Declassified document hints Israel spy
serving life for bogus reason
Jonathan Pollard
NEW YORK – With little fanfare and no
news media coverage, a dramatic, potentially game-changing development
in the Jonathan Pollard spy case quietly occurred three months ago.
Jonathan Pollard is currently serving his 30th year of an
unprecedented life sentence in a U.S. prison for espionage on behalf of
an ally, Israel.
After years of failed efforts petitioning the government and the
court system to gain access to the classified material used to sentence
their client, Pollards’ security-cleared attorneys finally won an appeal
for declassification last fall.
As a result of the appeal, key sections of a 28-year-old classified
document that was the central justification for Pollard’s
unprecedentedly harsh sentence were declassified and released Nov. 13,
2014.
The 49-page document in question is a memorandum that was submitted
to the sentencing judge in 1987 by then-Secretary of Defense Caspar W.
Weinberger.
The document was obtained and reviewed by WND.
Pollard, who worked as a civilian intelligence analyst for the U.S.
Navy, was arrested in 1985 and indicted in 1987 on one count of passing
classified information to an ally, Israel. He gave up his right to a
trial and entered into a plea agreement, which was intended to spare
both Israel and the U.S. the embarrassment and damage that a lengthy
trial might incur. Despite the government’s acknowledgment that Pollard
fulfilled all the terms of his plea agreement, the government reneged.
He was sentenced to life despite the plea deal.
Pollard is the only person in U.S. history to receive a life sentence
for spying for an ally. The median sentence for the offense is two to
four years.
His sentence is generally acknowledged to have been driven by
Weinberger’s memorandum, a document that was never disclosed to the
public nor to any of Pollard’s security-cleared attorneys from the time
that he was sentenced in 1987.
According to U.S. government representations of the memo for nearly
three decades, the document was alleged to demonstrate that Pollard was
the spy responsible for the greatest harm to U.S. national security up
to the time of his sentencing. The government has persisted in this
characterization of the document despite a number of other documents
which have been brought to public attention and which appear to
contradict the government’s claims. The material includes the victim
impact statement and a recently declassified 1987 CIA damage assessment
of the case. And now, the new declassifications of the Weinberger
document itself.
Since his formal sentencing in 1987, the U.S. government has
repeatedly cited the secret Weinberger document as its main basis to
oppose either parole or presidential pardon for Pollard.
Last July, at Pollard’s first parole hearing after 29 years in
prison, the government again cited the Weinberger declaration, claiming
it contained sufficient evidence to warrant a denial of parole. Neither
Pollard’s security-cleared attorneys nor the parole commission itself
were allowed to view the document.
At the parole hearing, the government relied upon the document to
claim Pollard’s case represented “the greatest compromise of U.S.
national security to that date” – a charge which the parole board
accepted without viewing the document. Numerous former U.S. officials
who viewed the document have since stated categorically that
representation is false.
Pollard’s spy activities listed
About 20 percent of the memo is still classified, while many of the
section heads of the still secretive sections can now be seen in the
declassified version.
According to the document, as reviewed by WND, the crux of Pollard’s
spy activities described in the declassified sections affected the U.S.
relationships with Middle Eastern countries.
It states that Pollard provided Israel with information on Soviet
weaponry and radar systems, information of vital import to the Jewish
state’s security since at the time almost all of the technology used by
Israel’s enemies was Soviet-made.
The document notes Pollard “provided information on Soviet built
air-to-air missile systems and Middle East air orders of battle,” even
while allowing “[s]ince Israel depends for its national security on
control of Middle East air space, much of this information was
considered vital, and, as Col. Sella [of the Israeli Air Force]
remarked, was not previously possessed by Israel.”
The memo states Pollard provided information concerning the fighting
capabilities of Israel’s Mideast adversaries, with many of the specific
examples still classified.
In one newly declassified section, the document reveals Pollard
provided Israel with information on the Libyan air force. This data
resulted in enabling an Israeli airstrike on Palestine Liberation
Organization headquarters in Tunisia by helping the Israelis avoid
confrontation with Libyan air defenses.
The Libyan case provides a glimmer into what Weinberger viewed as
harmful to U.S. national security. Weinberger wrote in the memo the
strike harmed U.S. regional interests because of the resultant damage
and loss of life – 62 Palestinians and 27 Tunisians were killed in raid.
Weinberger called those deaths a “detriment” to the U.S.
He further complained the Israeli airstrike may damage relations with
Libya, which the Defense Secretary said he viewed as an “honest broker”
for U.S. He said Libya was helpful when it volunteered, with U.S.
assistance, to provide sanctuary to Yasser Arafat’s PLO – which at the
time was regarded by Israel as an enemy terrorist organization – when
Arafat’s group was exiled from Lebanon in 1982.
Weinberger further claimed Pollard caused “harm” to the U.S.
intelligence community by sharing with Israel intelligence that the U.S.
did not believe was in its interests to provide to the Jewish state.
States the document: “Defendant not only provided classified
information to Israel, which Israel was not authorized to receive, but
in doing so, he furnished original source documents, which had not been
‘sanitized,’ thus substantially compounding the harm.”
Weinberger is implying Israel was not supposed to receive full
intelligence on some issues and Pollard undermined that policy.
Weinberger himself signed the 1983 U.S.-Israel Memorandum of
Understanding that established strategic military and intelligence
cooperation between the U.S. and Israel on regional threats.
Attorneys petition Obama
In an oped published at WND today, Pollard’s pro bono attorneys,
Eliot Lauer and Jacques Semmelman, stated, “The recent disclosures …
show that the government has been dishonestly hiding behind the mask of
‘classified information’ to materially mischaracterize the nature and
extent of the harm caused by Mr. Pollard.”
Lauer and Semmelman contend, “The newly disclosed material shows that
any harm that may have been caused by Mr. Pollard was in the form of
short-term disruption in foreign relations between the United States and
certain Arab countries. That is not at all the same thing as harm to
U.S. national security.”
In light of the new disclosures and the strong support from American
officials who have long questioned Pollard’s “grossly disproportionate”
life sentence, the attorneys urge President Obama to commute Pollard’s
sentence immediately.
Obama “has the solemn duty to uphold the law of the land by finally
putting a stop to this ongoing travesty. There are no more excuses. The
president should exercise his constitutional power and grant clemency to
Jonathan Pollard,” they state in the WND oped.
Weinberger contradicts own memo, Senior U.S. officials demand ‘justice’
Weinberger’s memorandum has been the U.S. government’s main basis for
Pollard’s continued incarceration. Yet stunningly, even Weinberger,
before his death in 2006, recanted. Weinberger stated in a 2002
interview that the Pollard case was “a very minor matter, but made very
important. … It was made far bigger than its actual importance.”
Weinberger was one of the central figures accused in the Iran-Contra
affair of trading arms to Iran for hostages. He was indicted by a
federal grand jury on two counts of perjury and one count of obstruction
of justice but was pardoned before trial by President George H. W.
Bush, who was Reagan’s vice president during the scandal.
Since Pollard’s sentencing, a number of former Reagan Administration
officials who worked with Weinberger have charged that he was biased
against Israel and this affected his handling of the Pollard case.
Robert C. “Bud” McFarlane served as U.S. national security adviser and worked closely with Secretary Weinberger.
In a letter dated Feb. 9, 2012, McFarlane wrote, “The affidavit filed
by former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger was surely inspired in
large part by his deeply held animus toward the state of Israel. His
extreme bias against Israel was manifested in recurrent episodes of
strong criticism and unbalanced reasoning when decisions involving
Israel were being made.”
McFarlane went on to say the “imprisonment of Mr. Pollard for more
than 26 years is more than excessive,” and “a great injustice.”
Dr. Lawrence J. Korb served as assistant secretary of Defense under
Weinberger and worked closely with him from 1981 to 1985 (a period that
includes Mr. Pollard’s arrest). In a declaration filed Dec. 20, 2013, in
the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, Korb
stated that “the severity of Mr. Pollard’s sentence appears to be the
result of Mr. Weinberger’s almost visceral dislike of the impact that
Israel has on U.S. foreign policy.”
Korb went on to state, “I fully support Mr. Pollard’s application for release on parole.”
In a letter dated July 5, 2012, R. James Woolsey, former director of
the CIA, wrote of Pollard that he supports his release and that it is
time to “free him.” Woolsey has repeatedly contended in his public
statements on the case that “anti-Semitism” is a factor in the on-going
incarceration of Pollard, and he has repeatedly urged the administration
in the pages of the Walls Street Journal and other newspapers to
“Forget that Pollard is a Jew … pretend he’s a Greek- or Korean- or
Filipino-American and free him!”
The day after the new Weinberger declassifications were released last
fall, eight senior U.S. officials, fully versed in the classified
material of the case wrote a strongly worded letter to Obama decrying
the parole commission’s denial of parole to Pollard.
The officials include Woolsey, MacFarlane, Korb, former White House
counsel Bernard Nussbaum and other former heads of the Senate
Intelligence Committee. In their Nov. 14, 2014, letter they slam the alleged “lie” that was used to deny Pollard parole.
The officials write, “The allegation that Pollard’s espionage ‘was
the greatest compromise of U.S. security to that date’ is false; and not
supported by any evidence in the public record or the classified file.
Yet it was this fiction that the Parole Commission cited to deny
parole.”
The officials continue by noting that the government relied on a
“stale, largely discredited, 28-year-old classified memorandum written
by former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger” in making its
decision.
“Mr. Weinberger himself discounted his original damage assessment of
the Pollard case in a 2002 interview … [and] the unreliability of the
1987 Weinberger document was known to and ignored by the Parole
Commission,” the officials wrote.
Perhaps the most damning part of their letter to Obama, who when
visiting Israel in March of 2013 and stated there he would ensure
Pollard received a fair parole hearing, was the close of their appeal to
the president: “Denying a man his freedom based on a claim of damage
that is patently false while ignoring exculpatory documentary evidence
and hiding behind a veil of secret evidence is neither fair nor just,
and it simply is not the American way. …
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