Keep This Spy Behind Bars

President Clinton has asked senior administration officials to recommend by Jan. 11 whether he should grant clemency to Jonathan Pollard, the former Navy intelligence analyst who was convicted in 1987 of spying for Israel. Clinton has twice before rejected commutation for Pollard, most recently in 1996, with the State, Defense and Justice departments and the CIA all opposing any change in his life sentence. There is no reason to think that any of the government officials most familiar with the damage done by Pollard to national security have changed their minds, and there is no reason for Clinton to change his. Pollard should remain in prison, where he deserves to be.

For at least 18 months in the mid-1980s Pollard provided his Israeli handlers in Washington with thousands of pages of top-secret intelligence documents. Pollard’s American apologists argue that the fact he was spying for an ally mitigates his crime. They further contend that he was only giving Israel information it needed to safeguard its security, and that the United States in fact was derelict in not voluntarily sharing this data with Israel. This assumes a comprehensive familiarity with the stolen material they obviously do not have. The Israeli government does know what was in those documents, but its assurance to credulous sympathizers that it had a right to whatever material Pollard provided is self-serving and presumptuous nonsense.

Pollard’s appeal for clemency hasn’t been helped by Israel’s refusal to return the stolen goods it received. It hasn’t helped either that at the U.S.-sponsored talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in October, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sandbagged Clinton at the last minute by trying to link his acceptance of the Wye Plantation accord to clemency for Pollard.

The full extent of the damage done by Pollard’s spying remains hidden from public view. There are reports that some material he gave the Israelis found its way to Moscow, either via Soviet spies inside the Israeli government or because Israeli intelligence used the information as trading material. This might well have compromised methods and sources used by the United States to acquire intelligence in the former Soviet Union.

Pollard was generously paid by Israel for engaging in espionage against his own country and knew from the first moment that he was committing a major crime. That is what put him where he belongs.