Deceit of an Ally, Part 3
B R U C E B R I L L
This is the third in a five-part series by former NSA agent Bruce Brill based on his recently released book, Deceit of An Ally: NSA’s Secret Jew Room & 1973 Yom Kippur Treachery.
For part 2, click here.
Former U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) Mideast analyst Bruce Brill knew days in advance that Syria and Egypt planned to invade Israel on Yom Kippur (6 October) in 1973. Yet General Eli Zeira, Israel’s Director of Military Intelligence, many years later, confided in Brill that his American intel partners had assured him that the Arabs would not attack Israel. From the moment Brill heard this disturbing revelation, he began a mission to unravel the deception that resulted in the unnecessary deaths of over 2,600 Israelis. The vital intelligence Brill obtained was purposely corrupted in restricted, unmonitored rooms within the NSA. Brill discovered these rooms while working within the inner sancta of the agency.

An Israeli armored unit encamped on the east bank of the Suez Canal during the Yom Kippur War
I ended the previous installment by raising some burning questions that still need to be answered. All of these questions came to a head as I approached the end of my tour of duty as a Middle East intelligence analyst for NSA, the U.S. National Security Agency. I was still at my permanent assignment at Fort Meade, Maryland, when I, finally, received my honorable discharge, in April, 1974. Though I had already promised myself multiple times that I would go to Israel as soon as my service ended, to scout the place out, I had the fortunate opportunity to hop some military transports out to the West Coast, and so decided to take advantage of this to visit a few army buddies.
I paid a visit to Elmer Glover in Monterey, California, who lived close to the Presidio, where I had been stationed for almost a year before coming to Fort Meade, and from whom I had learned many a classic American fiddle tune. Elmer was an old-time fiddler who played with the original Sons of the Pioneers, one of the earliest and best-known singing groups in the Western music style, a style that was later merged with Country music to create the “Country & Western” genre we all know so well today. I also met up with my former NSA colleague, “Daoud” (remember, in the Arabic language department, we were all given Arabic names — I was “Bessem”), who was a guitar player (and had now become a pastor in the fundamentalist Church of God!)

Bruce and “Merwan” in 2023
With all this fiddling around, I began yearning to return to the East Coast so I could participate in the National Fiddle Contest in Washington, D.C., which I intended to be my last major activity before leaving for Israel. So, after a brief stopover in Cañon City, Colorado, to visit “Merwan”, I decided to try my luck at hopping freight trains back to D.C. What an experience! Perhaps I’ll include all the glorious details in my personal memoirs someday, but suffice it to say that there is no view of the natural beauty of my native country comparable to that framed by an open boxcar door. I even saw the U.S. Capitol from that unique vantage point. Also, suffice it to say that I tied for first place in the National Fiddle Contest — albeit in the dubious category of “Most Unique Fiddle Style”.

Bruce Brill performing at the National Fiddle Contest in 1974
After the contest was over, it was time to keep my long-standing promise to myself, and so, finally, in July of 1974, I hopped a flight to Israel. This was the first time I had ever been to Israel in my life, and I was instantly mesmerized by the country. However, my sister — always the precocious one in the family — had preempted me by getting accepted to Hebrew University earlier that year. So I crashed at the student dorms until I could figure out where I was going to plant myself in this completely new environment. One of my first experiences as a new arrival in Israel was to visit the Old City of Jerusalem. While walking through its glimmering limestone streets, a middle-aged Arab gentleman approached me and graciously offered to show me around the ramparts of the city’s famous walls. As we walked alongside the parapet, I was constantly told, “Dis from where de Arab he shoot de Jew.” Hmmm … not exactly a warm welcome to the Holy Land, and — little did I know at the time — a foreshadowing of the all-too-frequent terrorist attacks I would be exposed to during my many decades in Israel.

Bruce and Vivian Brill on their wedding day, with Uncleo standing next to them.
Capitalizing on my background in languages, I enrolled in an English teachers’ certification course, with the goal of teaching English in Israel, and began taking a liking to one of the instructors. (Hmmm … this might be illegal today.) Vivian was a beautiful Orthodox Jewess, and her vivaciousness (as well as her dark complexion and pretty face) left me smitten. Fast forward half a year, and we’ve decided to get hitched, but we can’t do it in Israel: the Rabbinate won’t accept me as a Jew! They’re demanding that I prove my Jewishness. (This is ironic, considering that my mother — maiden name Levin — was a Levite, and my father was a descendant of the “Bryll”, Ben Rabbi Yehuda Leyb, the great-grandson of the famous medieval Rabbi, the Maharal, a supposed scion of the House of David.) I even brought my sister to testify, but her blonde hair and blue eyes didn’t help my case much. (My parents had just moved to Florida, so all the necessary documentation was packed away.) Vivian and I had no choice — we had to get married outside of Israel. And so, tails between our legs, we returned to Vivian’s home neighborhood of Borough Park, Brooklyn — a.k.a. Jerusalem-on-the-Hudson.
One of Israel’s nutty laws (no shortage of them!) required us to stay outside of Israel for at least 6 months in order for me to not forfeit my rights as an Oleh Hadash (new immigrant). To make a long story short, six months turned into one year, which turned into five years. For most of the first year, we moved in with “Uncle Leo”, my former roommate and supervisor at NSA’s Hebrew Division. Uncle Leo — or “Uncleo”, as we affectionately called him — was more than just a landlord — he was a dear friend. Vivian was the first female in Uncleo’s house in years. His “Home for Unwed Fathers”, as he jokingly called his beautiful nineteenth-century home in Laurel, Maryland, was built in the classic Victorian style, replete with separate hot and cold sink spigots and plumbing pipes outside the walls. (Uncleo used to joke that he should replace the metal sewer pipes with see-through plastic to get some entertainment with each flush from the upstairs bathroom.) During our five years in Maryland, besides teaching Hebrew at the local synagogue, both Vivian and I worked for an NSA subcontractor, Techtran, translating confidential and secret documents from Hebrew to English for Uncle Sam — known affectionately as Unclsam. On the side, I got my Master’s Degree in Agricultural Engineering at the University of Maryland, researching and developing a novel system for harnessing wind energy, a field in which I had a long-standing interest.
Like Jacob waiting on Rachel, five years passed in what felt like a day, and soon we found ourselves on a plane back to Israel. Upon our return, we were placed in a Merkaz Klitah (Immigrant Absorption Center) in Kiryat Arba, near the Biblical city of Hebron. “We” now included three young children, two girls and a boy. After seven months in Kiryat Arba, we moved the brood to Tekoa, the birthplace of shepherd-cum-prophet, Amos. One of things I was most looking forward to about living in Tekoa was meeting a good-spirited young American immigrant named David Rosenfeld, who had heard of my work in wind energy and who, himself, had a dream of building a windmill in his adopted home of Tekoa, where the strong and steady winds are perfect for such a project. He also happened to be Director of the Herodion, the nearby ancient summer palace of King Herod, whose iconic conical structure dominates the surrounding landscape.
Our move to Tekoa took place on July 4th, 1982. But, as fate would have it, we never did meet David. He was knifed to death two days before our arrival by P.L.O. terrorists at the Herodion. The tragedy shook the entire community, and created an immediate opening at the Herodion. I was appointed the new Director of the Herodion, a position usually given to the new kid on the block. I ended up holding the position for over a year, with no incident.

The Herodion, as viewed from the modern-day settlement of Tekoa | Photo: YJ Staff
Though individual journeys are, I believe, important to fill in the full picture, this series is not meant to be a personal memoir, and so I will skip ahead to 1985, three years later, when an American Jew who worked for the United States Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) was caught spying for Israel. Like me, he was a Middle East analyst. Unlike me, he violated his secrecy oath. I took my secrecy oath very seriously, and had little sympathy for Jonathan Pollard when he was sentenced to life imprisonment in March, 1987.
Nonetheless, due to the similarities in our roles within the American intelligence community, Pollard’s case continued to pique my interest, and when a rally was held in his support a few years later in front of the American Consulate on Agron Street in central Jerusalem, I decided to attend — mostly out of curiosity. One of the featured speakers was the well-known former Lehi (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel) member and right-wing firebrand, Geulah Cohen. Geulah came on stage and gave a rousing speech in defense of Jonathan Pollard, the main point of which was that Pollard had no choice but to break his oath and spy for Israel because he had seen, with his own eyes, that the United States was withholding vital intelligence information from its close ally. When I heard this, I almost jumped out of my proverbial seat! This was exactly what I had encountered at NSA just before the Yom Kippur War. When Geulah got off the stage, I rushed up to her and told her my story: that I had worked at NSA and been privy to intelligence that Syria and Egypt were planning to invade Israel on Yom Kippur, 1973 — two days before it happened; that this information was deliberately supressed and not passed on to the Israelis; that there were explicit Jew-free rooms at NSA which I, as a Jew, was not allowed to enter. Before I knew it, Geulah was pushing me onstage and in front of the microphone, and I proceeded to spend the next 15 minutes telling my story to the crowd.
When Geulah got off the stage, I rushed up to her and told her my story: that I had worked at NSA and been privy to intelligence that Syria and Egypt were planning to invade Israel on Yom Kippur, 1973 — two days before it happened.
Among those present were a number of Israeli journalists, and when I got off stage, they began to approach me, intrigued by my behind-the-scenes vantage point on the events leading up to the Yom Kippur War, an historical watershed that left deep scars — and many questions — on Israeli society. The end result was, in the written press, a feature article in the April 12, 1991 edition of Yedioth Ahronoth (one of Israel’s major newspapers), written by well-known journalist Nachum Barnea, entitled “Shamir Dances the Tango, Baker Cries”, with a subsection called “Bruce Brill’s Story”. On television, I was interviewed by Gabi Gazit on his nighttime show HaLayla (roughly analogous to the Tonight Show in America), and I was also granted an interview by Israel Television’s senior news correspondent, Gil Sadan, on the eve of the 20th anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, but this interview was subsequently cancelled, accompanied by an apology from the station manager that he didn’t doubt my testimony — rather, he doubted the testimonies of Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan.

“Shamir Dances the Tango, Baker Cries”, a feature article in the April 12, 1991 edition of Yedioth Ahronoth, included a subsection called “Bruce Brill’s Story”.
Eventually, I came to the attention of Carol Pollard, Jonathan’s sister, who contacted me and asked if I would advocate on behalf of her brother. I thought about his violation of his secrecy oath. Didn’t he deserve the punishment meted out to him? Sensing my hesitation, Carol sent me a ton of materials about her brother’s case, including a book entitled Pollard: The Spy’s Story, written by Bernard Henderson, Jonathan’s father-in-law. The book was an eye-opener, and as I read it, two things became crystal clear to me: First, Pollard was Jew-baited — set up to be entrapped because he was a Jew; Second, those (at the time) inexplicable inducements offered to me before my discharge from NSA (see Part 2), to continue at the agency, now became a bit more explicable: perhaps anti-semitic elements at NSA were looking to bait a “Pollard”, already in 1974. Remember, the lie detector test had caught me, red-handed, saying that I would pass classified information to a foreign national, and yet the agency seemed adamant in throwing incentive after incentive my way to keep me on. Something didn’t add up. Why would they be so resolved to keep a potential security risk in their midst?
Two things became crystal clear to me: First, Pollard was Jew-baited — set up to be entrapped because he was a Jew; Second, those (at the time) inexplicable inducements offered to me before my discharge from NSA, to continue at the agency, now became a bit more explicable: perhaps anti-semitic elements at NSA were looking to bait a “Pollard”.
While I could never prove my hypothesis, what did become completely clear was that Jonathan Pollard had been shafted. And so, without further delay, I began a personal campaign for his freedom. If I had a dollar for each letter I wrote to organizations and newspapers, well … you know the thing. I even wrote a poem that appeared in the November, 1994 edition of Your Jerusalem, expressing outrage at the injustices that I perceived, and lamenting the unfair suffering which Pollard was now enduring.
Pollard’s Applause
Right courage came forth from an unforeseen place;
A son of old Judah and of the New World.
A slight, balding man with bespectacled face,
the base on which bravery’s flag was unfurled. …

The poem “Pollard’s Applause”, as it appeared in the November, 1994 issue of Your Jerusalem
My tactic for advocating for Pollard’s release was this: I tried (unsuccessfully) to portray him as a good American — and an innocent one — by merit of his efforts to protect the lives of innocent Israeli civilians. I argued that he took up the mantle of his supervisors, who should have been doing — and neglected to do — what he eventually felt that he had no choice but to do: pass on vital, life-saving intelligence to their ally, Israel.
Though my pleas fell on many deaf ears, none were more deaf than those of Jewish Americans — in particular, their official representatives. All of the major Jewish organizations seemed profoundly embarrassed by Pollard’s actions, since they brought to the forefront the taboo issue of dual loyalty among American Jews. The aversion to stirring up this issue continues to this very day: when I recently published my book, Deceit of an Ally, many mainstream organizations both in the United States and Israel refused to allow me a venue to present my story. “It sounds anti-American,” they told me. And they’re right, it does sound “anti-American”. But it is anything but. Let me explain.
My book points an accusing finger at the clandestine cells implanted deep within the American intelligence community that, according to John Loftus, author of The Secret War Against the Jews, “actively work against Israel’s interests, even when there is no discernible benefit to the United States.” They do this by, among other means, spying on Israel for financial and geopolitical gains and manipulating international covert policies and national security agendas. Entry for Jews into these enclaves is strictly verboten, and knowledge of their very existence is kept secret, particularly (as may be surmised) to Jews. Thus, I reason like this: if America is “Israel’s greatest ally”, as it very publicly and very repeatedly declares, then why should covert cells be embedded throughout the country’s intelligence agencies that are intentionally working against it’s ally? In doing so, they operate in opposition to stated American policy, and what could possibly be more anti-American than that?
If America is “Israel’s greatest ally”, as it very publicly and very repeatedly declares, then why should covert cells be embedded throughout the country’s intelligence agencies that are intentionally working against it’s ally?
So, if anything, my book is anti-anti-American — which, by some law of mathematics I learned in the eighth grade and have long since forgotten, makes it proudly pro-American. At this point, the reader may be asking, “How could I, a Jew, have discovered these secret no-Jews-allowed, anti-Israel cells at NSA?” We’ll tackle this question in the next installment. Stay tuned.
Bruce Brill is an independent journalist and former U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) Middle East analyst. He is author of the book Deceit of An Ally: NSA’s Secret Jew Room & 1973 Yom Kippur Treachery
Bruce Brill may be contacted at bruce.brill@gmail.com.