Spy Swap Rumors Cloud Pollard Parole Issue

By Ella Bancroft

After 10 years in prison, convicted U.S. spy for Israel Jonathan Jay Pollard becomes eligible for parole from his life sentence later this year. Most of the U.S. Jewish groups that have been pressing for commutation of his sentence now seem ready to renew their campaign with President Bill Clinton. Pollard was a factor in the dismissal by Attorney General Janet Reno of her first deputy, Philip Heymann, who appeared to be trying to slip a Pollard pardon through the early chaos of the Clinton administration without consideration of the massive public opposition it would engender. Now lined up on Pollard's side are the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council (NJCRAC), an umbrella for 13 national and 117 local Jewish groups, and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, which includes some 50 national Jewish groups. However, three NJCRAC agencies that did not sign a letter on Pollard's behalf to the U.S. Parole Commission were the American Jewish Committee, B'nai B'rith's Anti-Defamation League, and the Jewish War Veterans of America. The AJC refusal apparently was based upon a technicality, the ADL refusal reflects division within its leadership, and the JWV has opposed either commutation or parole ever since Pollard's conviction.

Said Seymour Reich, a former Conference of Presidents chairman who now heads the American Zionist Movement, "The only way I see Pollard getting his freedom is presidential action...The problem is that it's not clear that the White House understands that Pollard is an important issue for the community." He didn't mention that the White House may understand that it's also an important issue for the millions of other Americans who have had access to U.S. military secrets and didn't sell them to a foreign power in return for a monthly salary, jewelry, and all-expenses-paid trips to Europe.

The pro-Pollard headquarters is now split three ways. His first wife, Anne Henderson, who was convicted with him, now lives in Israel, where she presumably serves as a daily reproach to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who was defense minister when Israeli officials under his command hired American Naval counter-intelligence specialist Pollard to steal his country's secrets. Pollard's sister, Carol, heads up U.S.-based parole efforts, and his new wife, Esther Zeitz, who became acquainted with Pollard by mail and married him in prison, organizes Canadian efforts. However, Carol and Esther don't speak to each other.

Rumors of a three-way spy swap involving Pollard are floating in Israel, where the government admitted this year that Prof. Marcus Klingberg, an Israeli biological and chemical warfare researcher who "disappeared" in 1983, had in fact been tried and convicted for espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union. There are about a dozen such "missing" Israelis, all believed to have been secretly tried and jailed on security charges. Israeli journalists have suggested a swap is in the making where Pollard would be released to Israel, Klingberg, who at 78 is in failing mental and physical health, would be released to Russia, and Russia would release unnamed American spies captured during the Cold War. "The kicker, however," according to Israel correspondent Larry Derfner in the Jewish Week of Queens, NY, "is that there is no evidence that Russia has any American spies left to release."

A swap that would have tremendous support in Europe and perhaps in the U.S. would be Pollard for Mordechai Vanunu , who converted to Christianity and revealed photographs of Israel's nuclear weapons production facilities at Dimona, where he was employed. Vanunu's defection was public, not clandestine, but he nevertheless is as reviled in Israel (for his conversion to Christianity as well as for his nuclear revelations) as is Pollard in the U.S. The humane Pollard-Vanunu exchange might make sense to everyone but Israel's power-intoxicated organized supporters in the U.S., who see compromise as defeat. Therefore it probably it won't happen.

King Hussein and American-born Queen Noor of Jordan paid and paid and paid for the lobbying help they sought from U.S. Jewish leaders for forgiveness of Jordan's debt to the U.S. in return for making peace with Israel. On their latest U.S. trip the king and queen, Jordanian Prime Minister Zeid Bin Shaker, and three of the king's sons toured the Simon Wiesenthal Center Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, along with California Governor Pete Wilson and U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein. The king and queen also were hosted in New York by chairman Lester Pollack of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, a delegation from which the king had hosted last year in Amman. The problem is that although U.S. Jewish leaders were willing to lobby Congress for a bigger bite of foreign aid for Jordan, they wouldn't agree to sharing any part of U.S. aid to Israel, now close to half of the worldwide U.S. aid pot, to help retire Jordan's debt, or to help any of the Arabs who have made or are thinking about making peace with Israel.

When the U.S. got a tip that Imad Mugniyah, a Lebanese Hezbollah leader accused by the U.S. in connection with a number of terrorist acts against Americans in Beirut, would be returning from a conference in Khartoum on an aircraft scheduled to land in Jeddah, the FBI asked to arrest him. The Saudis, aware that sentiment in the Arab world is hardening rapidly against the U.S. for not putting pressure on Israel to halt Jewish settlements in Jerusalem and the West Bank, didn't say yes and they didn't say no. Instead the Saudi government refused permission for the plane to land. Mugniyah got away and the Clinton administration got a taste of what the Muslim world soon may be like for Americans again as a consequence of its policy of never saying no to Israel.

Palestinian Ziad Abu Ain was the subject of an intense campaign on U.S. college campuses a decade ago when Israel demanded his extradition from Chicago on charges that he had been involved in a bombing in Israel in which two Israeli students were killed. Although his attorney, Ramsey Clark, pointed out that the "evidence" consisted only of a statement extracted from another Palestinian youth under torture, the resident alien was deported and jailed in Israel. Subsequently freed in an Israeli-Palestinian prisoner exchange, Abu Ain will become comptroller of the Palestinian National Authority in Gaza.

Vice President Harriett Zimmerman of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee was nominated along with former Florida Rep. Dan Mica, now a lobbyist for the insurance industry, to serve on the board of directors of the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, DC. Zimmerman's nomination by the Clinton administration to the U.S. government-funded institute, whose first president was long-time U.S. Ambassador to Israel Sam Lewis, is no surprise. Although the institute is supposed to deal with peace on a worldwide basis, in practice it has functioned since its founding as a U.S. taxpayer-funded adjunct to the Israel lobby in Washington.

Twenty-nine-year-old Jay K. Footlik [sic] is the new Clinton White House's liaison to the American Jewish community. A former senior research assistant to UCLA Prof. Steven L. Spiegel, a hard-line U.S. Zionist whose extensive writings mirror those of Israel's right-wingers, Footlik will assume some of the duties of Sara Ehrman, former White House liaison officer who has moved to the Democratic National Committee, where she will continue to oversee the administration's Jewish liaison operation. Footlik served in the 1992 Clinton campaign and has been working in the Office of Presidential Personnel. Commenting on the appointment, Johns Hopkins University political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg told the Jewish Week of Queens, NY, "One of the ironies of this administration is that they have not regarded Jews as an alien group that needs to be courted. Jews have always been an inherent part of this administration. That says something good about the president."

Basking in unaccustomed media attention after the Oklahoma City bombing is Kenneth Stern, who had brought out an exhaustive study of citizen militia movements prepared for the American Jewish Committee only days before the Oklahoma tragedy. Now Stern, who monitors extremism for the AJC, has signed a contract with Simon and Schuster to publish his study in book form by April 19, 1996, the first anniversary of the bombing.

Back when her husband, President George Bush, was close-mouthed about his true feelings on hot-button political issues, journalists listened carefully to Barbara Bush's frank and commonsensical remarks to get an idea of what he really thought. That may or may not be the case with former Secretary of State James Baker, who apparently has decided not to enter the Republican presidential race himself but who is a very likely candidate for a high-level administration job in any Republican administration. That makes particularly interesting the recent comment by Mrs. Susan Baker about "the serious injustices that have been experienced by the Palestinian people." If only intelligence, honesty, and human decency could replace smarmy hypocrisy as the prime requirement for public office in our beloved, benighted country.