Anat Kamm arrived on Wednesday morning at the Neveh Tirza Prison in Ramle to
begin serving a four-and-a-half year sentence for leaking classified
materials.
Kamm, now aged 24, was convicted in February in a plea bargain
under which she pleaded guilty to stealing 2,085 IDF documents, more than 700 of
which were classified, and passing many of them on to Haaretz reporter Uri
Blau.
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The plea bargain dropped two far more severe charges of
deliberately intending to harm state security, an offense that carries a maximum
penalty of life imprisonment.
Kamm was sentenced on October 30 by a panel
consisting of Judges Nurit Ahituv, Miriam Diskin and Ra’anan Ben-Yosef. At the
sentencing, the judges said that Kamm had “cynically exploited her position”
during her army service as a clerk in the office of OC Central Command
Maj.-Gen.
Yair Naveh in the capital’s Neveh Ya’acov
neighborhood.
The judges said that in September 2008, after her discharge
from the army, Kamm intended to give the files she had gathered to a Yediot
Aharonot reporter, but when that fell through, she handed a disc containing
1,500 documents, 150 of them marked as highly classified and 330 as classified,
to Blau.
Blau used the classified material as the basis for two articles
for Haaretz. In the first, published in October 2008, Blau accused the IDF of
defying a High Court of Justice ruling against the targeted killings of
Palestinian terrorists.
The next article, published a few weeks later,
similarly intimated that the army had earmarked Palestinian terrorists for
targeted killings, and included a photocopy of a targeted-killing order Kamm had
given to Blau.
On the 17th of this month, Kamm appealed her
sentence.
She also asked for a postponement of the sentence during the
entire appeals process, a request that was rejected by Supreme Court Justice
Miriam Naor.
“It is impossible to know whether the intelligence [Kamm]
gave away has found its way into the hands of foreign agents, hostile or not,”
said Ahituv in explaining Kamm’s conviction. She added that the documents Kamm
stole and gave to Blau contained information relating to army operations that
could cause “enormous potential harm” if it fell into enemy hands.
Kamm
described Naveh’s office as “embarrassing in terms of information security” and
said she had not undergone any security check before being assigned to her army
role, even though it gave her access to the most confidential
documents.
The IDF declined to comment on Kamm’s sentence.
While
Kamm’s trial is over (pending appeals), Attorney- General Yehuda Weinstein has
yet to decide whether to prosecute Blau. Weinstein held a hearing for Blau in
May on whether to try him for receiving and keeping classified military
documents stolen by Kamm. The hearing was prompted after the Tel Aviv District
Attorney’s Office announced that there was sufficient evidence to indict Blau
for unauthorized possession of classified documents.
Following Kamm’s
initial arrest, Blau remained in London for nearly a year before returning under
an agreement with the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), in which he would
return all classified documents in his possession.
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