Israeli Make-Believe: Jonathan Jay Pollard Did Not Damage the United States

By Andrew I. Killgore

Israeli make-believe in the U.S. media has always been that spy-for-Israel Jonathan Jay Pollard never really hurt the United States. He only stole U.S. intelligence about the Arabs that Israel needed for its own defense.

Besides, the line continued, Israel was an American ally. As such the United States was actually remiss in not freely providing the intelligence taken by Pollard. Thus, while he may have been technically wrong, it was not really fair to condemn him.

Holding an opposite view was Caspar Weinberger, secretary of defense in 1985 and 1986 when Pollard was arrested and sentenced to life in prison. Weinberger said Pollard should be shot. The secretary of defense also wrote a closely held 40-page memorandum to the judge hearing the case against Pollard, detailing just how badly his espionage had hurt the United States.

Measured by volume alone, Pollard’s thefts were unprecedented. The U.S. General Accounting Office, in an article on domestic espionage, concluded that Pollard stole 800,000 pages of intelligence. The Washington Report has concluded, based on figures carried in the newspapers and on conversations with prosecutors familiar with the case, that the volume of highly classified material stolen by Pollard would fill 75 regular-size office file cabinets.

American media make-believers assert that Pollard was promised by the prosecutors that he would not receive a life sentence if he pled guilty. And thus that he was betrayed. But I have been told by prosecutors familiar with the Pollard case, and other cases, that prosecutors may make recommendations to the judge, but he alone decides what a sentence will be.

The Weinberger memorandum is still closely held, but some of its points have “leaked.” None of these put Pollard in a better light.

Some of Pollard’s thefts reached Soviet hands. Several of our intelligence agents (not the CIA case officers who handle the agents) were killed, apparently because the KGB could figure out, based on material stolen by Pollard, who they were. The location of U.S. defense installations and units also reached the U.S.S.R., according to some earlier news items.

How had the contents of documents Pollard stole reached the Soviets? Had he stolen intelligence that they wanted? Was this on orders from his Israeli handlers? The “answer” in the American press, reprinted from the Israeli press, acknowledged, in effect, that American intelligence had reached the Soviet Union from Israeli sources. The “explanation” originating from Israeli government sources was that Israeli intelligence had been penetrated by a Soviet “mole” who stole the documents for Moscow.

The mole story explains “how” American secret documents might have reached Moscow but does not explain what Israel was doing with these documents in the first place. Was the Israeli story that Pollard stole only information about the Arabs false?

Had there been a “Mister X” somewhere inside the U.S. government who told Pollard’s handlers what specific documents he should steal, as many American press accounts have always speculated? If so, his name has not reached the media, but this has not stopped private surmises that “X” might have been a then-high-ranking Pentagon official.

Where make-believe stumbles, British satirist/social critic George Orwell’s “memory hole” takes over. In his book Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell created the memory hole. It represented his fear that a systematic distortion of truth and a continuous rewriting of history, with the planned and systematic destruction down the “memory hole” of truthful and accurate accounts, would end in perpetual dictatorship.

And that seems to be exactly what is being carried out by the make-believers dedicated to always presenting Israel in a favorable light. This is continuing even though now, at Pollard’s insistence, the Israeli government has conceded that the Pollard affair was not a “rogue” operation, but that in fact he was employed by the government of Israel.

A recent long Washington Post article consigns to the memory hole the magnitude of Pollard’s thefts, the possibility that a very high level “Mister X” also working with Israeli intelligence existed inside the U.S., the fact that extremely sensitive U.S. intelligence reached Soviet hands and the likelihood that U.S. agents lost their lives as a result.

Jonathan Jay Pollard, it seems, is actually a nice guy. If you don’t yet believe it, you may need more exposure to what Friends of Israel write in the American media.

Andrew I. Killgore is the publisher of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.