Jonathan Pollard

About Jonathan Pollard

Sentence & Imprisonment

On November 19, 2015, Jonathan Pollard was released from prison after serving 30 years of a life sentence for his activities on behalf of Israel.
The median sentence for the offense Pollard committed – one count of passing classified information to an ally – is 2 to 4 years. Pollard received his life sentence without a trial, as a result of a plea bargain which he honored and the U.S. government violated.

BACKGROUND Facts of the Pollard Case


http://palmtreeofdeborah.blogspot.com

“We Were Like Dreamers”

23 Sivan 5781 03 June 2021 https://palmtreeofdeborah.blogspot.com/2021/06/we-were-like-dreamers.html

Arutz Sheva Interview with Jonathan Pollard in Beit Yehonatan

In a recent interview, Yehonatan and Esther Pollard talked about the clash of realities between Yehonatan’s seemingly endless and hopeless years in prison and their visit to Beit Yehonatan. This is the building named for Pollard in the Yemenite Village near Ir David. Upon their recent visit, they were greeted with much love and rejoicing, singing and dancing.
During all those dark years, even though he could hardly imagine it, Yehonatan focused on the truth that he knew – that HKB”H exists and He can and will perform miracles for His children. He depended on HKB”H to rescue him at the appropriate time and that until that time arrived, HKB”H would grant him the strength to endure. Today, his dreams have been realized beyond his imagining. But that is not the end of the story. It’s just the beginning.
This is reminiscent of what we read in Tehillim 126: “When God brings about the return to Zion, we were like dreamers. Then our mouths will be filled with laughter and our tongues with joyous song.”
Today, we still sit in the darkness of our exile, which just got a little darker still with the agreement of all our internal enemies to unite together to form the next government in Israel. But, we have to take the lesson from Yehonatan, to focus on the promised redemption. Just as it has come true in a small measure for him, it will most assuredly come true for all Bnei Yisrael.on a scale so grand, we can’t even imagine it.
Just as Yehonatan has arrived in Eretz Yisrael a free man once more, celebrated by all those who love him, so we will yet see Ben David upon his throne and the Beit Hamikdash standing gloriously in its place. Then, we will say together, “We were like dreamers.”
TOP


http://palmtreeofdeborah.blogspot.com

Who Is Worthy to Lead?

3 Sivan 5781 13 May 2021 https://palmtreeofdeborah.blogspot.com/2021/05/who-is-worthy-to-lead.html
Erev Shabbat Kodesh
Parashat Bamidbar
The Haftarah for Parashat Bamidbar comes from the Prophet Hoshea, chapter 2. Here is what I consider to be the pertinent takeaway for this week…
And the number of the children of Israel shall be as the sand of the sea, which shall neither be measured nor counted; and it shall come to pass that, instead of saying to them, “You are not My people,” it shall be said to them, “The children of the living God.”
And the children of Judah and the children of Israel shall be gathered together, and they shall appoint for themselves one head, and they shall go up from the land, for great is the day of Jezreel.
Say to your brethren, “Ammi,” and to your sisters, “Ruhamah.”

~ ~ ~

Jonathan Pollard Gives Strength to the Jews Living in Mixed Cities in Israel

TOP


Jonathan Pollard’s Remarks, Mercaz HaRav Yeshivah on Yom Yerushalayim 5781

Posted 11May2021 Jacob Richman “Jonathan Pollard English Speech at Jerusalem Day Celebration at Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva – May 10 2021”: עצרת ההודיה המרכזית לציון 54 שנים לאיחוד ירושלים.
Jonathan Pollard said the Jewish people didn’t receive the Land of Israel from the League of Nations, the UN, or US, but that it was given to them
by G-d. The Enemy is within the City’s Gates. Israel should leave the UN, which is “Knesset of hate,”, Jordan has no claim over Jerusalem.
https://www.jpost.com/

Pollard: Israel should expel US diplomats

Israel should leave the UN, which is “Knesset of hate,” he tells Merkaz Harav Yeshiva
By GIL HOFFMAN MAY 11, 2021 20:04 https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/pollard-israel-should-expel-us-diplomats-667810
If the United States wants to have its consulate in Jerusalem serve the Palestinian Authority, as it did until three years ago, Israel should expel all US diplomats working there, Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard said at Merkaz Harav Yeshiva’s Jerusalem Day celebration Monday night.
“No US diplomat should be allowed to staff it,” he said. “They should be declared persona non grata and asked to leave the country.”
Pollard served 30 years in prison for spying for Israel in the US. He was the guest of honor and greeted as a hero at the annual event, where the prime minister or president usually speaks. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu canceled on the event at the last minute.
Stressing that nothing he would say in the speech was politically motivated, Pollard offered his advice to Israel in the half-hour address. He warned against not only obvious enemies with guns, but also enemies in the US State Department and in the UN.
Pollard said Israel should leave the UN, which he called “the Knesset of hate.”
“Our presence there is an insult to our ancestors who fought and died for this country,” he said.
Israel should take away Jordan’s role over the Aqsa Mosque, and the Religious Services Ministry should take over responsibility for prayers there, Pollard said.
“The [Jerusalem] Wakf [Islamic religious trust] are ideological descendants of the Nazis,” he said.
Pollard suggested expelling Palestinian terrorists to Ireland, where he said the Palestinians are liked. He warned against what he called the fiction of the two-state solution.
“They would get the state, and we would be under the ground,” he said. “Hashem [God] gave us this land, not the League of Nations, not a British lord and not the United States.”
Jerusalem Mayor Moshe Lion presented Pollard, who now lives in the city, with a certificate of appreciation in honor of his sacrifices on behalf of the Jewish people and Jerusalem. It is fitting to celebrate the liberation of Jerusalem and of Pollard on the same day, he said.
TOP


israel-hayom-logo

‘I don’t regret helping my people and my land’

In an exclusive interview with Israel Hayom, Jonathan Pollard describes the decision to hand over classified information to Israel, the brutal expulsion from the Israeli Embassy, the war for survival in prison, the love story with Esther, and the moment he arrived back home, in Israel.

By  Boaz Bismuth , Caroline B. Glick and Ariel Kahana
Published on  03-26-2021 12:00 Last modified: 03-26-2021 06:41 26March2021 https://www.israelhayom.com/2021/03/26/i-dont-regret-helping-my-people-and-my-land/

Jonathan and Esther Pollard in Jerusalem-Photo-Eric Sultan

Jonathan and Esther Pollard in Jerusalem-Photo-Eric Sultan

On Nov. 21, 1985, at 10 a.m., Jonathan Pollard and his then-wife arrive at the Israeli Embassy in Washington. He still recalls what happened in those moments, second by second, as if they had happened only yesterday.
He describes FBI surveillance, including agents with rifles and a helicopter. He says he got to the embassy and flashed the car’s lights at the guard, and the gate opened, saying, “They knew who we were.” He went in, and the gate closed behind him, leaving his FBI tail outside.
He got out of the car and asked, “Is this it? Am I home? This is sovereign Israeli territory.” And he was told: “Everything is fine. You’re home.”

Jonathan Pollard FREE in Israel – “God’s Miracle”

Then, Pollard says, someone came out of the embassy and called over the security guard. A group of five or six people was speaking, and he saw them distance themselves from him, after they had been gathered around him, patting him on the shoulder.
“This isn’t good,” he said to himself. “They don’t want to be caught in the crossfire.”
Then the security guard told Pollard that under orders from Jerusalem, he was to use the main gate. Pollard told him he wouldn’t make it to the main gate, that there were 20 FBI agents waiting for him outside.
“Do you know what they’ll do to me?” he asked. “And he said, ‘Sorry, you have to leave.'”
Q: What did you feel at that moment? Disappointment, fear, anger? 
“It was mostly confusion. Real confusion. So I said to him, ‘Do you know what they are going to do to me when I leave?’ Yes. ‘Do you know what they are going to do to my ex-wife?’ Yes. And I said, ‘You’re still telling me to leave?’ Those are the orders from Jerusalem. Leave. So I looked at him and I said, ‘Then shoot me.’
“I said, ‘I know what’s going to happen and I’m not prepared for this. Just shoot me. You’ll say that you thought I was a terrorist and it was a car bomb. Just do it now, quickly. Don’t think about it.’ And no, obviously, he didn’t want to do that, so as I turned around to go into the car he said, ‘Excuse me,’ and I said yes, he said, ‘Your boss wants your last report.’
“So I stood there, thinking about this, and the only thing I was weighing at the time in my mind was my duty to Israel and my anger at this guy for his chutzpah.”
Pollard gave the guard a code word relating to his last report, then got in his car and left the embassy grounds.
The FBI stopped him immediately.
“They were very polite,” he said, recalling that as he cuffed him, he looked up “at our flag flying. It’s a slate grey sky, cold, bitterly cold, and all the curtains in the embassy are coming down, the Venetian blinds are coming down. Like an eye closing. … And the only thing that I thought of at that time, strangely enough, was a song that the British played when they marched out of Yorktown. The world turned upside down, that’s what they played.”
Q: If you had said you refuse to leave, do you think the Israelis would have forced you out? 
“They would have physically removed me. They had orders. They were good soldiers also.”

Jonathan and Esther Pollard in Jerusalem -Eric Sultan

Jonathan and Esther Pollard in Jerusalem -Eric Sultan

‘Everyone wants a selfie’

March 2021. Jonathan and Esther Pollard greet us on a quiet street in central Jerusalem and take us to their apartment, where they have been living since they arrived in Israel some three months ago. The government rented the apartment for them for a year from its owner, a Jewish American.
Pollard says the people in his new neighborhood are “wonderful.” When he needs to, he goes out to the small market on the corner, and sometimes he and his wife, Esther, go grocery shopping together. It’s hard for him to walk because of back pain and leg pain, he says, but it’s “hard to describe” the wonder of taking a walk with Esther.
“Everything is so wonderful, the sky is blue and beautiful,” he says. People talk to them, he says, and from the conversations, he gets the sense that “they know” that “someone was willing to sacrifice his life for them.”
One thing puzzles him: Why do people ask to take selfies with him? He laughs at the “nonsense.”
“When I went to prison, there were no smartphones and no selfies. Esther and I are both very private people, and privacy is important to us,” he says.
Esther adds: Friends invited us to come to them for Shabbat. But after Jonathan didn’t have a Shabbat table for 30 years, he prefers his own.”
Israel Hayom‘s conversation with the couple lasts seven hours, over the course of three meetings. It’s hard to jam everything into one article, and certainly to lay out an affair that lasted 35 years, with so many details and changes. But what we heard was even harder.

Jonathan and Ester Pollard lands in Israel: ‘Ecstatic to be home at last’

Pollard, 66, speaks mostly in a calm voice. Only twice during the interview does his voice crack: when we speak about the children he and Esther did not have, and the horrors he experienced in prison.
He handles the questions we ask and goes into details about everything. Although he is trying to put the past behind him, because now he is “starting a new chapter, and this interview isn’t the end, but just the beginning,” he says that in his new life, there are “too many things” that reopen the wound.
Dozens of times during the conversation, he stresses that now he is home. And when he says, “We’ve come home,” he means to Israel, not his personal home.
A day before the interview, the couple visited the Western Wall for the first time. Then, they went to Har Hamenuhot, to the grave of former Chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu, who threw his support behind Jonathan for the beginning.
Pollard was excited that things have come full circle. He says it was “hard” to see the Western Wall plaza divided into pods because of COVID, but at the grave of Rabbi Eliyahu, he was deeply moved. “He treated me like a son and Esther like a daughter. Even better,” he says, adding that at the grave, he had the experience he had “hoped for.”
He knows only a few words of Hebrew but learns new ones each day. He is starting to take in what it means to live in Israel, including exhausting contact with the local bureaucracy, such as taking out an Israeli driver’s license.
“The last time I drove was on Nov. 21, 1985,” he smiles. Senior officials in the Prime Minister’s Office, under Cabinet Secretary Tzachi Braverman, are handling his matters personally.

Jonathan and Esther Pollard leave the courthouse in New York on the day of his release 20November2015-Justice for Jonathan Pollard-Courtesy

Jonathan and Esther Pollard leave the courthouse in New York on the day of his release 20November2015-Justice for Jonathan Pollard-Courtesy

But the main challenge facing them right now is Esther’s cancer and the treatments she is undergoing at Hadassah Ein Karem Medical Center in Jerusalem. Esther says she’s alive, and that’s the most important thing, and adds that the couple has dealt with so many difficulties over the last 35 years, including questions about Jonathan’s life and death, and now this. She says it’s hard, painful, and very complicated, but what keeps her going is that they have the possibility to simply be happy together.
Indeed, it appears as if they are making up for lost decades. Jonathan says that in New York, after he was released from prison, even though they were living in a one-room apartment, they learned to live together and enjoy each other’s company. He says that people “don’t believe” what conditions they were living in, but Esther made the apartment into a palace, and they were happy. He says he doesn’t go out much, to museums or cultural events. “I have my wife,” he says.
Q: Are you completely free now? 
“Not completely,” he says, explaining that as far as the Americans are concerned, he is not allowed to discuss the specific intelligence he handed over. He says he was warned about that before he was released from prison. He is worried about what the Americans will do if he says something problematic.
Q: When you arrived in Israel, did you receive any warnings from the Israeli security establishment about your freedom of movement or things you are not allowed to say? 
“No.”

A mother’s tears

Jonathan Jay Pollard was born on Aug. 7, 1954, to a Jewish family in Galveston, Texas. From a young age, he showed amazing intellectual talents. Jewish identity had an important place in the family’s life, especially for him. He was deeply influenced by the story of an uncle who escaped Germany before the Holocaust and arrived in the US.
He says his uncle was on board a ship that reached the US coast from Europe but was not allowed to drop anchor. The Jews in the US refused to intervene, he says, in order to avoid looking like warmongers. “My uncle was forced to jump off a ship near Trinidad, and from there he swam ashore.”
His father, Morris, was drafted during World War II and was responsible for a biological warfare station in Texas. “Years later, he read about President Roosevelt’s refusal to bomb Auschwitz and allow Jewish refugees into the US, and broke down. Later on, he understood why I did what I did.”
At age 16, Pollard visited Israel for the first time, as part of a delegation of a science program for youth with the Weizmann Institute. At age 22, he completed a BA in political science at Stanford University. He registered for an advanced degree in law and international relations, but because he had already been hired for a job in Navy Intelligence, he did not complete that degree.
Q: Why didn’t you make aliyah? 
“I don’t want to blame my mother for this, but my mother’s tears were pretty convincing.”
He convinced himself that what he needed to do was improve his abilities so that when he decided to “come home” – make aliyah – he could do well in any occupation he might choose. Business held no interest for him. What he wanted to do was serve in the army, handle weapons.
Q: Is it true that while you were a student you said you wanted to be a spy for the Mossad? 
Pollard says no, but when he was a student, a professor had tried to recruit him to the CIA, but he declined.
Years later, he says, the CIA reached out to him again, and this time, he began the process. He says that in the interview he was asked many questions, including whether he had ever used marijuana. He says he responded with a smile because he had done so years before while in college in California, “Like everyone did.”
This was something that ruled out many candidates for the CIA, including himself. And, he notes, he was also recruited for Navy Intelligence at their initiative – they were the ones who reached out to him.
Q: If you’ve mentioned drugs, there were claims that you were a drug dealer. 
Pollard says “absolutely not,” and calls those claims part of the “character assassination against him.
In 1979, Pollard was accepted into the Office of Naval Intelligence. He served at a base in Suitland, Maryland, near Washington DC. In 1981, he met his first wife, and four years later they married. They lived at the Nelson Building, near Connecticut Ave. in Washington.
As Pollard earned promotions, he was exposed to increasingly classified materials – and more of it. At a certain stage, he had access to all the maritime and air movements of the Soviet military. Parts of the information had direct ramifications for Israel’s security. In his last position, he was stationed at the Navy Field Operation Intelligence Office of the Naval Intelligence Command as an analyst.

Jonathan and Esther Pollard during a visit in prison-Reuters-Archives

Jonathan and Esther Pollard during a visit in prison-Reuters-Archives

A first meeting at the Hilton

Esther pulls out two gas masks, the kind that was distributed in Israel during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.  “These are thanks to the information Jonathan gave,” she says, explaining that Jonathan had supplied information about Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons factories. Where did Israel get that information, she asks? “From him.”
Pollard adds that there were “existential threats” to Israel, and not just Saddam’s gas, that the US was support to report to Israel under an intelligence-sharing agreement, but did not.
He says that when he raised the issue with his superior, he was told to forget about it, “that the Jews are really sensitive about gas.”
He says that there was an anti-Semitic atmosphere at the agency, and he faced a dilemma – should he leave everything and make aliyah, or should he – seeing the danger to his people and his country – do what needed to be done. He wondered if, once again, Jews would be targeted for extermination using gas.
“What do we mean by the words ‘Never again?'”
Q: Who initiated your first meeting with Aviem Sella in May 1984? 
Pollard says he had a childhood friend named Steve Stern, with whom he shared his growing frustration over the Americans’ refusal to hand over information about threats to Israel.
At a certain point, he says, Steve asked him if he would like to help Israel, and when Pollard said yes, Steve suggested he meet with Col. Aviem Sella, an officer in the Israeli Air Force, who was spending a year studying in the US.
Pollard knew his name as the person who had planned Israel’s bombing of Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981 and the strike on the Russian anti-aircraft system that Syria had deployed in Lebanon the following year.
Their first meeting took place at the Hilton Hotel in Washington. “We’re sitting there on the balcony because it was kind of confidential, it was OK. I looked down and there’s one of my colleagues pulling out a security red stripe top secret; there’s a guy sitting across from him, taking it, looking at it, nodding his hand, and putting it in a briefcase.
“I said to Aviem, we have to get out of here now because I was sure there were pictures being taken. There was surveillance. So we went out the back. And we went to a park and I put my cards face up with him, as we say.
“I said I will not spy against the United States, he said ‘No, we understand that.’ I said I would not compromise any American operations or technology. He said, ‘We understand that this is just for us. You know we’re being embargoed right now for intelligence.’ I said yes, I knew.”
Pollard had been present at many meetings with Israeli representatives as a representative of the Navy.
Pollard says that Sella asked him about many subjects and appeared to have been well-briefed. He confirmed what Sella asked him about.
“He said that’s why we were here. I made it very clear I didn’t want any money. Very clear, right off the bat, that this was not about money. I didn’t want any gifts, just to know if it was needed, if it helped. If not, [he should] get back to me and I’d try to improve the quality of the intelligence.”

Pollard leaving court during one of the hearings in his trial -GettyImages-Archives

Pollard leaving court during one of the hearings in his trial -GettyImages-Archives

Q: But you knew what the Israelis’ expectations were. You also knew that as far as the Americans were concerned, you couldn’t give classified information to a friendly state. 
“I already stepped over the line.”
Sella sent Pollard’s offer to supply intelligence to Israel, and it was accepted. A decision was made for the Bureau of Scientific Contacts in the Defense Ministry, the office responsible for collecting intelligence from friendly nations that would handle the young Jewish American. The Head of the bureau at the time was master spy Rafi Eitan.
And so, with this idealistic act, one of the most difficult affairs in the history of Israel, and possibly international espionage, began.
Pollard would eventually be caught and imprisoned for 30 years – an extreme and unprecedented punishment when compared to the other spies convicted of similar crimes, both before and after him.
It would shake US-Israeli relations to the core and have massive ramifications to this very day. Israel’s legendary intelligence apparatus would suffer an indelible trauma, and US Jews would suffer a shock that would overshadow how they were treated for generations to come.

A file from Military Intelligence

From the moment the contact with Pollard began, he emerged as an intelligence gold mine. He had access to many intelligence databases, and at the request of his Israeli handlers, he delved into them and extracted extremely valuable information for Israel.
He says that in the 14 months he was active, there were seven times when he handed over documents in a briefcase, in accordance with the requests made of him. Among other things, he says, he was asked to immediately notify Israel of any intention by Arab armies to launch a surprise attack.
At first, Pollard worked with Aviem Sella, and later was handled by Yossi Yagur. An employee of the Israeli Embassy, Irit Erb, rented a secret apartment near the embassy in which the documents Pollard smuggled out of his office were photocopied.
It was the time of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was supplying Arab countries with the best weapons available. Israel didn’t have satellites yet, so Pollard handed over the American satellite images.
He supplied intelligence about attempts by Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Iran to develop nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, as well as ballistic missiles; about planned terrorist attacks against Israeli civilian targets; and about maneuvers by Arab armies and the Soviet Navy in the Middle East.
He also supplied aerial images of a PLO base in Tunisia that allowed the IAF to bomb it in 1985. Journalist Wolf Blitzer, who investigated the affair, quoted senior Israeli officials who said that the intelligence was critical to Israel’s security.
Q: Who wanted it more? Did Israel want your services, or did you want to serve Israel? 
“It was back and forth. Look, when you see something you are collective, when you see something that scares the hell out of you, and is a bona fide strategic threat to the existence of this country, you want more.”
Esther says that Rafi Eitan said in his last interviews that the quality of the intelligence supplied by Pollard was so good it was “almost addictive.” She says that Eitan intended to stop asking for it, but couldn’t because of the quality of the information.
Pollard says that is correct, adding that in a report from the Eban Commission, the government described the intelligence as “24-karat, pure gold.”
Q: So they asked for more and more? Specific things? 
“It got to the point where I would show up to a meeting in a safe house and I would be given a folder, open the folder. Ehud Barak’s name was on there, and the collection priorities. All of it. Page after page after page. I said, ‘I’m one person, what do you want me to do? [They said], ‘You have to do this, this is life or death to the state, what kind of patriot are you?'”
“I want you to understand something, this was not an offensive operation by us. It was defensive. There’s a big difference. And it was made very clear to me from the start, no American technology, no American war plans, no American codes, no American agents, anything. Fine, that corresponded with what my objectives were, to get the information to Israel.
“My expectations at the time were that once I accomplished that and they said I could, I would make aliyah. And that would be the end of it. But what happened as time went on [was that] the information that I was providing to Israel became more frightening.
“By the way, everything I’m saying, I was polygraphed on and was in a document that I submitted to the court. Every single thing I’m saying right now. I’m not going to say anything that was not in that public document.”

Rafi Eitan-Dudi Vaaknin-File

Rafi Eitan-Dudi Vaaknin-File

An Israeli passport for ‘Danny Cohen’

In the fall of 1984, Pollard was introduced to Rafi Eitan for the first time at a safe house in Paris. He flew there with his then-wife, Anne, supposedly to attend a relative’s wedding. The meeting would turn out to be a watershed moment for the mission, and after it, the spy’s activity would be expanded. But it would also expose the differences between him and Eitan, and plant the seeds that would eventually lead to the affair blowing up and Pollard paying a terrible price.
“Everyone” took part in the meeting, he says: Rafi, Aviem [Sella], himself, and two more people, whose names he didn’t get. “This was the official handover between Aviem and Yossi Yagur, who later became my control officer,” he says.
Yagur was from the Bureau of Scientific Contacts, and his official role was defined as Israel’s “intelligence attaché” from 1980 until Pollard’s capture in November 1985.
Pollard says Eitan asked him to give him the names of American agents in Israel. “I said, ‘I can’t do that. He said, ‘Well, I’m giving you a direct order.’ I said, ‘I don’t care what you’re giving me. I don’t do that.’ He said, ‘You are being paid,’ and I wasn’t quick enough to understand what he was saying. He said, ‘You’re being paid, you do as I say. I said, ‘I don’t care if you’re paying me or not paying me, I am not doing that.'”
Q: Did you know the names of American agents in Israel? 
“No.”
Two weeks after the meeting in Paris, Pollard met with his handlers at the safe house in Washington. He was given an Israel passport in the name of “Danny Cohen” and made the transition from volunteer to agent, part of the bureau.
When he asked them why they had chosen that name, he was told, “We had an Eli Cohen in Damascus, so you are the Danny Cohen in Washington.”
“My first reaction was, hey, I don’t want the way it ended for Eli Cohen in Damascus, that’s not a good thing for me. He thought this was funny, I didn’t think this was funny at all.”
Pollard says that led to the question of what would happen if he were caught.
“The story at that time was, play for time, don’t take a polygraph. And I’m thinking to myself, you don’t know how it works in the United States. The first thing they do is sit you down on a chair and hook you up [to a polygraph]. That’s the first thing, so I said yeah, okay, and? They said ‘don’t admit to anything and we’ll extract you, we’ll get you out.’
“And I said, ‘Well, how do you intend to do that exactly because I live in a death trap. There are only two entrances, there are two ways to get in and out and they are both easily watched. It’s not like I’m living in an adjoining building, where you can cut a hole in the wall for me and I can gallop out the back door. I went through this whole thing. And Rafi just kept blowing me off.”
Even though Pollard acted out of ideology and never asked for money, after that meeting Eitan ordered him to be paid $1,500 monthly. Later, his salary from Israel was raised to $2,500 a month as a sign of appreciation for his performance. Eventually, the financial compensation cast a pall over his version that he had not operated out of greed, and allowed the enemies that would pop up later on to make up false accusations against him.
Pollard claims that the money he received went to cover expenses incurred by the mission. He says he was the one who paid for plane tickets and hotels for all the team members in Paris, and for meals in restaurants. He says team members would come to his hotel to enjoy themselves.

‘You were given an order, complete it’

Q: Was there any moment you wanted to quit, and were forced to stay on because of pressure from Israel?
“Yeah. There was a moment that I felt this way, I was reminded of it when I read about the superb Mossad operation in Tehran to get the nuclear documents.
“I was asked to go to a facility that I had absolutely no right to go into. None, okay? And I had to come up with an explanation as to why I was going in. And it took me a couple of weeks to figure out a way of doing it. And I did it. And I came out and I stood by the car and I was waiting for somebody to come get me. I didn’t know how well the cover story would hold, but it did.
“I understood why the information was needed but they put me in horrible jeopardy. And I passed word back to Rafi that I hoped this information was worth the life of an agent because if it isn’t, they squandered me for nothing.
“And he wrote back, through Yossi Yagur, ‘I gave you an order, this is not subject to negotiation, complete your order.’
Q: Why did you keep working with Rafi Eitan if he treated you that way? 
“Because I wasn’t working for him. The cause was greater than anything else.”
Q: Did you feel any sense of pride? 
“You have to understand my psychology, I was relieved and thankful that I could help.”
Q: What do you see as the difference between Yossi Yagur and Aviem Sella? 
“For me, they were both nice guys, they were both very well-educated, they were both appreciative. It didn’t make a difference. The thing with Aviem as an operator was he knew exactly how important certain information was and he could fine-tune the request in terms of what a pilot needed.”
Q: Did you know, in real-time, what Israel was doing with the information you gave it? 
“The only one that I was aware of was Tunisia because I was sitting in my office, making arrangements to find out if the flight had been discovered. I had a number to call that would have allowed the planes to be called back.”
Q: What did you feel after the strike? 
“It wasn’t anything personal. I felt relieved. I felt proud of the guys who flew that long mission.”
Q: But you were part of it. 
“No, I felt relieved that we finally hit these bastards in a way that counted, and if I felt anything it was profound sadness afterward that the target of our raid [Yasser Arafat] had escaped what he deserved.”
Q: Looking back, do you regret what you did?

Anne Pollard in New York 28September1989 -AP-Gerald Herbert-Archives

Anne Pollard in New York 28September1989 -AP-Gerald Herbert-Archives

Pollard says he thinks about that a lot but asks what he should regret – helping his people and his land? He says that at his synagogue, there were two flags: a US one and an Israeli one. “That’s how I was raised.”
Pollard says he does regret not being “more effective,” and he regrets that the Israeli government treated him the way that it did, and that the American government used him as a “weapon” against Israel.
But he is not sorry for working for his people and his homeland. He says that given the information he had, he had no other choice. Israel was supposed to have received the intelligence from the US according to an agreement that was in place, but when Israel asked for it, the US said it didn’t exist.
Pollard says that denying its existence was “much worse” than not handing it over.
The intelligence was “so critical to our existence,” he says. It was intelligence that would win a war and something that could not be neglected.
Esther says, “The gas masks. I like to use this example because it’s the easiest for people to understand. Before we had gas masks and chemical antidotes and secure rooms and sealed rooms, we were building bomb shelters, how did we suddenly know to start building bomb shelters and to start getting gas masks and chemical antidotes?
“Because Israel did not want to acknowledge Jonathan, they kept this very quiet. Nobody ever officially explained how we suddenly have gas masks or how we suddenly have security rooms. And if you go in the Education Ministry, and you go into the library and try to find [the] information they teach children in classrooms, there’s not a word about him,” she says.
Pollard: “There was an incident where Israeli defense officials came through the Pentagon and asked about a certain facility in Iraq that they heard was producing poison gas during the Iran-Iraq war. The Americans told them it didn’t exist. We didn’t have a satellite at the time, we weren’t flying, because it was a war, we weren’t flying Phantoms, RFEs over Iraq at the time. Okay, so you trust the Americans. So I was asked to find out before the delegation left. So I found out.”
Pollard said he went to the safe house. “I walked in, and my team was standing there, there were three people standing there. A nice big floor. I asked them to move the furniture and I started pulling out evidence at putting it down. It covered the entire floor.
“Yossi Yagur looked at me, I’ll never forget this as long as I live, looked at me and said, ‘Jonathan, it’s sometimes better to deal with reliable enemies than unreliable friends. We were told this doesn’t exist.’ I said, ‘Well, you were lied to.'”
Q: What you’re describing is the United States deliberately hiding from Israel information regarding an existential threat.
“Yes, that was just one of them. Lying about it. It wasn’t just the sin of omission, it was the sin of commission, as well.” Pollard says that when people wax poetic about Israel’s “great friends, the Americans,” he tells them that friendships don’t last forever.
Q: At what point did you conclude they were hostile to Israel? 
“I always knew, because my father, who was wise in his ways, kept telling me: What you think you know about the relationship is a myth.”

‘Pin it on the Pakistanis’

Much like Eli Cohen, who during his last visit to Israel already sensed he was about to be caught, Pollard was very worried at his last meeting with Rafi Eitan in the summer of 1985.
The bureau chief was hospitalized at Beilinson Hospital in Petach Tikva after undergoing eye surgery.
If what Eitan said in an interview with Israeli investigative journalism show Uvda in December 2014 is to be believed, he concluded in August 1985 that the operation should be stopped. But he said that a request had come in from a Military Intelligence official to obtain information about gas manufacture in an Arab country.
Eitan’s widow mentioned the country by name – Iraq. The official who asked for the intelligence was apparently then-head of MI, Maj. Gen. Ehud Barak. Pollard says that he was afraid to leave Israel when the visit was over and had a “bad feeling” on the plane.
He told his then-wife, Anne, that he’d get off the plane if he could.
Pollard says he told Eitan and the other team members that he was not in friendly surroundings, he was behind enemy lines, and that was how the operation should be treated.
“Rafi Eitan basically told me, ‘If you get caught, make sure that it’s pinned on the Pakistanis.”
“I said, ‘How the hell am I supposed to do that?’ He said, ‘You’re a smart boy, you figure it out, but just make sure before we rescue you that the dirt will stay on the Pakistanis.’
“So I thought about it and I did what I could. I went to diplomatic parties, officially at the Pakistani Embassy. I had pictures taken with the defense attaché, very personal pictures with him, with arms around each other, everything. They were in the apartment, prominently displayed.”
Pollard says the last order he received from Yagur, in the autumn of 1985, was to obtain a list of the Iranians’ air defense equipment that they could use to defend Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf.
“This was in the middle of the Iran-Iraq War. I looked at Yossi and said, ‘Are you mad? The Iranians? What are we talking about?’ That’s when I was introduced to the arms-per-hostages deal that was then being conducted. I said, okay, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, I got it.”

‘Water the cactus’

In the fall of 1985, the noose around Pollard began to tighten. His work colleagues noticed he was handling documents that didn’t pertain to his work in suspicious circumstances, and they began to wonder about it. He worked out a code with Anne that he would use to let her know he’d been caught.
“About a week before I was arrested, I noticed lots of strange things happening in the office. My safe was open, and this was very dangerous. It’s a double cipher lock safe, and it was open. My desk was in disarray and I went to report it immediately to the security officer. He was just very blasé about the whole thing, [said] ‘Don’t worry about it.’ I was greatly troubled.
“That night I came back very late to the office. We were always working late so nobody noticed. And I put a ladder up over my desk, I don’t know what made me do it, but I did. And I moved the tile, the acoustic tile, and there’s a camera, pointing right down at the desk. So I put the ladder away and I left. And I had a hard talk with myself driving home.
“Part of my brain said ‘Run, now, run.’ I had the ability to do it at that point. The other half of my brain said ‘No, you have to run the risk and get this final information, the one they asked for at the embassy.’
“And I said I thought I could run that risk. That was a very tragic mistake. If I’d been a cold-blooded agent, I would have just disappeared at that point. If I had made the wrong decision, you wouldn’t be talking to me right now.”
On Sunday, Nov. 18, Pollard arrived for his standing meeting with the Israelis, not far from the embassy, but no one opened the door.
The next day, Pollard was summoned for questioning by the FBI. Two days later, with inspiring sang froid, he told the people interrogating him that he was spying for Pakistan. They wanted to know who his contact was. “I was ready with that. I knew the people in the Pakistani Embassy that were involved in intelligence and defense, and I gave them their names,” he says.

Aviem Sella -KOKO-File

Aviem Sella -KOKO-File

Q: At any point in time, did you give the Pakistanis any information? 
“No, never. I was never charged with that.”
Q: And what about contact with China and South Africa? 
“As part of my job I dealt with a lot of countries in an official capacity. The prosecution realized that there wasn’t anything on which to hang a charge of real damage.
“There were two charges that constituted the actual damage. One, that I had given Israel information that undermined the United States’ ability to receive a quid pro quo. And the second one was because the Americans felt that the Arabs felt that I had made Israel too strong. That’s it in black and white. If only.”
Q: Did your handlers ask you to supply information Israel could use to defend itself in exchange for information from other countries? 
“No. Never. The information was always specific to our needs.”
Q: Did you give them the names of American agents? 
“You have to look at my charge sheet. I was specifically indicted for giving classified information to an ally, Israel without intent to harm the United States. The law differentiates between someone who intends to harm US national security and someone who doesn’t.
“I could have given away very sensitive intelligence information that could and would have caused extreme damage to the national security. War plans, codes. If any of that material had been transmitted to Israel, I could have and should have been indicted for intending to harm the country, because I should have known that compromising this kind of intelligence this kind of information would do irreparable harm to the national security. I wasn’t.”
Pollard says he was only convicted of handing over intelligence that caused diplomatic harm.
“I never ever agreed to, nor did I ever implicate anybody else in the case. Never. They came to me with the name ‘Aviem Sella.’ And that’s when I took the polygraph [wire] off. The FBI guy said, ‘Don’t worry, they told us everything about it.'”
Pollard and his then-wife saved Sella and his wife, Yehudit, at the last minute, and apparently Yossi Yagur and Irit Erb, too, from the clutches of the American investigation.
“The FBI arrested me outside the office. I asked to call my wife, Anne, because Aviem and his wife were waiting to have dinner with us at a restaurant in town.” He says his main concern at that moment, he says, was to get Sella out of the country because he did not have diplomatic immunity.
He saw himself as disposable, whereas Sella was a hero, a “strategic asset” for Israel.
“I was just a soldier,” he said.
He says he called Anne and apologized for not being able to come to dinner, and uttered the code they had made up only a few days earlier: “Water the cactus,” which meant that he’d been caught and she needed to leave town immediately.
Pollard says she evaded the FBI and got to Sella, who “of course” left her behind – but he says that is a story for another time. Pollard says that Anne was supposed to have been moved out of the US.
Sella left the US immediately and rushed to update Rafi Eitan – not necessarily in that order. A mere 24 hours before Pollard was exposed, Eitan notified then-Prime Minister Shimon Peres that an Israeli spy in the US was about to be exposed. Pollard was allowed to go home, under heavy surveillance and bugging, and could not flee.
The next day he would be interrogated again, but another 36 hours would go by before he was arrested. Could he have been saved at this stage? Did anyone think of it?

‘Come to the embassy tomorrow’

After questioning him, the FBI allowed Pollard to go home. He says agents had raided the apartment and found the Pakistani pictures, the money, and everything else. He looked out the window and saw agents everywhere.
He says he had two American phone numbers to call in case of an emergency that he had been given at the meeting in Paris.
Pollard says he had used public phones on the street to contact the Israelis and receive instructions. On the fateful evening, he and Anne went out for a walk, and clearly saw that they were being followed. He said he entered a phone booth and made the call. “The phone number had been disconnected already. That wasn’t a good feeling.”
He tried another number. It was already clear that the FBI was following him, he says, but he had no choice other than to make the call since it was the pre-cellphone era.
Q: Whom did you call? Who were you supposed to speak to? 
Pollard doesn’t know. The number was a Washington one that he’d never called. After numerous tries, a man picked up. Pollard explained the situation and was told, “We know there’s a problem.” Pollard says he was asked to “keep talking,” to allow the other members of the network time to leave the country.
The next day, Nov. 20, Pollard was taken in by the FBI for another round of questioning, in which representatives of Navy Intelligence, where he had worked, took part.
He described what he had done, but switched the names of his Israeli handlers to Pakistanis he knew, as per the cover story. It worked. Later, the chief investigator, Ronald Olive, wrote that until Pollard entered the Israeli Embassy, he and his colleagues had believed that he was spying for Pakistan and didn’t know about his connection to Israel.
That evening, too, Pollard was allowed to go home, and went for a walk with Anne to make phone calls so he could call the Israelis. He says he called the same number and told the man who answered that he had admitted to being a Pakistani spy, and he was waiting for the escape plan. He was told that there was no escape plan, and his orders were to come to the Israeli Embassy at 10 a.m.
“The only thing I said in return was, ‘Are you crazy? Are you insane?’ I said I’d confessed to being a Pakistani spy, I was prepared to go to jail as a Pakistani spy. ‘You’re telling me to come to the embassy?'” Pollard was told that those were the orders.
He said he was “ready for extraction.”
“I’m ready to be taken out [of the country],” he told the man, who answered, “There is no extraction.”

Jonathan Pollard at the Federal Correctional Institution in Butner North Carolina 17December1997 -AP-Ayala Bar-Archives

Jonathan Pollard at the Federal Correctional Institution in Butner North Carolina 17December1997 -AP-Ayala Bar-Archives

Q: So why did you go to the embassy?
“When you are in that situation, you want to believe people, because you have no escape. I was scared half to death at this point.”
In the hours that followed, Anne made another mistake. In an attempt to cover her tracks, she gave a neighbor a suitcase full of documents, telling her that she and her husband were leaving town, and would she keep it until they returned. But the neighbor was the daughter of a high-ranking naval officer, and when the couple was arrested, she contacted the FBI and gave them the suitcase.

‘Rafi Eitan buried me’

The next morning, the couple arrived at the Israeli Embassy and were turned out, on orders from Israel.
Q: When you were turned out of the embassy, what thoughts went through your head? 
“I felt real fear for what our country could become. Israel. My only country. Any country that could do this to a loyal agent was capable of anything. I grew up on this myth that you never leave a soldier behind, which is bullshit. We do. It’s not just me. No. Those two boys in Gaza [fallen soldiers Staff Sgt. Oron Shaul and Lt. Hadar Goldin, as well as captives Avera Mengistu and Hisham al-Sayed]. It’s been happening since the Lavon affair. And even before that, there were cases like that.”
According to what Rafi Eitan told Uvda, he was the one who, from the “red phone” at his Tel Aviv home, gave the order to “throw him out.” Immediately thereafter, he went to update then-Prime Minister Shimon Peres, Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Eitan took full responsibility and immediately resigned as head of the Bureau of Scientific Contacts.
As for Aviem Sella, Israel – despite its promise to tell the whole truth – hid his part in the affair for a long time. When the Americans learned about it, they were once again furious, and even now, there are high-ranking American officials who believe that Israel has not revealed the entire truth about the affair.
Sella, who at the time was considered a future candidate for the commander of the IAF, was later forced to give up his appointment as commander of the Tel Nof Airbase and resign. After the affair was exposed, neither he nor Eitan ever set foot in the US again.
Eitan later claimed that an escape plan had been prepared for Pollard and Anne, and that they had a few days to escape.
“Pollard sentenced himself when he came to the embassy with suitcases full of documents,” he said.
Pollard flatly denies these claims, and says he did not bring any documents with him, and that his suitcase contained only “clothes and medicine.”
Eitan wrote and deleted a chapter about Pollard in his autobiography, The Secret Man. His widow, Miriam, wrote in the introduction that “The Pollard affair stuck in Rafi’s throat for 34 years. It never let him go, and he never let it go.” She says that Eitan took his secrets with him to the grave, mainly to defend the political echelon that had handled Pollard.
Pollard thinks differently. He says Eitan “had to” delete the chapter about him because it contained “the truth – that he abandoned me, he lied about me, he buried me, and he did everything he humanly could to make sure I never came home.”
Q: To the best of your knowledge, what specific secrets did he delete? 
“Two big secrets. One, he could actually have given an accurate account of how much the government knew at the time and agreed to …  Because from what I understood later, he was kind of bragging, discussing the information coming in, and bragging in front of the Mossad representatives, saying ‘Look what we did, where were you?’
“Number two, he could actually describe in great detail exactly what intelligence was in this affair. Something I can never do.”
In response to these statements, Rafi Eitan’s family said, “Out of respect for his memory, total confidence in his integrity, wisdom, and motivation, which were solely for the sake of Israel – we as a family continue his path of refraining from any comment about Pollard.”
Q: Have you called Aviem Sella since you were released or since you arrived in Israel? 
“No.”
Q: Would you like to meet with him and with Yossi Yagur? 
“No.” Pollard says he is happy that they both managed to get out of the US and return home, and that when he heard about it, he felt relieved, and wishes them all the best.
Q: Are you angry at them? 
No, he says, he feels nothing toward them. According to Pollard, it’s “in the past,” and he is happy about that.
Q: But Sella was an agent. 
“Of course. I mean, he was in this funny position of being an agent, but he was also a pilot. A hero pilot, no less.”
Neither Aviem Sella nor Ehud Barak responded to Israel Hayom‘s requests to comment.

A Free Pollard campaign message projected onto the wallsof the Old City of Jerusalem in 2010-Archives

A Free Pollard campaign message projected onto the wallsof the Old City of Jerusalem in 2010-Archives

Information about Iran and the Contras

Pollard’s arrest caused a seismic shock. At the time, Israel had a national unity government, and with a war in Lebanon and boundless inflation, the US was giving Israel diplomatic backing and defense aid that were very vital.
In a report on the affair from the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, then-committee chairman Abba Eban wrote that Pollard’s exposure had created real fear that Israeli-US relations could fall apart. Shamir later told his confidant, Avi Pazner, that he had never had “such a difficult conversation” with then-Secretary of State George Shultz.
In an attempt to do damage control with the Americans, everyone involved – Peres, Shamir, Rabin, and Rafi Eitan – decided to do all they could to bury the affair and shift the blame to Pollard.
In a telegram to Shultz, and in a cabinet meeting, Peres claimed that Pollard had explained he was a US intelligence envoy and displayed credentials to prove it. But the Eban Commission report determined that this version was “imaginary and groundless.”
Peres said explicitly at the time that it was “best not to investigate” the affair. He and Shamir put all the blame on Eitan and knowingly lied in describing Pollard’s handling as “partisan, without permission and without authority.” This whitewashing led to another series of lies by official Israeli representatives.
On Nov. 30, 1985, at 3:30 a.m., nine days after Pollard’s arrest, Shultz called Peres. Both sides reported the conversation, but not the secret agreements Peres made that would later seal Pollard’s fate.
According to the Eban Commission, Peres shrugged off responsibility for the agent and claimed that he had been operated without permission. He promised to tell the US the entire truth about the affair and allow it to investigate everyone involved, but never kept these promises.
A promise that was kept was the return of the documents Pollard had supplied to Israel – in other words, to supply US prosecutors with crates of evidence about the extent of his work.
The Eban Commission wrote that Peres’ agreement to return the documents Pollard had handed over was “fundamentally wrong” and caused major damage, as they formed the basis of Pollard’s eventual conviction and life sentence, despite Israel’s claim that it had received assurances from America that they would not be used against Pollard.
Pollard says that he tried to use the information he had about the administration’s involvement in the Iran-Contra affair to avoid prison. He says he told one of the investigators about the affair, which still had not been made public, and told him to go check with the White House and tell them that if he was released, he would keep his mouth shut.
He says that two nights later, at 2 a.m., the door of the jail cell opened. Two people he didn’t know, without ID tags, not in prison guard uniforms and wearing sunglasses, told him to get dressed and leave by the back door.
“I ran as hard as I could, and as far as I could, and I hid in a broom closet,” he says.
“A couple of days after that I found out that the hostage rescue unit from the FBI was waiting outside the back door with an order to shoot the first person who came out the door. This was in the newspaper.”

U.S. And Israel Negotiate Release Of Convicted Spy

BUTNER, NC – APRIL 1: The Federal Bureau of Prisons Correctional Complex where convicted Israeli spy Jonathan J. Pollard is housed, is seen on April 1, 2014 in Butner, North Carolina. Pollard, a former Navy intelligence analyst serving a life sentence for spying for Israel more than a quarter century ago, could be released under the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Sara D. Davis/Getty Images/AFP
== FOR NEWSPAPERS, INTERNET, TELCOS & TELEVISION USE ONLY ==

‘You’re smart, finish it’

Pollard says that at one point in his sentence, when he was at Butner Federal Prison, someone from Israel he didn’t know came to visit him. The man was “official” enough to be allowed in, and was with a lieutenant colonel from the National Security Agency.
“The conversation took a very strange turn. He [the Israeli] said to me, you consider yourself a patriot. I said I’d like to think so. He said, well, you’re causing the country a lot of pain right now. And you’re causing a lot of problems. I said, ‘I’m sorry.’ He said, ‘If you’re a real patriot, a real patriot would do the honorable thing.’ I said ‘I’m sorry, I’m confused, what is the honorable thing?’ He said, ‘You know, you’re a smart boy.’
“I still didn’t understand what he was saying. It was the lieutenant colonel, the American, that started yelling at him, ‘How dare you? Are you out of your mind?’ And I said, ‘What’s going on?’ He [the American] said ‘He wants you to kill yourself.’
“I looked at the Israeli guy, and I said to him, ‘Is that what you want me to do?’ His answer was very quick: ‘If you’re a real patriot, that’s what you would do.’ The lieutenant colonel got up, grabbed him by the back of the neck, and threw him out. He said, ‘I’ve been in this business many, many years, I never thought I would live to actually hear what just happened.’
“He said, ‘Don’t hurt yourself, you don’t do anything to yourself, you stay alive and you’ll get home.”
The state of Israel hired attorney Richard Hibey to defend Pollard. Some might say, to put up a show of defending him, after they burned him. Intensive talks between the two countries resulted in a plea bargain that included a sentence of 10 years in prison for handing over documents.
Pollard says he never trusted him, that Hibey cooperated with the interrogators. To test him, Pollard says he intentionally told him lies, a bunch of stories. He was called in to take an FBI polygraph the next day, and the interrogator asked him the same things he had told his lawyer.
Hibey also forced him to sign the plea bargain, Pollard says. “I’m in the courtroom, my ex-wife is in a wheelchair, slumped over, bleeding, I’m about to take my plea. Hibey said, ‘Look at your wife, you want to have her blood on your hands? If she goes back to prison, you know she won’t live another month.”
Pollard says he wanted to fight, because without the documents the Israelis returned, there was no case against him. “Many years later when I talked to another lawyer, he said if I’d refused to sign [the plea bargain], they would have had no evidence.” But Pollard said that Hibey was looking out for the Israeli government’s interests, and forced him to sign.
Q: Why didn’t you hire someone else? 
He says the judge wouldn’t allow him to do so, and asked Pollard if he accepted the plea bargain of his own free will.
“I said ‘No your honor, they’re threatening to kill my wife and the document is a lie. It’s perjured testimony.’ He said, ‘Well, you have a difficult decision to make, you’d better make it now.'”
Pollard says he looked at Anne, looked at the situation, and his lawyer made signing motions. “I said, OK, I’ll sign it,” he says.
But the affair didn’t end when Pollard signed the plea bargain. It only opened the door for the US to exact the mother of all revenge against someone it believed had betrayed it.
In those years, 24 American agents were exposed and executed in the Soviet Union. A secret memo that the prosecution put before the judge accused Pollard of handing them over. According to the conspiracy theory, which was expounded in reports and books by journalists hostile to Pollard, he had given the Russians the agents’ names so that they would make it easier for Russian Jews to leave the USSR.
Pollard says that the day his verdict was handed down, someone from the State Department entered the courtroom and delivered a document to the judge and prosecutor.
“He opens up his briefcase, hands the judge a piece of paper, whatever it was, and walks out. The judge reads it, hands it to the prosecutor. The prosecutor starts laughing, comes over to the table. Puts the paper down and looks at my lawyer, says ‘Huh, your client is getting –'”
Q: F***ed. 
“I would have liked Israel to care enough about our Russian brothers and sisters to have considered doing that.”
Pollard reiterates that he never burned any agent.
Only in 1994 was the story that Pollard was the one who supposedly handed American agents to the KGB finally debunked. That year, the Americans exposed the highest-ranking Soviet mole in the CIA, Aldrich Ames, who admitted to exposing the agents. Ames was sentenced to life in prison, which he is still serving.
Pollard says that Ames was also the one who came to the court the day of his conviction and gave the judge the document accusing him of burning the US agents.
A few days before the sentencing, the administration took another step to destroy Pollard. Although State Department Legal Adviser Abraham Sofaer had himself signed off on the plea bargain, then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger asked the judge to violate it.
In a special memo he sent to the judge, Weinberger wrote that it would be “hard to imagine worse damage to national security than what Pollard caused.”
That was the final nail in the coffin of the biased trial. Although the sides had agreed on a 10-year prison sentence, the prosecutor said in his summation that Pollard would “never see the light of day,” and that is what happened. The judge rejected the deal and sentenced him to life in prison, with a recommendation that he not be allowed clemency – a completely disproportionate punishment for the crime of which he was convicted. It was already clear that tinges of latent anti-Semitism had sealed his fate.

2,000 letters that never arrived

“There were a lot of hands on the keys of my jail cell,” Pollard says, and some people wouldn’t have minded if he had died.
At the end of the 1990s, Esther Pollard managed to meet with Rafi Eitan for the first time, and he told her he regretted only one thing in the entire affair. “I thought it would be something very highbrow, very moral and he said, ‘My only regret is that when Pollard came into the embassy I didn’t order a bullet put through his head, then there would have been no Pollard case. That’s my only regret.”
Eitan did not deny the account.
Pollard served the first seven years of his sentence in the US Federal Prison in Marion, Illinois, one of the most secure federal prisons at the time. In 1994 he was moved to Butner Prison in North Carolina, where conditions were slightly less stringent. He stayed there until his release in 2015.

Jonathan Pollard will be released from US jail in November

epa04864976 Jonathan Pollard’s wife, Esther Pollard, poses for photograph outside her house after she gave a statement to the media in Jerusalem, Israel, 29 July 2105. Jonathan Pollard, the former US Navy intelligence analyst, was convicted of spying for Israel and will be released in 20 November 2015 after serving 30 years in jail, a US parole board decided on 28 July 2015. EPA/ABIR SULTAN *** Local Caption *** 30.07.15

Q: Is there anything that has changed in you because of prison? 
“Yeah, I’m actually, I believe, a better man. Why? Because when I was in prison I realized very quickly that I was the representative of Jews because I was really the first Jew a lot of guys had ever met. I was also a representative of the State of Israel, because of who I was, and I was also her husband, and there were many instances where I declined to do something in prison, whether it was gambling, or whether it was drinking, anything that would number one bring dishonor on our marriage, number two bring dishonor on this country.”
US prison authorities are known for being tough, but Pollard, for reasons that are not hard to guess, encountered the most extreme version of that. Some 2,000 letters that he wrote to Esther over the years left the prison but were intercepted in Washington and never reached her. What’s worse, letters he sent to his mother in the last month of her life never arrived.
“When my mother, aleyah hashalom, was dying, I asked for permission to write to her. And they said, okay, fine, you can write letters to your mother. So what does a son say to a dying mother? Everything that you can. I wrote many times during the day, every time I could, I wrote. I don’t know how many letters there were, but there were a lot. So she died. And a little while after that the chief of security came in and asked to see me.
“He said, are you feeling okay today? He said, I want you to keep control. Okay. And he pulls up a bag with all the letters in it. He said they were never sent out of Washington. He said, just so you know, they X’d out the stamps so you can’t use them again.’
“What kind of animal does something like this? What kind of animal stops a letter from a son to a dying mother?”
Q: How did you spend your time in prison? How did you stay normal in prison? 
“What does a normal person do in an abnormal situation? He creates his own reality. My reality centered around my wife. I was going to do whatever it took to return to her as sane as I could be and normal.
“I didn’t have writing privileges. I had 200 minutes of phone conversation a month, and the beginning was more like 30 minutes.
“Our doors couldn’t be locked. Insane. That meant my roommate and I, hopefully you got a good roommate, would have to switch during the evening. An hour on, an hour off, in front of the door with a knife.”

Morris Pollard -Dudi Vaknin-Archives

Morris Pollard -Dudi Vaknin-Archives

“I lived every day, I woke up in the morning, I said my prayers, and I got my knife, [made of plexiglass to evade the metal detector], I put it in my special pocket, and I went out.”
Pollard says he never knew what would happen, or whether he would return to his cell safely.
One time in the prison dining hall, he saw a man get stabbed. “Somebody just sitting next to me, talking to me, I don’t know the guy, next thing I know he has a knife in his neck, his head is on the table, and there was blood. I had to pick up my tray and leave.
“I was sent to the adjoining unit to get toilet paper, and you could die in prison for toilet paper. I had a big box of it. So as I was walking back, I heard a noise and I turned the corner and the entire hall, maybe 25 meters [82 feet], was a warzone, the Blacks and the Mexicans were killing one another, knives, everything, there was blood everywhere.
“An officer was on the ground, he was stabbed, and I’m holding a box that’s worth dying for, many times over. And at the end of the hall is my friend, my roommate, and an officer behind steel plexiglass were just shaking their heads, looking at me like ‘You’re dead.’ So the door locked behind me and there’s really nothing else to do at that point. I had a knife. But I’d be dead before I pulled it out.
“I just said the Shema[Yisrael prayer] the whole time walking down that hallway. I didn’t look to the right, I didn’t look to the left. I stepped over the blood and the bodies, and I kept going straight down the hall, and I finally got to the door, and the officer opened it up and let me in. And I turned around and I said, ‘Here’s your toilet paper, I hope it was worth it.'”
Pollard says he once saw someone get his head bashed in, his eyes knocked out. “And I have to step over him, looking at the murdered, and the murderer looks at me and says ‘How are you doing?’ and I said a lot better than him. And walked on.
“Esther knows all these stories. And worse ones. Have you ever seen somebody with their intestines out? Let me tell you how that happens. He’s a mule bringing in drugs, and he didn’t get rid of them fast enough, so they cut him open and they pulled his intestines out and took the drugs out of his intestines.”

‘They trusted me because I wasn’t a rat’

Q: Were you ever beaten? Were you physically harmed? 
“No. I was in a peculiar situation, I didn’t talk. I didn’t turn state’s evidence against anybody. And pretty much everybody knew that. And the society that we have in prison, sorry, we had in prison, values certain attributes that other people [in] normal society don’t understand, or wouldn’t recognize.”
Q: Were there incidents when you clashed with other prisoners? 
“I had an incident where I went out on the yard and there was an elderly black gentleman, he collapsed and I ran over. I was giving CPR, I was giving mouth to mouth, I was doing everything.
“Fifteen minutes later, the ambulance comes, and as I loaded this very nice gentleman, very nice guy, up on the ambulance, I noticed that his shoes were missing. And I just went crazy, and I was screaming at all these Black guys. I said ‘You’ll roast in hell for what you did. You stole the shoes of a dead man. A decent, kind man. You stole his shoes. You’ll all go to hell.'”
Q: How did people in prison react to the fact that you were an Israeli spy? 
“At one point I’m walking across the compound and all the Black guys were giving me high fives. ‘Yeah, you’re the man, you’re not the Jew anymore, you’re the man.’ I asked my roommate what happened and he said, ‘You didn’t hear the news this morning?’ I said no. He said, ‘Oh, NPR and CNN announced that sources in the Drug Enforcement Agency have identified you as the Israeli mafia’s drug kingpin distributing cocaine in Washington.”
“I said, seriously, if I had that kind of money, you think I’d have this dog of a lawyer that I had? So he was laughing.”
But these lies persist, Pollard says, including rumors that he and Anne spent all their money on drugs. “I’m drug tested every week, like I’m going to do drugs,” he says.
“The guy I eventually lived with for eight or nine years, ex-Army, great guy, innocent, totally innocent of his charges of attempted murder. And everybody in the prison knew it. He’s still there.”
Q: How did the prison management treat you? 
“The prison administration was actually okay with me because I wasn’t a rat. I wasn’t a rat, so I was trusted. There was one really bad warden that I’ve had to go to war against. One of the other inmates nearly killed him, so he was out of my life, thank God.
“I never changed my thinking when I was in prison,” he says. “I tried to maintain whatever sense of decency and compassion I have.”
Pollard shared what was on his mind with the prison wardens.
“An inmate in my factory came to me begging for help, he was a mental patient, he had committed murder, but he was schizophrenic, and he said they put him on medication, and he was hearing voices telling him to kill himself. I said I’d go talk to his psychiatrist about it. I did, I was warned off. ‘You’re no doctor, you come to me again, I’ll have you locked up.’
“About a week later, he was late for work. My manager told me to go get him, and I said I wouldn’t. Why? Because he’s probably dead. If I find him, I’ll be sent to the hole [solitary confinement] for six months while you investigate it. You come with me.
“And there he was, hanging. So at the memorial, I was asked to say a few words, because I was kind of his mentor in the factory. I said what was on my heart. I said, ‘We have a murderer in this audience.’ And of course we had a lot of murderers.
“No, we have a member of the staff that’s a murderer. Then it got quiet and I pointed to the doctor, and I said, ‘You murdered this guy. You should be wearing khaki, you should be wearing a prison number just like the rest of us. You’re a murderer. Then the warden got everybody out of the chapel, and he came to me and he said that was very interesting, and the last statement I’d ever make in the prison chapel. But he knew it was true.”
But sometimes, he says, the guards could be humane. In 2001, after filing a petition, he was brought to a Washington court, where the judge gave instructions to the guards not to allow Pollard to eat or shower while he was in Washington. He was to take part in the legal proceedings and then immediately return to prison.

A rally urging Pollard's release in Jerusalem, Jan. 2, 2014 (Yonatan Sindel/File)

A rally urging Pollard’s release in Jerusalem, Jan. 2, 2014 (Yonatan Sindel/File)

“I was taken back to the Arlington prison, which was across the river in Washington. The captain of the prison said the judge’s orders were no food, no clean clothes, no shower.
“The day of the hearing, I hadn’t had anything to eat for 48 hours. The marshal said, ‘This is my last day, and I think this is wrong. I’ll keep my back to the camera and you’re going to eat my lunch. I said, ‘Why are you doing this?’ He said, ‘Because you’ve always treated me with respect.’ So he fed me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and an orange and grape juice, with his back to the camera.”
Q: Did you ever think of committing suicide? 
“No, look. Jews don’t commit suicide, they buy retail. Seriously, I never ever thought of that, for two reasons. One, what it would do to my wife, because the act of suicide is a cowardly act, and I would be abandoning my wife, and it would be the ultimate act of betrayal to my wife to do something like that. Second of all, I don’t like the message that it would send to the goyim.”
Q: You read a lot of books in prison. 
“I have 10,000 books sitting in a container in Ashdod, and I had 7,000-8,000 from my first prison that somehow disappeared, I don’t know what happened to them. And my first library, which was at home, sorry, in Washington (old habit) was about 6,000 volumes. I remember when the FBI walked in and looked at it, they said ‘My God, why do you read so much?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. I just like to learn things, that’s all, you should try it.'”

The first letter from Esther

In 1990, Pollard divorced his first wife and partner in espionage, Anne, who had been sentenced to five years in prison, but was released early because of health problems.
Pollard had known Esther from his youth, but he didn’t know it until later in life. She was born and raised in Canada as Elaine Zeitz, the daughter of an Orthodox Jewish family. In the late 1980s, she was teaching English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as part of her master’s degree.
Esther says that one day when she was in Jerusalem, someone gave her an old copy of the Jewish Press newspaper. She wondered why someone would give her an old copy, put it in her bag, and forgot about it. She says that that weekend, she was on her way to visit family and was bored on the bus, so she took out the paper and started reading it.
She saw a printed request to write to Jonathan Pollard, which noted that “he enjoyed it.” She didn’t know who he was and had never heard of the affair but thought it would be an act of kindness. She put it on her to-do list and forgot about it. After a few months, just before she returned to Canada, she found the article.
One day, Esther says, she was sitting in a cafeteria, writing Jonathan a letter, but didn’t have too much to say since they didn’t know each other. She later returned to Canada and began working on her MA, but planned to make aliyah.
Then all of a sudden, two letters from Jonathan appeared in her mailbox. He had numbered the envelopes, but she read the second one first, which included all the information about his case, and then the first one, which was personal.
“And I should be very honest, when I first pulled the letters out of the mailbox, what was the first thing I said? I don’t have time for this now. I was finishing another degree, and I was back in school teaching, I just came back from Israel and I don’t have time. Anyway, God had other ideas.
“The first envelope was the wrong one, it was the one with the information on the case, and I’m not a politically active person in Canada, I’m a typical Canadian Jew, we tend to be indifferent to politics unless it’s Israel.
“I read it and I went into shock, how could this happen, how could this be, this is America, America doesn’t do things like this, then I opened the second envelope, which was a personal letter from him, and again I went into shock, because I expected it to be from a man who was bitter, and angry, and hurt, and disappointed. And the whole letter was so filled with love of the land and love of the people, just so full of light, I was blown away.
“I took his first letter to work the next day. I was working teaching in a bilingual learning center for children with learning disabilities and social and emotional issues. I showed the letter to my assistant, and I said, this is the kind of man I could marry. She said ‘Already? One letter, you marry?'”
She began to write back.
Q: And after a few letters, you discovered you knew one another? 
Pollard: “Eventually. ‘When did you go to Israel, what did you do there?’ And then, suddenly… wait a second…”
Esther: “Oh, you are him.”
Esther: “So over the course of the next few years, I wrote him more than 2,000 letters, which I have copies of. He answered my letters, but I never got them, ever.” She says that she only ever received five other letters from him, “some of them were not really letters, they were postcards that were written in microscript.”
The prison authorities stopped all of Pollard’s letters early on. The couple made up for it in the phone calls he was allowed, during which it turned out that they had met in Israel when they were young, as part of a program for Diaspora Jewish youth. It turns out that they had a lot in common – love for the nation, love for the land.

‘Children are everything’

Esther devoted her entire life to Jonathan. She influenced him to become religious, and become close to Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu. They married in 1993.
Esther Pollard made aliyah in 2005, and for 10 years, while journalists reported that she was living a life of luxury at the government’s expense, she was living in a one-room apartment she had been offered by a Jerusalem widow on Bezalel Street in Jerusalem. She insists she never received a penny from the government.
For four years straight, she read Psalms for him at the Western Wall. She took on public leaders and authority figures in Israel and the US for how they had treated Jonathan and for what she described as their abandonment and betrayal of him. Some people criticized her for her harsh style, and even claimed that it was hurting attempts to get him released.
“I never wanted to be his spokesperson. I wanted to be his wife, I wanted to be his lover, I wanted to be his friend. I did not want to be his spokesperson. But when we realized that there was an agenda, and it was really hostile to his ever getting out of prison, he said to me, ‘You have to do this for me.’
“There came many points in time where, unfortunately, the agenda of the government of Israel was not our agenda,” she says.
Esther also says that the clashes with the government created alienation between Jonathan and his brother, Harvey, and sister, Carol.
“The government of Israel enlisted everybody in the family to carry the same line,” Esther says.

Jonathan and Esther Pollard in New York after his release from prison 21November2015 -Justice for Pollard-Courtesy

Jonathan and Esther Pollard in New York after his release from prison 21November2015 -Justice for Pollard-Courtesy

Pollard: “One of the things that was most hurtful to me during this entire period of time is what the successive governments of Israel did to my wife. They understood that the most dangerous weapon I had was a wife that could speak Hebrew fluently. And they did everything they humanly could to discredit her, to undermine her, to wreck her credibility, and to lie shamelessly about her.
“You know, I read stories at the time based on information from Israeli government sources that my wife was receiving millions of dollars, living in a beautiful luxury house. I finally forced Esther to show me where she lived here. But this was a dump. I walked in, I looked at this and I had to walk outside and put my head in my hands. This is where she had lived for 10 years.
“I brought this up with government representatives. I said, ‘Did you see where she lived? And they said well, yeah. I said, ‘Then why did you leak those stories?’ He didn’t answer.”
Pollard and Esther speak honestly about the heavy price they paid by not being able to have children while he was in prison for 30 years. Esther says, “This has been one of our greatest tragedies and sorrows.”
“In Israel, people understood the idea that a basic human right is to bring children into this world. In America it’s exactly the opposite, the minute you’re arrested and convicted, you no longer have any rights, and you certainly have no right to have children. We pleaded with successive governments to give us a break, to give us a chance, an opportunity to have children.”
Pollard: “Any way. Any way.”
“If anybody tells you that men don’t have a need for children as much as women do, they’re lying. Because children are everything. I asked repeatedly. There wasn’t a year that I didn’t submit a petition, something, for permission to have a child. It was always denied.”
“There are state prisons that allow cohabitation, that allow [conjugal visits], and the prisons are quieter, because nobody wants to lose that privilege.
“I would say that one of the highest prices that both of us paid was not having children. I would say that’s an accurate statement. Losing the most productive years of my life pales in comparison to the loss of [not] having children.
“Living 30 years with absolute fear and dread every day that it could be your last, pales in comparison to not having children. And I try to explain this to people and I’m kind of shocked at the kind of indifference people show to the whole issue of having children.
“The latest example is the Yemenite children’s affair. We all know what happened, please, we’re not children. We’re not naive. And for the government to just let the court decide? I met somebody here in this room from the government last week. I said, ‘All these people want is an apology. They just want you to say you’re sorry.
“I said as far as compensation, it’s not your right, and it’s not the right of the court to determine what the compensation should be. They lost children. You know how they lost them, stolen, sold, murdered, buried, abandoned, who knows what happened to them, and you’re saying, ‘We’ll let the court determine how much money a child is worth.'”

‘The character assassination began in Israel’

The calls for Pollard’s release in Israel began as soon as he was put in prison. But as the years went by, it seemed that American Jews weren’t ready to forgive him. The US defense establishment fought back every time the issue of his release was brought up, and often, it was the Jewish establishment that led the opposition.
Dennis Ross, former US President Bill Clinton’s special Middle East coordinator, admits in his book The Missing Peace that he thinks Pollard was wronged in his trial, but nevertheless recommended to Clinton in 1998 that he use Pollard to try and wring concessions out of Israel on a peace deal with the Palestinians.
Ross wrote that Pollard received a heavier punishment than other people who committed similar crimes and that his release would be a boon to Israel. Ross also wrote that he told Clinton he didn’t have many cards like that in his deck and the president would need it sooner or later, so he should use it.
But it wasn’t only the Americans who were alienated – it was also the Israeli establishment. Under the false narrative that Pollard hadn’t been an official agent, the government refused to grant him Israeli citizenship. Only petitions to the High Court of Justice filed by Esther and a group of activists forced the Rabin and Netanyahu governments to do so in the 1990s.
Along with the lack of acknowledgment, there were numerous unofficial leaks. Pollard has read everything written about him over the years and says attempts at character assassination originated from Israel, not the Americans, and aimed to “destroy my credibility, and my character, and my reputation.
“They described me as an adventurer, somebody who was totally out of control. Every dirty story that has subsequently come out by the Americans or here in Israel by low-grade so-called media personalities has been based on those lies. They didn’t realize that by defaming the agent, you defame his cause.”
Pollard brings up claims that he was a drug dealer, a rumor spread by someone who called himself a college classmate, but whom none of Pollard’s friends remembered.
Pollard’s father hired a private investigator to look into the rumor, and it turned out that the FBI had hired the “classmate” to slander him. “If I was a drug dealer, where’s the evidence, and why wasn’t I tried for it?” he asks.
Esther: “I stopped reporting to anyone here or telling anyone in the media how sick he was, because I was getting an awful lot of feedback and a tremendous sense that certain people in government would be very happy if he died.”
Q: In the CIA report, and other places, it says that Israel opened secret Swiss bank accounts for you.
Pollard confirms that Rafi Eitan had sent him to open an account, but he wasn’t the owner of it. Moreover, he says, if accounts were opened in his name, he’d like to know where the money is, because he’s been “broke” since he got out of prison.

Welcome to New Jersey

Only when Pollard had been in prison for 25 years did public figures in the US start commenting publicly about the unreasonable punishment he had been given and the false, unproven accusations leveled at him.
Former CIA director James Woolsey, former assistant Secretary of Defense Lawrence Korb, congressional representatives, and others – including the Jewish community – called on former President Barack Obama to end his prison term. Obama agreed only to commute it to 30 years, meaning that Pollard would be released on Nov. 20, 2015, 30 years to the day after he was arrested.
Pollard says his release was part of Obama’s attempts to settle Israel and Jewish public opinion after the nuclear deal with Iran was signed in the summer of 2015.
Pollard says that Obama adviser Ben Rhodes met with senators who opposed the Iran nuclear deal and opened the conversation by mentioning that Jonathan Pollard was probably going to get paroled.
Pollard says this was an attempt to divert their attention from the Iranian issue and make Israel out as an entity that had damaged US national security in an attempt to weaken Jerusalem’s arguments against the deal.
Then, he says, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch went on TV everywhere calling him the “worst spy” but saying that the US had to let him go. She said the US wished it could keep him in prison until 2045.
Q: What did you go through ahead of your release? 
“The night before I was released they moved me to the prison hospital, out of concern for security,” he says. Then his prison officer sat down with him for a heart-to-heart chat, something he’d never done. Pollard says the man was very happy he was being released and brought him kosher food, and he ate like he hadn’t eaten for 30 years.
Then, he says, two NSA officials arrived and warned him that his release would not be a pleasant experience. They told him there were a lot of people who wanted to stop it.
He was taken to a local airport in North Carolina, where his lawyers were waiting with a plane that belonged to Daniel Abraham. Only at one minute after midnight did they remove the cuffs from his hands and feet and told him he was free to go. When the plane took off, Pollard worried that the change in air pressure would cause his legs to bleed.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calls Jonathan Pollard

Esther was waiting for him in New Jersey, not having been able to get to North Carolina because of inclement weather. When he deplaned, he heard someone at the airport say something he never thought he’d hear: “Welcome to New Jersey.”
Pollard says his release wasn’t a moment of unmitigated joy. He says he was happy to see Esther, to hold her hand in private, without being watched. He said she had made their tiny apartment in New York into a “palace,” but was exhausted and afraid of what might happen.
“My back hurt, my legs were bleeding. I was afraid I was going to die,” he says.
He still had an electronic GPS surveillance bracelet on his ankle and was only allowed to walk around a small area in Manhattan. As for work, he was not allowed to be employed anywhere where there were computers, and what job could he do, he asks, without a computer?
Esther says people thought they’d be dancing for joy, but they were busy with questions of life and death, and the authorities had treated them “brutally.” She says that the night after he was released, neither of them slept. She says they had been asked to go to appear at the parole office three hours after they arrived in New York, rather than the customary 72 hours given to any other prisoner.
After five years living under heavy restrictions in New York, it took personal approval from former President Donald Trump to lift them and allow Pollard to make aliyah. Even that simple step, which for other prisoners happens automatically, entailed a battle.
Then-Israeli Ambassador to the US Ron Dermer, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and Israel Hayom owners Dr. Miriam and the late Sheldon Adelson enlisted to help put an end to the Pollard tragedy.
On the last day of his parole, they were waiting for a message telling him to come to the courthouse to have the bracelet removed. It was the eve of Shabbat. “Finally, Mark Meadow put the hammer down on the Justice Department and I finally got a call with minutes to spare [before Shabbat].”
Q: If you hadn’t made it in time, would it have been blocked? 
“They would have had to go to court … I had already asked my rabbi if I could go ahead and get the GPS taken off [on Shabbat], and he said, ‘Yes, of course. You go down. You get it done and you go home, you don’t wait.’
“I called Mark Meadows later and I thanked him profusely for his help in this matter. And the guy answered in a way that absolutely humbled me. His sincerity and his decency were just overwhelming. They were manifest and obvious that this guy was the real deal. And what he said was to the effect of ‘When you go home, make us proud.’
“I didn’t get a call from anybody in the Jewish establishment who said that.”
Three months later, on Dec. 30, 2020, more than 35 years after he was arrested, Pollard and his wife, Esther, took off in the Adelsons’ private plane. At 2:59 a.m., when the plane’s wheels touched down, he recited the Shehecheyanu blessing. 

Jonathan and Esther Pollard on the flight to Israel -Exclusive to Israel Hayom

Jonathan and Esther Pollard on the flight to Israel -Exclusive to Israel Hayom

“First of all, I didn’t know Bibi was going to be there. It was very nice. I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t prepared any statement at all. I turned to Esther, and I said ‘Oh my God, what am I going to say? She said, ‘You’ll think of something.’
“So I got off the airplane and it was instinctive on my part to just get down and kiss the ground. And actually to bless the land, which is what I did.”
Esther: “We were very excited.”
Pollard: “What was I thinking? That I was completing a circle with my wife.
Netanyahu met them at the airport. Pollard says they were excited to finally be home after 35 years, and that they thank the people of Israel and the prime minister of Israel for bringing them home.
They say no one could be prouder of Israel, or its leader, than they are. They are committed to becoming “productive citizens” as soon as possible. Israel is a great country with a glorious future, they say – the future of the Jewish people, and “we aren’t going anywhere.”

The problem for American Jews

The Pollard affair embarrassed Israel, enraged the US, and subjected American Jews to shame and a sense of threat. Pollard’s decision to spy for Israel, especially the ideological justification for the act, hit the deepest and most sensitive nerves of US Jews, and awakened the most frightening demons.
In those years, Jews in influential positions were suspected of using their position to favor Israel’s interests over those of the US, so many Jews saw Pollard as supplying ammunition to those who sought to hurt them. Not only did US Jewry not defend him, they also avoided him like the plague. Even when the Israeli government started to acknowledge their responsibility, Jewish leaders didn’t lift a finger to help him. The Israeli spy didn’t do much to help himself when he and his wife voiced their opinion about them.
“Their attitude was, ‘Get the hell out of our face. You already showed where your loyalty was.’ And I always have an argument with these people. I said my loyalty is to the Jewish people and the Jewish state. And they said, ‘Well, you don’t belong here.’ I said, ‘Barur [obviously]. I don’t belong here, neither do you. You should go home.’ Their answer was, ‘We are home. This isn’t exile, this is the United States.’
Pollard says that after he was arrested, the FBI gave him a book of names of prominent pro-Jewish people, their addresses and phone numbers. “It reminded me of the book the Nazis had for the invasion of England with names of Jews. I was told to put a checkmark next to a name if I suspected they had connections to Israeli intelligence. [They said], ‘You won’t have to give evidence, you won’t have to give testimony in court, nothing, just put a checkmark next to their name.’ I didn’t touch it.”
Q: Do you remember the names? 
“Of course. I remember because at the time they were screaming and yelling for my head. They said they had no problem with my life sentence. No one in the Jewish community had a problem with the life sentence.”
Pollard says he once asked a Jewish leader who came to visit him in prison what would have happened if he had brought the evidence of danger to Israel to him, rather than to Aviem Sella. He said, ‘I would have offered you coffee, and I would have kept you there and would have had the FBI come and arrest you as an agent provocateur.’ What? When people say ‘Never again,’ do they understand what that means? No. No. They don’t understand what that means.”
Q: Jews in the US accuse you of dual loyalties. 
“If you don’t like the accusation of double loyalty, then go the f*** home. It’s as simple as that. If you live in a country where you are constantly under that charge, then you don’t belong there. You go home. You come home. If you’re outside Israel, then you live in a society in which you are basically considered unreliable. The bottom line on this charge of dual loyalty is, I’m sorry, we’re Jews, and if we’re Jews, we will always have dual loyalty.”
“American Jewry has one major problem – they consider themselves more American than they do Jews.
“My father was a very highly decorated army officer during World War II. He graduated from college with a veterinary degree and he was in the US Cavalry, and he got accepted into Yale medical school.
“So he traveled with my mother to Yale, to New Haven, in uniform. He walked into the admissions office and the dean of admissions took one look at him, and said, ‘What’s your real name?’ My father said ‘Pollard.’ ‘No,’ the dean said, ‘What’s your real name?’ So my father said ‘Polanski.’ So the dean said, ‘Jew, huh?’ He said they had one too many and my father would not be admitted. My father said he’d already been accepted. The dean said, ‘One too many.'”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu greets Jonathan Pollard at the Ben-Gurion International Airport 30December2020

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu greets Jonathan Pollard at the Ben-Gurion International Airport 30December2020

Q: If a young Jewish naval intelligence officer today is asked by the Mossad to work for Israel, and calls to ask for your advice, what would you tell him? 
“I’d tell him, not doing anything is unacceptable. So simply going home is not acceptable. Making aliyah is not acceptable. You have to make a decision whether your concern for Israel and loyalty to Israel and loyalty to your fellow Jews is more important than your life.
“Because you know what would probably happen to you if you get caught. It will be hell. But you have to look at yourself every morning in the mirror, and you have to live with yourself. If you do nothing, and you turn your back, or simply make aliyah, and go on with your life, you’ll be no better than those Jews who before and after the destruction of the Temple said, ‘It’s not my responsibility.'”
Q: So you recommend that he should do what you did, and pay the price. 
“I need him to go in with his eyes open.”
Q: When you joined naval intelligence, did you ever expect to find yourself in the situation you wound up in? 
“No. If I’d known, I would not have joined naval intelligence. I wouldn’t have gone into the intelligence field. My father, may he rest in peace, begged me not to. He knew I was too idealistic and too pro-Israel to turn away. After I was arrested he came to see me and said, ‘I understand why you did what you did, and I love you for it, and I will never abandon you.’ And that was the only thing he ever said to me in all the years that I was in prison, and it really changed him.” Pollard says he has yet to visit his father’s grave and recite the Kaddish.

‘I don’t need an apology’

In spite of everything he has been through and the difficulties of adjusting to life in Israel, Pollard is passionate about continuing to help the Jewish people. He says he was raised on stories about Ari Ben Canaan and the Exodus. The stories left out incidents such as the Altalena. Today, Pollard says he did what he did for the sake of the people and the land – not necessarily for Israel, and “certainly” not for the Israelis governments, which he says abandoned him.
Q: Why do you think they abandoned you? 
“Maybe I am too nationalistic for them, maybe I am too proud as a Jew for them, maybe because I wear a kippa, maybe because of my right-wing views. Maybe they’re just jealous for some crazy reason. I don’t know. It’s a psychology that I don’t understand, but not only did Israel abandon and betray an agent, and try to bury him with the lies, the media also participated and is still participating in it.”
Q: Maybe the governments were worried about the future of Israeli-US relations? 
“Think about something, some man comes up to you, looks at your wife, slaps her across the face – are you going to be afraid to hit him back? There comes a point in time where you have to draw a line and you say no, this is not right. You touch my wife, you insult her, you hit her, I’m going to hit you and you’ll never forget it.”
Q: Would you like an apology from the government? 
“No. I don’t want any apology for myself. I want a rock-solid guarantee that they will never do this again to anybody else. That they will abandon an agent in the field, they will never betray him, they will never give evidence against him, that they will never lie against his wife, they will never undermine his credibility, that they will defend the agent, they will protect the agent, and they will get the agent home as quickly as humanly possible. That’s the only thing I want.”
Q: Do you think Israel learned a lesson from your case? 
“Absolutely not. Because a leopard doesn’t change its spots. Because the government as an institution has not learned its lesson. You don’t lie to the Israeli people. You don’t lie to the people working for you. You don’t misrepresent things. I’m sorry, it sounds naive, but that’s the way I believe. So if you ask me if they learned their lesson, a civil answer is ‘no,’ a complex answer is ‘hell no.'”
Q: Are you angry? 
“No. My father, may he rest in peace, told me that if you walk down the route of vengeance and anger, and retribution, you have to be prepared to dig two graves, one for the object of your hatred, and the other one for yourself.
“If I believed that all Israel was the government, I wouldn’t feel the way I do now. I would be angry, I would be enraged, I would feel horrible. I would feel betrayed, and I would feel disgusted. I don’t know how I could stay here, but I never ever believed that the actions were for anything or anyone other than the land and people of Israel. And to this day, the land and people of Israel have stayed loyal to me.”

“I have too much to be happy about right now, my wife is still alive, and I’m with her, and we’re home. And we have a future. This is not the end of the story. I promise. As old as we are, this is the beginning.”
Pollard says that he is closing a circle with Esther, and that what happened to them was a tragedy, not of their choosing, but 35 years later – they are home. “How could I be angry? How could I not be happy?”

Jonathan Pollard in Jerusalem -Eric Sultan

Jonathan Pollard in Jerusalem -Eric Sultan

‘Let the wound heal’

And indeed, they think about the future. Along with one of their lawyers, the Pollards have set up a new company whose goal is to make Israel energy independent. Pollard believes that his own abilities and those of his partners will get them to that goal.
At the same time, he and Esther are hoping to put the past behind them and allow the wound to heal. When asked if he intends to write a book about the affair, he says no, because in a book, he would have to write the truth, and there are many things that still cannot be said, as well as things that Israel, the US, and US Jews are not ready to hear.
Q: Can you travel to the US if you want to? 
“If I’m suicidal, yeah.”
Q: How would you define yourself today? 
“I’m Esther’s husband. That’s number one. I’m a Jew. I’m a Jew living in his land. And I’m an engineer who’s developing renewable energy projects.
Q: An Israeli agent? There are people who would be proud of that. 
“There’s nothing proud about this case.”
Q: A day or two after you landed in Israel they said you would be joining a party and going into politics. Where did that come from? 
“It came from people who were trying to create reality. I have always said, from the very beginning, I want nothing to do with politics. I am not going into politics. At all.”
Q: What would you like written on your tombstone? 
“The only thing I’d like on my tombstone is I love my wife more than life itself and I love my land and people. Period. If that is what I’m remembered for, in that order, then I’d be very happy.”
Q: Israel is a land of milk and honey – what would you add to that? 
“Dreams.”
TOP


Professor Alan Dershowitz on Ex-Spy Jonathan Pollard

To really understand the United States and it’s societal antisemitism just read the Book “The Lies They Tell” by Tuvia Tenenbom

“The Lies They Tell” by Tuvia Tenenbom ISBN-13 : 978-9652299116

"The Lies They Tell" by Tuvia Tenenbom ISBN-13 : 978-9652299116

“The Lies They Tell” by Tuvia Tenenbom ISBN-13 : 978-9652299116

Publisher: Gefen Publishing House Year Published: 2017
Tenenbom’s latest book demonstrates why a concerted effort should be made to encourage American Jews to emigrate to Israel.–Asaf Shimoni, The Times of Israel
Tenenbom had a grim story to share about anti-Semitism in the United States. He told it in a most entertaining way.–Robert Isler, Jewish Link of New Jersey

The Lies They Tell – Tuvia Tenenbom’s latest book

Feb 25, 2017 by Phyllis Chesler https://phyllis-chesler.com/articles/the-lies-they-tell-tuvia-tenenboms-latest-book

A unique, funny and disarming man gets to the parts of America that Obama seems not to have noticed, even those populated by African-Americans.

Many serious people have researched and written about anti-Semitism—but only a handful have attained a large, popular audience.

The Lies They Tell: Book Review

By David Lange June 16, 2017 https://www.israellycool.com/2017/06/16/the-lies-they-tell-book-review/
…Through his encounters with everyday Americans, Tenenbom discovers (and confirms for us) many things. Like the utter hypocrisy of the left, who go on about the palestinians across the world, but turn a blind eye to the very real suffering within underprivileged communities in their own backyard; the disturbing and pervasive racism – including anti-Semitism – that exists; the Jewish self-loathing of many American Jews; and the correlation between believing in climate change and being anti-Israel.
Ultimately, what Tenenbom uncovers is an America that is a forced melting pot in which the majority of people are afraid to share their political and religious views with strangers….


http://palmtreeofdeborah.blogspot.com

BE AFRAID, BE VERY AFRAID

25 Nissan 5781 07 April 2021 https://palmtreeofdeborah.blogspot.com/2021/04/be-afraid-be-very-afraid.html
Day 10 of the Omer
The recent Pollard interview has been met with predictable derision by a poster-child journalist for Jewish-America. The hatchet has been drawn and Haaretz and the JNS are slashing away today. My response to the author is “scared much?”
Despite his assertion that “the United States is not just another country where Jews are alien wayfarers destined someday to be expelled,” in the depths of his soul, he knows differently. This despicable character who is much to be pitied is described as having studied history at Columbia University. How self-deluded do you have to be to be a student of history and not take to heart the old adage that those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it?
Do I think Jews are in danger of being expelled from America? They should be so lucky! No, I think they are doomed to go down with that sinking ship. That is the choice they have made. And no doubt, when the water starts lapping over the bow, Mr. Loyal-Jewish-American will still be insisting it’s the greatest place in the world for Jews to be. He turns a deaf ear to the fear stirring in his soul for does he not have his Gentile brothers and sisters right there at his side, accepting and approving, cheering him on? This is the kind of Jew the goyim love – for awhile – until they begin to despise him.
The message for Jews who cling to HKB”H is not to be afraid. But to the Jew outside the Land of Israel, who has no understanding that he is a foreigner there, I say be afraid, be very afraid of what is in store for you. You might have a hatchet in hand for Jonathan Pollard, but the Master of the Universe is holding a mountain over your head.

This is the REAL Enemy:

Drain the Washington DC, Deep State Corrupt Swamp

Drain the Washington DC, Deep State Corrupt Swamp

TOP


jonathanpollard-org-logo

Facts of the Pollard Case

https://jonathanpollard.org/facts.htm
Click here to go directly to related articles and sub pages below.

  • See Also: Information on the Pollard Case

    1. Jonathan Pollard was a civilian American Naval intelligence analyst. In the mid 1980’s (circa 1983-1984), Pollard discovered that information vital to Israel’s security was being deliberately withheld by certain elements within the U.S. national security establishment.
    2. Israel was legally entitled to this vital security information according to a 1983 Memorandum of Understanding between the two countries.
    3. The information being withheld from Israel included Syrian, Iraqi, Libyan and Iranian nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare capabilities – being developed for use against Israel. It also included information on ballistic missile development by these countries and information on planned terrorist attacks against Israeli civilian targets.
    4. When Pollard discovered this suppression of information and asked his superiors about it, he was told to “mind his own business”, and that “Jews get nervous talking about poison gas; they don’t need to know.”He also learned that the objective of cutting off the flow of information to Israel was to severely curtail Israel’s ability to act independently in defense of her own interests.
    5. Pollard was painfully aware that Israeli lives were being put in jeopardy as a result of this undeclared intelligence embargo. He did everything he possibly could to stop this covert policy and to have the legal flow of information to Israel restored. When his efforts met no success, he began to give the information to Israel directly.
    6. Jonathan Pollard was an ideologue, not a mercenary. The FBI concluded after nine months of polygraphing that Pollard acted for ideological reasons only, not for profit. This fact was recognized by the sentencing judge who declined to fine Pollard. (See the addendum for further details.)Furthermore, on May 11, 1998, Israel formally acknowledged Jonathan Pollard had been a bona fide Israeli agent. This fact wiped out any remaining doubt about Jonathan Pollard’s motives. Being an official agent is, by definition, the polar opposite of being a mercenary.
    7. In 1985, his actions were discovered by the U.S. government. His instructions from Israel were to seek refuge in the Israeli embassy in Washington. When Pollard and his former wife sought refuge there, they were at first received and then summarily thrown out into the waiting arms of the FBI.
    8. Jonathan Pollard never had a trial. At the request of both the U.S. and Israeli governments, he entered into a plea agreement, which spared both governments a long, difficult, expensive and potentially embarrassing trial.
    9. Jonathan Pollard fulfilled his end of the plea agreement, cooperating fully with the prosecution.
    10. Nevertheless, Pollard received a life sentence and a recommendation that he never be paroled – in complete violation of the plea agreement he had reached with the government.
    11. Jonathan Pollard was never indicted for harming the United States.
    12. Jonathan Pollard was never indicted for compromising codes, agents, or war plans.
    13. Jonathan Pollard was never charged with treason. [Legally, treason is a charge that is only applicable when one spies for an enemy state in time of war.]
    14. Jonathan Pollard was indicted on only one charge: one count of passing classified information to an ally, without intent to harm the United States.
    15. Prior to sentencing, then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger delivered a 46-page classified memorandum to the sentencing judge. Since then, neither Pollard nor any of his cleared attorneys have ever been allowed to access the memorandum to challenge the false charges it contains-a clear violation of Pollard’s constitutional rights.The day before sentencing, Weinberger delivered a four-page supplemental memorandum to the sentencing judge. In it, he falsely accused Pollard of treason. Also in the supplemental memorandum, Weinberger advocated a life sentence in clear violation of Pollard’s plea agreement. The implication that follows from Weinberger’s false characterization of Pollard’s offense as “treason” is that the country Pollard served, Israel, is an enemy state.
    16. Pollard was shown the supplemental Weinberger memorandum only once, just moments before sentencing – hardly adequate time to prepare an appropriate defense to rebut the false accusations in it.
    17. No one else in the history of the United States has ever received a life sentence for passing classified information to an ally – only Jonathan Pollard. The median sentence for this offense is two to four years. Even agents who have committed far more serious offenses on behalf of hostile nations have not received such a harsh sentence.
    18. Pollard’s attorney never appealed from the life sentence. The time to file for such an appeal was within ten days of sentencing. Years later, with a different attorney, Pollard filed a habeas corpus challenge to the sentence.The Court of Appeals, in a two-to-one decision, rejected the challenge, largely on procedural grounds.The majority placed heavy emphasis on the failure to appeal from the life sentence in a timely manner, and on the resulting far heavier burden faced by Pollard in seeking to challenge the sentence via habeas corpus. [Note: “Habeas corpus” is a procedure by which an incarcerated person may bring a court challenge to the legality of his or her incarceration – often long after the underlying case has been concluded.]In a dissenting opinion, Court of Appeals Judge Stephen Williams called the case “a fundamental miscarriage of justice,” and wrote that he would have ordered that Pollard’s sentence be vacated.
    19. In November 1995, Israel granted Jonathan Pollard Israeli citizenship. The official presentation took place in January of 1996. This publicly signaled to the U.S. Israel’s willingness to accept full responsibility for Pollard.
    20. U.S. government sources falsely accuse Pollard in the media of passing “rooms full of classified information” and “hundreds of thousands of documents” to Israel. This volume of information is an absurdity! Pollard would have needed to make numerous “drops” using a moving van to have transferred such a large volume of information. In actual fact, Jonathan Pollard made a grand total of eleven “drops” to the Israelis, using only a small briefcase to hold the documents.
    21. The government used an insidious formula to exaggerate the volume of information that Jonathan Pollard passed to Israel. The formula was: if only one page or a single sentence of a document was passed to the Israelis, it was counted as if the whole document had been transmitted. Even referenced documents and sources were counted as having been transmitted in toto. Using this calculation, a single page could be counted as 50 hard-bound 500 page volumes!
    22. There is no Mr. “X”. The CIA claim that another highly-placed spy in the U.S. had to exist in order to give Jonathan Pollard his highly specific tasking orders is a complete fabrication. To understand how Pollard was tasked by Israel to secure specific documents, see: Was there another U.S. spy tasking Pollard? – Mr. ‘X’ Exposed.
    23. On May 12, 1998 , in the same statement in which the Government of Israel publicly acknowledged Jonathan Pollard as an Israeli agent, it accepted full responsibility for him, and indicated its commitment to securing his release and repatriation to Israel.
    24. Jonathan Pollard has repeatedly expressed his remorse publicly and in private letters to the President and others. He regrets having broken the law, and is sorry he did not find a legal means to act upon his concerns for Israel. (See Remorse Page.)
    25. Jonathan Pollard has been openly linked to the Middle East Peace Process since 1995.The Israeli government recognized long ago that Jonathan’s sentence was unjust, that the documents he delivered to Israel did not remotely cause the damage that the prosecution claimed but never proved. As a result of this recognition, various Israeli administrations have negotiated, as a matter of basic fairness, to secure Jonathan’s release.Since 1995, within the context of the peace process, the US has repeatedly exploited the plight of Jonathan Pollard to extract heavy concessions from Israel.However despite express promises made by the United States to Israel, Jonathan Pollard remains in jail.
    26. It was the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin who, in 1995, first began openly to negotiate for Jonathan’s release as part of the peace process.Although President Clinton promised Prime Minister Rabin that he would release Jonathan as part of a Middle East peace settlement, the President refused to honor his promise after Rabin was assassinated.
    27. Rabin’s successor, Prime Minister Shimon Peres, continued to link Jonathan to the peace process, and even went so far as to include a spy swap proposal as part of the deal for Pollard’s release.
    28. The Wye Plantation summit is a prime example of U.S. exploitation of Jonathan Pollard.Both before and again during the Wye summit negotiations in the fall of 1998, President Clinton promised to release Jonathan Pollard. Pollard was the deal-maker at Wye which enabled the accords to be completed.
    29. At the last minute, with the eyes of the world focused on the Wye Accords signing ceremony which was about to take place in Washington, Clinton reneged on Pollard’s release, creating a storm of negative publicity for Israel.
    30. How the Wye fiasco came about:In September, 1998, just before the mid-term Congressional elections, President Clinton (who at the time was facing impeachment hearings and in need of a foreign policy PR victory) asked Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to attend a three-way summit with the Palestinians at Wye River, Maryland.Clinton knew that a successful summit at Wye just before the Congressional elections would be good not only for his image, but would also reap great political benefits for the Democrats in their bid to regain control of Congress. As an inducement to Netanyahu, Clinton promised to release Jonathan Pollard within the context of the summit.Understanding the value of Jonathan Pollard for his own re-election bid, and needing him as a sweetener to sell any kind of “peace” deal to the Israeli people, Netanyahu ignored the entreaties of Republican friends like Newt Gingrich and agreed to attend the summit. (Gingrich would later repay Netanyahu by leading the Republican charge of slander and lies against Jonathan Pollard.)
    31. Once the Wye summit was underway, Clinton quickly “forgot” his promise to free Jonathan Pollard and there was little Netanyahu could do.
    32. Talks at Wye broke down over the release of Palestinian murderers with Jewish blood on their hands and over Israel’s request for the extradition of Ghazi Jabali, the chief of Police in Gaza who was wanted for his role in planning and executing terrorist attacks in Israel.
    33. To break the stalemate, the Palestinians suggested Jonathan Pollard as the solution. They proposed that Pollard be sold to Netanyahu once again: the US would give Jonathan to Israel in return for Israel’s freeing of hundreds of Palestinian terrorists and immunity for Ghazi Jabali.
    34. The US and Israel agreed to the Palestinian plan to swap Pollard for terrorists and murderers.President Clinton personally worked out the details of the deal in a late-night private session with a Palestinian and an Israeli representative.
    35. According to the deal, Prime Minister Netanyahu was to receive a side letter from President Clinton the next morning (one of approximately 30 side letters the Americans had promised) guaranteeing Pollard’s release for November 11, 1998, one week after the US House elections.The Pollard negotiation was the deal-maker at Wye which allowed the summit to be successfully wrapped up and a signing ceremony to be planned for the next morning in Washington, on Friday October 23, 1998.
    36. Only hours before the signing ceremony, P.M. Netanyahu received all of the American side-letters that had been promised to him, except one – the one guaranteeing the release of Jonathan Pollard.Netanyahu threatened not to attend the signing ceremony unless he got the Pollard side letter. Clinton said, “Trust me.” Netanyahu, knowing he was about to be double-crossed by Clinton over Pollard for the second time, refused.Netanyahu demanded that in the absence of a side letter of guarantee, Pollard should be freed into his custody immediately, or no signing ceremony. Arik Sharon supported Netanyahu and they threatened to leave Wye without signing the accords.
    37. In order to take the pressure off of President Clinton, CIA chief George Tenet quickly leaked the news of Pollard’s imminent release to the media in a deliberate – and ultimately successful – attempt to torpedo the deal.He sent emissaries to Capitol Hill to hold emergency meetings with leading Senators and Congressmen to enlist their support in publicly denouncing Pollard’s release. Many lies were told by the CIA emissaries about Jonathan Pollard to convince the legislators to act swiftly and in unison. Believing the lies, the legislators complied and began an unprecedented series of public actions to prevent the release of Jonathan Pollard.
    38. Meanwhile at Wye, under heavy pressure and still fearful that Netanyahu would not back down, Clinton quickly negotiated a private fall-back position with Netanyahu: Clinton would publicly promise to do a “speedy review”of the Pollard Case and he would use that review to free Pollard a few months later, parallel to the release of the 750 Palestinian terrorists who were part of the price Israel had agreed to pay for Pollard.Under heavy public pressure and betrayed by his own Minister of Defense, Yitzhak Mordecai*, who closed ranks with Clinton, Netanyahu folded and accepted this private deal. The signing ceremony was held in Washington as scheduled. *(Mordecai himself is now on trial in Israel in 2001 for sexual assault.)
    39. Netanyahu’s capitulation at Wye, the public spectacle of his being brought to heel by the Americans, and the lopsided deal he brought home from Wye now that Pollard was no longer perceived to be a part of it, would shortly cost him his premiership.
    40. After Wye, the White House falsely accused Netanyahu of having injected Pollard into the Wye summit at the last moment.However, eye witnesses to the Pollard deal at Wye, including the Israeli and the Palestinian who had negotiated the deal with Clinton and the former Israeli Cabinet Secretary, all later contradicted the White House version of events and affirmed that President Clinton had committed himself to the release of Jonathan Pollard as an integral part of the Wye Accords.

      Note: Prime Minister Netanyahu was the first prime minster of Israel to agree to free Palestinian terrorists with Jewish blood on their hands. That is the price the Americans demanded for Pollard at Wye. To this day, this represents a keen embarrassment for Netanyahu and his party, even more so since he did not receive Pollard but the Palestinian murders were released nonetheless. That is why no official source from the Netanyahu government ever wants to publicly admit to it. They keep the details to a minimum, but all concur that Pollard’s freedom was bought and paid for by “concessions”at Wye.

       

    41. When Netanyahu returned to Israel after Wye, he created a firestorm of publicity by releasing 200 Palestinian common criminals from Israeli prisons.The Palestinians were outraged, and insisted that these common criminals were not the prisoners that they had bargained for at Wye. The Americans angrily protested. Netanyahu reminded the Americans that the Wye Accords do not specify exactly which prisoners Israel must release. Critics wondered if the Prime Minister had lost his mind to antagonize the Americans this way.Only those close to Prime Minister Netanyahu understood that this was Netanyahu’s private, pointed reminder to Bill Clinton that if he was thinking of double-crossing him yet a third time over Pollard, he should think again. No Pollard, no release for the Palestinian murderers and terrorists.Unfortunately for Jonathan Pollard, Netanyahu’s government fell before he was able to act on this.
    42. In a meeting with Netanyahu right after his electoral defeat in the Spring of 1999, Jonathan Pollard’s wife, Esther, received assurances from the former prime minister that the new prime minister, Ehud Barak, had been fully briefed about what had been agreed to at Wye and about the fall-back position; that is to say, Israel had yet to free the 750 terrorists with blood on their hands and was still supposed to receive Pollard home in a “parallel gesture” from President Clinton.
    43. Not long after Barak took office, the 750 Palestinian murderers and terrorists walked out of prison as free men. Jonathan Pollard remained in his American jail cell.
    44. In an attempt to justify Clinton’s reneging at Wye, a story was leaked to the press that George Tenet, a Clinton appointee, had threatened to resign as head of the CIA if Pollard were released.The story, though not logical, sounded plausible and it became popular to cite the opposition of the American Intelligence community as the reason Clinton did not honor his commitment at Wye to free Pollard.This was soon exposed as the lame excuse it was when Clinton freed a group of unrepentant FALN terrorists in the fall of 1999, in an attempt to improve his wife’s popularity with New York State’s Hispanic community in her election bid for the Senate. (See Senate Race Page.)To this day, the same lame excuse continues to be used to justify the unjustifiable failure of Clinton to honor his commitment.
    45. In September of 1999, despite strenuous opposition from all of his government advisors and agencies, President Clinton freed 14 unrepentant Puerto Rican terrorists, members of the FALN, charged with bank robbery and various acts of terrorism, including over 130 bombings in the US, and the deaths of American police officers.Clinton ignored a solid wall of opposition from the Justice, Intelligence and Defense departments and Congress, invoked his powers of executive clemency and set the FALN terrorists free. In doing so, he unequivocally put the lie to the notion that any government agency might tie his hands or influence his decision in matters of clemency. (See FALN Page and Clemency Page.)
    46. More than two years elapsed after Wye. President Clinton did no review. Jonathan Pollard remained in prison while the US continued to extract Israeli concessions for his release.
    47. Those who still believed the myth that it was the American Intelligence Community that was tying the hands of President Clinton, also clung to the belief he would finally honor his many promises to release Jonathan Pollard – including the commitment he had made at Wye – at the end of his term, when he could do so without fear of political reprisal.
    48. Beginning in 1991 Rabbi Mordecai Eliyahu, the former Chief Rabbi of Israel, and Jonathan’s rabbi, offered himself to the U.S. Justice Department as Jonathan’s guarantor. The offer was ignored.Rabbi Eliyahu repeated the same offer every year after that in private letters to President Clinton.Every offer went unacknowledged until the fall of 2000, when Esther Pollard received a letter from the White House indicating that the President was aware of the former chief Rabbi’s offer and that it would be part of the President’s consideration in reaching a final decision on her husband’s case.
    49. President Clinton never kept his promises.When he left office in January 2001, Jonathan Pollard was not included among those that to whom Clinton granted clemency:
      • in spite of his repeated express commitments to Israel to free Pollard in return for numerous heavy concessions
      • in spite of his commitment to free Pollard as an integral part if the Wye Accords
      • in spite of the appeals of the Jewish community, and
      • in spite of the gross injustices of the Pollard case which include:
        • a grossly disproportionate sentence
        • a broken plea agreement
        • use of secret evidence
        • a false charge of treason
        • ineffective assistance of counsel
        • ex parte communication between prosecutors and judge
        • a lack of due process
        • a sentencing procedure infected by false allegations and lies

      On his last day in office, Clinton granted clemency to 140 people. Many who received executive clemency had been convicted of very serious offenses, including murder, robbery and drug dealing. Some of those pardoned had served no prison time at all before being pardoned. Among those pardoned were Clinton’s brother, and a former head of the CIA. (See Clemency Page.)

    50. In September of 2000, Jonathan Pollard’s attorneys, Eliot Lauer and Jacques Semmelman, filed a motion in the US District Court of Columbia to vacate his sentence.The motion, supported by documentation, presents a compelling and very disturbing picture of serious government misconduct that went unchecked by Mr. Pollard’s then-counsel. As a result of that misconduct, and as a result of his attorney’s ineffectiveness Jonathan Pollard was sentenced to life in prison on the basis of false allegations, and under circumstances that violated his plea agreement. (See Legal Doc: Declaration of Jonathan Jay Pollard In Support of Motion for Resentencing. See also Legal Doc: Memorandum of Law in Support of Jonathan Jay Pollard’s 2255 Motion for Resentencing.)
    51. Since he was sentenced in 1987, none of Jonathan Pollard’s security-cleared attorneys have been able to see the classified portions of the docket in order to challenge them in a court of law or to defend him in a clemency proceeding.In September of 2000, Jonathan Pollard’s attorneys filed a separate motion requesting that attorney Eliot Lauer be allowed access to the secret portions of the Pollard court docket. (See Legal Doc: Motion to Unseal the Pollard Record.)
    52. On January 12, 2001, Chief Judge Norma Holloway Johnson denied the attorneys’ request to allow Eliot Lauer access to the complete Pollard docket, upholding the government’s claim that Lauer’s seeing the secret portion of the record poses a risk to American national security.Both Lauer and Semmelman hold TOP SECRET level security clearances, which they obtained from the Justice Department in order to be eligible to see their client’s full record.A motion for reconsideration was filed January 18, 2001. (See Legal Doc: Motion for Reconsideration of Court Order.)
    53. Amicus briefs supporting Jonathan’s new legal cases have been filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, as well as by top American legal authorities. (See Amici Briefs on the Court Case Page.)
    54. Five Prime Ministers of Israel and three Presidents of Israel have requested Jonathan Pollard’s release from the United States. Israel has pledged to be responsible for its agent who has served many years in prison under harsh conditions, and who has fully and repeatedly expressed his remorse. (See Remorse Page.)Between close friends and strong allies, that ought to be enough.

    See Also:

    Articles

    Sub Pages

    (collections of related articles and information)

TOP

The True Motives Behind the Sentencing of Jonathan Pollard

An Interview with Angelo Codevilla – Special Feature

 

Justice4JP Release – July 17, 2000 https://www.jonathanpollard.org/2000/071700a.htm

 

Wesley Phelan – The Washington Weekly

(Originally published January 11, 1999.)Few issues in recent history have caused such heightened political sensitivity as the fate of Jonathan Pollard, the former naval intelligence officer convicted of spying for Israel in the 1980s.
The Pollard case hit the public forum again in October 1998, when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked President Clinton to release Pollard as part of the Wye River agreement. According to New York Post correspondent Uri Dan, three days before the conclusion of the talks Clinton gave Netanyahu a commitment to do so. This reportedly angered CIA director George Tenet, who threatened to resign if Clinton carried through on the promise. In an attempt to save face the President sent letters to all senior administration officials, asking for information and advice on the matter. This, in turn, upset officials at the Justice Department, who felt they should have the lead role in a clemency review in a major espionage case.
There the matter stood, with apparent unanimity of all “informed” national security and legal experts, until January 2,1999. On that date the Washington Post published an article by four university professors arguing that the President should indeed extend clemency to Pollard. The article provoked an immediate, negative response, including a rebuttal letter to the Post from Vincent Cannistrano, former head of intelligence programs at the National Security council and a Washington Times article by Representative Porter Goss, Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
Among the authors of the Washington Post article was Alan Dershowitz, a predictable Clintonista, but also Angelo Codevilla, a conservative Republican. Why would a conservative Republican and noted expert on national security argue for clemency for Pollard? We called Codevilla to find out:
QUESTION: You have co-written an article with Irwin Cotler, Alan Dershowitz and Kenneth Lasson, entitled “Justice and Jonathan Pollard.” How is it that the four of you came to write this article?
CODEVILLA: We four have very little in common: Alan Dershowitz is a secular liberal law professor at Harvard; Ken Lasson is an orthodox Jewish liberal; I don’t know Colter’s politics; and I am a conservative Catholic. We have in common a concern for justice. We believe, for very different reasons, that Jonathan Pollard has not gotten justice. The others believe this because of their acquaintance with the legal aspects of the case. I know that he hasn’t gotten justice because of my knowledge of the intelligence and policy aspects of the case.
QUESTION: When you say he hasn’t gotten justice, what do you mean?
CODEVILLA: Well, let’s get one thing out of the way. Jonathan Pollard committed espionage. He violated the law and was rightly sentenced to prison. However, the average sentence meted out to someone who spies for an ally, not an enemy, and who confesses to the crime — thereby sparing the United States the embarrassment of a trial — is approximately seven years, with an average time served of about four years. Jonathan Pollard was sentenced to life in prison and has served now over thirteen years.
QUESTION: Is it true that Jonathan Pollard is kept in the basement of a building?
CODEVILLA: It was true. For the first 7 years of his imprisonment he was kept in solitary confinement, 3 stories below ground, in the basement of a building. That is an extraordinary punishment. Aldrich Ames was never treated that way, and John Walker was not either. Ames and Walker are the people who, without a doubt, have done the greatest possible harm to the United States. In the case of Walker, it is fair to say that if there had been a war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the 1970’s or 1980’s, the Soviet Union would have won itlargely due to the efforts of John Walker. Walker gave them the capacity to read all of our Navy generated messages, and therefore many of other messages generated by U.S. code machines.
QUESTION: What was it specifically that Ames did?
CODEVILLA: Ames was the Chief of Counter Intelligence for the Soviet-East European division of the CIA. He was the man in charge of validating all of the intelligence coming from the USSR, and the man in charge of safeguarding our own agents in the USSR. This man gave to the Soviets the identity of every last US agent working in the USSR. That allowed the Soviets to capture and/or turn those agents. That means all of the intelligence — and I do mean all — coming from human sources in the USSR, from about 1985 until the collapse of the USSR, was manipulated entirely by the Soviets. Anyone reading the New York Times got a much truer picture of what was happening in the USSR than did Presidents Reagan and Bush. Those men, sitting at the top of the intelligence establishment, were getting information that was handcrafted in Moscow by the KGB.
QUESTION: How did the sentences they received compare to the sentence Pollard received?
CODEVILLA: They all three received life in prison. But there is absolutely no comparison between them. Jonathan Pollard was a GS-12, intelligence analyst with no access to vital secrets.
QUESTION: What does that mean?
CODEVILLA: That’s someone who is making $40,000 per year, maybe,barely in the professional ranks.
QUESTION: What exactly was it that Jonathan Pollard gave to the Israelis?
CODEVILLA: He gave them that part of the flow of U.S. intelligence which they used to receive regularly, but which the U.S cut off after 1981. As you know, the U.S. has a long-standing, mutually beneficial intelligence exchange relationship with Israel. We give Israel a lot of information. In 1981 Israel used some of that information to strike and destroy Iraq’s nuclear reactor. Bobby Ray Inman, at the time Deputy Director of the CIA, was very angry, and cut off a good chunk of that information flow.
QUESTION: Because of that strike?
CODEVILLA: Yes. I was in the U.S. Intelligence Committee hearing room when Bobby Ray Inman came in and told us how outraged he was that Israel had destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactor. He told us that the US was engaged in a “sophisticated and very successful effort” to turn Saddam Hussein into a pillar of American foreign policy in the Middle East. The Israelis, in theirblundering ways, as he put it, had misunderstood Saddam Hussein. They had figured this nuclear reactor posed a danger of Saddam building nuclear weapons. Our CIA knew better than that, and was outraged that the Israelis had done this. As a result, Inman was unilaterally cutting off the flow of US intelligence to the Israelis.
Now, Jonathan Pollard was a young, Jewish intelligence analyst in the Office of Naval Intelligence, who wrongly took it upon himself to provide to Israel that which had been cut off. This consisted of intelligence ‘products.’ I emphasize the word ‘products.’ It was satellite pictures, reports of all kinds, electronic directories, so on and so forth. Jonathan Pollard could not haveprovided codes, because he did not have any access to codes. GS-12 analysts don’t.
QUESTION: But he did have access to satellite photographs of US nuclear installations and Soviet nuclear installations?
CODEVILLA: No, not U.S. installations. He had access to all kinds of satellite photographs of interest to the Israelis.
QUESTION: Did he give them photographs of Soviet installations?
CODEVILLA: He gave them primarily Middle Eastern information. You must understand that from an intelligence point of view, the subject of a report, coming from any given source, is not nearly as important as the source. What intelligence people rightly worry about are what they call ‘sources and methods.’ This is what Pollard did not have access to. Compare what Pollard did — giving away satellite photographs — with what William Kampelis did in 1978. He sold the operating manual for the KH-11, which is our only picture-taking satellite. This was a big book which told you how the satellite worked, how it was operated, what its schedule was, etc. Kampelis was sentenced to 40 years, but he was let out about five years ago, after serving about 14 years.
Pollard, who never gave out any operating manual to any intelligence system, is in jail for life. What he gave out was satellite pictures. These pictures were no different in terms of sources from what the U.S. was still giving to Israel. The U.S. was still giving Israel pictures of southern and western Syria. Pollard was giving them pictures of eastern Syria and Iraq. So in terms of satellite intelligence SOURCES his impact was nonexistent.
QUESTION: Well, the news reports say that he gave a whole room full of documents to the Israelis.
CODEVILLA: That’s a lie.
QUESTION: They say many cubic feet of documents.
CODEVILLA: A lie is an untruth that is known to be an untruth. The intelligence people who say those things include all of the documents in the bibliographies and tables of contents of the documents Pollard turned over. In other words, if Pollard turned over a book with a bibliography containing 50 books, he was accused — unofficially, mind you, because a distinction must be made between what he has been unofficially accused and actually punished for and what he was officially indicted for. If you add up all the books in all the bibliographies in all the documents he turned over, you might say that they would fill a small room. But what he actually gave away was seven briefcases full, neither more nor less. Seven briefcases do not a room fill, except in the imaginations of insincere people.
QUESTION: Some people say he compromised an American operation to wiretap Soviet undersea cables. Is there any truth to this?
CODEVILLA: Those people have no idea what they are talking about. The undersea cable was compromised by a man named Ronald Pelton.
QUESTION: In what manner was he responsible for its being compromised?
CODEVILLA: Ronald Pelton was an analyst at NSA who was working on a project translating and processing the takes from the undersea cables. We had two such taps and were working on a third. These were without exception the highest quality sources that the US possessed. Pelton quite simply sold that information to the USSR directly. Pelton got 40 years. Pollard gave away no sources and methods whatever. He got life.
But back to the issue of what Pollard is being punished for. The indictment that he agreed to plead guilty to did not charge him with any breach of sources or methods. It did not charge him with giving away a room full of anything. After the plea bargain had been consummated and before sentencing, there was an ex parte submission to the Judge by Caspar Weinberger. This memorandum was entirely outside the indictment. Its contents have never been made public. Nor have they been shared with the Senate Intelligence Committee or the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board or the Intelligence Oversight Board. But this memo contained the lie that Pollard caused the deaths of countless U.S. agents. It also reportedly said the Israelis sold part of the information to the Soviet Union. All of these things are not only untrue, they were known by Weinberger not to be true.
The issue that our article in the Washington Post addressed was that no American citizen ought to be punished on the basis of information not shared with an impartial body and not subject to refutation. You ask what a conservative has to do with Alan Dershowitz on this kind of matter. This is not about Alan Dershowitz and Angelo Codevilla, this is about George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, and Abe Lincoln.
QUESTION: The rejoinder to you by those who have read the article would be that many people make plea bargains, but plea bargains are not binding on a judge. The duty of a judge is to make the best decision he could make based on intelligence and the needs of American security.
CODEVILLA: Judges in the Anglo-Saxon tradition are supposed to write opinions explaining their judgments. Judges are supposed to evaluate the evidence and contrasting arguments provided to them at trials. Judges are not supposed simply to listen to some powerful person whispering in their ear. In the case of this judge, he allowed himself to be used by Weinberger, who lied to him and supplied a false memorandum. I find this behavior by Weinberger to be contemptible, and the judge’s behavior to be beneath American standards.
QUESTION: That leads to the next question, what was Caspar Weinberger’s motive in presenting to the judge a false memorandum?
CODEVILLA: This is the most interesting of questions, and it comes down to this: embarrassment over a dumb, failed policy, and moreover a policy in which he had a personal interest. The policy was building up Iraq, a policy to which Weinberger and much of the rest of the U.S. government sacrificed true American interests during the 1980s. Up until the very eve of the Gulf War the U.S. Government was still incredulous that Saddam Hussein would play anything other than the role which the best and the brightest of the Reagan and Bush administrations had assigned him.
QUESTION: I remember that U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, had a meeting with Saddam Hussein a few days before American troops were deployed to the area. In the Iraqi transcript of the meeting she reportedly told Hussein the border dispute with Kuwait was an “Arab problem” that the U.S. was not much interested in.
CODEVILLA: Oh yes. The Bush Administration hung Ambassador Glaspie out to dry on that one. In fact, she was doing nothing other than following the official line of the U.S. Government. She herself was not naive about Saddam. She was faithfully carrying out a naive U.S. policy. But that is the least of it. The U.S. did a lot more than express views. We supplied Saddam Hussein with not only arms, but with intelligence and forbearance. I remember Bobby Ray Inman coming to the Senate Intelligence Committee and telling us that we had taken Iraq off the countries sponsoring terrorism. The Senatorsguffawed at that one.
QUESTION: When was that?
CODEVILLA: That was in 1982.
QUESTION: What was your position at that time?
CODEVILLA: I was a senior staff member on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
QUESTION: Whom did you work for specifically?
CODEVILLA: Senator Malcolm Wallop of Wyoming. The main thing is we permitted, licensed and financed large American corporations to build plants there, and we encouraged large European countries to build plants there. The infrastructure that is being bombed right now in Iraq and which was bombed during the Gulf War, is mostly American-built, financed, or licensed. Now we get to the deeply and personally embarrassing part. One of the companies involved was Bechtel, with whom Caspar Weinberger and George Schultz, Secretaries of Defense and State, had close personal relations.
QUESTION: How was this company involved?
CODEVILLA: They built one of the factories that later on made chemical weapons. Now, what is Jonathan Pollard’s role in all of this? He gave to Israel U.S. satellite pictures of these factories, together with U.S. intelligence assessments of what these factories were doing. These pictures and intelligence assessments contradicted what the U.S. government was officially telling Israel. So the Israelis were coming to America, and in official meetings were calling people like Weinberger liars, which of course these officials did not appreciate.
QUESTION: The truth was hard to bear?
CODEVILLA: The truth is always hard. The only truly punishable offense in Washington is to tell the truth. You will get along in Washington better by lying one way or the other. If you tell the truth you are unlikely to be forgiven.
QUESTION: Some of the rumors going around say Pollard could not have carried on this espionage by himself, that he was too low level a person. What do you think about that?
CODEVILLA: The kernel of truth in that allegation is that the things he is unofficially accused of he most certainly could not have done.
QUESTION: I see.
CODEVILLA: He certainly could not have done everything he is accused of because he was too low level. The key document in the Pollard case is the indictment. If you compare the indictment with the fabulous charges that are leveled against him, you will find that they are not comparable to one another. You’ll say, “We are talking about two different people.” There was a person who was indicted for certain things, then there is the person who is spoken of as the greatest spy of the age.
QUESTION: So he was sentenced not on the basis of the indictment, but on the basis of Weinberger’s false information?
CODEVILLA: That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.
QUESTION: Well, it’s hard to get through all the layers of press indoctrination on this matter.
CODEVILLA: He was sentenced on the basis of things whispered in the ear of a compliant judge.
QUESTION: By a person who was personally interested in the outcome?
CODEVILLA: That’s right. It is called C-O-R-R-U-P-T-I-O-N. It is abuse of power. If you want to know why Angelo Codevilla is involved in this case, it is because I consider abuse of power un-American.
QUESTION: As someone who has been involved in Republican politics at the national level, what impact will the article in the Washington Post and this interview have on your career?
CODEVILLA: That is irrelevant. The Republican Party had better start caring about telling the truth. For some years now it has been trying to make its way on the basis of cleverish behavior. It has flopped, and has deserved to flop. At any rate the Pollard case is just another test of whether we Americans, Republicans and Democrats, care more about the truth or more about protecting the prerogatives of powerful people. Those of us who wrote the article share the view that no American should be sentenced on the basis of words whispered in a judge’s ear. And if those words are whispered by someone in a high position, so much the worse.

BIO NOTE:

Angelo Codevilla has had a very distinguished career, serving as a U.S. Naval Officer from 1969-1971 and a Foreign Service Officer from 1976-1978. Hewas a Senior Staff Member for the Senate Intelligence Committee from 1978-1985, and served on the Reagan Administration State Department and Intelligence Transition Teams in 1980. Since 1995 Codevilla has been a Professor of International Relations at Boston University.


See Also:

TOP


esseragaroth-blogspot-com-logo

(אובמה, פולארד, ופסח) Obama, Pollard, and Passover

ד’ לחודש הראשון תשע”ג Thursday, March 14, 2013 http://esseragaroth.blogspot.com/2013/03/obama-pollard-and-passover.htmlד’ לחודש הראשון תשע”ג
What a fantastic poster!

Let My Brother Go!

Let My Brother Go!

 

These poster are throughout Jerusalem.

Please circulate and I need volunteers to help me flood Jerusalem and Tel Aviv with these posters to beseech Pharoah to release Pollard NOW
נא להפיץ וכן אני צריך מתנדבים להפיץ מודעות אלו בירושלים ובתל אביב לבקש מפרעה לשחרר את פולארד עכשיו
יקותיאל Yekutiel
054-4876709
Esser Agaroth (2¢):

Jonathan J. Pollard

Jonathan J. Pollard

This is not the first time the comparison between President Obama and the Egyptian Pharoah of old, has been made. I speak, of course, of the “…new king over Egypt who knew not Joseph.” (Ex. 1:8)
This is also not the first time that the comparison has been made between the Exile of Egypt and the Exile Edom (Esau/Rome/The West), our current exile. Likewise, our Sages draw many parallels between the Exodus from Egypt and the completion of the fourth and, God willing, final exile.
Will ParObama release this son of Israel? Or will HaShem “harden his heart?” (Ex. 4:21)

Was the recent swarm of locusts across Israel just a seasonal thing? Or was it a sign of what is to follow?
In any event, I recommend that Jews begin their trek toward Israel now.
It is amazing just how many forget, even now, as we approach the holiday of Pesah (Passover), that the goal after being taken out of Egypt, and then receiving the Torah, was to reach Israel, the Land that was promised to us.
TOP


From TOMER DEVORAH:
http://palmtreeofdeborah.blogspot.com

Jonathan J. Pollard

Jonathan J. Pollard

Remembering Jonathan Pollard on His 59th Birthday

8 Menachem Av 5773 15 July 2013
We were born in the same year, only 35 miles apart – the distance between Houston and Galveston. But, what worlds we’ve traveled since then.
For my fellow Texan, my fellow Israeli and my Jewish brother, I pray Hashem’s mercy, comfort, love and peace in the present circumstance and that the Holy One, Blessed be He, in whose hands are every detail of our lives, will finally grant every request for your freedom, your life, your health and your future.
When Mashiach, who is already present among us, is finally revealed, you should be the first Jew he rescues!

Jonathan Pollard has now paid SEVEN TIMES the usual penalty for breaking American law. Today, he is being held as a HOSTAGE by a corrupt United States government which is fast losing all credibility and right to rule in the world due to its perversion of justice and righteousness.
Join me in remembering today – on his birthday. He’s 59 years old and 28 of those years have been spent behind bars – for the sake of Israel
TOP


http://palmtreeofdeborah.blogspot.com

The Unforgiveable Sin

24 Marcheshvan 5781 11 November 2020 https://palmtreeofdeborah.blogspot.com/2020/11/the-unforgiveable-sin.html
Before I turn to the topic I’ve chosen for today, let me be very clear to everyone reading that my views and opinions are mine alone. I do not represent anyone but myself here. And so it has been for over a decade and, God willing, it will remain that way for as long as HKB”H allows me to speak.
What was Jonathan Pollard’s real crime?

“Jonathan Pollard was indicted on only one charge: one count of passing classified information to an ally, without intent to harm the United States.” [See Facts of the Pollard Case.]

That is the crime he was accused of, but that is not the crime for which he was sentenced to life imprisonment. That crime – the real crime – his unforgivable sin was exposing the true face of America.

Pollard discovered that information vital to Israel’s security was being deliberately withheld by certain elements within the U.S. national security establishment.
Israel was legally entitled to this vital security information according to a 1983 Memorandum of Understanding between the two countries.
The information being withheld from Israel included Syrian, Iraqi, Libyan and Iranian nuclear, chemical, and biological warfare capabilities – being developed for use against Israel. It also included information on ballistic missile development by these countries and information on planned terrorist attacks against Israeli civilian targets.
When Pollard discovered this suppression of information and asked his superiors about it, he was told to “mind his own business”, and that “Jews get nervous talking about poison gas; they don’t need to know.”
He also learned that the objective of cutting off the flow of information to Israel was to severely curtail Israel’s ability to act independently in defense of her own interests.
Pollard was painfully aware that Israeli lives were being put in jeopardy as a result of this undeclared intelligence embargo. He did everything he possibly could to stop this covert policy and to have the legal flow of information to Israel restored. When his efforts met no success, he began to give the information to Israel directly.

The “Medinah shel Chesed” – the pig’s front paws shoved out proudly in front to show how “kosher” it is – this mass graveyard of millions of assimilated Jews; the worst crime anyone can commit in their view is to do anything that dispels their illusion of purity.
America as a nation has a narcissistic personality – question them, cross them – and you will certainly be made to pay and pay dearly and pay forever – their need for revenge can never be satisfied.
Jonathan Pollard was concerned about threats from our Arab enemies, never even imagining that the country he worked for was itself the worst enemy of all. The missionary apparatus was just getting set up in the early eighties, but by the time he was thrown in prison and the key tossed away, Israel had been infiltrated in a very big way.

TOP


http://palmtreeofdeborah.blogspot.com

“Another Jewish Holiday, Another Lockdown”

25 Marcheshvan 5781 12 November 2020 https://palmtreeofdeborah.blogspot.com/2020/11/another-jewish-holiday-another-lockdown.html
….
As I have pointed out before – curfews, tracking, lockdowns – the whole world is now getting a small taste of Jonathan Pollard’s reality.

Jonathan Pollard's Parole Conditions

Jonathan Pollard’s Parole Conditions

From the Justice for Jonathan Pollard website, we find…

Over time, the Rav [HaRav Mordechai Eliyahu, ztz”l] shared with us and with a few others who were very close to him that Jonathan’s release is the key to the redemption of all of Am Yisrael.
He taught us how Jonathan’s release is also the key to the release of all of Israel’s captives and MIAs. Once Jonathan is out, all the captives are all out! Once they are all out, we are all in Geula!
Perhaps most significant of all, the Rav always referred to Jonathan as the “Yosef HaTzadik shel doreinu” (The Yosef Hatzadik of our generation).

It was reported on the Shuvu Banim website back in April that Rav Pinto said:

“…this whole pandemic could have come about just because of one single person who is suffering, one person who is suffering tremendous pain.”

In that same article, the rabbi reportedly said:

“We will pass through this plague,…. But you should know, that this world is not going to remain the same world it was. …Just as after the mabul, and the generation of the flood, when the world was totally changed. Just like occurred after all those other times when there were such big shocks across the whole world, at this sort of level, and the world changed – so the same will happen here.”

~ ~ ~
TOP


http://palmtreeofdeborah.blogspot.com

A Special Day of Prayer

3 Kislev 5781 19 November 2020 http://palmtreeofdeborah.blogspot.com/2020/11/a-special-day-of-prayer.html
Today has been designated a special day of prayer on behalf of Jonathan and Esther Pollard, for their healing and for release from travel restrictions imposed by the terms of his parole, preventing their return to Eretz Yisrael. It is sponsored by Youth for Pollard and they are asking each one in his own place to pray a few chapters of Tehillim 120, 121, 130, 23 – ending with the prayer specially composed for Jonathan and Esther by HaRav Mordechai Eliyahu, ztz”l.
Tizku l’mitzvot! May all your prayers be answered affirmatively and may we all hear very good news very soon! May it be His will.

Special day of prayer on behalf of Jonathan and Esther Pollard

Special day of prayer on behalf of Jonathan and Esther Pollard

TOP


http://palmtreeofdeborah.blogspot.com

BARUCH ATAH HASHEM MATIR ASSURIM!!!

6 Kislev 5781 21 November 2020 http://palmtreeofdeborah.blogspot.com/
“Blessed are You, Hashem, our God, King of the universe, who releases the bound.”
So sorry for the delay in responding. I just got home. What a time to go away for Shabbat and be without my laptop!!
I am simply overjoyed at this wonderful news and so happy for Yehonatan and Esther.
Wishing them a BIG MAZAL TOV!!

 

mazal tov

mazal tov

With thanks to each and every one of you who added your prayers,
and a very special THANK YOU to HaKadosh Baruch Hu who heard and answered!!
~ ~ ~
Following is the text of the press release issued by Jonathan Pollards attorneys on their letterhead (printed with permission) …

STATEMENT OF ELIOT LAUER AND JACQUES SEMMELMAN

ATTORNEYS FOR JONATHAN J. POLLARD

NEW YORK, NY (November 20, 2020) The U.S. Parole Commission has issued a certificate terminating parole and lifting all parole restrictions on our pro bono client Jonathan J. Pollard. Specifically, Mr. Pollard is no longer subject to a curfew, is no longer prohibited from working for a company that does not have U.S. government monitoring software on its computer systems, is no longer required to wear a wrist monitor that tracks his whereabouts, and is free to travel anywhere, including Israel, for temporary or permanent residence, as he wishes.
During the past five years, since his release on parole from federal prison, Mr. Pollard has been subject to these U.S. government restrictions. We are grateful and delighted that our client is finally free of any restrictions, and is now a free man in all respects. We look forward to seeing our client in Israel.
Mr. Pollard was released on parole November 21, 2015. He had been in prison since November 21, 1985, serving a sentence of life in prison for conspiracy to deliver classified information to the State of Israel.
Over the past several months, we have communicated with the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Parole Commission, emphasizing that Mr. Pollard has had an exemplary record, both as a prisoner and as a parolee, and that there is every reason for confidence that he will be a model citizen after his parole restrictions are lifted.
Mr. Pollard has asked us to communicate the following on his behalf:
• Mr. Pollard is happy to finally be able to assist his beloved wife Esther, who is fighting an aggressive form of cancer. Mr. Pollard would like people to know that it was his wife, more than anyone else, who kept him alive during all the years he was in prison.
• Mr. Pollard is deeply grateful to his longstanding pro bono lawyers Eliot Lauer and Jacques Semmelman, and their law firm Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt & Mosle LLP, who have stood by him for so many years, and whose perseverance, creativity, and forceful advocacy were instrumental in securing his release from prison on parole, and the lifting of the parole restrictions.
• Mr. Pollard is also extremely thankful to Rabbi Pesach Lerner, who has worked tirelessly for many years on Mr. Pollard’s behalf, and to the generous contributors who have assisted financially during the past five years, as the U.S. government placed insurmountable impediments on Mr. Pollard’s ability to earn a living.
• Mr. Pollard expresses appreciation and gratitude to Ambassador Ron Dermer, acting under the auspices of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for their efforts on his behalf.
• Mr. Pollard thanks Dov Friedberg for his longstanding support and friendship; Israeli attorneys Larry Dub and Nitsana Dirshan-Leitner for their devoted pro bono representation over many years; and Adi Ginsberg, Rabbi Asher Mivtzari, and all the volunteers under their direction for their unrelenting work in Israel on Mr. Pollard’s behalf.
• Mr. Pollard expresses his deepest respect and heartfelt thanks to the late Chief Rabbi, His Honor Rav Mordechai Eliyahu zt”l, and to his entire family, as well as to his Chief of Staff Rav Chaim Suissa, for providing spiritual guidance and strength to Jonathan and Esther Pollard from the outset of the case, and whose friendship remains strong and vibrant.
• Mr. Pollard is deeply grateful to so many others in the U.S., Israel, and around the world who have helped devotedly. They are too numerous to mention by name, but they include: Andrew Brooke, Goldi Steiner, Risha Balter and Nomi Winkler of Toronto; Bella Amiram and Naomi Knobel of Jerusalem; and in the U.S., the late Chaim Stern, attorneys Kenneth Lasson and Gary Apfel, and the late Judge George Leighton. Finally, Mr. Pollard thanks all people of good will who have kept him in their prayers and hoped for this day.
Please continue your heartfelt prayers for the Pollards as they continue the struggle for Esther’s life. Pray for the refuah shleimah of Esther Yocheved bat Raizel Brachah.
Comments:
Anonymous Anonymous said…
Baruch Hashem! Prayers have been heard and answered. May also the prayers for refuah shleimah for Esther be heard and answered also.
The statement made by his lawyers contains a massive revelation that few know about and even fewer will notice; “working for a company that does not have U.S. government monitoring software on its computer systems.” I know of several large financial and brokerage companies that had all of their incoming and ooutgoing media, data, and communications information routed through a secure, onsite NSA communicationss hub that no company executive or employee had access to, and none even had a clue what it was. This statenment by the lawyers just goes to show that there is no such thing as a private and confidential communication. It also highlights the ironic fact that unwarranted state sanctioned spying on businesses and individuals is permissable, as is witholding critical security information from an ally. The second major revelation in the statement clearly shows the ultimate hypocrisy of the state sponored injustice in Pollards case.
May the Pollards live out the rest of their days in good health and comfort in EY.
—–stingray—–
TOP


shirat-devorah-logo

Jonathan Pollard: “Key to Redemption”

November 22, 2020 https://shiratdevorah.blogspot.com/2020/11/jonathan-pollard-key-to-redemption.html

Jonathan and Esther Pollard

Jonathan and Esther Pollard

The following is from an article dated July 2015 written by Rivkah Lambert Adler
One of the most prominent personalities who offered Pollard emotional and spiritual support during his decades in prison was Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu. Eliyahu served as a Chief Rabbi in Israel from 1983 to 1993 and had a close and supportive relationship with Pollard for 20 years. Eliyahu passed away June 7, 2010.
Shortly after Eliyahu’s death, Pollard’s then-wife Esther began to speak out about the spiritual messages the rabbi shared with them. In an article published by The Yeshiva World News on June 11, 2010, Esther shared Eliyahu’s prediction that the eventual release of Jonathan Pollard from prison is connected to the final redemption.
“Over time, the Rav [Rabbi] shared with us and with a few others who were very close to him that Jonathan’s release is the key to the redemption of all of Am Yisrael [the Jewish people],” she wrote. “He taught us how Jonathan’s release is also the key to the release of all of Israel’s captives and MIAs. Once Jonathan is out, all the captives are all out! Once they are all out, we are all in Geula [redemption]!”
“Perhaps most significant of all, the Rav always referred to Jonathan as the ‘Yosef HaTzadik shel doreinu’ (The Yosef Hatzadik of our generation),” she added.
This last reference connects Jonathan Pollard to the Biblical Joseph, who was also imprisoned.
In August of 2010, Esther Pollard sent her husband a birthday letter which he released for publication. In it, she strengthened her husband’s spirits with the words of the recently departed Rabbi Eliyahu.
“You are a cosmic key to the redemption of the Jewish people. Your release is synonymous with the release of the Shechinah [the Divine presence] from galut [exile]. Your release is tied up with the Moshiach Ben David’s [Messiah son of David’s] return to the Land. Your release is bound to the redemption of the land and people of Israel.”
TOP


http://palmtreeofdeborah.blogspot.com

“THE LIES THAT JUST WON’T DIE”

27 Kislev 5781 12December2020 http://palmtreeofdeborah.blogspot.com/2020/12/the-lies-that-just-wont-die.html
Third Candle of Hanukkah
Shavua Tov!

Exclusive Investigative Report by Avraham Weissman

THE LIES THAT JUST WON’T DIE – Unraveling the Tangled Web of Deceit That Cost Jonathan Pollard His Freedom for 35 Years
Click to download PDF file   Click to Download the Report THE LIES THAT JUST WON’T DIE-NM 22-27
HAMODIA Prime December 9, 2020
TOP


Arutz Sheva http://www.israelnationalnews.com/

Jonathan Pollard lands in Israel

Jonathan Pollard arrives in Israel a month after the US Parole Commission lifted the restrictions on him.

Elad Benari , 30December2020 4:03 AM https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/293967
Jonathan Pollard landed in Israel on Tuesday night, the Israel Hayom newspaper reported.
According to the report, the Pollards arrived in Israel on a direct private flight from Liberty Airport in Newark, New Jersey, to Ben Gurion Airport. Prior to landing, Pollard was invited by the pilots into the cockpit, where he listened to the Ben Gurion Airport control tower, which greeted him in Hebrew on the occasion of his arrival in Israel.
Israel Hayom editor-in-chief Boaz Bismuth tweeted a photo of Pollard and his wife, Esther, aboard the plane.

Israel Hayom editor-in-chief Boaz Bismuth tweeted a photo of Pollard and his wife, Esther, aboard the plane.

Israel Hayom editor-in-chief Boaz Bismuth tweeted a photo of Pollard and his wife, Esther, aboard the plane.

Diaspora Affairs Minister Omer Yankelevitch welcomed Pollard to Israel.
“Jonathan, how good it is that you came home,” she tweeted.
Pollard’s arrival in Israel comes a month after the US Parole Commission issued a certificate terminating parole and the restrictions that were imposed on him, making him free to travel anywhere, including Israel.
When Pollard was released from prison in 2015 after serving 30 years of his life sentence for transmitting classified information to Israel, his parole commission imposed strict parole guidelines for a period of five years.
As part of those restrictions, Pollard was not allowed to leave his home between 7:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m., was monitored by a GPS device and was not permitted to leave the US. That five-year period ended in November.
It had been widely speculated that Pollard will move to Israel once the restrictions are lifted. His attorney, Eliot Lauer, told Arutz Sheva last month that Pollard and his wife “have every expectation to make Aliyah and move to Israel. Because of Esther’s medical condition, they first need to get approval from the medical advisers in New York and make sure that she’s medically capable of making the trip and that suitable arrangements will be made in Israel to continue her progress. Once that is done, I think it’s just a question of logistics, packing up and getting on a plane.”


Jonathan and Ester Pollard lands in Israel: ‘Ecstatic to be home at last’

Posted 30December2020, 15 Tevet 5781: Jonathan Pollard landed in Israel on Tuesday night, some 35 years after being arrested in the United States and serving 30 years in prison for spying for and providing top-secret classified information to Israel which the US Deep State was required by law to provide Israel.
The Pollards arrived in Israel on a direct private flight from Liberty Airport in Newark, New Jersey, to Ben Gurion Airport. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was moved to meet them on the tarmac next to the plane where they kissed the Holy ground of Eretz Israel and recited the Shehecheyanu blessing together then the Pollard’s received their Teudat Zehut (Israeli Identity Cards).
The Pollards making Aliyah (immigrate to Israel) is as important as Natan Sarnakey, the Soviet Refusenik, who made Aliyah from the Soviet Union in February 1986. Just as the Corrupt Soviet Deep State has collapsed so will the corrupt US and Israeli Deep State collapse.

TOP