Posted on 05/26/2003 9:17:56 PM PDT by Nachum
As supporters of Jonathan Pollard prepare for a prayer rally on his behalf at the Western Wall on June 4, it appears that one of the most important questions surrounding his case has been answered. Former federal prosecutor John Loftus, in an article in the June issue of Moment Magazine, writes the following:
"There is a good reason why neither Congress nor the American Jewish leadership supports the release of Jonathan Pollard from prison: They all were told a lie - a humongous Washington whopper of a lie. The lie was [that] Pollard had supposedly given Israel a list of every American spy inside the Soviet Union... Soviet agents in Israel, posing as Israeli intelligence agents, passed the information to Moscow, which then wiped out American human assets in the Soviet Union...
"A week after [Pollard was sentenced to life in prison], the Washington Times reported that the United States had identified Shabtai Kalmanovich as the Soviet spy in Israel who supposedly worked for the Mossad but was actually working for the KGB; he had betrayed American secrets to Moscow. Washington insiders winked knowingly at one another: Pollard's contact in Israel had been caught. Just to make sure that Pollard was blamed, U.S. intelligence sources, several months later, leaked word to the press of the Kalmanovich connection...
Citing 'American intelligence sources,' the UPI announced that the 'sensitive intelligence material relayed to Israel by Jonathan Pollard had reached the KGB.'"
Loftus then fires off his bombshell:
"But it was all untrue. Every bit of it. Pollard wasn't the serial killer. The Jew didn't do it. It was one of their own WASPs - Aldrich Ames, a drunken senior CIA official who sold the names of America's agents to the Russians for cash. Pollard was framed for Ames' crime, while Ames kept on drinking and spying for the Soviets for several more years… Ames was arrested in February 1994, and confessed to selling out American agents in the Soviet Union, but not all of them. It was only logical to assume that Pollard had betrayed the rest of them, as one former CIA official admitted shortly after Ames' arrest…
"No one dreamed that yet another high-level Washington insider had sold us out to Soviet intelligence. Years passed, and eventually a Russian defector told the truth. A senior FBI official - Special Agent Robert Hanssen - had betrayed the rest of our agents. Hanssen was arrested in February 2001, and soon confessed in order to avoid the death penalty. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole."
Loftus then writes that a low-level decision was finally made in the Navy's intelligence service to re-examine the Pollard case, and "with sickening chagrin, the Navy discovered that the evidence needed to clear Pollard had been under its nose all along" - namely, that Pollard did not have the special "blue stripe" clearance needed for access to the room in which the list of secret American agents inside Russia was kept. "There is no way on earth," Loftus concludes, "that Jonathan Pollard could have entered the file room, let alone the safe where the list was kept."
Loftus also writes that he then "began to realize that Pollard's tale was only the beginning of a much bigger story about a major America intelligence scandal" - a cover-up of the deep ties between Saudi Arabia and terrorists such as Osama Bin-Laden. "Whenever the FBI or CIA came close to uncovering the Saudi terrorist connection," Loftus writes, "their investigations were mysteriously terminated. In hindsight, I can only conclude that some of our own Washington bureaucrats have been protecting the Al Qaeda leadership and their oil-rich Saudi backers from investigation for more than a decade."
Loftus continues:
"I am not the only one to reach this conclusion. In his autobiography, Oliver North confirmed that every time he wanted to do something about terrorism, [then-Defense Secretary Weinberger, whose secret memo led to Pollard's life sentence] stopped him because it might upset the Saudis and jeopardize the flow of oil to the U.S. "John O'Neill, a former FBI agent and our nation's top Al Qaeda expert, stated in a 2001 book written by Jean Charles Brisard, a noted French intelligence analyst, that everything we wanted to know about terrorism could be found in Saudi Arabia. O'Neill warned the Beltway bosses repeatedly that if the Saudis were to continue funding Al Qaeda, it would end up costing American lives, according to several intelligence sources. As long as the oil kept flowing, they just shrugged. Outraged by the Saudi cover-up, O'Neill quit the FBI and became the new chief of security at the World Trade Center. In a bitter irony, the man who could have exposed his bosses' continuous cover-up of the Saudi-Al Qaeda link was himself killed by Al Qaeda on 9/11..." "Pollard never thought he was betraying his country. And he never did, although he clearly violated its laws. He just wanted to help protect Israelis and Americans from terrorists. Now in prison for nearly two decades, Pollard, who is in his late 40s, grows more ill year by year. If, as seems likely, American bureaucrats choose to fight a prolonged delaying action over a new hearing, Pollard will probably die in prison. There are people in power inside the Beltway who have been playing for time. Time for them ran out on 9/11. Sooner or later, they are going to be held accountable. I hope that Pollard lives to see it."
The full text of Pollard's attorneys' largely-laudatory response to Loftus' article is available at "www.jonathanpollard.org/".
Amazing, isn't it? I never thought I'd see the day when there would be people on a conservative forum arguing that a high level convicted spy should be pardoned. It boggles the mind.
Exactly. So why do you insist on this "foreign entity", I believe you called Israel, being particularly "shameless"?
Sort of weird, isn't it? I know of a case where two hackers carted out that amount of computer manuals from someplace, years ago in the good ol' days of Kevin, but classified stuff?
It seems to have been standard operating proceedure during the Clinton administration.
I came back to the thread today to get a gander at all the people "on this forum" who "common[ly]" accuse Pollard of having caused the deaths of Soviet agents. Where are they? Have they taken off from posting in honor of Memorial Day or something?
Like I said, this looks like a charge (with a very LeCarre "blue stripe" angle) that Loftus manufactured against Pollard just to clear him of it. It taints everything else Loftus says about Pollard.
I notice in some other posts you are taking the tried and true Pollard defense of disproportional punishment. If other spies can get off with a slap on the wrist, why not him? Now this is a staple of the Pollard defenders, raised every time his name is mentioned.
Pollard defenders need to ask themselves what role they have played in keeping this cretin behind bars for all these years. From the git-go they have aggressively and unabashedly kept Pollard's case in the news, jockeying it to the center of Israeli/US relations at every opportunity. They have denounced loudly and viciously any American official who they deem unsympathetic to Pollard's cause, and done the same to broad swaths of the American people who have the temerity to express distaste for a traitor.
The aggressive tactics of Pollard's defenders have not worked, but instead have served only to keep the wound open by constantly pick, pick, picking at it.
When you have a courier card, and you check them out from the classified library, you're assuming full responsibility.
It's what got people suspicious--someone at the classified materials repository noticed how much stuff Pollard was checking out, and asked his office about it--and Pollard hadn't checked the stuff into the safe.
You need to look in the archives, at Pollard threads, probably :).
I notice in some other posts you are taking the tried and true Pollard defense of disproportional punishment.
I'm not so much a "Pollard defender" as I'm wondering why there is disproportional punishment (and there is) in this one case. That, of course, leads to wondering if all is on the level here. If not, we have a miscarriage of justice, possibly. Are you arguing that this would be a good thing?
My impression is that Pollard passed on the technical information to Israel who in turn APPARENTLY passed it on to the USSR for reasons unknown (to me).Supposedly it was in exchange for allowing technical people to emigrate. This part is not often talked about, probably because it reflects rather poorly on the Israelis. Allies spy on each other, that's a given....but they aren't expected to pass the information to enemies.
-Eric
So in other words, without all the twists, you're calling Israel shameless?
The most serious acts of treason Pollard committed have not been disclosed. Despite all the tons of ink and millions of pixels expended on this case, that remains true.
I choose to trust my beloved leader, Ronald Reagan, and his agent at the Department of Defense, Cap Weinberger, both of whom signed off on the case, that the sentence is fair.
~snip~
After years of denials, Israel finally admitted Pollard, a U.S. Navy civilian analyst, was not a "rogue agent," as it originally claimed, but a spy for Israeli intelligence.
Pollard caused enormous damage to U.S. national security. He gave Israel top-secret U.S. military intelligence and diplomatic codes; names of nearly 100 U.S. agents in the Mideast, who were then "turned" by Israel; NSA code-breaking techniques and targets; intercepts of foreign communications; and U.S. war-fighting plans for the Mideast.
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 agents' names were linked to the secrets they supplied - a major breach of basic intelligence security - remains a mystery.
Some of the enormously sensitive secrets stolen by Pollard may have been either sold, or bartered, by Israel to the Soviet Union.
A number of key CIA agents in the East Bloc were allegedly executed as a result of Pollard's spying. The KGB likely gained access to top-secret U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. government officials caught passing top-secret information to Israel have been similarly hushed up. Two were senior defence department officials under Ronald Reagan, one a top state department official in a previous administration. None was prosecuted.
Pollard's defenders claim he, like French Capt. Alfred Dreyfus in 1894, is a victim of anti-Semitism in the military. They maintain Pollard was "only" spying for a friendly country, motivated solely by concern for Israel's security. These assertions are patently false. Pollard was suspected for some time of spying. Investigation was held off precisely because of fears of raising cries of anti-Semitism. Pollard took large sums of money and jewelry from Israeli agents in payment for spying.
With remarkable chutzpah, Israel, which receives up to $5 billion in U.S. aid annually, refuses to return documents stolen by Pollard, or allow U.S. intelligence to debrief Mossad agents who ran Pollard in order to learn the full extent of the disaster. While Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu kept calling for Pollard's release on "humanitarian" grounds, he refused to free prisoner of conscience Mordechai Vanunu, now serving 18 years in solitary confinement in Israel for telling a British newspaper about Israel's nuclear arsenal.
Pollard is no Jewish patriot. He is a traitor who sold out his country, and fellow intelligence officers, for money, then claimed he was being persecuted by anti-Semites.
Victim he is not. To the contrary, Pollard is a poster boy for anti-Semitism. His treason unfairly exposes all American Jews to hate, and accusations of doubtful loyalty.
Jonathan Pollard is a traitor of the worst kind - not a second Dreyfus - and should stay in prison.
Not quite. This is his original quote:
and when the spies get caught, we don't normally have the foreign entitities who benefitted from the spy's treachery so shamelessly lobbying
The "selective snipping", as you call it, seems truer to his original statement than his disclaimer.
From what I've heard, Weinberger was as big a b**tard as Reagan was a saint. Still open questions in my mind.
Oh, and you were looking for statements that Pollard cost the lives of oodles of agents. Look in #74. I knew they'd turn up sooner or later :).
You can look at it that way. One can also say that since this information has been withheld from the public that Cap Weinberger is hiding something to protect himself at Pollard's expense. While it is true that we do not know if Loftus knows what he is talking about, we are are just as uncertain as to Weinberger's duplicity.
Maybe you do not trust in John Loftus, but how much do you trust Cap Weinberger? I, for one, trust neither.
Wimpycat is a she? My mistake :). Anyway, normally you don't see this kind of thing, but to call it especially "shameless" coming from another government is a bit off, imo. Usually this sort of stuff is kept in the back channels, as the Pollard thing seems to have been in the beginning. Then, as we all know by now, Clinton welshed. From there on, different rules seem to apply.
But not enought to have deserved a life sentence.
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