Jonathan Pollard: Has the Punishment Come to Outweigh the Crime? : Keep him locked up: His spying did great damage. An expected Israeli bid for his release should be resisted.

The inauguration of President Clinton is expected to be quickly followed by a request from the Israeli government--probably through diplomacy’s “back channels”--to release American spy Jonathan Jay Pollard to Israeli custody.

Pollard spied against the United States, giving thousands of classified, highly sensitive documents to a foreign country. Because that country was Israel, Pollard has--within a narrow circle--become a celebrity, a martyr and the hero of an international campaign to spring him from the maximum-security prison where he is serving a life sentence.

For at least 17 months in 1984-85, Pollard traveled from his office at the Naval Intelligence Support Center in Suitland, Md., to the Washington area’s many intelligence-gathering outposts, where he collected the secrets he sold to Israel. He amassed what was later described as “a room full of documents.” Some of the information he sold compromised U.S. intelligence activities--and possibly Americans and friends of America--in Arab countries.

Former Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger said that Pollard’s depredations “both damaged and destroyed policies and national assets which have taken many years, great effort and enormous national resources to secure.” Weinberger said that it was “difficult for me . . . to conceive of a greater harm to national security than that caused” by Pollard “in view of the breadth, the critical importance to the United States and the high sensitivity of the information he sold to Israel.”

That is what Weinberger said on the record in an affidavit before Pollard’s sentencing in 1987. Weinberger also prepared a highly classified damage report. The report remains classified, even though disclosure of its contents would probably blunt the free-Pollard campaign. Retired Rear Adm. Thomas A. Brooks, former director of U.S. Naval Intelligence, has told associates: “It isn’t a question of what he gave away--but what didn’t he give away.”

The view of Pollard by U.S. intelligence officials is that he is a traitorous lowlife, “right there with the child molesters,” as one Navy captain said. But in political Washington--the White House, the Justice Department and the State Department--Pollard is more a problem than a criminal, a sensitive topic that must be handled with extreme caution, for he has a constituency; he is the first American spy to be the beneficiary of a special-interest group.

Only in Washington could spying become a political issue, like gun control or wheat subsidies. Only in Washington could diplomats and lobbyists try to transform a spy into a misunderstood zealot and his brazen acts of espionage into mere mischief between friendly nations.

Pro-Pollard crusaders have been lobbying for his freedom in the media and in the nation’s capital while U.S. spy-catchers look on, angry and frustrated. Because of security restraints, the spy-catchers cannot reveal the full extent of Pollard’s pillaging. And because of the complex relationship between the United States and Israel, members of the Pollard lobby can cry “Israeli bashing” or even “anti-Semitism” whenever the merits of their campaign are challenged.

Initially, Israel described the spying as a “rogue operation” run outside of the Israeli intelligence Establishment. The State Department was willing to let the matter go at that. Soon after Pollard’s arrest, a meeting in Washington on the U.S.-Israeli strategic cooperation agreement went on as planned. But the Pentagon and the Justice Department, suffering from an epidemic of spying, pressed for a thorough investigation of Israel’s espionage in the United States. “In a case like this,” an intelligence official told us, “there is always the possibility of a false-flag operation.” (This is spy-catcher shorthand for the duping of a prospective secrets-giver by an unfriendly agent claiming to be working for a friendly nation.)

The free-Pollard campaign became politically serious in 1988 when 70 Israeli legislators petitioned President Reagan to pardon Pollard and his wife, Anne Henderson Pollard. (She was sentenced to five years for her part in the spy operation; she has since been released and divorced by Jonathan.)

Pollard was certainly a mercenary, spying for Israel for money. He told U.S. authorities that his base rate was $1,500 per month (tax-free, of course), and he was asking for an increase when he was caught. In addition, he said, the Israelis bought his wife a $10,000 diamond ring and gave the couple between $10,000 and $12,000 in cash--he forgot exactly how much--to pay for their honeymoon in Europe.

Pollard is now serving a life sentence for his crimes against the United States. The new President should carefully read the Pollard files when he receives the “friendly note” that we know is now being written in Jerusalem.