Posted on 11/04/2002 5:23:57 PM PST by JohnathanRGalt
by Jonathan Pollard
The Wall Street Journal - Originally published February 15, 1991
JONATHAN POLLARD: ....the photos that I turned over to the Israelis were of a number of Iraqi chemical weapons manufacturing plants which the government did not want to admit existed. Why? ....What the administration was really concerned about was being placed in a position where it would have to admit that it had tacitly condoned the creation of an Iraqi chemical weapons manufacturing capability.
In 1985, my son, Jonathan Pollard pleaded guilty to providing Israel with information about the military capabilities of Arab states, including Iraq. Today he sits in a basement cell, in isolation 23 hours a day, serving a life sentence.Jonathan was never accused of or indicted for treason, because he did not commit treason. He was indicted on one count of passing information to an ally, Israel. Abdel Kader Helmy, an Egyptian American rocket scientist, participated in a scheme to illegally ship ballistic missile technology to Egypt - technology later used to help increase the range of Iraq's Scud-B missiles. Mr. Helmy got less than a four-year sentence. Jonathan who warned Israel about Iraq's capabilities, got life.
America is now fighting a war with Iraq, while the one person who tried to warn Israel about Iraqi threats sits in jail. In a 1989 letter excerpted below, Jonathan wrote to an American rabbi from his cell that America would have to go to war against Iraq if we failed to prevent the completion of chemical facilities that we knew were under construction. How right he was. - Morris Pollard
Dear Rabbi,
My name is Jonathan Pollard and I am currently serving a life sentence due to my activities on behalf of Israel.
Lest you labor under a false impression, Rabbi, I want to state quite categorically that I do not consider myself to be above the law. I fully appreciate the fact that I must be punished for my activities however justified I may have felt them to be. That being said, I do not believe that the draconian sentence that was meted out to me was in any way commensurate with the crime which I committed. Nowhere in my indictment... was I ever described as a "traitor," which is hardly a surprise given the fact that the operation with which I was associated actually served to strengthen America's long-term security interests in the Middle East.
Notwithstanding [then Defense Secretary Caspar] Weinberger's disingenuous opinion, any objective examination of the record will show that no American agent, facility or program was compromised as a result of my actions - not one. But this salient fact was conveniently overlooked by Mr. Weinberger, who felt that I deserved the death penalty for having had the audacity to make Israel "too strong."
In retrospect, perhaps one of the worst things that the Reagan administration did to Israel during the course of my trial was that it purposely distorted the nature of my activities in such a way as to leave the impression that Israel had somehow become a threat to the national security of this country. So, by intent, the subsequent sentence that I received was an arrow aimed directly at the heart of the US-Israel "special relationship."
The case of Mr. and Mrs. Abdel Kader Helmy appears to be yet another instance where the political aspects of an espionage trial have been of paramount concern to the government. As you'll recall the Helmys are Egyptian-born US citizens who were accused last year of funneling highly sensitive ballistic missile technology to their native land. At the time of his arrest on June 24, 1988, Mr. Helmy was a senior propulsion engineer who held a "secret" level security clearance from the US Department of Defense. According to a 36 page affidavit filed by the Customs Service ... US customs agents searching [Mr.] Helmy's trash found handwritten notes outlining how to work with carbon-carbon fiber material used in rocket nose cones and "stealth" aircraft; instructions on building rocket exhaust nozzles; a description of an extremely sensitive microwave telemetry antenna; and a complete package needed to build or upgrade a tactical missile system.
Although there is no public evidence linking [Mr.] Helmy directly with the Iraqis, intelligence sources have indicated that the Egyptians have used [Mr.] Helmy's expertise to help Baghdad modify its stockpile of Soviet-supplied Scud-B ballistic rockets. His principle responsibility, however was to ensure the success of an Egyptian-Iraqi missile program which had encountered some developmental problems. Code named BADR 2000 by the Egyptians and SAAD-16 by the Iraqis, this Argentine-designed weapon has an estimated range of 500 to 1000 miles, and from what I've been told, figures prominently in Arab strategic planning against Israel.
If one compares the way in which the government responded to my affair with the soft-pedaling of the Helmy case, the existence of a double-standard becomes apparent. Firstly at the insistence of the State and Defense Departments, all espionage-related charges against Mr. and Mrs. Helmy have been quietly dropped.... [T]he administration has done everything it can to reduce the notoriety of the Helmy affair.
The problem ... lay in the fact that many of the photos that I turned over to the Israelis were of a number of Iraqi chemical weapons manufacturing plants which the government did not want to admit existed. Why? Well, if no one knew about these facilities the State and Defense Departments would have been spared the embarrassing task of confronting Iraq over its violation of the Geneva Protocol of 1925, which banned the use of chemical weapons in war. You have to remember... that at the time of my sentencing the massacre of Kurdish civilians in Halabja had not yet occurred, and what little concern was being voiced over Iraq's apparent use of poison gas was largely ignored by the administration which did not want to anger the Arab world by criticizing the use of such barbaric weapons against Iran. The photos I gave Israel, though, if "compromised" would have jeopardized the administration's policy of callous indifference to this issue, in that they constituted hard, irrefutable proof that Iraq was indeed engaged in the production and wide scale use of chemical weapons. What the administration was really concerned about was being placed in a position where it would have to admit that it had tacitly condoned the creation of an Iraqi chemical weapons manufacturing capability.
Once the atrocity of Halabja had occurred though, the White House was placed in a rather awkward position. On the one hand the US Intelligence community did not want to be accused of having failed to keep an eye on Iraq's burgeoning chemical weapons arsenal. Then again, the CIA ... could not very well confirm the existence of the Iraqi poison gas plants without running the risk of compromising the Reagan administration's policy towards these facilities.
After a few days of "soul searching," the State Department finally admitted that the US had intercepted some Iraqi Intelligence communications which indicated that lethal gas had, in fact, been used against unarmed Kurdish civilians. The Iranians had astutely outmaneuvered them, though, and the issue had to be "contained" before it caused a rift in US - Arab relations. Certainly, confirming the undeniable operational employment of chemical munitions by the Iraqis was preferable to describing the exact dimensions of their poison gas plants, which would have raised some uncomfortable questions on Capitol Hill.
Thus in attempt to recapture the moral "high ground," so to speak, from Iran, the White House evidently decided that it would be better for the US to be seen as leading the public denunciation of Iraq rather than the Ayatollah Khomeini. As it was though, the Administration still managed to salvage its standing in the Arab world by preventing Congress from imposing any punitive sanctions against Iraq. In essence, then, what I did by passing satellite photos of the Iraqi poison gas plants to Israel, was to endanger the Reagan Administration's pro-Saudi political agenda, not the intelligence community's "sources and methods."
According to the prosecution, there were two reasons why the government refused to tell Israel about Iraq's poison gas plants: 1) fear of compromising the KH-11 [intelligence] system and 2) concern over Israel's probable reaction once they recognized the threat these facilities posed to their survival.
What the Israelis would actually have considered was a preventative attack on the Iraqi chemical factories before they had become fully operational. Once they had come online, you see, and the Iraqis had been able to disperse their arsenal of chemical munitions, these plants, like the ones in Syria, would only have been attacked either in war time where the idea of a preemptive strike is valid, or in a clandestine sabotage campaign aimed at slowing their production of poisons. This was the same reasoning, by the way, that lay behind the Reagan Administration's desire to bomb the Rabta industrial complex before the Libyans had had the opportunity to complete its construction.
The crisis over the Rabta plant does beg the question, though: If the Reagan administration felt justified in its desire to eliminate what it perceived to be an impending Libyan chemical threat to our national security, why was it so unwilling to grant Israel the same right of preventative self- defense with regard to Iraq's poison gas manufacturing facilities?
So what was I supposed to do? Let Israel fend for herself? If you think that is what I should have done, then how can we condemn all those ... who during the Second World War consciously participated in the abandonment of European Jewry? Seriously, Rabbi, what would be the difference between what they did and a decision on my part to have kept silent about the Iraqi poison gas threat to Israel? I'd rather be rotting in prison than sitting shiva for the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who could have died because of my cowardice. -Jonathan Pollard.
Using the information that Pollard supplied, it is even conceivable that the Sovs would have been able to prevent or even to countermand a Presidential order to US submarines to launch a secondary strike against the Soviet Union. I hope that he dies in jail, and that before he does, he has become quite a popular girlfriend to have among the inmates there.
URL please. We need a reference on that unsubstantiated statement. Otherwise, we'll all have to assume you're blowing smoke -- we'll have no Al-taqiyya here at FreeRepublic.
Well, you don't have to wonder:
A Jewish immigrant of Yemeni extraction working on then-secret Israeli nuclear ambitions snapped some photos of the lab where he worked. . . .
For taking these few photos, the Israelis sentenced him to 20 years in prison.
Did they have good cause? Of course they did. But what would they have done to him if he had pulled a "Pollard"?
Good Lord, it would have been a .22 below the ear...
No, not 20 years. I assume you are refering to Mordechai Vanunu who was sentenced to 18 years. He should be out in 2004 but he was up for parole (two years early) at the end of last month. Google news makes no mention of the outcome of his parole hearing one way or the other. Anyone know? I've sent a message to the webmasters of the Vanunu website to see if they know. I'll report back.
(By the way, I think Vanunu did the right thing too).
Jonathan Pollard is now in his 18th year of incarceration -- and will probably spend the rest of his life there. Vanunu has been in jail for the last 16 years.
Hell, I think I've posted most of them...glad to see others doing so for a change. ;)
Hell yes, you have. But Israel will stand, and the diaper heads will take a dump in their own head cloths. Jonathan Pollard is trash, but Osama and his kind are the real enemies.
I don't think GWB is going to do it, no matter how much the pressure.
First, I know that Israel admitted that Pollard was a spy for them in 1998 in the hopes of increasing Pollard's chance of getting him released by the Clinton administration. We don't know how much he was paid (if at all) by the Israeli government. Anyone know?
Second, I've already commented on a similar case -- Vanunu, an ethnic Moroccan who worked in a Israeli nuclear centre and blew the whistle on Israeli possession of nukes -- in the previous post. I think 18 years is too long, certainly not life.
The U.S. had pledged to share information with Israel -- and did not. The U.S. betrayed it's ally before Pollard passed the first secret. Pollard thought it strange and dangerous that the data concerning the Iraqi poison gas operation was being withheld from Israel. "I was so scared about what was being withheld, and the more I dug, the more horrified I became about the extent of the betrayal."
Pollard's concerns were exacerbated when a superior officer told him, "Jews are too sensitive about gas."
In your post, you provided a link that defined "Al-taqiyaa".
I clicked on the link you provided, and I came up with the following definition:
Al-taqiyya and dissimulation are words used for a practice of Muslims blatantly lying to non-Muslims.
Is it your aim to somehow send me into a kind of intellectual panic?
In other words, when I state my feeling that this American traitor should be punished in America for hurting my country, America, is it your position that my feelings make me somehow muslim?
That seems odd.
Please explain.
Now, in view of your apparent ignorance that the Pollard take was, in fact, brokered to the USSR, I don't know if you're up to snuff regarding Israeli matters, but I'd like to ask you a question:
Are Israelis who support Israeli punishement of Israeli traitors similarly derided in Israel by other Israelis as being somehow MUSLIM?
I'd like you to answer that.
Let me frame it up in more specific terms:
If a couple Israeli soldiers are brought up on charges of selling ammo to Hezbollah (another recent item), can Israelis who support the punishment of such traitors expect to be tarred by other Israelis with the "MUSLIM" brush?
And I would like you, JohathanRGalt, to answer that question.
I'll admit that an invitation to dinner does, strictly speaking, constitute an invitation to share something. It's an invitation to share some food.
If you should accept this invitation to share, and following dinner I discourage you from heftying my silverware away in a pillowcase, have I, too, betrayed you?
Pollard is a whiney puke who should have been executed.
Glad you asked. Some yokels really are uppity, aren't they? But let's read:
"Eitan, together with Sella and Yagur, gave detailed instructions to Pollard about the classified data that they wanted him to obtain. They also discussed payments to Jay. The spy would receive a salary of $1,500 per month. Other gifts would follow, including reimbursements for Pollard’s trips and an expensive diamond and sapphire ring that ended up on Anne’s finger as her engagement ring..."
http://www.crimelibrary.com/spies/pollard/5.htm
Pollard was quite a well motivated patriot, wasn't he...?
I don't think you understand. It's like we're speaking two different languages. Pollard is not the "American Dreyfuss". Captain Dreyfuss in France was framed and sent to Devil's Island. Pollard was guilty and deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison for betraying his country. It makes no difference that he is Jewish by ethnic background, don't you see that his disagreements with American foreign policy didn't allow treason? Are we speaking the same language?
Pollard's concerns were exacerbated when a superior officer told him, "Jews are too sensitive about gas."
That comment does not excuse his treasonable acts against his country, and Americans don't feel guilt about gassing Jews, why should we?
Hello! Let's stop playing around and start reading from the same page, shall we?
"One senior (Israeli) official, pressed on the question of whether the $300,000 Pollard allegedly was promised over a 10-year period by his Israeli control agents did not suggest something wider than a small 'renegade' spying operation appeared annoyed when he retorted: 'Thirty thousand a year is peanuts. . .' ."
http://www.foreigncorrespondent.com/archive/pollard.html
"According to CIA sources, Pollard provided Israeli intelligence with names of important American agents inside the former Soviet Union and Russia who had supplied information on East Bloc weapons and war plans. How the agent's names were linked to the secrets they supplied - a major breach of basic intelligence security - remains a major mystery. Some of the enormously sensitive secrets stolen by Pollard were reportedly either sold, or bartered, by Israel to the Soviet Union.
"A number of key CIA agents in the East Bloc were reportedly executed as a result of Pollard spying. KGB likely gained access to top-secret US codes - either directly from Israel, or through spies in Israel's government. In short, Pollard's treachery caused one of the worst security disasters in modern American history.
"FBI investigators discovered Pollard was being directed to steal specific secret data by a senior Administration official, known as "Mr. X." But the White House, unwilling to stir up a domestic political storm, quashed the investigation. To my knowledge, three previous cases of high-ranking US government officials caught passing top secret information to Israel have been similarly hushed up. Two were senior defense department officials under Reagan, one a top State Department official in a previous administration. None were prosecuted."
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