Spy’s Father Campaigns for Son’s Release : Justice: Morris Pollard tells students at a private school that his son broke the law for a moral purpose.

A group of San Fernando Valley youngsters listened raptly Thursday as the father of confessed spy Jonathan Jay Pollard pleaded with them to join a nationwide campaign to free his son, who he said gave classified information to Israel “for a moral purpose.”

Pollard, a former civilian intelligence analyst for the U.S. Navy, confessed in 1987 to passing U.S. defense secrets to Israeli agents and was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Among the documents Pollard passed to Israel were satellite photos, data on Soviet weaponry and the location of U.S. ships and training exercises, government officials said.

“My son broke the law, but for a moral purpose,” said Morris Pollard to about 135 students enrolled at Valley Torah, a private Orthodox high school in North Hollywood. “The information he gave to Israel, for instance, about poisonous gas plants in Syria and Iraq, saved lives and was being withheld by the United States.

“For that, Jonathan anticipated he would be severely punished, but not that he would get life in prison.”

For the past 18 months, Morris and Mollie Pollard’s quest to muster support for their son from the Jewish community has taken the elderly couple from their South Bend, Ind., home to synagogues and religious schools throughout the country.

Morris, a 73-year-old biology professor at Notre Dame University, usually takes the podium, and Mollie, 72, answers questions afterward.

The couple are hoping that if enough people contact their congressional representatives, their son will be either freed or he will receive a new trial.

Pollard never presented a defense because he pleaded guilty in exchange for what he believed would be leniency from the judge, his father said Thursday.

Alan Dershowitz, an attorney who teaches law at Harvard University, said he has taken Jonathan Pollard’s case without fee because he believes the spy and his wife received unduly harsh sentences.

Pollard’s wife, Anne Henderson-Pollard, received two five-year terms after she pleaded guilty to conspiring to receive government property and being an accessory to possession of national security information.

“I’ve done a systematic study of every similar case in American history, and no one else has ever been sentenced to more than 10 years for spying on an ally,” Dershowitz said.

“If he had not been Jewish, the sentence would have been lighter.”

But the campaign to free Pollard is not universally supported by Jews.

Yehuda Lev, associate editor of the Jewish Journal, a Los Angeles-based weekly newspaper with a circulation of 56,000, said Pollard’s supporters suffer from “paranoia about anti-Semitism.”

Many students at Valley Torah, however, said they were upset about Pollard’s plight after hearing his father speak.

“I have lost my trust in the American government,” said Joshua London, 14.