ben-Ami Kadish, 84, a 13-year Monroe resident who lives in the Ponds, was charged by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York with participating in a conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government, specifically, the Israeli government.
   After hearing the news, some members of the community were surprised. One friend said he couldn’t comment on the charges, but the character of Mr. Kadish.
   ”He’s a great individual and human being,” Stan Hoffman, past commander and present chaplain of the Jewish War Veterans Post 609. “He did more than was called for the community.”
   ”When Jewish War vets started and had no place to meet he invited us to his house and his wife made us dinner,” Mr. Hoffman said. “We needed a place and he came through — he always came through.”
   The charge carries a maximum sentence of five years imprisonment, a maximum term of three years’ supervised release, a maximum fine of $250,000, or twice the gross monetary gain or loss derived from the offense, whichever is higher and a mandatory $100 special assessment, according to a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York.
   Federal agents said that Mr. Kadish was working with the same Israeli handler, a co-conspirator, who had worked with Jonathan Jay Pollard, an American citizen sentenced in 1987 on espionage charges for providing classified information to Israel.
   Government officials said that from 1979 through 1985 Mr. Kadish obtained classified documents related to national security from the U.S. Army’s Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center at the Picatinny Arsenal in Dover, where Mr. Kadish worked as a mechanical engineer for 26 years.
   Once the documents were retrieved, the complaint stated that from 1980 through 1985 the co-conspirator would meet Mr. Kadish at his New Jersey home to photograph the documents.
   The co-conspirator resided in the Bronx, N.Y., at the time of the incidents and was employed by the government of Israel as the consul for science affairs at the Israeli Consulate General in Manhattan, the complaint states.
   The co-conspirator never paid Mr. Kadish, but instead gave him small gifts and occasionally bought dinner for Mr. Kadish and his family, it stated.
   Mr. Kadish had signed out or borrowed at least 35 classified documents from August 1979 through July of 1985 from the arsenals “library,” which included information on nuclear weaponry and atomic-related information, documents that Mr. Kadish’s security clearance shouldn’t have allowed him access to, the complaint stated.
   Other documents that investigators said were in Mr. Kadish’s possession included information on major weapon systems on a modified version of an F-15 fighter jet that the United States had sold to another country and major elements of defense strategy, the complaint stated.
   Mr. Kadish, although born in Connecticut, grew up in what was then Palestine and fought with Hagana, the underground military organization that operated in Eretz, Yisrael from 1920 to 1948, according to an article published in the New Jersey Jewish News in 2006.
   Mr. Kadish served in the British and American military during World War II and is the ex-commander of the Jewish War Veterans Post 609 in Monroe.
   Mr. Kadish was accused of lying to FBI agents when questioned on March 21, and later to a federal grand jury during an investigation about his recent contact with the co-conspirator.
   United States District Judge William H. Pauley is scheduled to sentence Mr. Kadish in a Manhattan Federal Court Room on Feb. 13.