Question:
Which Western allies of the US have been caught spying against the US?
And The United States spying on all of the above.
Generally speaking you and your friend are both correct.
There are two types of espionage. Economic and National Security. France, Germany and Israel have all been caught in the past conducting espionage to gain trade information or technology to bolster their own industries. Even trying to overhear government leaders personal conversations to get incite on their real feelings on various issues.
Israel's Johnathan Pollard was not an economic spy. He stole tens of thousands of documents with profound national security implications. We still don't know everything he stole now nearly 40 years later. We do know He compromised four major intelligence gathering systems.
Human assets, A year of daily reports from the Navy's Sixth Fleet Ocean Surveillance Information Facility (FOSIF) in Rota, This is raw human SIGINS data. With it they could discover every human asset the US had across the middle east.
satellites, THE documents that Pollard turned over to Israel were not focused exclusively on the product of American intelligence its analytical reports and estimates. They also revealed how America was able to learn what it did -- a most sensitive area of intelligence defined as "sources and methods." Pollard gave the Israelis vast amounts of data dealing with specific American intelligence systems and how they worked. For example, he betrayed details of an exotic capability that American satellites have of taking off-axis photographs from high in space. While orbiting the earth in one direction, the satellites could photograph areas that were seemingly far out of range.
SIGINT, POLLARD also provided the Israelis with what is perhaps the most important day-to-day information in signals intelligence: the National SIGINT Requirements List, which is essentially a compendium of the tasks, and the priority of those tasks, given to various N.S.A. collection units around the world. This along with the RASIN an acronym for radio-signal notations. The manual, which is classified "top-secret Umbra," fills ten volumes, is constantly updated, and lists the physical parameters of every known signal, destroyed America's ability to effectively use SIGINT's on the eve of the first Gulf War.
nuclear submarines. A number of officials strongly suspect that the Israelis repackaged much of Pollard's material and provided it to the Soviet Union in exchange for continued Soviet permission for Jews to emigrate to Israel. Other officials go further, and say there was reason to believe that secret information was exchanged for Jews working in highly sensitive positions in the Soviet Union. A significant percentage of Pollard's documents, including some that described the techniques the American Navy used to track Soviet submarines around the world, was of practical importance only to the Soviet Union.
But the tens of thousands of documents he stole didn't stop there.
He stole documents on NATO's defense tactics and strategies for Europe, complete with landing sites for American / Canadian relief efforts in the event of a Soviet Invasion. The American Signals intelligence Bible, how we identified and measure military strength using radio signatures. That US nuclear submarines were regularly shadowing soviet subs in the oceans of the world for their entire patrols months, without the Soviets knowing about it. Raw intelligence reports used to track back and identify networks of spys and contacts the CIA relied on leading up to the first gulf war, effectively blinding US intelligence. In truth Israel has never provided the United States with a manifest of all that Pollard stole. Israel denied Pollard was their spy for the first 13 years of his incarceration in the US. Much of what he stole ended up in the Soviet Union.
So I would say Pollard was one of the most damaging spy's the United States ever caught. On par with the worst soviet spy of the 70's and 80's. Entirely different category from French spy's bugging Concorde passengers to overhear business gossip. Or even Germany and the US bugging each other's government officials.
from comments
from Timur Shtatland
Could you please provide the references for your claims? For example, this: "Much of what he stole ended up in the Soviet Union.", and "...Pollard was one of the most damaging spy's the United States ever caught. On par with the worst soviet spy of the 70's and 80's.", etc. –
THE TRAITOR: The case against Jonathan Pollard.
BY Pulitzer Prize winning journalist SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Along with the quotes above from this source here are a few other supporting quotes
A number of officials strongly suspect that the Israelis repackaged much of Pollard's material and provided it to the Soviet Union in exchange for continued Soviet permission for Jews to emigrate to Israel. Other officials go further, and say there was reason to believe that secret information was exchanged for Jews working in highly sensitive positions in the Soviet Union. A significant percentage of Pollard's documents, including some that described the techniques the American Navy used to track Soviet submarines around the world, was of practical importance only to the Soviet Union. One longtime C.I.A. officer who worked as a station chief in the Middle East said he understood that "certain elements in the Israeli military had used it" -- Pollard's material -- "to trade for people they wanted to get out," including Jewish scientists working in missile technology and on nuclear issues. Pollard's spying came at a time when the Israeli government was publicly committed to the free flow of Jewish emigres from the Soviet Union. The officials stressed the fact that they had no hard evidence -- no "smoking gun," in the form of a document from an Israeli or a Soviet archive -- to demonstrate the link between Pollard, Israel, and the Soviet Union, but they also said that the documents that Pollard had been directed by his Israeli handlers to betray led them to no other conclusion.
A full accounting of the materials provided by Pollard to the Israelis has been impossible to obtain: Pollard himself has estimated that the documents would create a stack six feet wide, six feet long, and ten feet high.
A senior intelligence official whose agency was involved in preparing the report for the White House told me, somewhat facetiously, that he would drop all objections to Pollard's immediate release if the Israeli government would answer two questions: "First, give us a list of what you've got, and, second, tell us what you did with it." Such answers are unlikely to be forthcoming. The Israeli government has acknowledged that Pollard was indeed spying on its behalf but has refused -- despite constant entreaties -- to provide the United States with a complete list of the documents that were turned over to it.
Jonathan Pollard Was One of the Most Damaging Spies in US History
The Truth About Jonathan Pollard
The prosecutors produced a secret letter and memo from Secretary of Defense Caspar "Cap" Weinberger referring to the "enormous" harm that Pollard had done to our national security. In his memo, Weinberger directly accused Pollard of betraying America's "sources and methods," which is to say, he had betrayed our spies in foreign countries.
Weinberger publicly stated that Pollard was the worst spy in American history: "It is difficult for me, even in the so-called year of the spy, to conceive of a greater harm to national security than that caused by the defendant." Despite his plea agreement to the contrary with the government, Pollard was given the maximum sentence, life in prison. Weinberger later said that he wished Pollard had been shot.
Jonathan Pollard was one of the worst traitors of the 20th century. He deserved to languish as long as he did.
Talk:Jonathan Pollard/Archive 2
"Pollard caused enormous damage to U.S. national security. He gave Israel top-secret U.S. military intelligence and diplomatic codes; names of nearly 100 U.S. agents in the Mideast, who were then "turned" by Israel; NSA code-breaking techniques and targets; intercepts of foreign communications; and U.S. war-fighting plans for the Mideast. According to CIA sources, Pollard provided Israeli intelligence with names of important American agents inside the former Soviet Union and Russia who had supplied information on East Bloc weapons and war plans. How the agents' names were linked to the secrets they supplied - a major breach of basic intelligence security - remains a mystery. Some of the enormously sensitive secrets stolen by Pollard may have been either sold, or bartered, by Israel to the Soviet Union. A number of key CIA agents in the East Bloc were allegedly executed as a result of Pollard's spying. The KGB likely gained access to top-secret U.S. codes - either directly from Israel, or through spies in Israel's government. In short, Pollard's treachery caused one of the worst security disasters in modern U.S. history."