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BY SHANE
HARRIS
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The United States considers him one of the most damaging
spies in recent history. Israel considers him a martyr. And now, he may be
coming home.
Jonathan Pollard, who has been imprisoned for nearly 30
years after giving U.S. military and intelligence secrets to Israel, may
be releasedwithin the
next two weeks as part of
what two officials familiar with the discussions described as an effort to
salvage the flailing Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. In exchange, these people
said, Israel would consider releasing 14
Israeli-Arab prisoners who've also been jailed for decades as well,
potentially, as Marwan Barghouti, a prominent Palestinian militant. White House
spokesman Jay Carney neither confirmed nor denied the reports at his daily
press briefing. "I have nothing new...that I haven't said in the past,
which is that [Pollard] was convicted of espionage and that he is serving his
sentence," Carney said. The State Department dismissed the discussions as
"rumors about what may or may not
be on the table."
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| Jonathan Pollard |
Pollard, who was
sentenced to life in prison in 1987, has long maintained that he only gave
information to Israel -- an American ally -- so it could protect itself from
hostile countries in the Middle East. Not so, say intelligence officials who
served at the time of Pollard's crimes.
"Much of what he took, contrary to what he'd have
you believe, had nothing to do with Arab countries or the security of Israel,
but had everything to do with U.S. collection methods, to include most
specifically against the Soviet Union," retired Adm. Thomas Brooks, the
former director of naval intelligence, said in an interview. Pollard worked for
Brooks in 1980 when Brooks was in charge of a Navy intelligence office based at
Ft. Meade, Md, which is also the headquarters of the National Security Agency.
Among the highly-prized secrets that former officials say
Pollard gave away while working as a civilian intelligence analyst for the Navy
were technical details of sophisticated U.S. spy satellites; analyses of Soviet
missiles systems; and information about eavesdropping equipment used by the NSA
to intercept foreign governments' communications, including all ten volumes of
a highly-classified manual known as "the Bible" that spelled out how
the United States intercepted Soviet communications.
This isn't the first time that Pollard's release has been
floated in the midst of U.S.-brokered Middle East peace talks. In 1998,
President Bill Clinton was prepared to release Pollard during the summit at Wye
River, Md., but the effort was scuttled when intelligence officials protested
and then-Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet threatened to resign.
That reveals the depths of U.S. spies' animosity toward
Pollard, whom many regard as one of the most harmful spies in recent history.
Three decades after Pollard confessed to giving Israel a stack of documents
that, by his own estimation, would have measured six-by-six feet and stood
10-feet high, intelligence veterans insist that Pollard did far more damage to
U.S. national security than is generally known.
"I think what he did is exceeded only by Edward
Snowden," said Brooks, drawing an analogy between Pollard and the former
NSA contractor who gave millions of pages of classified documents about
eavesdropping systems to journalists, and who's now living in Russia under a
grant of political asylum.
But Pollard's supporters have been adamant that he should
be released from prison, and that he never should have served this long.
Pollard is regarded as a national hero in Israel, where nearly every prime
minister since the time of his arrest, in 1985, has called for his release. In
the late 1990s, the presidents of fifty-five major American Jewish
organizations jointly called for Pollard to be set free. And for decades,
there've been mass protests both in Israel and the United States calling on a
succession of American presidents to free Pollard, both on humanitarian grounds
and, his supporters say, because he gave information to a close U.S. ally, and
was unjustly accused of betraying the United States. Many of those protests are
organized by Pollard's wife, whom he married while in prison and remains one of
his staunchest defenders.
When Brooks supervised Pollard, he dismissed Pollard and
sent him to work in another office, where he was stripped of his security
clearances, because Pollard showed signs of being "mentally
unstable," Brooks said.
A few years later, Pollard's security clearances were
restored, and shortly thereafter he began spying for Israel, Brooks said.
"Giving that [intelligence] away was a tremendous boon to the
Soviets," he said, repeating a frequently-levied charge that classified
intelligence made its way into Soviet hands. Some former officials have claimed
that Israel bartered the purloined intelligence in exchange for the Soviet Union
allowing Jews to emigrate to Israel.
Brooks said that in his opinion, the information Pollard
gave to Israel was probably stolen by Soviet spies. "The Mossad at the
time was well penetrated by the KGB," Brooks said. "Based on the
degree of penetration by the Russians, it would be very, very strange if they
didn't get access to it."
Brooks said that the damage to U.S. intelligence efforts
was considerable and long-lasting, and included sources of intelligence that
were permanently lost to American spies. A former senior intelligence official
said the number of documents Pollard stole was among the largest in U.S.
history up to that point.
In a 1999 New Yorker article,
journalist Seymour Hersh interviewed former intelligence officials who said
they could measure the cost of Pollard's spying in terms of communications
channels that went silent. "The data passed along by Pollard included
detailed information on the various platforms -- in the air, on land, and at
sea -- used by military components of the National Security Agency to intercept
Israeli military, commercial, and diplomatic communications," Hersh wrote.
Hersh quoted an anonymous intelligence expert who claimed
that U.S. intelligence personnel noticed a significant decrease in the
communications traffic they were monitoring, including at NSA listening posts
in England, Tel Aviv, and Cyprus. "We could see the whole process [of
collecting intelligence] slowing down," the expert told Hersh.
In 1998, Brooks, along with three fellow retired admirals
who had served as directors of naval intelligence, wrote a letter to the Washington Post to dispel what they called
"myths" that Pollard was an Israeli patriot who wanted to help Israel
protect itself from a surprise attack. "Pollard pleaded guilty and therefore
was never publicly tried," the retired admirals wrote. "Thus, the
American people never came to know that he offered classified information to
three other countries before working for the Israelis and that he offered his
services to a fourth country while he was spying for Israel."
They didn't name the countries, but Pollard reportedly
offered classified material to South Africa, Argentina, and Taiwan, and also
was in touch with Pakistani and Iranian sources about trying to broker arms.
Pollard was motivated my money and greed, the admirals said, applauding Clinton
for not releasing the spy. Pollard didn't deny taking payment for his services
-- more than half a million dollars, prosecutors alleged at his sentencing
hearing in 1987 -- but claimed he was being rewarded simply for doing a good
job, and that he intended to pay back some of the money.
One former intelligence official said the amount of
information Pollard stole, as well as the "indiscriminate" nature
with which he took it, is what most outraged U.S. spies. Pollard couldn't have
known everything that he took, nor could he be sure that it was only shared
with the Israelis, the former official said.
In a sworn statement to the judge presiding over
Pollard's sentencing, then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger said Pollard
had compromised several classified intelligence systems. Weinberger also
reportedly told the judge there was suspicion -- though no proof -- that
intelligence Pollard gave to Israel was later obtained by the Soviet Union.
Pollard told Hersh that as far as signals intelligence --
NSA's bread and butter -- was concerned, the U.S. government "has
consistently lied in its public version of what I gave the Israelis."
Brooks, the retired admiral who once supervised Pollard, said
he had no objections to his being released now. Pollard is eligible for parole
next year, so even if he's not freed as part of current peace talks, he might
not remain in prison much longer.
"I really don't care what happens to him,"
Brooks said. "He's had a long time in prison." Brooks said he
wouldn't object to parole or even a commutation of Pollard's life sentence.
"But I have a great, great opposition to pardoning him," he said, an
act that can only come from the president. "He has no sense of remorse or
guilt whatsoever."
John Hudson and Yochi Dreazen contributed
reporting.
Gali Tibbon / AFP
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