Will Clinton Yield to Pressure and Free American Who Spied for Israel?

By Tim Kennedy

Five years ago, shortly before a federal judge handed confessed spy Jonathan Jay Pollard a lifetime prison sentence for selling classified intelligence documents to Israel, Pollard made an impassioned plea for mercy. "I broke faith and took the law into my own hands," he admitted. "I should have recognized the infectious nature of an ideology, Zionism."

Pollard, who worked as a civilian intelligence analyst for the Navy, admitted that he was recruited by Israel in 1984 and passed along tens of thousands of pages of classified documents until Nov. 18,1985, when he was arrested while attempting to seek asylum at the Israeli Embassy in Washington. Israel paid Pollard more than $45,000 in cash for the stolen documents, and promised to deposit at least $300,000 more in a Swiss bank account.

"It is likely he will never see the light of day again, " Pollard's prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Joseph DiGenova said after Pollard's sentencing in March 1987. According to court records, Pollard's spy activities compromised a record number of classified documents, and provided his Israeli handlers with descriptions of covert intelligence programs, the identities of undercover Mideast agents, and technical assessments of radar and other military electronic equipment used by Israel's Arab neighbors.

In a court affidavit, then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger said: ''[It is] difficult for me to conceive of a greater harm to national security than that caused by Pollard in view of the breadth, the critical importance to the U.S., and the high sensitivity of the information he sold to Israel."

During a November visit to the White House, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin—who became his country's defense minister shortly after Pollard was recruited as a spy—asked President Bill Clinton to commute Pollard's life term and release him from prison.

When a White House reporter asked Clinton and Rabin to comment on the Pollard release proposal, the president said: "We discussed it and I explained that, under our procedures here, I cannot make a decision on the Pollard case until the Justice Department makes a recommendation to me." Clinton added, however, that "Under the terms of the United States constitution, I do not have to follow the recommendation of the Justice Department . . . "

The U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington, which prosecuted the original case, has already told the head of the Justice Department, Attorney General Janet Reno, that it opposes early release for Pollard. ''We have stated our strong opposition to the possibility of Jonathan Pollard having his sentence commuted," a source at the U.S. Attorney's office, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Washington Report. "This is based on the strong damage that Pollard's activities inflicted on the United States."

Law enforcement and intelligence community officials worry that Pollard, once out of jail, will reveal additional U.S. military secrets, the source said. There also is worry among the officials in the American intelligence community that the secret information collected by Israeli intelligence "has been severely compromised by agents from the former Soviet republics and, possibly, other foreign powers."

"When all these considerations are taken together," says the government source, "Pollard's release could cause continued damage to American intelligence assets." Insiders at various intelligence agencies predict, however, that Clinton will ignore the advice of the country's top law enforcement officials, and will commute Pollard's sentence.

''Pollard will be released before the end of the year," a Mideast expert at the Defense Intelligence Agency predicted flatly. Asked why Clinton would make such a decision, the DIA official says, "Because it's a new American administration, and it's a new Israeli government.''

The DIA official said he was disappointed with the situation, and added, ''The Likud government never officially asked for [Pollard's] release. This one [the Rabin government] has."

George A. Carver, Jr., a former senior intelligence officer who is now a fellow with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, does not conceal his anger at the possibility of Pollard's release: "Pollard is precisely where he deserves to be...in prison,'' Carver told the Washington Report. "I can't see any reason to let him out. When a person commits espionage for a foreign power, it's still espionage, whether it's for Israel or anybody else."

A Zionist Hero

To many Israelis and Jewish Americans, Pollard is a Zionist hero who has been sold short by Israeli politicians and his former intelligence officers. Various pro-Israel groups in the U.S. and abroad have lobbied for Pollard's release and routinely run full-page ads in major U.S. newspapers. These groups have also raised millions of dollars to cover Pollard's legal expenses. The fund-raising effort is being led by the Israeli Public Committee for the Release of Jonathan Pollard.

The Israeli government is banking Pollard's $5,000 monthly salary, according to CNN correspondent Wolf Blitzer. The cash is to serve as a "little nest egg," should Pollard ever be released from prison and move to Israel.

The $5,000 monthly stipend, Blitzer wrote in his book, Territory of Lies, is twice what the former counter-intelligence analyst was paid each month by the U.S. Navy. Blitzer says there is a "tradition in the Israeli intelligence community" that captured espionage agents have their former salaries doubled and set aside for them.

Soon after it was established, the Israeli Public Committee began urging Israel to formally demand Pollard's release. In 1991, the committee's spokesman, Amnon Dror, learned that Israel reportedly holds several U.S.-backed spies. Dror has since aggressively urged the Israeli government to "swap" Pollard for one of these imprisoned agents.

Officially, the U.S. government denies that Israel is holding any American spies. However, Yitzhak Rabin told Israeli journalist Yossi Melman in early 1986 that "Israel had discovered five American spies in the late 1970s and early 1980s in sensitive nuclear and industrial facilities.''

Thomas Powers, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, writes that the CIA's "working relationship with Israeli intelligence [the Mossad] is one of the agency's oldest and closest, rivaled only by its ties to the British Secret Intelligence Service." What made the relationship between the CIA and Mossad unique, say intelligence service insiders, was the tacit mutual understanding that the two countries would not spy on each other.

According to CIA lore, of which there is plenty on this subject, the Agency's fabled counterespionage chief, James Jesus Angleton, considered Israel part of his "secret fiefdom," and reportedly had close friendships with many Israeli leaders, including former Israeli intelligence agent and longtime Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek.

The CIA's cozy relationship with Israel turned sour in 1982, sources say, shortly after Israel's invasion of Lebanon. According to a speech delivered in early 1987 by former Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman David F. Durenberger (R-MN), the CIA's then-director, William J. Casey, "changed the rules of the game" by authorizing the recruitment of an Israeli military officer, who, unhappy with the invasion, offered the CIA classified information about the U.S. government.

Israeli spying activities in the United States were said to have been ongoing for "years" when John Davitt, former head of the U.S. Justice Department's internal security division, was interviewed by The Washington Post.

Retired since 1980, Davitt was responsible for reviewing all espionage cases pending at the Justice Department. He said Israeli intelligence services were "more active than anyone but the KGB [former Soviet intelligence service] . . . They were targeted on the United States about half the time, and on Arab countries about half the time. "

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Seymour M. Hersh writes in The Samson Option that Pollard gave Israel top-secret U.S. intelligence on the Soviet Union, and former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir approved passing on some of the most important of that information to the Soviets.

Hersh's book, a well-documented account of the development of Israel's nuclear weapons program, insists Pollard was recruited by Mossad in 1981–three years earlier than the U.S. espionage charges against him alleged. Hersh claims Israel has a portion of its nuclear arsenal targeted on the former Soviet Union, and that Pollard was recruited by the Mossad to gain sensitive targeting data for these Israeli nuclear weapons.

"The nuclear targeting data supplied by Pollard included top-secret intelligence on the location of Soviet military targets," Hersh writes. "Some of the most important Pollard documents were retyped and sanitized by Israeli intelligence officials and then made available to the Soviet Union as a gesture of goodwill, at the specific instructions of Yitzhak Shamir."

According to George Carver's assessment of the documents stolen by Pollard, "sanitization" would be difficult. "[The documents were in] such detail," said Carver in 1985, "that a professional analyst could discern what U.S. collection systems must have been used to acquire these data, the capabilities and limitations of those systems, and even, in some cases, likely identities of human agents."

Confirmation of the concerns expressed by Hersh and U.S. law enforcement officials regarding infiltration of Israeli intelligence by foreign powers can be found by a careful reading of the Israeli press. Over the past six months, four spy scandals have occurred in Israel involving secret "moles" who infiltrated the Israeli government to supply the ex-Soviet Union with "political and military intelligence." Reuters reports that "two more spy cases would be revealed shortly."

The most highly placed of these espionage agents is Shimon Levinson, the former head of security in the prime minister's office. Levinson, who was once a colonel in the Israeli intelligence service, has been sentenced to prison for 12 years for spying on behalf of the KGB.

Tim Kennedy, an analyst based in Washington, DC, writes about defense technology and foreign affairs.