About 25 years ago, Jonathan Jay Pollard, a US naval intelligence analyst,
betrayed his country by providing highly classified information to Israel. Even
though Israel was and still is a US ally and is routinely supplied with US
intelligence, Pollard deserved to be severely punished for his
actions. However, the punishment should fit the crime. In his case, it
does not.
After his arrest and indictment by a grand jury, Pollard agreed
to plead guilty to one count of giving classified information to a US ally. In
return for his guilty plea – which spared the government the embarrassment of
conducting a trial involving highly sensitive information – and his cooperation,
the US attorney pledged not to seek a life sentence.
This seemed like a
reasonable resolution. The average sentence meted out to individuals
convicted of giving classified information to an ally is seven years, with
average time served of about four years.
Despite the terms of the plea
bargain, in 1987 Pollard was sentenced to life – a sentence generally reserved
for spies such as Aldrich Ames, who pleaded guilty to giving classified
information to the Soviet Union during the Cold War that led to the loss of many
lives.
The question is why Pollard received such a harsh sentence, and
why he still languishes in prison despite the pleas of hundreds of US
legislators, a former CIA director, a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence
Committee and several Israeli leaders.
THERE ARE at least three reasons
for this state of affairs.
First is the victim impact statement of my
former boss, Caspar Weinberger, secretary of defense at the time of Pollard’s
arrest. Weinberger’s statement, much of which remains classified, implied that
some of the information Pollard supplied to Israel made its way to the Soviet
Union. Weinberger argued that Pollard was no different from spies who
provided information to the Soviets, and was thus guilty of
treason.
Second, at the time of his arrest, the Israeli government
refused to acknowledge that Pollard was one of its agents, and claimed that he
was part of a rogue operation. Not surprisingly, the Israelis also steadfastly
refused to return the reams of documents Pollard had delivered to them or
debrief the US about their contents. This added fuel to the notion that
Pollard was working for the Soviets or another US enemy rather than for an
American ally.
Third, Pollard was an unsympathetic character. He not only
took about $45,000 from the Israelis in exchange for the information he handed
over, he gave two highly publicized interviews from jail before his sentencing,
one with Wolf Blitzer and another with Mike Wallace. In these interviews, which
the government claimed were not authorized, he didn’t express remorse but
instead attempted to rationalize his behavior.
But none of these
conditions exists now. Weinberger’s contention has been debunked. Information
that Pollard gave to Israel did not make its way to the USSR. Instead, the
information that the Soviets received during the 18 months Pollard was spying
for Israel most likely came from Ames and Robert Hanssen, a onetime FBI agent
who spied for the USSR and Russia from 1979 to 2001.
James Woolsey, CIA
director from 1993 to 1995, stated after examining the Pollard case file that
none of Pollard’s information went to the Soviet Union. Moreover, Woolsey now
believes that Pollard has served long enough and should be released. And in a
2004 interview, Weinberger himself admitted that in retrospect, the Pollard
matter was comparatively minor; he doesn’t even mention it in his
memoirs.
In 1998, the Israeli government finally admitted that Pollard
was one of its agents, granted him Israeli citizenship, and has sought clemency
for him from three US presidents. Finally, Pollard himself not only expressed
remorse before the sentencing judge, but has done so several times publicly over
the past 25 years (and the government has conceded that the jailhouse interviews
had to have been authorized).
ONE PRESIDENT actually agreed to grant
clemency to Pollard. In October 1998, president Bill Clinton and Prime Minister
Binyamin Netanyahu worked out an agreement to release Pollard as a way of
facilitating an Arab-Israeli peace agreement. However, the deal was scuttled
when George Tenet, the CIA director at the time, threatened to resign. Tenet was
apparently concerned about the signal Pollard’s release would send to the
intelligence community, and believed he still had information that could
jeopardize national security.
Some now argue that Pollard should be
released because it would improve US-Israeli relations and enhance the prospects
of success of the Obama administration’s Middle East peace process. Although
that may be true, it is not the reason I and many others have recently written
to the president requesting that he grant Pollard clemency. The reason is that
Pollard has already served far too long for the crime for which he was
convicted, and by now, whatever facts he might know would have little effect on
national security.
The writer, a former assistant secretary of defense in
the Reagan administration, is a senior fellow at the Center for American
Progress.