Jonathan Pollard – Justice Served?

by Mark H. Levine
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When her husband urged her to “go see our friends and give them our cactus,” Anne Henderson-Pollard knew something terrible had happened. The peculiar words were a code that Jonathan Pollard had devised, instructing Anne to destroy top secret documents he had stolen from his office, where he worked as an intelligence analyst. For 18 months, Pollard’s spying went undetected, but on November 15, 1985, FBI agents detained him for questioning. Lacking sufficient evidence, interrogators released the young man, who fled with his wife to his spymaster’s embassy in Washington, DC. Instead of receiving a hero’s welcome, the couple was turned away. “Do you know what I have done for Israel?” Pollard pleaded. “I’m an Israeli agent.”

Today, Jonathan Pollard sits in prison, having served 21 years of a life sentence. No one disputes the facts that lead to his conviction: Pollard, an American Jew, spied for Israel; he provided Israel with valuable classified information, including U.S. assessments of Syrian, Iraqi, Libyan, and Iranian nuclear and chemical weapons capabilities; in return for a promise from prosecutors not to seek a sentence of life in prison, Pollard cooperated with them and pled guilty.

A CONTROVERSY BREWS

Agreement about the controversial affair ends with those elementary facts. Pollard’s supporters believe he deserves clemency because injustice has kept him imprisoned far longer than reasonable for his crime. His critics, on the other hand, claim that Pollard deserves life in prison because he severely damaged national security.

JUSTICE IS SERVED

The argument against freeing Jonathan Pollard stands on whether the secrets Pollard gave away severely compromised U.S. spy networks. According to a classified memorandum written for the trial judge by then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Pollard’s actions amounted to treason. “It is difficult for me…to conceive of a greater harm to national security,” Weinberger wrote.

JUSTICE WAS PERVERTED

Pollard’s supporters cry foul. They claim the plea bargain agreement was violated when prosecutors submitted Weinberger’s top secret memorandum, which indirectly urged the judge to hand down the maximum penalty. As a result of that injustice, Pollard received the harshest sentence in American history for selling U.S. secrets to an ally. Similar offenders have been sentenced to an average of only two to four years in jail. Even more grievous, Pollard’s attorneys have been continuously denied access to Weinberger’s classified document, preventing them from challenging the damaging evidence in court. This violation of due process prompted U.S. Appeals Court Judge Stephen Williams to dissent from his colleagues and condemn Pollard’s sentence as “a complete and fundamental miscarriage of justice.”

THE JEWISH VIEW

When Jonathan Pollard was arrested, the American Jewish community feared antisemitism, so they distanced themselves from him. But as he languished in jail through the mid-1990s, Americans and Israelis—including three prime ministers— urged President Clinton to release Pollard. His lifetime sentence “is unduly harsh,” they pleaded. But Clinton refused. Pollard’s suffering prompted Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu—former chief rabbi of Israel—to decide in 1997 that the obligation to redeem captives (pidyon shvuyim) applies to the American spy. Jews everywhere must “do everything they can” to free Pollard, he wrote, because unjust captivity is worse than starvation and death (Bava Batra 8b).