Gordon Thomas - Gideon's Spies

While this had led to a considerable change in U.S. intelligence, the data in the Weinberger affidavit was deemed to be still so ultrasensitive that its publication would provide valuable information to foreign intelligence services—including Mossad.

So important was Pollard to Israel that Dagan had sent a Mossad lawyer to attend Pollard’s first public appearance since he was sentenced. The case was heard in the Washington District Court in September 2003. Pollard looked older than his forty-seven years, his skin paler, his eyes occasionally glancing round the packed courtroom. He wore wire-rimmed spectacles, an embroidered yarmulke, and a green prison overshirt. He had a gray-brown beard and shoulder-length hair, giving him the appearance of an Old Testament prophet. Some forty relatives and supporters packed the small courtroom. They included several rabbis, among them Israel’s former chief rabbi, Mordechai Eliahu. His wife, Esther, and his father were also present. Pollard closely followed the legal arguments. The Mossad lawyer, a slim, middle-aged man, sat at the back of the court, taking notes in Hebrew.

The nub of Pollard’s case was that he should be allowed to appeal his sentence because his then attorney, Richard Hibney, had failed to file a notice of appeal when the prosecution asked the trial judge, Aubrey Robinson, for a life sentence without parole after “inducing Pollard to plead guilty by promising the State would not ask for life.” A further argument centered around the claim that Pollard’s then defense team had been refused access to the Weinberger affidavit “because they did not have the requisite security clearance.” Pollard’s new lawyers told the court they were also “seeking a pardon or sentence commutation” from the Bush administration. That part of the argument was “based on Pollard’s rights as an American citizen to due process.”

Over the years, Pollard’s attorneys had had meetings with Israeli prime ministers Benyamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, and Ariel Sharon. They had also met with Mossad intelligence chiefs Nahum Admoni, Shabtai Shavit, Danny Yatom, Efraim Halevy, and more recently, Meir Dagan. There had been a carefully orchestrated campaign in Israel to bombard the U.S. embassy with requests for Pollard’s freedom. Top Jewish lawyers had traveled from Israel to meet with equally renowned lawyers in the United States to plan legal moves. No defendant had had such a powerful support system. At every opportunity, the all-powerful Jewish lobby in Washington had battled tirelessly.

The Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, a consortium of fifty-five groups, continued to argue in 2004 that whatever Pollard had done could not be called treason “because Israel was and remains a close ally.” Further pressure constantly came from many leading Jewish religious organizations. The most vociferous was the powerful Reform Union of American Congregations. Harvard Law School professor Alan M. Dershowitz, who had served as Pollard’s lawyer, had said. “There is nothing in Pollard’s conviction to suggest that he had compromised the nation’s intelligence-gathering capabilities or betrayed world-wide intelligence data.”

But Pollard still had an equally powerful opponent: George Tenet, director of the CIA. In 1998, Tenet had said he would resign if Pollard was released. That still remained his position in 2004. Ted Gunderson, a top FBI agent at the time Pollard was arrested, said “Pollard stole every worthwhile intelligence secret we had. We are still trying to recover from what he did. We had to withdraw dozens of agents in place in the former Soviet Union, in the Middle East, South Africa, and friendly nations like Britain, France, and Germany. The American public just doesn’t know the full extent of what he did.”

In prison, Pollard divorced his first wife, Anne (who had been sentenced to five years imprisonment for being his accomplice), and converted to Orthodox Judaism. In 1994 he married, in prison, a Toronto schoolteacher named Elaine Zeitz. Esther Pollard, as she was from then on known, became the spearhead of the campaign to have her husband freed. In April 2004, she repeated a familiar theme. “The issue of Jonathan concerns every Jew and every law-abiding citizen. The issues are much bigger than Jonathan and myself. We are writing a page of Jewish history.”

An indication of how much more was written on that page of history has surfaced. Ari Ben-Menashe, a former intelligence adviser to the Israeli government who is now a Canadian citizen running a political consultancy in Montreal, strongly opposes Pollard’s gaining his freedom. “The still unresolved question is whether Pollard’s thefts were also passed to China,” said Ben-Menashe. “Much of what Pollard knows is still in his head. A man like that doesn’t lose his touch because he is locked away.”

But in April 2004, Meir Dagan had learned that the U.S. deputy attorney general, Larry Thompson, had suggested Pollard’s freedom should be seen in the context of the “big picture” in the Middle East. It was an argument that did not go unnoticed by Pollard supporters. Recently, 112 out of 120 members of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, signed a petition demanding Pollard’s release on “humanitarian grounds. Washington has double standards, releasing dangerous Palestinian prisoners while keeping Pollard incarcerated.”

Pollard was granted Israeli citizenship in 1996 to enable the Tel Aviv government to bring further pressure to bear. Two years later, a U.S.brokered peace accord between Israel and the PLO nearly foundered when the then Israeli prime minister, Benyamin Netanyahu, tried to link the agreement with the release of Pollard. President Clinton held firm, Israel backed off.

A stumbling block to any new move to obtain Pollard’s freedom could be a statement Bill Hamilton, president of Inslaw—the creators of the Promis software—made. “Judge Hogan should also be made aware that the FBI office in New Mexico conducted a foreign counterintelligence investigation of Robert Maxwell in 1984 for selling Promis in New Mexico, which is the headquarters for the two main U.S. intelligence agencies on nuclear warfare, the Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories. Although the copy of the FBI Investigative Report that Inslaw obtained under the Freedom of Information Act was heavily redacted by the government for national security reasons, the text that is still able to be read reveals that the FBI investigation was based on a complaint from two employees at the Sandia National Laboratory.”

Hamilton’s claims are said by Gunderson to be “the real smoking gun that will put the whole Pollard business into its proper context.” They will also bring Rafi Eitan’s latest activities into the spotlight.

By April 2004, Israel’s legendary spymaster had made several secret trips to the United States. FBI agents tracking him admitted they were unable to question Eitan, who had been Jonathan Pollard’s controller, because he now traveled on an Israeli diplomatic passport. His visits had been to supervise the mobilization of thousands of sayanim—the name comes from the Hebrew for “to help”—many of whom received weapons training during their military service. Others had worked in U.S. military intelligence. A number were currently employed by police forces across the country. They had been briefed by Eitan on how to update the defense systems of Jewish banks, synagogues, religious schools, and other Jewish-owned institutions.

“While their allegiance to their birth country cannot be doubted, each sayan recognizes a greater loyalty: the mystical one to Israel and a need to help protect it from its enemies,” Meir Amit, a former Mossad chief, has said. He created the sayanim secret force. Known as Israel’s “invisible army,” its members are vetted by professional Mossad intelligence officers, katsas, before being recruited to protect Israel’s many interests in the United States. But the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI have seen it as a vote of no confidence in their ability to protect those interests.