For more than two decades after he allegedly furnished an Israeli operative with secrets about U.S. nuclear initiatives and sensitive weapons programs, Ben-Ami Kadish lived unnoticed by law enforcement authorities in suburban New Jersey.

Until yesterday, that is, when Kadish, 84, was arrested at his home, taken to a federal courthouse in Manhattan and charged with four counts of conspiracy allegedly for serving as an foreign agent and allegedly for lying to the FBI about a recent telephone conversation he had with his alleged Israeli handler.

Kadish, a mechanical engineer, worked at the U.S. Army's research arsenal in Dover, N.J., in the early 1980s. He routinely checked classified documents out of a library there and passed them to an unnamed Israeli official who had provided a list of what he wanted, according to a four-count criminal complaint the FBI filed yesterday.

The official photographed pages related to nuclear weaponry, the F-15 fighter jet program and the U.S. Patriot missile defense system, according to an FBI affidavit on which the complaint is based.

Kadish's actions appear to have escaped detection for years even though his handler allegedly also collected classified information from Jonathan Pollard, a former Navy intelligence analyst. Pollard is serving a life sentence in a federal prison in Butner, N.C., after pleading guilty to an espionage-related crime in 1986...

...The US National Security Agency certainly has that capability - but why would they make such a significant investment in an Israeli spy handler who presumably long ago came in from the cold and is no longer active?

One probable answer is "Mega" - reportedly the code-name of what some US law enforcement and counterintelligence officials believe is an Israeli mole placed somewhere in the upper reaches of the American government during the time that Pollard was active. ..

...One possibility is that the FBI and Justice Department wanted the arrest to hit the headlines before the start of trial in the US government's case against the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, scheduled after many delays to get underway in Washington on Tuesday.

The charges in the AIPAC case are similar to that of the Kadish affair - that two senior AIPAC officials, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, improperly received classified material from Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin and passed it on to Israeli diplomatic officials.

But the government has encountered many pre-trial setbacks in making its case. Unlike Kadish, Rosen and Weissman were not themselves government employees, and violated no loyalty oaths. Indeed, the prosecution of such civilians on this charge is unprecedented, and the trial judge has already agreed to a series of defense motions that are likely to make this case a tough sell, if not an embarrassment, for the FBI and Justice Department.

How convenient, then, to have the Kadish case break big in the media right before the trial begins, helping to create the impression for judge, jury and public that AIPAC's activities took place in a context of past Israeli efforts to spy on US secrets...