After 30 years in prison Jonathan Pollard, a former US civilian naval intelligence clerk convicted of spying for Israel, has been released from prison on parole at the age of 61.
Pollard, who sold US secrets for money, was released on Friday morning from the US federal prison in Butner, North Carolina, after serving his minimum recommended sentence. He is the only person to have received a life sentence for spying on the US for an ally.
Despite his release he will be subjected to rigorous bail conditions that confine him to living in the New York area, bans him from access to the internet and forbids him from giving interviews.
Pollard will also not be allowed to travel abroad for at least five years despite efforts by Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, to persuade Barack Obama that he should be allowed to travel to Israel.
Welcoming his release, Netanyahu, one of the most prominent advocates for a pardon for Pollard over the years, said in a statement: “The people in Israel welcome the release of Jonathan Pollard. As someone who has raised the issue for many years with American presidents, I have dreamt of this day. After three long and hard decades, Jonathan is finally reunited with his family.”
Pollard’s case was seen in strikingly different terms in Israel and the US – even when the possibility of his release was being discussed as a quid pro quo for progress on Middle East peace, a deal that never came to pass.
For US officials he was seen as an unreliable Walter Mitty figure who had betrayed his country for financial gain, and American politicians, particularly those with intelligence interests, have lobbied against his release. He is seen as a traitor by many Americans, one who damaged trust between the US and its Jewish citizens.
However, in Israel – which gave him citizenship while he was in prison – he was ultimately embraced by officials after initially being left to his fate.
Since his arrest, Pollard has been described as intelligent, but having an “extreme and unstable personality”, making his very acceptance in the intelligence community shocking.
Despite the high profile campaign to secure a pardon, including a recent personal appeal to Obama by Netanyahu, in recent weeks it has become clear that Israeli politicians and Pollard’s supporters have changed tack.
Netanyahu this week asked ministers to refrain from commenting on the Pollard case, while his supporters have become increasingly tight-lipped amid speculation that a less aggressive approach might see his parole conditions lifted.
Pollard’s case played out in the 1980s. After his graduation from Stanford University, Pollard attempted to realisedreams of becoming a spy for Israel’s intelligence apparatus, Mossad.
He started working for the US navy as an intelligence officer and by 1984 offered to pass secrets to an Israeli air force veteran.
He and his wife, Anne Henderson, were arrested in 1985 after Pollard passed “suitcases” of classified documents to Israeli intelligence in exchange for $10,000 and jewels, Haaretz reported. He pleaded guilty in 1986 in hopes of avoiding a life sentence, but in 1987 the plea agreement was rejected by federal court judge Caspar W Weinberger.
Some contend Pollard passed thousands more documents to Israel. A former deputy general counsel for national security at the FBI, ME Bowman, maintainedin an editorial in the New York Times that Pollard passed enough documents to “occupy 360 cubic feet”.
Pollard’s supporters have long argued that documents he stole were intelligence that should have been passed to Israel anyway – they were vital to security and should have been shared as part of a memorandum of agreement between the countries.
“Pollard was painfully aware that Israeli lives were being put in jeopardy as a result of this undeclared intelligence embargo,” attorneys argue on a website dedicated to his cause. “He did everything he possibly could to stop this covert policy and to have the legal flow of information to Israel restored. When his efforts met no success, he began to give the information to Israel directly.”
No comments:
Post a Comment