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The Truth About Jonathan Pollard John Loftus When American intelligence broke
the Soviet wartime code, we learned that the Soviets had infiltrated the
American government. The American intelligence community’s penchant for
secrecy and its refusal to admit that it had been infiltrated was so great
that it failed to disclose this to President Harry S. Truman. This is how
Daniel Patrick Moynihan described it: "The Soviets knew we knew
they knew we knew. The only one who didn’t know was the President of the United
States. Our politics was injured for 30 years by this."—Quoted in the New York Times,
March 30, 2002 There is a good reason why neither
Congress nor the American Jewish leadership supports the release of Jonathan
Pollard from prison: They all were told a lie—a humongous Washington whopper
of a lie. The lie was first whispered in the "bubble," the secret
intelligence briefing room on Capitol Hill, but it quickly spread. Just before Pollard’s sentencing,
Senator Chic Hecht of Nevada, a senior member of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, telephoned the leaders of every major Jewish organization to warn
them not to support Pollard in any way. Pollard had done something so
horrible that it could never be made public. Several senior intelligence
sources confirmed the message: No matter how harsh the sentence, Jewish
leaders had to keep their mouths shut; don’t make a martyr out of Jonathan
Pollard. Washington insiders thought they
knew the big, dark secret. David Luchins, an aide to Sen. Daniel Patrick
Moynihan, announced to reporters that he had seen "secret documents
confirming that Pollard’s spying had resulted in the loss of lives of U.S.
intelligence agents." Luchins later recanted his statement, but not
until the damage had already been done. Pollard had supposedly given
Israel a list of every American spy inside the Soviet Union. On several
occasions Soviet agents in New York had posed as Israelis. The CIA reasoned
that that was also true in Israel: The Mossad had been infiltrated by one or
more Soviet spies. In the trade this is called a "false flag"
operation: Your enemy poses as your ally and steals your secrets. In this
case, the CIA reasoned in attempting to explain its horrendous losses,
Pollard had passed the information to Israel he had stolen, which in turn
fell victim to the "false flag" operation. Soviet agents in Israel,
posing as Israeli intelligence agents, passed the information to Moscow,
which then wiped out American human assets in the Soviet Union. Pollard hadn’t meant for this to
happen, but the result of the "false flag" mistake was mass murder.
In a matter of months, every spy we had in Russia—more than 40 agents—had
been captured or killed. At least that was the accusation, but the basis for
it had been kept secret from Pollard and his defense counsel. The public could not be told the
horrifying truth: American intelligence had gone blind behind the Iron
Curtain—we had lost all our networks, as the intelligence community publicly
admitted more than a decade later. The Soviets could have attacked the United
States without warning. Everyone who knew at the time (including me) blamed
Pollard. On March 5, 1987, at 2:22 p.m.,
the sentencing hearing in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., began in
Criminal Case No. 86-207, United States of America v. Jonathan Jay Pollard.
The prosecutors produced a secret letter and memo from Secretary of Defense
Caspar "Cap" Weinberger referring to the "enormous" harm
that Pollard had done to our national security. In his memo, Weinberger
directly accused Pollard of betraying America’s "sources and
methods," which is to say, he had betrayed our spies in foreign
countries. Weinberger publicly stated that
Pollard was the worst spy in American history: "It is difficult for me,
even in the so-called year of the spy, to conceive of a greater harm to
national security than that caused by the defendant." Despite his plea
agreement to the contrary with the government, Pollard was given the maximum
sentence, life in prison. Weinberger later said that he wished Pollard had
been shot. A week after the sentencing, the
Washington Times reported that the United States had identified Shabtai
Kalmanovich as the Soviet spy in Israel who supposedly worked for the Mossad
but was actually working for the KGB; he had betrayed American secrets to
Moscow. Kalmanovich had been flying under a false flag. Washington insiders
winked knowingly at one another: Pollard’s contact in Israel had been caught. Just to make sure that Pollard was
blamed, U.S. intelligence sources, several months later, leaked word to the
press of the Kalmanovich connection. "A Russian mole has infiltrated the
Mossad and is transmitting highly sensitive American intelligence information
to the Russians," was the report flashed around the world by United Press
International on Dec. 14, 1987. Citing "American intelligence
sources," the UPI announced that the "sensitive intelligence
material relayed to Israel by Jonathan Pollard had reached the KGB." But it was all untrue. Every bit
of it. Pollard wasn’t the serial killer. The Jew didn’t do it. It was one of
their own WASPs—Aldrich Ames, a drunken senior CIA official who sold the
names of America’s agents to the Russians for cash. Pollard was framed for
Ames’s crime, while Ames kept on drinking and spying for the Soviets for
several more years. In fact, Israeli intelligence later suspected that Ames
played a direct role in framing Pollard. But no one in America then knew the
truth. Ames was arrested in February
1994, and confessed to selling out American agents in the Soviet Union, but
not all of them. It was only logical to assume that Pollard had betrayed the
rest of them, as one former CIA official admitted shortly after Ames’s
arrest. Even one life lost was too many. So Pollard continued to rot in jail.
No one dreamed that yet another high-level Washington insider had sold us out
to Soviet intelligence. Years passed, and eventually a Russian defector told
the truth. A senior FBI official—Special Agent Robert Hanssen—had betrayed
the rest of our agents. Hanssen was arrested in February 2001, and soon
confessed in order to avoid the death penalty. He was sentenced to life in
prison without parole. Would the Americans now admit that
they had been conned into blaming Pollard? Beltway bureaucrats do not readily
admit to mistakes of this magnitude. Instead, they convinced themselves that
Pollard might still be at least partly to blame for the worst debacle in U.S.
intelligence history. One desperate analyst from the National Security
Council, looking for something to pin on Pollard, had his own theory. Maybe
the Russians didn’t initially believe that their own spies (Ames and Hanssen)
had procured all the names of U.S. agents in the Soviet Union. Maybe
Pollard’s list tipped the scales. Such things had happened before.
Once again, Washington insiders circled their alphabet agencies to fire back
at the critics who dared to suggest that Pollard might have been innocent of
the major charge against him. Meanwhile, deep inside the Navy’s
intelligence service, a low-level decision was made to re-examine the Pollard
case in view of the convictions of Ames and Hanssen. With sickening chagrin,
the Navy discovered that the evidence needed to clear Pollard had been under
its nose all along. As my source in Naval intelligence
explained, the list of our secret agents inside Russia had been kept in a
special safe in a special room with a special "blue stripe"
clearance needed for access. When I was a lawyer in the Justice Department
and would be sent over to the CIA to do research, I was permitted to use only
a blue-striped, CIA-issue legal pad for note-taking. Nothing with a blue
stripe could leave the building without being scrutinized by CIA security. But Jonathan Pollard didn’t have
"blue stripe" clearance, according to intelligence sources I spoke
with. That was the bombshell that would clear him of any possible connection
to the deaths of our Russian agents. Just to make sure, I checked it
out, even visiting Pollard in prison to confirm it. Sure enough, there is no
way on earth Jonathan Pollard could have entered the file room, let alone the
safe where the list was kept. But the intelligence community’s
failure to catch this and thereby discredit a critical piece of prosecutorial
evidence was, to put it mildly, a bit of an oversight. Some would say it was
an obscene blunder. I regard it as an understandable mistake that was
overlooked in the avalanche of phony evidence the KGB was planting that
pointed to Pollard and away from Ames and Hanssen, whom the Soviets wanted to
protect. Both of them had "blue stripe" clearance, as was well
documented in several books that have been written on each man and his
exploits. The lack of "blue
stripe" clearance was the final proof that Pollard could not possibly
have betrayed our Russian agents. It should certainly have gotten him a new
hearing. As a former federal prosecutor, I can state that it would be hard to
rebut this kind of evidence. The Justice Department, in one of
its briefs, had specifically mentioned the "false flag" theory as
grounds to support Pollard’s heavy sentence, arguing in part, that spying
even for friendly countries can be damaging if information ultimately falls
into the wrong hands. In this, the Justice Department had unwittingly misled
the judge. Weinberger also raised the "false flag" issue in his
top-secret memorandum to the judge. The only possible way to uphold
the sentence might be the "harmless error" doctrine. The government
could admit that Pollard had never stolen the Russian agent list, but so
what? Maybe he had passed other information that was equally damaging, so he
would still deserve to remain in prison for the rest of his life. The problem with the
"harmless error" strategy is that the rest of the material that
Pollard gave the Israelis was itself pretty harmless. In fact, the original damage
assessment from the intelligence community confirmed that the impact on our
national security—of the release of information other than the agent
names—was not serious. This assessment came after Pollard’s initial grand
jury appearance, but before the Soviets began to frame Pollard with the phony
Kalmanovich connection. No less a figure than Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles
Leeper had characterized damage caused by the release of the information that
Pollard actually gave Israel as "minimal." The reason America suffered so little harm is simple:
Pollard was stealing Soviet secrets for Israel, not American secrets for the
Soviets. Before the fall of communism, the Soviets were shipping guns to
nearly every terrorist group in the Middle East. Pollard knew that U.S.
intelligence had been ordered to share this information with Israel—under an
executive order signed by President Reagan—but had not done so. In fact, as Pollard himself admitted in one of my three
prison interviews, many, if not most, of the documents he handed over were
cover sheets showing the titles of files that the U.S. was supposed to share
with Israel, but were holding back. (The U.S government, according to Israeli
intelligence sources, mistakenly counted the cover sheets as if they were
full files and came up with the mythical "room full of stolen
documents," instead of the small boxfulls or so that Pollard actually
passed.) In the long run, though, the issue is not how many boxes Pollard
passed, but whether anything he gave Israel did harm to America. After the government’s "false flag" theory was
blown up by the "blue stripe" discovery, the anti-Pollard members
of the intelligence community had to come up with a new PR campaign for
damage control. In order to justify Pollard’s life sentence, they had to show
that he did do some potentially catastrophic damage to America. What they
came up with was a bit of a stretch. Pollard had given Israel a set of radio
frequency guidebooks, a worldwide listing of short-wave radio bands. It takes
a lot of time and money to compile one of these guides, but essentially they
are just publicly available information, openly deduced by listening to who
is talking to whom on which radio bands. Seymour Hersh is a famous reporter and long-time friend.
(I was his secret source in his 1983 book The Price of Power—Kissinger in
Nixon’s White House (Summit Books). But Sy had his leg pulled on Pollard
by his CIA sources, as a result of which Sy published a story in the New
Yorker in January 1999 claiming that these radio guides were just about
the crown jewels of U.S. intelligence. The truth is that certain portions of
the guide had already been sold to the Soviets by the Walker spy ring,
according to courtroom testimony, which also revealed that the Soviets
thought so little of the guides’ value that they did not even bother to ask
their top spies, Ames and Hanssen, to steal the remainder of the set.
Moreover, as previously noted, the government’s own damage assessment report
originally concluded that the loss of the guides was a minor matter. So much for the crown jewels. If that is the best spin the
intelligence community can come up with, Pollard is probably entitled to
immediate release for time served. The truth is that without the "false
flag" theory, and the accompanying "worst spy in history"
hysteria, Pollard would probably have been served no more than five years in
prison. He has already served 18 years. After 9/11, though, I began to realize that Pollard’s tale
was only the beginning of a much bigger story about a major America
intelligence scandal, which is the subject of a book I am now working on.
Although Jonathan Pollard did not realize it, he had stumbled across the
darkest secret in the Reagan administration’s closet. It is one of the reasons
that I am serving as the intelligence advisor on a trillion-dollar federal
lawsuit filed in August 2002 against the Saudis on behalf of the victims of
9/11. Pollard in fact did steal something that the U.S.
government never wishes to talk about. Several friends inside military
intelligence have told me that Pollard gave the Israelis a roster that listed
the identities of all the Saudi and other Arab intelligence agents we knew
about as of 1984. (This has been corroborated by Israeli sources, as well.)
At that time, this list, known in intelligence circles as the "blue
book," would have been relatively unimportant to the United States—but
not to Israel. Since 9/11, however, Pollard’s "blue book" is of
profound interest to everyone, including the U.S. These particular agents are
now a major embarrassment to the Saudis and to the handful of American spy
chiefs who had employed these Saudi intelligence agents on the sly. Some of
the names on this list—such as Osama Bin Laden—turned out to be leaders of terrorist
groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood and what we now call Al Qaeda. In hindsight, we now know that Pollard stole the one
book—that, incidentally, was alluded to in Weinberger’s secret
memorandum—that unquestionably proves that the Americans knew as early as
1984 about the connection between the Saudis and terrorist groups. How does this all fit together? During the Reagan-Bush
administrations, the National Security Council wanted to throw the Soviets
out of Afghanistan using Arab soldiers instead of American. It seemed like a
good idea at the time, but no one thought about the long-term consequences.
In imitation of the Soviet strategy of hiring terrorists, we asked the Saudis
to recruit a proxy army of Islamic terrorists whom we would supply with guns
and pay indirectly, according to intelligence sources. By having the Saudis
hire the "freedom fighters," we could avoid embarrassing questions
in Congress about giving the taxpayers money to known Arab terrorists. In 1982, I went on "60 Minutes" to expose Nazi
war criminals I had been assigned to prosecute who were then working for the
CIA. It was one of those Cold War blunders. The CIA didn’t have a clue it was
dealing with Nazi war criminals. It thought they were "freedom
fighters." In 1985, I ended up testifying before the U.S. House
Judiciary Committee about Nazis on the intelligence payroll. Sadly, the only lesson the intelligence bosses learned was
to put the bad guys on someone else’s payroll (the Saudis for one), and then
reimburse them under the table. Because of my whistle-blowing during the
early 1980s, the CIA was still pretty sensitive about hiring Nazi
"freedom fighters" without background checks, so they were mostly
kept out of the loop about the Arab terrorists hired clandestinely by the Saudis
to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. The Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989. The naive
Americans walked away from the Frankenstein monster they had created, but the
cynical Saudis kept the terrorists on the payroll. From the Saudi perspective,
it was safer to keep paying the terrorists groups to attack Israel, Bosnia or
Chechnya rather than letting them all back into Saudi Arabia. As one U.S.
intelligence bureaucrat cynically confided to me, "Sure we knew that the
Saudis were giving money to terrorist groups, but they were only killing
Jews, they weren’t killing Americans." In this "Keystone Cops" affair, one wing of U.S.
intelligence was hunting terrorists while another winked at the Saudis’
recruitment of them. I have spoken to numerous FBI and CIA counter-terrorist
agents, all of whom tell a similar story. Whenever the FBI or CIA came close
to uncovering the Saudi terrorist connection, their investigations were
mysteriously terminated. In hindsight, I can only conclude that some of our
own Washington bureaucrats have been protecting the Al Qaeda leadership and
their oil-rich Saudi backers from investigation for more than a decade. I am not the only one to reach this conclusion. In his
autobiography, Oliver North confirmed that every time he wanted to do
something about terrorism, Weinberger stopped him because it might upset the
Saudis and jeopardize the flow of oil to the U.S. John O’Neill, a former FBI
agent and our nation’s top Al Qaeda expert, stated in a 2001 book written by
Jean Charles Brisard, a noted French intelligence analyst, that everything we
wanted to know about terrorism could be found in Saudi Arabia. O’Neill warned the Beltway bosses repeatedly that if the
Saudis were to continue funding Al Qaeda, it would end up costing American
lives, according to several intelligence sources. As long as the oil kept
flowing, they just shrugged. Outraged by the Saudi cover-up, O’Neill quit the
FBI and became the new chief of security at the World Trade Center. In a
bitter irony, the man who could have exposed his bosses’ continuous cover-up
of the Saudi-Al Qaeda link was himself killed by Al Qaeda on 9/11. Congress has been told repeatedly that American
intelligence never knew the identities of the Arabs who threw the Soviets out
of Afghanistan. Inadvertently, Pollard stole the ultimate smoking gun that
shows exactly what the leaders of our intelligence community knew and when
they knew it. The "blue book" Pollard stole flatly establishes that
all the dots were connected many years before 9/11, and the only thing the
intelligence chiefs did competently was cover up the fact that we had long
known about the Saudi-terrorist link. In the ultimate irony, Pollard may have to be let out of
prison to testify before Congress about the negligence of his own superiors.
Like O’Neill, Pollard had tried to warn his superiors that a wave of
terrorism was coming out of the Middle East, but no one would listen. Pollard
himself told me this. Pollard has admitted—to me and in writing to President
Clinton—that he was wrong and stupid in passing the information to Israel on
his own, but in the long run he may have committed the most unpardonable sin
of all: He was right and the bureaucrats were wrong. Pollard never thought he was betraying his country. And he
never did, although he clearly violated its laws. He just wanted to help
protect Israelis and Americans from terrorists. Now in prison for nearly two
decades, Pollard, who is in his late 40s, grows more ill year by year. If, as
seems likely, American bureaucrats choose to fight a prolonged delaying
action over a new hearing, Pollard will probably die in prison. There are
people in power inside the Beltway who have been playing for time. Time for
them ran out on 9/11. Sooner or later, they are going to be held accountable.
I hope that Pollard lives to see it. |
