Washington – New Documents Show Orthodox Jew Falsely Acused As Spy

Washington – For the past 11 years, Army tank engineer David Tenenbaum has been trying to undo the damage the government did to him in four days in 1997, when he was accused of being a spy for Israel.

It started with a polygraph test administered February 13, where one interrogator yelled epithets about how they knew how to deal with Jews. The next day, Mr. Tenenbaum arrived at work and found his computer gone and his name erased from the classified e-mail system at the Tank Automotive and Armaments Command in Warren, Mich.

He was then asked to enter a conference room, where agents from the FBI informed him he should confess to the crime of espionage. When Mr. Tenenbaum learned he would not be arrested, he walked out of the room and to his Toyota Camry parked on the base outside of Detroit. A guard asked him for his badge and proceeded to use it to scrape away the parking decal on his windshield.

Then the Jewish Sabbath came and the investigators he met in his office the day before began ransacking his home and confiscated this amateur violinist and guitarist’s music books as well as the coloring books that belonged to his 4-and-a-half-year-old daughter.

The ordeal was complete on the following Monday. Mr. Tenenbaum read in the Detroit Free Press that he was an alleged spy and learned later that the FBI had forgotten to seal the court request for the Eastern District Federal Court of Michigan asking for a search warrant of his home. Some newspapers even began to call him the next Jonathan Pollard, the Naval officer who was sentenced to life in prison for stealing technology for Israel in 1986.

new details emerged this week when an independent watchdog organization called the Project on Government Oversight published new internal documents relating to the Pentagon inspector general’s investigation into the handling of the Tenenbaum case.

Among the documents is a presentation laying out the inspector general’s findings. The presentation’s third slide says, “Mr. Tenenbaum experienced religious discrimination when his Judaism was weighed as a significant factor in the decision to submit him for an increase in his security clearance.”

Mr. Tenenbaum said he is not surprised that the military would try to suppress the report.

“For almost 12 years I have been fighting for justice,” he said. He added that many of the security officials he regards as his tormentors have been promoted in the military. Meanwhile, he is still seen as something of a pariah in his office. He is no longer allowed to work on his favored project of designing armor for Humvees. In the interim, he has earned a doctorate in chemical engineering.

“For 11 years I have been waiting for vindication,” he said. “You have to imagine this, I was wrongfully accused of espionage. The punishment is either death or life in prison. I believe the only worse crime is assassinating a U.S. president.” He went on: “My father was a Holocaust survivor. He was the only one who survived. He passed away a year before this happened. Can you imagine him seeing his only son being singled out for the same reason he was, being a Jew?”

According to a sworn affidavit of Mr. Tenenbaum, when he took his first polygraph test in 1997, his questioner said to him: “I have done other Jews before and gotten them to confess and I’ll get you to confess too,” and, “I can tell you are lying by looking into your eyes.”

Jewish community leaders and former Defense Department officials say Mr. Tenenbaum’s case represents a disturbing phenomenon.