Clinton Under Pressure to Grant Clemency to Pollard

By Paul Findley

The fate of Jonathan Jay Pollard, the paid spy for Israel now serving a life sentence in prison for stealing thousands of top-secret documents while an employee of the U.S. Navy, is high on the White House priority list facing Janet Reno, President Bill Clinton's attorney general.

Reno's plate is filled with a wide assortment of tough legal challenges, but none has behind it more political firepower than the clemency plea for Israel's famous spy.

Since his presidential candidacy began two years ago, Clinton has been under heavy pressure from pro-Israel interests to release Pollard, despite the enormous damage to American security interests caused by the spy's sale of U.S. secrets to the state of Israel over a five-year period.

In a little-noted comment during the recent Washington convention of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the organization registered to lobby for Israel's interests, Executive Director Thomas A. Dine announced that a petition for clemency is now being examined in the U.S. Department of Justice, moving through processing so that papers will be in order if President Bill Clinton decides to release Pollard.

Dine told convention delegates that all major Jewish organizations now support Pollard's release. This may be a slight exaggeration, as the American Jewish Committee views Pollard as an embarrassment and has been cautious in commenting on his plight.

In a letter to Aubrey Robinson, the federal judge presiding over the Pollard trial, former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger declared that Pollard's spying had caused "irrevocable harm" to the nation's security and placed at high personal risk U.S. intelligence agents and military personnel worldwide. The documents stolen by Pollard would fill a box six feet by six feet by ten feet. Weinberger said: "The sheer volume of information [stolen] has made this one of the worst espionage cases in U.S. history."

President Clinton has not publicly mentioned the case since assuming the presidency, but expressed sympathy for the spy during his campaign last year. The spy's sister, Carol Pollard, has been appealing for his release full-time for several years and has spoken in his behalf to more than 400 meetings of U.S. Jews. She believes Clinton will release him "when the time is right."

While in office, President George Bush replied curtly in the negative when a reporter asked if he could commute or reduce Pollard's sentence. He ignored a public appeal signed by 560 U.S. rabbis and refused a last-minute private plea for Pollard from Yitzhak Shamir, former Israeli prime minister.

Pollard's spying caused "Irrevocable harm" to the nation's security.

The Israeli government has invested more than a half-million dollars in Pollard. Beginning in 1984, it paid him $1,500 a month for stealing U.S. secret documents, then, pleased with the suitcases full of secret documents he was copying from Navy files, quickly increased the pay to $2,500 a month, with the promise that this income would continue for nine more years. Israel also provided $20,000 to finance two luxury vacations for Pollard, plus a $7,000 diamond for his wife.

In addition, according to ABC News, the Israeli government has provided most of the $2 million set aside for his legal defense. The rest comes from fund-raising appeals conducted among Jews worldwide. Part of the money was used te employ attorney Alan Dershowitz, who appealed the life sentence. Last October the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the appeal.

According to Wolf Blitzer, author of Territory of Lies, a book about the Pollard case, the Israeli government is depositing $5,000 a month in a European bank account for his ultimate benefit. Blitzer is now the White House reporter for CNN News.

According to United Press International, information stolen by Pollard "was traded to the Soviets in return for promises to increase emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel." U.S. intelligence agents first learned of this Israeli-Soviet spy link when information stolen by Pollard was "traced to the Eastern bloc." At the time, the Cold war was still a major challenge to the Untied States. The Warsaw Pact still existed and governments of Eastern Europe were considered unfriendly to the United States. The Soviet Union, a major beneficiary of Pollard's spying, was America's number-one enemy.

A Markedly Different Attitude

Since Bill Clinton's inauguration, the presidential attitude toward Israel is markedly different. Under President George Bush, the United States criticized Israel for building Israeli housing in East Jerusalem and elsewhere in the occupied territories and rejected Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem and Syria's Golan Heights. East Jerusalem was expressly identified on several occasions as territory subject to negotiation.

A month before departing, the Bush administration voted for a United Nations resolution demanding that Israel immediately return to their homes the remaining 397 Palestinians from the 415 that Rabin had suddenly and arbitrarily expelled to a hilltop in southern Lebanon. It was hailed as a significant decision by the U.S., one of the few times in recent years when the United States has supported a United Nations rebuke of Israeli behavior. Diplomats immediately began work drafting a resolution that would impose sanctions if Israel failed to cooperate. With an eye on changes in policy that might occur after Bill Clinton's inauguration a month later, Rabin rejected the demand.

After taking office, Clinton reversed the U.S. position, immediately turning his back on the plight of the expelled Palestinians. He has since given ample evidence that the United States, after an interregnum of uncertainty under Bush, is now fully relegated to subordination to Israel. He has expressed not a word of concern about Israel's continued rapid pace of housing construction in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip or its increasingly harsh measures to suppress Palestinian protest.

When Clinton received Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin at the White House in what has to be described as a love fest, not a word was mentioned about the hapless Palestinians. Instead, Clinton assured Rabin that U.S. aid to Israel would not be cut, despite cutbacks in almost every aspect of the U.S. budget. He even promised an increase in aid if Israel works out a deal with Syria.

In this atmosphere, it will not be surprising if Pollard is suddenly set free, placed on an El Al airliner, and headed for a hero's welcome and a life of never-ending luxury and adulation in the state of Israel.

No Protest Expected on Capitol Hill

On Capitol Hill not a word of protest can be expected. The day after Pollard's highly publicized arrest occurred in 1985, a lobbyist employed by AIPAC braced himself for trouble when he began his scheduled round of appointments with congressmembers and senators on Capitol Hill. Although accustomed to friendly cooperation because of Israel's influence in Congress, the lobbyist was convinced that the legislators he met would chastise him harshly over Pollard's thievery. "I just knew it would be the first thing mentioned at every stop, " the lobbyist said.

After all, he reasoned, even columnist William Safire, who normally writes only friendly things about Israel, had said of the espionage: "The Pollards in America, and their spymasters in Israel, have done more damage to their respective countries than any terrorists could dream of doing." To the lobbyist's astonishment, his appointments were uneventful: "The Pollard arrest was never once mentioned. "

With the attention of the American people focused on tumult in Russia, barbaric conduct in the former Yugoslavia, and the intense legislative scramble over the Clinton economic proposals in Washington, Pollard's release is unlikely to produce more than a blip on the television screen or a footnote in the back pages of the daily newspaper.

Former Illinois Congressman Paul Findley is chairman of the Council for the National Interest, a membership organization located at 1511 K St. NW, Suite 1043, Washington, DC 20005.