Screaming Skull
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The Scientist Who Mistook Himself for a Spy- NYT
A lawyer for the Justice Department said in court on Tuesday that Stewart Nozette, a scientist who worked for the United States government for decades before being arrested on Monday on espionage charges, had been willing to sell some of America’s “most guarded secrets” to a man he believed to be an Israeli intelligence officer.
What Mr. Nozette did not know was that the man who told him over lunch in a Washington hotel in September, “I wanna clarify something from the start. And I don’t say it very often, but um, I work for [the] Israeli intelligence Agency known here as Mossad,” was in fact an undercover F.B.I. officer.
Recently, Mr. Nozette has been working with NASA, on a collaboration with India’s space agency to search for water on the moon, but over the past two decades he has worked for several government agencies, primarily on defense technology. A news release from the Justice Department announcing his arrest on Monday said, “From 1989 through 2006, Nozette held security clearances as high as Top Secret and had regular, frequent access to classified information and documents related to the U.S. national defense.”
According to a former colleague interviewed by The Associated Press, Mr. Nozette did a stint at the Defense Department, working on the Strategic Defense Initiative — the so-called “Star Wars” program that aimed to build an antimissile shield in space. The A.P. reported that some of Mr. Nozette’s subsequent work for NASA was “essentially a nonmilitary application of Star Wars technology.”
He also worked at the Department of Energy in the 1990s, where he held a special security clearance described in the criminal complaint against him (.pdf) as “equivalent to the Defense Department’s Top Secret and Critical Nuclear Weapon Design Information clearances.”
Since Mr. Nozette’s arrest on Monday, journalists and bloggers have been trying to fill in a couple of intriguing blanks in the criminal complaint.
The first one is the identity of the unnamed “foreign company” mentioned in the complaint. According to the government, for most of the past decade Mr. Nozette “acted as a technical consultant for an aerospace company that was wholly owned by the Government of the State of Israel.” On Tuesday, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Mr. Nozette had been employed as an outside consultant by Israel Aerospace Industries. Haaretz reports that the company is “Israel’s largest exporter of defense and aerospace technology.”
As Politico’s Laura Rozen pointed out on her blog, when he took on this consulting work Mr. Nozette apparently concluded that he had effectively become a spy. According to the transcript of Mr. Nozette’s conversation with the undercover officer posing as a Mossad recruiter, the scientist said:
I thought I was working for you already. I mean that’s what I always thought, [the foreign company] was just a front.
The Justice Department said on Monday that “the complaint does not allege that the government of Israel or anyone acting on its behalf committed any offense under U.S. laws in this case.” But the complaint does mention that when Mr. Nozette traveled to “a different foreign country,” identified only as “foreign country A,” in January, he returned without two thumb drives found in his luggage when he left the United States. In a post on Talking Points Memo, Justin Elliott examined the possibility that “country A” could be India.
Mr. Nozette’s most recent work has been on a collaboration between NASA and the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), in which instruments on board India’s Chandrayaan-1 satellite were used to discover water on the Moon. As Mr. Elliot notes:
One of the ways Nozette passed information to the “Mossad” agent in September was on a computer thumb drive. He also offered information on nukes and other weapons systems.
But before that, according to the complaint, Nozette in January traveled to Country A, taking two computer thumb drives along, but returning without them. [...]
According to the complaint, Nozette also told a colleague sometime before the January trip that, if the government tried to “put him in jail” in an unrelated case involving his non-profit, Nozette would move to Israel or Country A and “tell them everything” he knew.
In India, media reports focused on the question of whether Mr. Nozette might have spied against rather than for India. According to a report from the Indian news agency ANI, an official with the Indian space agency, Bhaskaran Nair, “said Nozette visited ISRO’s establishments in Bangalore twice during the Chandrayan project and interacted with scientists but had no access to critical scientific establishments during the visit.” Mr. Nair added:
There is no threat to ISRO or to Chandrayaan. ISRO has strict security protocols for foreign scientists. Accordingly, Nozette had not been allowed access to critical establishments, as he was not allowed to the clean room. We ensured complete compliance to the protocol. Like any other foreign national, Nozette had no access to critical facilities.
This video report from the Indian broadcaster NDTV includes footage of Mr. Nozette during an appearance on Indian television in 2008, talking about the collaborative mission between NASA and ISRO (note that the Indian space agency’s name is pronounced “is-row,” so the discussion in the report is not about Israel):
The A.P. reported that a law enforcement official familiar with the investigation said that Mr. Nozette came under scrutiny after NASA’s inspector general started looking at whether he had submitted false claims for expenses. While looking into Mr. Nozette’s finances, the official told The A.P., investigators found indications that he might be working for a foreign government, which led them to start the national security investigation that eventually led to the F.B.I. sting.
On Tuesday the BBC’s Global News podcast included an interview with Jonathan Turley, a lawyer who has represented espionage suspects, who said that Mr. Nozette was “a perfectly brilliant individual … accused of doing something perfectly moronic.” Mr. Turley also noted that Mr. Nozette, who is 52, does have something in common with other men ensnared in espionage cases:
Those of us who have done espionage cases often talk about the types of people we see — its a very small specialty of criminal law — one of the rules of thumb is that most of our clients tend to be in their fifties, and he’s in his fifties. But if you look at Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, Jonathan Pollard, they were all in that age group, and there’s a sort of mid-life crisis that occurs, where some men have sexual affairs and some have spying fantasies.
While there is no way of knowing if Mr. Nozette was experiencing a mid-life crisis, he did note in an interview on NASA’s Web site that he had slowed down in recent years. Asked about his hobbies, he replied:
I used to fly and scuba dive when I was younger but have not been as active recently. Now I enjoy cooking and listening to The Grateful Dead Channel on Sirius satellite radio.
A lawyer for the Justice Department said in court on Tuesday that Stewart Nozette, a scientist who worked for the United States government for decades before being arrested on Monday on espionage charges, had been willing to sell some of America’s “most guarded secrets” to a man he believed to be an Israeli intelligence officer.
What Mr. Nozette did not know was that the man who told him over lunch in a Washington hotel in September, “I wanna clarify something from the start. And I don’t say it very often, but um, I work for [the] Israeli intelligence Agency known here as Mossad,” was in fact an undercover F.B.I. officer.
Recently, Mr. Nozette has been working with NASA, on a collaboration with India’s space agency to search for water on the moon, but over the past two decades he has worked for several government agencies, primarily on defense technology. A news release from the Justice Department announcing his arrest on Monday said, “From 1989 through 2006, Nozette held security clearances as high as Top Secret and had regular, frequent access to classified information and documents related to the U.S. national defense.”
According to a former colleague interviewed by The Associated Press, Mr. Nozette did a stint at the Defense Department, working on the Strategic Defense Initiative — the so-called “Star Wars” program that aimed to build an antimissile shield in space. The A.P. reported that some of Mr. Nozette’s subsequent work for NASA was “essentially a nonmilitary application of Star Wars technology.”
He also worked at the Department of Energy in the 1990s, where he held a special security clearance described in the criminal complaint against him (.pdf) as “equivalent to the Defense Department’s Top Secret and Critical Nuclear Weapon Design Information clearances.”
Since Mr. Nozette’s arrest on Monday, journalists and bloggers have been trying to fill in a couple of intriguing blanks in the criminal complaint.
The first one is the identity of the unnamed “foreign company” mentioned in the complaint. According to the government, for most of the past decade Mr. Nozette “acted as a technical consultant for an aerospace company that was wholly owned by the Government of the State of Israel.” On Tuesday, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Mr. Nozette had been employed as an outside consultant by Israel Aerospace Industries. Haaretz reports that the company is “Israel’s largest exporter of defense and aerospace technology.”
As Politico’s Laura Rozen pointed out on her blog, when he took on this consulting work Mr. Nozette apparently concluded that he had effectively become a spy. According to the transcript of Mr. Nozette’s conversation with the undercover officer posing as a Mossad recruiter, the scientist said:
I thought I was working for you already. I mean that’s what I always thought, [the foreign company] was just a front.
The Justice Department said on Monday that “the complaint does not allege that the government of Israel or anyone acting on its behalf committed any offense under U.S. laws in this case.” But the complaint does mention that when Mr. Nozette traveled to “a different foreign country,” identified only as “foreign country A,” in January, he returned without two thumb drives found in his luggage when he left the United States. In a post on Talking Points Memo, Justin Elliott examined the possibility that “country A” could be India.
Mr. Nozette’s most recent work has been on a collaboration between NASA and the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), in which instruments on board India’s Chandrayaan-1 satellite were used to discover water on the Moon. As Mr. Elliot notes:
One of the ways Nozette passed information to the “Mossad” agent in September was on a computer thumb drive. He also offered information on nukes and other weapons systems.
But before that, according to the complaint, Nozette in January traveled to Country A, taking two computer thumb drives along, but returning without them. [...]
According to the complaint, Nozette also told a colleague sometime before the January trip that, if the government tried to “put him in jail” in an unrelated case involving his non-profit, Nozette would move to Israel or Country A and “tell them everything” he knew.
In India, media reports focused on the question of whether Mr. Nozette might have spied against rather than for India. According to a report from the Indian news agency ANI, an official with the Indian space agency, Bhaskaran Nair, “said Nozette visited ISRO’s establishments in Bangalore twice during the Chandrayan project and interacted with scientists but had no access to critical scientific establishments during the visit.” Mr. Nair added:
There is no threat to ISRO or to Chandrayaan. ISRO has strict security protocols for foreign scientists. Accordingly, Nozette had not been allowed access to critical establishments, as he was not allowed to the clean room. We ensured complete compliance to the protocol. Like any other foreign national, Nozette had no access to critical facilities.
This video report from the Indian broadcaster NDTV includes footage of Mr. Nozette during an appearance on Indian television in 2008, talking about the collaborative mission between NASA and ISRO (note that the Indian space agency’s name is pronounced “is-row,” so the discussion in the report is not about Israel):
The A.P. reported that a law enforcement official familiar with the investigation said that Mr. Nozette came under scrutiny after NASA’s inspector general started looking at whether he had submitted false claims for expenses. While looking into Mr. Nozette’s finances, the official told The A.P., investigators found indications that he might be working for a foreign government, which led them to start the national security investigation that eventually led to the F.B.I. sting.
On Tuesday the BBC’s Global News podcast included an interview with Jonathan Turley, a lawyer who has represented espionage suspects, who said that Mr. Nozette was “a perfectly brilliant individual … accused of doing something perfectly moronic.” Mr. Turley also noted that Mr. Nozette, who is 52, does have something in common with other men ensnared in espionage cases:
Those of us who have done espionage cases often talk about the types of people we see — its a very small specialty of criminal law — one of the rules of thumb is that most of our clients tend to be in their fifties, and he’s in his fifties. But if you look at Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, Jonathan Pollard, they were all in that age group, and there’s a sort of mid-life crisis that occurs, where some men have sexual affairs and some have spying fantasies.
While there is no way of knowing if Mr. Nozette was experiencing a mid-life crisis, he did note in an interview on NASA’s Web site that he had slowed down in recent years. Asked about his hobbies, he replied:
I used to fly and scuba dive when I was younger but have not been as active recently. Now I enjoy cooking and listening to The Grateful Dead Channel on Sirius satellite radio.
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