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Jews vs. Spooks President
Clinton has made a career of wriggling out of problems of his own making, but
he may finally have trapped himself. During last year's Wye peace talks,
Clinton apparently hinted to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that
he would free convicted spy Jonathan Pollard--now serving a life sentence--if
Israel signed the peace deal. After CIA Director George Tenet protested,
Clinton backed off slightly, agreeing only to reconsider Pollard's clemency
in exchange for Netanyahu's signature. It's no
wonder Clinton is so dilatory: Pollard presents a dilemma with no
satisfactory political solution: The entire national security apparatus, from
Tenet to the FBI to the Defense Department to the State Department to the
heads of House and Senate intelligence committees, adamantly opposes
Pollard's release. And virtually the entire American Jewish community favors it.
The spooks or the Jews: Which should he choose? Clinton
finds himself in this swamp because the dynamics of the case have vastly
changed during the past few years. A civilian Navy intelligence analyst,
Pollard was arrested in 1985 and quickly pleaded guilty to selling secrets to
Israel. In 1984-85, he had given 500,000 or more pages of highly classified
documents to his Israeli handlers. In the plea agreement, prosecutors
promised not to seek a life sentence, but the judge, after reading a secret
account of the damage Pollard had done, sentenced him to life anyway. Until
recently, Pollard's cause had been championed mostly by a small, vocal,
paranoid, inflammatory, dishonest group of supporters, principally extremely
pro-Israel, right-wing American Jewish groups. Their primary claims are that:
1) Pollard did no real harm to national security; 2) he was well intentioned
in spying for our friend Israel; 3) he was unfairly deprived of a trial; 4)
he never saw the evidence against him; and 5) the government broke his plea
agreement by asking for a life sentence. All these
assertions, which are made incessantly and at high volume, are false. Pollard
did enormous damage to U.S. national security, thoroughly compromising
intelligence-gathering in the Middle East and elsewhere (more on this below).
He also spied (or tried to) for several countries besides Israel. He had no
trial because he chose to plead guilty. He did see the evidence against him,
and so on. (Pollard's perfervid supporters repeat these canards despite all
evidence: Morton Klein, national president of the Zionist Organization of
America, told me that prosecutors "promised they would be very lenient
on him ... then asked for a life sentence." In fact, prosecutors told
Pollard they would ask for a "substantial" sentence and then didn't
ask for a life sentence.) Pollard
devotees also demagogically appeal to Jewish sentiment. They liken the
"Pollard Affair" to the Dreyfus Affair, and assert that Pollard was
sentenced to life because he is Jewish. They claim that Pollard's arrest
caused an "outpouring of Jewish bloodletting" in national security
agencies, "quoting" top national security officials as saying they
don't need any more "Jew-boys like Pollard." They have portrayed
anti-Pollard Jewish groups as lapdogs trying to ingratiate themselves with
mainstream America. As long as
these kooks were Pollard's principal support, it was easy for Presidents Bush
and Clinton to ignore him. But then Pollard got lucky. In the early '90s, the
Israeli government, which had distanced itself from Pollard, embraced him.
And during the past three years, mainstream Jewish groups have started coming
around. Almost every significant Jewish organization now supports Pollard's
release, from the World Jewish Congress to B'nai B'rith to the Conference of
Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations. Elie Wiesel, Edgar Bronfman Sr.,
and Alan Dershowitz--a holy trinity of North American Jews--recently implored
the president to grant Pollard clemency. Mainstream
Jewish groups had ignored Pollard in the '80s and early '90s because they
concluded that anti-Semitism had nothing to do with his arrest or sentencing.
Their new Pollard advocacy is moderate and muted--low-key constituent
service. They have given Pollard's cause new credibility by avoiding the
preposterous claims of his loyalists. They insist that his behavior was
loathsome. They don't question the legality of his plea or his sentence. They
don't claim that an Israeli spy deserves special treatment. But, they say,
Pollard has shown remorse for his wrongdoing. He deserves freedom on
"humanitarian" grounds: He has served far longer than anyone else
convicted of spying for an ally. Other such spies spend 2 to 4 years in
prison: Pollard is closing in on 14 years. But the
mainstream arguments, too, are wrong. Pollard does not, in fact, seem to be
terribly remorseful. He took Israeli citizenship in 1995, and he recently
called the United States a "foreign country." He has said, "I
would rather be rotting in prison than sitting shiva for the hundreds of
thousands of Israelis who could have died" had he not spied. In 1993 he
was caught trying to smuggle classified information out in his prison
letters. More
important, the mainstream groups are downplaying what Pollard did. Pollard is
not just some confused, well-meaning, basically harmless spy who was
railroaded by an overzealous judge. In the Jan. 18 New Yorker, Seymour Hersh
assessed the damage caused by Pollard to America's national security. It is
vast, arguably as much as all-star snoop Aldrich Ames did in his spying for
the Soviet Union. According to Hersh, who was leaked information that had
been kept secret since Pollard's arrest, Pollard not only compromised
America's Middle East operations, he also gave away tons of American classified
data about the Soviet Union. Pollard handed over information about how the
United States tracked Soviet subs. He gave the Israelis the bible of American
signals intelligence, a manual that shows exactly what foreign (that is,
Soviet) signals the United States has intercepted. He gave away documents
that could have helped the Soviets identify American moles. He may have even
given away the United States' attack plan for a war with the U.S.S.R. This
information was probably traded to the U.S.S.R. by Israel in exchange for
Soviet Jewish émigrés. Pollard may have spied for a "friendly"
country, but he did a traitor's work. Pollard's
supporters have reacted to these revelations with skepticism. None of the
Jewish groups has reversed its support for Pollard's release. His absolutist
followers smear Hersh as a fabricator. Mainstream groups, not unreasonably,
question the timing of Hersh's story. For 14 years, the intelligence
community has refused to release this damage assessment on the grounds that
it would harm national security. The only reason to release it now is
political, and national security officials shouldn't play politics. Hersh's
information may be damning, they say, but it is unverifiable and irrefutable.
Pollard's supporters can cling to that excuse. Clinton has no such out. He knows whether the charges in the Hersh story are true, and that's why he's in such a quandary. Usually, Clinton finds a way to reconcile the presidential and the political. Here he cannot. If Pollard is guilty of all that Hersh charges him with, Clinton the president knows that freeing him is a terrible wrong, a slap at America's national security guardians and an invitation to our allies to spy on us. But even if Pollard is guilty of all that Hersh charges him with, Clinton the politician knows that freeing him is a political win, a present to some of his dearest supporters. There is only one way for Clinton to extricate himself from this dilemma: He can commute Pollard's sentence so that the spy can't go free until 2001. That would be the perfect Clintonian solution: Leave the mess for someone else to clean up.
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