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The Pollard “Deal”
AP sources: US considers release of spy Pollard
The United States is talking with Israel about releasing convicted spy Jonathan Pollard early from his life sentence as an incentive to the Israelis in the troubled Mideast peace negotiations, people familiar with the talks said Monday.
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In return for the release, the people close to the talks said, Israel would have to undertake significant concessions to the Palestinians in Middle East negotiations. Such concessions could include some kind of freeze on Israeli settlements in disputed territory, the release of Palestinian prisoners beyond those Israel has already agreed to free and a guarantee that Israel would stay at the negotiating table beyond an end-of-April deadline.
Besides a ton (literary) of other stuff Pollard stole daily reports about the position of nuclear submarines in the Mediterranean and gave them to the Israelis. He was largely motivated by money and had also offered his service to other countries. The Israelis sold the nuclear subs reports the got from Pollard to the Soviet Union. This at the height of the cold war.
Given Pollard to the Israelis would be a huge gift for which they will, guaranteed, give nothing significant in return.
Encouraged by such a deal the NATO foreign ministers are currently mulling over a similar idea. They want to offer Russia all Russian prisoners in their jails if it promises to behave nicely in Ukraine. Just kidding.
Israel, the abusive husband, wants to stay married while the Palestinians, the wife, urgently want a fair divorce. The U.S. plays the divorce judge. The Pollard deal getting done is similar to the divorce being rejected, the husbands continued abuse of the wife plus him getting custody of and alimony for the judges kids.
Now that's some deal.
@ Posted by: MRW | Apr 2, 2014 12:48:15 AM | 57
The Secretary of Defense at the time who did know the circumstances, understood the consequences to the nation, would beg to differ, and filed a brief to get this guy killed asap as result.
Not according to M.E. Bowman who was the man who briefed Weinberger:
First he gives his background:
I am a lawyer, but I’ve not always been a lawyer. I was for six years a naval intelligence officer. And then at that point, the Navy decided I would be better as a lawyer and sent me to law school.
I only had a couple of years as a lawyer before I had unexpected transfer orders to the National Security Agency. I was the first Judge Advocate to go to the NSA and the reason I went — the Director of the Agency at the time was Admiral Bobby Inman. Smartest man I’ve ever met in my life. And as soon as I got to NSA, he pulled me into his office and he said I made a mistake in my life. I always went to one particular lawyer for advice and we both made Admiral and we never had time to talk to each other again. He said, “I want you to learn everything you can about intelligence operations and how to support them with legal — with your law degree. And go out and train other people to do it.” And so that was my direction at first. From there I — after I left NSA, I got a second law degree and the — I went and became the legal advisor to Naval Intelligence.
Long story short in my 27 years of active duty, I only had two assignments that were not supporting intelligence operations. And as I neared the end of my career, I came back from a tour as a diplomat in Italy and I’d only been here a couple of months when the FBI came and said we want you to come and do the same thing for us that you did in the Navy. So I spent the next 11 years in the Senior Executive Service of the FBI.
The reason I give you that background is because I have worked every major intelli — every major espionage operation between 1979 and 2009. And quite a few that weren’t major operations as well. In my judgment there are four espionage agents who stand out as the ones who did the most damage to the United States. Chronologically they are John Walker, Jonathan Pollard, Aldrich Ames and Bob Hanson, who I knew personally. I never worked the Aldrich Ames case, that’s the only one that I didn’t work because I was transitioning from the Navy to the FBI at that time.
Then he explains that Pollard became a thief and a traitor for the money:
Now just to recap for a moment what Pollard was trying to do. He didn’t start out to give information to the Israelis, he started out trying to sell anything he could, including classified information. He approached the Pakistanis, he approached the South Africans, he approached the Australians. He turned over classified information to a South African attaché just as a show of good faith.
So you know, he’s not a person who was trying just to help the Israelis, he was a pretty venal person here. At one point when they were — he was meeting with his handlers in Paris, he started commenting you know, I’m really taking a big risk, you know, all this sort of stuff. You know I can really get a lot of time in jail for what I’m doing, it’s a big deal. And the Israelis said well, what is it you want? And he said up it by $1,000 a month.
So you know this is — this is really what he is. He’s a person trying to make money. Now what did he do to earn my suggestion that he’s one of the top four? He took so much information to the Israelis, that they had to install two high speed copiers in an apartment to take care of everything that he brought them.
Then he explains about Weinberger wanting the death penalty:
Now the information that he turned over, some of it actually was information covered by 18 U.S. Code 194, which is mostly electronics communication information. It carries the death penalty. But at the time that Jonathan Pollard was — did his espionage work, there was no death penalty in the United States. That had been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. And at that time, a life sentence was really in practice 30 years. So that’s what we were looking at.
Jonathan Pollard was pretty good about telling us all the information that he had given over. And as a consequence of that, one of the things that we do usually with espionage agents, or at least that I did, is I would write an Affidavit for a senior officer to sign that explained what the harm was.
So of the things that he gave us, I selected 19 different documents that represented the different categories of information that he had turned over to the Israelis. And I — just using each one, I explained what the harm is from this type of information, not from this document, but from this type of information and gave it to Secretary Weinberger. And Secretary Weinberger made his edits to it.
One of his edits — I have to tell you about this. One of his edits was he put in a sentence in there that said that if the death penalty were available, I would have no hesitation in recommending it. I crossed that out. And the next version I sent in to him, he put the same thing back in. And finally I said Mr. Secretary, if we can’t ask for the maximum punishment which is life, we can’t say that death is appropriate. He finally got the picture.
But anyway, this Affidavit was then given to Judge Aubrey Robinson, who is now deceased and I took it to him personally. I sat in an out room while he read it and gave it back to me and said thank you very much, that’s all he said. And then we went to sentencing. And at sentencing, the prosecutors really didn’t say anything. They got up and they said he’s done harm, he should receive a substantial sentence, but that’s about the character of all they said.
Jonathan Pollard got up and talked about what he had done and how sorry he was, and by the way I really didn’t do anything that caused any harm. And Judge Robinson said come up here young man. And he pulled out the Affidavit which he now had in his hand. And he pulled it open to a few pages and he said okay, now explain this one.
And Jonathan Pollard couldn’t answer what it was, because it was a very big deal. In fact it has been made public now, so I can tell you what Judge Robinson was pointing at. It was something that’s what we all the Raisin Manual. And the Raisin Manuel is — was at that time, a document that described all of the communications capabilities of the Middle East and how the NSA could attack them. And Judge Robinson just said explain this one young man and he was done.
So at sentencing, Jonathan Pollard got life, which as I said, meant about thirty years. He has been there for about 27 or 8 years at this point. He has been eligible for parole for some time. He will not ask for parole because he wants clemency so as soon as he steps out of prison, he can leave the United States and go to Israel.
Source for all the above is here: http://www.natsummit.org/transcripts/spike_bowman.htm
So no the then Secretary of State for Defense did NOT file a brief asking for the death penalty. With all due respect to you I’m going to believe somebody who was there and who was personally involved over some anonymous commenter on b’s site about whose credentials, expertise, and veracity I know nothing.
Dubhaltach.
Posted by: Dubhaltach | Apr 2 2014 11:44 utc | 63
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