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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).
