Jonathan Pollard, the former U.S. naval
intelligence analyst, has been in prison now for fifteen
years. For almost half this time, he has been sealed away
in solitary confinement in a dungeon 3 stories below ground
level.
His guilt is not in doubt. He acted
as an agent for the Israeli intelligence service while serving
as a civilian analyst in a U.S. counter-terrorist unit in
the early nineteen-eighties. He checked 7 brief-cases of
documents out of a a Pentagon library, brought them to a
safe house to be photographed by his Israeli case officers
and then returned them. It was classic espionage. Foregoing
a trial, he agreed to plead guilty of passing classified
information to Israel. In return, the government entered
into a plea agreement under which it promised not to seek
life imprisonment and Pollard would cooperate in identifying
the documents he had delivered to Israel. Even though the
Justice Department stipulated that he had cooperated (which
was verified by the library records), the Judge sentenced
Pollard to life imprisonment. The reason the judge decided
to disregarded the plea bargain deal was that Reagan's secretary
of defense Caspar Weinberger, submitted a secret memorandum
to the court which neither Pollard or his lawyers ever saw.
The plea bargain had left Pollard without the right to know
what secret accusation had been leveled against it, or answer
it. The appellate court upheld the star-chamber-like conviction
by a 2 to 1 decision (with the dissenting judge concluding
that the government's breach of the plea agreement was "a
complete and gross miscarriage of justice.") So, without
a trial where he could at least confront his accusers, intervention,
Pollard was locked away in a basement cell, becoming America's
man in the iron mask.
That he committed espionage does not
explain this draconian treatment. Espionage, after all,
does not occur in a vacuum. It is, by its very nature, a
conspiracy involving both a principal, who receives the
secret data, and an agent, who is in a position to intercept
it. The principal, in this case, was an American ally, the
government of Israel. Acting through a Washington-based
unit of its service, it provided Pollard with a shopping
list of documents--many of the kind which, up until the
flow was cut off, it had previously received from its liaison
with the CIA; it provided Pollard with case officers to
photocopy them so they could be returned; and it payed him.
If there was great damage done to US security, it was because
of the way the principal made use (or misuse) of the secret
information it had acquired. Even though the FBI quickly
established the identity of the Israeli case officers, no
legal action was taken against them. Nor was any action
taken against the government of Israel. Such actions against
an ally were apparently considered impolitic by the Reagan
administration. Instead, after getting Pollard to admit
his role through an unkept deal, it sealed him away in solitary.
When it comes the Game of Nations. As
secret-stealing is sometimes called, it is not easy to claim
the moral high ground. During this period, the US also conducted
espionage operation against a number of allies, including
Israel. The CIA was, for example, systematically spying
on Israel in the late nineteen-seventies. It was summarized
in a 47-page CIA report on Israeli intelligence, entitled
"Israel: Foreign Intelligence and Security Services."
It was classified "SECRET," "NOFORN", which meant it was
not releasable to foreign nationals, "NOCONTRACT", which
meant it was not releasable to contract employees or consultants,
and "ORCON", which meant that it could not be shown to anyone
else unless its originator, the CIA`s counterintelligence
staff, okayed it. One reason for this high level of classification
is the CIA had obtained much of the information, as the
document itself discloses, from " covert assets of the Central
Intelligence Agency" (p.46). "Covert assets" is CIA speak
for spies. Specifically, it had acquired secret data on
the sources and methods of Israel's two intelligence services
including its primary targets, "false-flag" recruitments,
surreptitious entry into embassies and the identity of top
personnel. Such information could only have been provided
by "covert assets" in the Israeli government who
had access to the sensitive intelligence secrets. The CIA
inadvertently permitted these purloined Israeli secrets
to fall into the hands of its enemies when it left this
document in the American embassy in Teheran.
The US, to be sure, may have had amply
national security grounds to justify such espionage against
an ally. But, by the same token, so may an ally have had
national security grounds for using espionage to acquire
secrets that US intelligence had intercepted from Iraq and
Syria. For example, one target of Pollard espionage was
the data that the US had obtained about Saddam Hussein's
biological warfare capability. So two allies were illicitly
attempting to obtain each other's intelligence secrets during
a tense period in the Middle East. The only difference is
that the US continues to keep one of the pawns involved
in this game permanently incarcerated--as if he were a lone
conspirator.
The passions surrounding this case now
seem detached from reason. Consider, for example, the passion
expressed by Pollard's prosecutor, Joseph diGenova when
asked this December about the possibility of a Christmas
pardon for Pollard. He told the New York Times "It is absolutely
indefensible from either a legal or humanitarian standpoint
to grant clemency to him" from his life sentence. Yet, diGenova
himself had made the (unkept) deal not to ask for a life
sentence for a life sentence--a deal which he would presumably
not have brokered if he deemed it indefensible from both--a
legal or humanitarian standpoint. Nor do diGenova, or other
Pollard-haters, vent their passion against the principle
behind the agent, or call for its permant punishment, which
would be politically unacceptable (at least outside of the
Buchanen camp). Pollard is their designated substitute.
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