For the past twenty-one years in a bid for freedom, Pollard has orchestrated a brilliant public relations campaign from his jail cell. Assisting in this effort is a list of attorneys that reads like a Who’s Who of the legal profession. Since his arrest in 1985, the lawyers he has retained from both the United States and Israel number well over a dozen. Multitalented and high priced, they include Alan Dershowitz, defense attorney, prolific author, and professor at Harvard Law School, and Theodore Olson, the former forty-second solicitor general of the United States and a man who has argued thirty-four cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.
By twisting or omitting relevant facts and making unsubstantiated allegations of anti-Semitism, Pollard has garnered the support of many well-meaning people and organizations that might look at his case differently if they knew the whole truth. In May 2000, in an interview on CNN’s The World Today with David Ensor, Richard Haver, who was in charge of damage assessment for the Pollard case, described him as a “confused person who loved the thrill of espionage and had security problems long before he worked for the Israelis. . . . Pollard . . . would’ve compromised the Israelis in a heartbeat, if it had struck him as something that he wanted to do. . . . He has now reinvented himself as a great Jewish patriot. . . .” Several analysts who worked with Pollard in the ATAC told me that at that time, they didn’t even know he was Jewish. Indeed, he remarked to Richard Sullivan that he was High Church Episcopalian.
Kurt Lohbeck, the reporter to whom Pollard told investigators he had passed classified materials, would agree that the analyst reinvented himself. On page 136 of his book, Holy War, Unholy Victory, he writes: “Jay’s reason for selling government secrets to Israel . . . was not a deep personal commitment to Israel, but a personal commitment to his wife and to his pocketbook. Jay wanted to wine, dine, and travel first class and to bedeck Anne with jewelry. He never concealed that he was an intelligence analyst. In fact, he boasted about it, proudly displaying a courier card that allowed him to avoid customs and immigration checks at ports of entry, calling it his get-out-of-jail-free card.”
Pollard started his campaign from jail by courting Jewish leaders and was initially rejected by much of the American Jewish community. After gaining the support of ardent Zionists, he used them to help him convince others that he was right and the government wrong. His support group started growing slowly while he was at the federal correctional facility in Marion, Illinois, and picked up speed in the 1990s. Today he has a huge network of supporters in Israel as well as a substantial following in the United States. More than sixty organizations have pushed for his release. From his jail cell he has even managed to pull the strings of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, on issues that directly affect his bid for freedom. Thousands of news reports, numerous television programs, several books, and a personal web site have made Jonathan Jay Pollard a virtual household name.
It was 11 October 1988, and after lengthy negotiations among CBS, the Department of Justice, and the DNI, Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes sat down at the federal prison in Marion for an interview with Pollard. Alan Dershowitz was also interviewed in this segment, along with U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova, Jim Jones of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, and the woman Wallace had interviewed once before, Anne Pollard.1
The DNI had stipulated that Pollard not be interviewed by anyone without an ONI representative present. In fact, two other people attended—an officer from the ONI and a special agent from the NIS. “I see the rats have come out of the woodwork,” Pollard commented upon spotting the two men sitting behind him.
The prisoner made an opening statement in which he apologized for breaking the law. He had merely wanted to assist Israel, he said. Then he started talking about the Holocaust and how in the 1940s the United States had abandoned the Jewish people to their fate.
Wallace pointed out that John Walker had received life for spying for the Soviets for twenty years. Why, he asked diGenova, did Pollard receive the same sentence as someone who had spied for a hostile nation and for a drastically longer period? DiGenova replied that the Weinberger memorandum spelled out in detail how severely Pollard had compromised U.S. national security. If the American public were ever given access to what he had taken and sold, the attorney said, “there would be no question about the sentence.”
Pollard continued to deny passing any information that would hurt the United States. When asked why he had signed the plea agreement, he replied that the government had been holding his wife hostage and he was told if he didn’t sign, her medical care would be withheld. He neglected to mention that months before the plea agreement was finalized, his wife had been out on bond.
Even after he signed the agreement, he claimed, she wasn’t given medical treatment because he wouldn’t identify the man the media had dubbed Mr. X. (Mr. X was the shadowy U.S. official who the government suspected was still actively spying on behalf of the Israelis.) The suspicion arose from the fact that on several occasions his Israeli handlers had asked Pollard for specific TS/SCI materials, citing exact titles and in some cases document control numbers. The suspicion was never proven. Following his guilty plea, Pollard told Wallace, someone in the government had shown him a master list of Jews suspected of being Mr. X. Though pressed hard by Wallace, Pollard wouldn’t say who showed him the list, on the grounds that agents changed their names every time he talked with them.
Then he changed his mind and said that diGenova had shown him the list. Wallace queried diGenova about this. The district attorney adamantly denied the existence of such a list, saying that what Pollard was alleging was an outrageous falsehood, an “example of the level and depth to which he had stooped in order to try and extricate himself from a situation that he, and he alone, was responsible for.” Pollard retaliated by calling diGenova “a pathological liar, and an unethical and incompetent attorney.”
When Wallace reminded Pollard that several of the U.S. attorneys on his case had been Jewish Americans, he looked agitated and responded, “Yes, and there were Capos also during the concentration camps.”
Pollard ended his interview with a quote from Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American, saying, “I never met a man who had better motives for all the trouble he’s caused.”
Wallace spoke with Anne at the federal medical center in Rochester, Minnesota, where she had been moved to receive medical attention. Once again, she was holding her stomach as if in pain. In response to a question about her medical care, Anne compared her situation to “what it must’ve been like in Auschwitz forty-seven years ago in terms of medical treatment, in terms of abuse—it’s terrible.” She claimed that her problem had been diagnosed but not treated, and that prison officials had told her she needed to learn how to deal with the pain.
Jim Jones had a different story. He acknowledged to Wallace that Anne was ill and in pain but denied that proper medical treatment had been withheld. She had filed numerous motions to have her sentence reduced or commuted on the grounds that she needed to seek outside medical treatment. The prison doctor had seen Anne, and more than twenty physicians from the Mayo Clinic had examined her. Jones said she had been refusing treatment because, in his judgment, were she to accept treatment and get better, it would remove her excuse for trying to spring herself from jail.
Later in the segment, diGenova commented to Wallace, “What this case is all about is what the Pollards have done to themselves, from day one. This has never been about what anyone has done to the Pollards.”
In January 1988 the Knesset had submitted a resolution to the U.S. Congressional Record in the form of a letter, and Congressman Norman Lent of New York forwarded it to President Ronald Reagan. It was read into the Congressional record on 19 October 1988. The letter read, in part, “We the undersigned, members of the Knesset, the parliament of Israel, ask you to grant executive pardon to Jonathan and Anne Pollard. We are fully cognizant of the complexities of the issue; however, we approach you on a humanitarian basis, assuming that after the Pollards are granted pardon they will immigrate to Israel. Humanitarian considerations especially require that generosity be applied to Anne Pollard, whose health requires utmost consideration of her needs.”2 The president took no action.
In August 1991, Pollard’s attorney at the time argued before the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., that Pollard’s sentence should be commuted on the following grounds: His plea had resulted in a miscarriage of justice, the government had breached its plea agreement, and Pollard’s counsel had been denied access to important evidence. Theodore Olson wrote the brief. President George H. W. Bush followed the lead of his predecessor in the White House by refusing to commute the sentence.
Many years later, in March 2005, I attended a conference on counterintelligence sponsored by the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive and the George Bush School of Government at Texas A&M University. CIA operations officer Brian Kelley and author and lecturer H. Keith Melton gave a presentation on the Robert Hanssen spy case. Former President George H. W. Bush attended, and after the presentation I had a chance to speak briefly with him. I shook his hand and said, “Mr. President, if you think the Hanssen case is interesting, you may want to read the book I’m writing on Jonathan Jay Pollard.”
He looked me in the eyes and replied: “He belongs just where he is, in jail. You do know there are a lot of people trying to get him out. That really burns me up.”
After serving three years and four months of her sentence, Anne was released on parole in March 1990. Four months later, her husband filed for divorce. Allegedly, Anne, in total disbelief, was served with divorce papers while in the hospital suffering from the stomach ailment that had plagued her for years.
Many conflicting stories circulated in the media about why Pollard decided to divorce Anne. According to one, he thought she was better off leaving him behind and getting on with her life. Other versions attributed the rift to rivalries flaring up between their parents over money and movie rights, and to a dispute over money owed to Anne from Pollard’s fundraising efforts.3 So many charges and countercharges were being bandied about—a situation exacerbated by the meddling of family and attorneys—that almost no one could decipher the truth.
Why the former analyst and the redheaded beauty with whom he had been so smitten divorced will probably never be known. Had Pollard rejected Anne—or was it the other way around? Anne’s interviewers had remarked that she hadn’t asked after Pollard’s welfare when the two of them were in jail, before the sentencing. Whatever the case may be, it was a sordid ending to a sordid love story. Fortunately, their union had produced no children.
On 20 August 1990, the Immigration and Naturalization Service reported that one of the coconspirators in the Pollard case, Ilan Ravid, arrived at New York’s Kennedy Airport with a tourist passport and a fourteen-day visa. He provided the address of 3514 International Drive, Washington, D.C. (the Israeli embassy). Although he was interviewed by the U.S. delegation in Israel in December 1985, he was less than forthcoming and did not reveal the names of the individuals in his residence that helped copy the classified documents Pollard provided. The government considered the possibility of asking him to submit to an interview. The NIS Investigative Summary Report indicated that it was unknown whether this interview ever came about.
Anne moved to Israel in 1991, looking to start a new life and bring closure to the Pollard espionage affair. She received her Israeli citizenship shortly after arriving.4 In 1998, however, she moved back to the United States and settled in California. According to an article in the 23 May 2004 edition of the Jerusalem Post, Anne, with the help of a Toronto-based film company, was demanding five million dollars in damages from the Israeli government for what she called “a horrific nineteen years following her arrest,” during which the Israelis abused and neglected her. She claimed that while she’d been living in Israel a watchdog of sorts was assigned to her, and that he demanded a monthly accounting of all her actions and expenses. The Israeli government was leaking lies about her and trying to make her leave, she complained. “I left Israel. I couldn’t stand it.”5
As for her ex-husband, when Pollard transferred to the federal penitentiary in Butner, North Carolina, in 1994, he married an ardent admirer and supporter of his from Canada, Ester Seitz. According to Ester, the two were married in a private ceremony during one of her visits to the penitentiary, though reporters could find no official records of the marriage.6 Since that time, she has dedicated her entire heart and soul to setting him free.
Not long after President George H. W. Bush refused to commute Pollard’s sentence, the Orthodox Union of Jewish Congregations of America, representing one thousand synagogues, wrote a letter to Attorney General William Barr strongly recommending commutation.7 In a two-to-one decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals denied Pollard a new hearing, but in a radio broadcast in April 1992, the president-elect, William Clinton, said he would “reevaluate Pollard’s life sentence and compare it to sentences handed out to other people under similar circumstances.”8
While the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith declared they believed anti-Semitism had not been the driving force behind Pollard’s sentence, and the American Jewish Congress had not yet fully thrown its support behind him, more and more newspaper columns, mostly in the Israeli press, began to call for Pollard’s release. On 30 November 1993, in a show of solidarity for Pollard in the Jewish religious community, a full-page advertisement showed up in the New York Times, “An Open Letter to President Clinton,” signed by a thousand rabbis. The ad read in part: “We . . . wish to voice our plea for justice for Jonathan Pollard. We in no way condone acts of espionage or any violation of our country’s laws. We nonetheless call upon you, Mr. President, to recognize that the lifetime sentence imposed upon Jonathan Pollard is unduly harsh and grossly inconsistent with the punishment given to other Americans convicted of similar and even worse crimes.” A week later Leonard Garment, one of Pollard’s attorneys, made the same plea in an op-ed piece in the Washington Post.
David Geneson, the former assistant U.S. attorney who had prosecuted the Pollards, broke his silence and spoke out publicly about the case in a letter to the Washington Post, arguing that Pollard had passed secrets to Israel for money, and that his giving them to an ally didn’t lessen the crime. “What [Pollard] did illegally disclose, and thereby compromise, was a range of this country’s most important secrets, much of which was pure intelligence unusable to the Israelis except as bargaining chips and leverage against the United States. . . .” Pollard’s life sentence was “what he deserved. . . . If a president wants to grant Pollard clemency, so be it. . . . Along with others, I did my part to enforce the law. . . . But let those who press Pollard’s position not minimize, modify or be less than truthful. Jonathan Pollard committed espionage, the effect of which was to inflict grave damage to the national security of the United States. . . .”9
Responding to Geneson in the Washington Post, Olson denounced a claim of his that the government hadn’t broken the plea agreement. He cited three breaches of the plea agreement, stating that the government had “savagely” attacked “Pollard’s motives and personality” and defamed him by saying he was motivated by money. “The government’s emotional and hyperbolic arguments,” he concluded, “succeeded in securing the harshest possible punishment of Jonathan Pollard—life imprisonment—even though the government had promised it would not seek such a sentence.”10 This is the central contention of countless books, articles, and motions to the court for resentencing.
Despite mounting pressure from a number of American Jewish leaders, an important political constituency of President Clinton’s, he refused to commute Pollard’s sentence.11 Leaders of the American Zionist movement released a statement on 24 March 1994, expressing deep disappointment and vowing to continue pressing for Pollard’s release on humanitarian grounds when he came up for parole.
Around August 1995, Pollard filed a petition with Israel’s Supreme Court asking for citizenship. His sister, Carol Pollard, had formed an advocacy group called Citizens for Justice for Pollard that sent twenty-plus thousand signatures to the parole board asking for his release, and it was alleged in the press that she and other members of Pollard’s family were opposed to his receiving Israeli citizenship because it would hurt his chances of getting parole (something Pollard had never asked for) and clemency. A rift set in between Pollard and his immediate family, and he cut off all ties with them. Later, in a letter Pollard released via electronic media to his sister, he threatened to sue her if she didn’t cease speaking to the press about his case. He also wanted a full accounting of the money she had raised through her advocacy group. He was alleged to have told Seymour Reich, president of the American Zionist movement, and Ammo Dror of the Public Committee Office for Jonathan Pollard, to dissociate themselves from his case because of statements they had made to the Israeli press expressing hesitation about supporting his effort to obtain Israeli citizenship.12
On 22 November 1995, ten years and one day after he had been arrested outside the Israeli embassy, Pollard was granted full Israeli citizenship. In a ceremony held later at the federal penitentiary in Butner, he was presented with his citizenship papers. The following month Prime Minister Shimon Peres met with President Clinton and asked for clemency for Pollard. The president also received letters from former Israeli prime ministers, defense ministers, and Knesset members pleading for his release. Pollard was confident that his Israeli citizenship would be enough to sway the president to release him. On 26 July 1996, however, his ploy to achieve freedom through Israeli citizenship backfired when Clinton denied his request for clemency.
For twelve years Pollard had been aggressively claiming that his espionage wasn’t a rogue operation, that it was sanctioned by the very top echelon of the Israeli government, and for twelve years the Israelis had denied it. Pollard had to find a way to force their hand.
In the spring of 1997, with the help of Ester and a stable of attorneys, Pollard filed an appeal with the High Court of Justice in Israel to prod the government into admitting that in fact he had been its agent.13 Though the Israelis reportedly tried to ban publication of the appeal, newspapers got hold of the story.
Meanwhile, news leaked that the FBI was investigating the possibility that a top U.S. government official, the mysterious Mr. X, had been passing sensitive information to the Israelis. According to the story, Secretary of State Warren Christopher provided a letter to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat after Arafat negotiated a withdrawal of Israeli forces from the West Bank with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The letter spelled out U.S. guarantees for the withdrawals. No copy was sent to the Israelis. The NSA managed to tape a conversation between an Israeli intelligence officer in the United States and his supervisor in Tel Aviv in which they discussed how to obtain a copy. The Israeli intelligence officer proposed that they get it from “Mega,” whereupon the supervisor was reported to have said, “This is not something we use Mega for.”14 The Israeli ambassador to the United States strongly denied the allegation.
In an article in the Washington Post dated 14 December 1997, Netanyahu released a letter he had sent to Pollard in prison. “I hope that our efforts on your behalf will help and that you will be a free man soon,” he wrote. The following February Pollard published part of a letter he had written to Netanyahu in which he blamed Eliakim Rubinstein for his arrest and the bitter fate that followed. Rubinstein, who had been the senior official present at the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., at the time of Pollard’s apprehension, was in charge of the ministerial Israeli committee trying to secure his release. Rubinstein resigned from this position.15
The Israeli government tried desperately to come up with a way to appease Pollard without embarrassing the State of Israel. They offered to give a statement to the United States conceding that he had been recruited by Israelis and had acted on behalf of Israel, but without the government’s knowledge of the actual operation. Enraged, Pollard demanded that he be recognized as an agent who had been fully sanctioned by the Israelis. Apparently, he told his attorney in Israel to cease all negotiations with the government there.
The Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz was a thorn in Pollard’s side because it published a series of articles critical of the former spy. In one, Ronen Bergman and Arye Dayan wrote of “Israel’s official contention that he was working as part of a rogue operation that was not authorized from above. Every Israeli leader who has asked the U.S. to release Jonathan Pollard has held steadfastly to this position. Acceding to Pollard’s request would make liars of four Israeli Prime Ministers (Peres, Shamir, Rabin, and Netanyahu) and two defense ministers (Herzog and Weisman), who would all be shown to have told untruths to three U.S. presidents (Reagan, Bush, and Clinton).”16 In admitting that it had sanctioned Pollard, Israel would also be confessing that for thirteen years it had lied to the people of Israel and the United States, the U.S. Congress, and numerous Jewish religious organizations.
Nevertheless, on 11 May 1998, Israel issued a formal proclamation that Jonathan Pollard had “acted as an official Israeli agent, handled by those serving as high-ranking senior officials of the Israeli Bureau for Scientific Relations [LAKAM].”17 In acknowledging its obligation to Pollard and its readiness to assume full responsibility, the State of Israel had succumbed to thirteen years of persistent demands. Pollard, it seemed, had won.
Two months later, the Israeli paper Ma’ariv ran a cover story on Pollard’s spy handler Rafael “Rafi” Eitan, who during all the years since Pollard’s arrest had kept relatively quiet about the involvement of the Israeli government. At last he came clean, and all was soon forgiven between him and his former agent. Eitan vowed he would do everything in his power to promote Pollard’s release.18 Other than Alexander Feklisov, the Rosenberg’s KGB handler, no other spy handler has spoken out publicly for the spy he managed. It was also the first time Eitan admitted the operation had been sanctioned from the beginning.
As time went on, I grew tired of counterintelligence work and wanted to get back to what I liked best, general crimes and homicides, particularly cold cases. When John McEleny, the deputy director of the NCIS, offered me a job as the division chief for death investigations policy and oversight, I jumped at the opportunity. In the fall of 1998, while I was sitting at my desk at NCIS headquarters, my phone started ringing off the hook. At the time, President Clinton was meeting with the Israelis and the Palestinians at the Wye River Plantation in Maryland to hammer out a peace accord. Apparently to induce the Israelis to sign, and urged on by Prime Minister Netanyahu, Clinton had informed him that he would release Pollard.
This was leaked to the media, igniting a firestorm of reports about Pollard’s imminent release from prison and setting the entire American intelligence community back on its heels. The prison authorities told Pollard to pack his bags, he was going home to Israel. Unable to reach Lydia Jechorek at the FBI, I called another professional acquaintance there, Les Wiser, the agent who had led the Aldridge Ames spy case and was still in counterintelligence. What was going on? According to Wiser, as soon as George Tenet, director of the CIA, heard about the carrot Clinton had extended, he met with the president and informed him that he couldn’t arbitrarily release Pollard, that there was more at stake than just releasing a spy and that the entire intelligence community had to be consulted before a decision about Pollard could be made. Furthermore, if the spy were set free, he would immediately tender his resignation as director of the CIA.
Whether such a conversation really took place was questioned for years, and it wasn’t until 2004, when the former president released his autobiography, My Life, that the conversation with Tenet was verified. At any rate, Clinton reconsidered and informed Netanyahu that he would take a serious look at the Pollard case and make his decision by January 1999.19 If not for the steadfast position of Tenet, Pollard might be free today.
The intelligence community was incredulous that Israel would dare use Pollard as a bargaining chip with the United States in such a sensitive and highly politicized peace process. Four former directors of naval intelligence—Admirals William Studeman, Sumner Shapiro, John Butts, and Thomas Brooks—submitted a letter to the Washington Post explaining why they did not believe Pollard deserved a pardon. “In terms of sheer volume of sensitive information betrayed,” they emphasized,
Jonathan Pollard rivals any of the traitors who have plagued this nation in recent times. Nobody is clamoring for the release of traitors like Aldrich Ames, John Walker, or Jerry Whitworth. . . .
We who are painfully familiar with the case feel obligated to go on record with the facts regarding Pollard in order to dispel the myths that have arisen from this clever public relations campaign . . . aimed at transforming Pollard from greedy, arrogant betrayer of the American national trust into Pollard, committed Israeli patriot.
Pollard pleaded guilty and therefore never was publicly tried. Thus, the American people never came to know that he offered classified information to three other countries before working for the Israelis and that he offered his services to a fourth country while he was spying for Israel. They also never came to understand that he was being very highly paid for his services. . . .
Pollard and his apologists argue he turned over to the Israelis information they were being denied that was critical to their security. The fact was, however, Pollard had no way of knowing what the Israeli government was already receiving by way of official intelligence exchange agreements. . . . Some of the data he compromised had nothing to do with Israeli security or even with the Middle East. He betrayed worldwide intelligence data, including sources and methods developed at significant cost to the U.S. taxpayer. As a result of his perfidy, some of those sources are lost forever.
Another claim Pollard made is that the U.S. government reneged on its bargain not to seek the life sentence. What is not heard is that Pollard’s part of this bargain was to cooperate fully in an assessment of the damage he had done and to refrain from talking to the press prior to the completion of his sentencing. He blatantly and contemptuously refused to live up to either part of the plea agreement. . . . It was this coupled with the magnitude and consequences of his criminal actions that resulted in the judge imposing a life sentence. . . . The appellate court subsequently upheld the life sentence.
If, as Pollard and his supporters claim, he has “suffered enough” for his crimes, he is free to apply for parole as the American judicial system provides. In his arrogance, he has refused to do so, but instead insists on being granted clemency or a pardon.
A presidential grant of clemency or pardon in this or any other espionage case—regardless of the foreign government involved or the ideological motivation—would be totally irresponsible from a national security standpoint. It would send a most damaging message to the loyal U.S. citizens entrusted with our national secrets, many of whom have emotional ties to other nations but nonetheless have taken seriously their oath to keep our national security information secret.
It would also say to foreign governments, “Your secrets are not safe with us.” In today’s multipolar world, where the threat of international terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction are constant concerns, intelligence and security cooperation with friendly foreign nations is essential. Anything that causes our friends to be reluctant to share intelligence with us could severely damage our national security. . . .20
On 11 January 1999, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence sent a letter to President Clinton urging him to deny Pollard’s request for commutation. They stressed that releasing him would establish two disturbing precedents. First, it would implicitly condone spying against the United States by an ally. Second, it would undermine the United States’ ability “to act as an honest broker throughout the world. We maintain relationships with many nations that are not necessarily complementary to one another. Those relationships depend upon our assurances of confidentiality. If you release Pollard, it will convey a message to our partners that we view secrets kept from our friends less sacrosanct.” Chairman Richard Shelby signed the letter along with fifty-nine other senators, including Diane Feinstein, John Kerry, Frank Lautenberg, Joseph Lieberman, and John McCain. In the end, President Clinton decided against granting Pollard clemency.
Pollard responded with vitriol, calling Israeli defense minister Yitzhak Mordechai a national disgrace for allegedly messing up the deal to release him and, in reference to Netanyahu, remarking, “You cannot sit with the Americans and pretend to be a guardian of Israel’s security while you sit back and let one of your own agents rot in their hand.”21
Pollard’s attorneys from New York, Elliott Lauer and Jacques Semmelman, had been working relentlessly since 2000, presumably on a pro bono basis, filing motions and attending hearings on his behalf. A little over a year after the Senate committee sent its letter, they filed a motion with the Washington federal court to gain access to the highly classified Weinberger memorandum so they could properly defend Pollard in his quest for resentencing. On 29 November 2000, Congressman Anthony Weiner wrote a letter to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia requesting that he allow Pollard’s attorneys full access to the sealed portion of the memo.22 The following January, Chief Judge Norma Holloway Johnson denied the motion, upholding the government’s claim that Pollard’s attorneys had no need to know. His attorneys also filed a separate motion to “vacate Pollard’s sentence,” which the court also later denied. In August 2001 Judge Johnson dismissed Pollard’s motion for resentencing.
Though Pollard was growing despondent, his support continued to gain ground in Israel. Netanyahu, now the former prime minister, met with him in the Butner correctional facility to reaffirm his support for release, and the Knesset sent a petition to President George W. Bush asking that he commute Pollard’s sentence on humanitarian grounds. One hundred twelve of the Knesset’s 120 members signed the petition.
Pollard’s next step was to approach the federal court of appeals. A new chief judge, Thomas Hogan, was assigned to hear his motions. In September 2003 Pollard’s attorneys argued their case for a new sentencing and access to the classified Weinberger memorandum. Pollard experienced yet another setback when Judge Hogan refused them access to the Weinberger memorandum—they hadn’t proven a need to know—and denied him a hearing on resentencing. They immediately filed another motion with the court to hear their case for a “certificate of appealability,” which, if successful, would permit the previous motions filed to be heard and ruled on again. Judge Johnson summarily rejected their appeal.
In June 2004 Pollard had his first major win when a two-judge panel ruled that his attorneys could argue an appeal of the lower court’s decision not to reopen his case on sentencing and denying him access to classified information. The following March they presented oral arguments to a three-judge panel of the appeals court. The presiding judges were Judith Rogers, David Sentelle, and Karen Henderson, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Mary McCord presented the government’s case. According to some reports, the judges appeared cool to Pollard’s attorneys in their bid for a new sentencing and access to classified information. Whatever their feelings, the appellate court set no date for a final ruling.
On 8 May 2005, the Associated Press reported that Pollard had submitted a document to the Israeli Supreme Court in which he alleged that he had been tortured in jail. In one incident, he claimed, he had been stripped naked in a subzero cell and had ice water thrown on him. He was trying to force the Israeli government to declare him a “prisoner of Zion,” a status that had been created for Jewish activists imprisoned in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. Supposedly, Israel was legally bound to do everything in its power to get prisoners of Zion released from jail.
Ten days after the AP report appeared, First Lady Laura Bush was visiting the Western Wall in Jerusalem. In a moment of silence, protesters demonstrating for the release of Pollard began chanting, “Free Pollard! Free Pollard!” The Israeli police held them back as Secret Service agents surrounded the First Lady.
On 22 July, in a two-to-one decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals denied Pollard’s appeal.
On 16 January 2006, the Supreme Court of Israel rejected Pollard’s plea to be declared a “Prisoner of Zion.”23 Then, in February, Pollard’s attorneys petitioned the United States Supreme Court to allow them access to former Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger’s TS/SCI damage assessment.24 The attorneys contend that having access will prove that much of the “supposed repercussions” of his spying activities never really happened. They may try to prove that the classified information that Pollard gave to the Israelis was not damaging to the United States.
The week of 13 March 2006 Pollard’s web site reported that: The Committee to Bring Jonathan Pollard Home had launched a massive media blitz throughout Israel, hanging up gigantic posters that featured Jonathan Pollard’s picture and the text (in Hebrew), AYFOH HA’BOOSHA? (Where is the sense of shame?). Citizens were being encouraged to hang the posters and banners on their balconies and buildings that displayed a graphic icon of Pollard and the Hebrew text: ROTZIM ET POLLARD BABAYIT! (We want Pollard home!) The cost of launching this country-wide campaign and where the funds were coming from was not mentioned.
A week later, on 20 March 2006, the U.S. Supreme Court justices rejected Pollard’s appeal to grant him access to classified documents in his sentencing file, among them the damage assessment memorandum by former Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger. Pollard hoped the documents would assist him in his pursuit of clemency from President Bush. The high court moved without comment to let stand a U.S. appeals court ruling that federal courts lack the jurisdiction to review claims of access to such materials in clemency petitions.25
On 28 March 2006 Rafael Eitan, leader of the Pensioners’ Party, ran in the Israeli elections and won one of the seven seats his party captured in the parliament. It was reported that a small contingent of Pollard supporters charged into Eitan’s headquarters and accused him of abandoning Pollard.26
It was the latest chapter in the dramatic, seemingly endless saga of Jonathan Jay Pollard’s quest for freedom. Most spies, when jailed, fade into obscurity. Not Pollard. No convicted American spies—not even Ethel and Julius Rosenberg—have ever enjoyed as much support from the country they spied for as Pollard. And none has received as much publicity in his own country. Even when selling his nation’s secrets—an activity that demands discretion above all—he drew attention to himself, and incarceration has done nothing to stop that. Today Jonathan Jay Pollard is right where he loves to be—not in jail, but in the spotlight.