America's Traitor, Israel's Patriot

By Mark Thompson/Washington

When Jonathan Jay Pollard realized that the FBI was hot on his trail in 1985 because he was suspected of spying for Israel, he fled to Jerusalem's embassy in Washington. Accompanied by his wife Anne and their cat Dusty, he pleaded with Israeli guards for sanctuary after the automatic security gate safely closed behind his 1980 green Mustang, stranding the FBI outside the compound. "Listen! I'm Danny Cohen!" he told the guards, using the false name on his Israeli passport. "It's me, Jonathan Pollard!" But Israeli officials wouldn't let him in.

Last Friday they couldn't get him out. Like a Halloween apparition, Pollard haunted the ninth and final day of last week's Middle East peace talks after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted that President Clinton free Pollard and allow the convicted spy to fly to Israel. Clinton agreed only to review Pollard's continued incarceration.

The case has always been an espionage trompe l'oeil, its outline and impact differing for each viewer. After getting over their initial shock at Pollard's acts, most Israelis and many U.S. Jewish groups believe Pollard, who has been in jail for 13 years, has been adequately punished. But inside the U.S. intelligence and military communities, there remains little doubt that Pollard's perfidy not only warranted but required the life sentence he received. To U.S. intelligence officials Pollard was a traitor whose release would give other allies a green light to spy on America. Pollard, they argue, was not so much a friend of Israel's as a lover of the cash and extravagant travel Israel lavished on him as he spied.

Pollard, 44, grew up Jewish in South Bend, Ind. He attended Stanford University and failed in a 1977 bid to land a CIA job. But two years later, the Navy put him on the payroll just outside the capital as a civilian intelligence analyst. He went to work assessing the Soviet navy but soon was granted top-level security clearances that essentially gave him a library card to the shelves holding the nation's most tightly guarded secrets.

Pollard took reams of classified material each weekend to an Israeli-occupied apartment, where agents churned it through a photocopier. After 18 months, he had brought enough paper to make a stack 6 ft. high, 6 ft. wide and 10 ft. deep. While Pollard apparently didn't ask for money up front, once he began spying, the Israelis paid him $2,500 monthly. Then there were the trips to Europe and a $7,000 diamond ring for Anne, whom Pollard divorced in 1990.

While much of what Pollard handed over remains classified, the U.S. government says he delivered intelligence on the Pakistani nuclear-bomb program, Iraqi and Syrian chemical weapons, Libyan air defenses and the layout of the Palestine Liberation Organization's headquarters in Tunis, which the Israelis bombed in 1985. More critically, in handing over this material, Pollard betrayed the U.S. intelligence community's "sources and methods"--a blueprint of the capabilities and limitations of the world's most powerful intelligence network and important clues to the identity of U.S. agents abroad. Pollard argues that he gave Israel only information it was entitled to under a 1983 pact between Washington and Jerusalem.

Last December, Pollard expressed remorse for his spying, shortly after winning Israeli citizenship. In May, Israel finally acknowledged its culpability in the affair. "You are not alone," Netanyahu told Pollard that month in a hand-written note. "The State of Israel will go on working, tirelessly and dauntlessly, to bring you home." And if Pollard finally heads home, it will be with the official Israeli passport--emblazoned with his own name this time--that he received in 1996.

--By Mark Thompson/Washington