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Microcontroller Projects for Hobbyists: The Truth About Jonathan Pollardby John Loftus Date: May 23, 2003 When American intelligence broke the Soviet wartime
code, we learned that the Soviets had infiltrated the
American government.
"The Soviets knew we knew they knew we knew. The only one who didn't know was the President of the United States. Our politics was injured for 30 years by this."-Quoted in the New York Times, March 30, 2002 There is a good reason why neither Congress nor the
American Jewish leadership supports the release of
Jonathan Pollard from prison:
Just before Pollard's sentencing, Senator Chic Hecht
of Nevada, a senior member of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, telephoned the leaders of every major
Jewish organization to warn them not to support
Pollard in any way.
Washington insiders thought they knew the big, dark secret. David Luchins, an aide to Senator. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, announced to reporters that he had seen "secret documents confirming that Pollard's spying had resulted in the loss of lives of U.S. intelligence agents." Luchins later recanted his statement, but not until the damage had already been done. Pollard had supposedly given Israel a list of every
American spy inside the Soviet Union. On several
occasions Soviet agents in New York had posed as
Israelis. The CIA reasoned that was also true in
Israel:
Pollard hadn't meant for this to happen, but the result of the "false flag" mistake was mass murder. In a matter of months, every spy we had in Russia-more than 40 agents-had been captured or killed. At least that was the accusation, but the basis for it had been kept secret from Pollard and his defense counsel. The public could not be told the horrifying truth:
American intelligence had gone blind behind the Iron
Curtain-we had lost all our networks, as the
intelligence community publicly admitted more than a
decade later.
On March 5, 1987, at 2:22 p.m., the sentencing hearing
in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., began in
Criminal Case No. 86-207, United States of America v.
Jonathan Jay Pollard.
Weinberger publicly stated that Pollard was the worst
spy in American history: "It is difficult for me, even
in the so-called year of the spy, to conceive of a
greater harm to national security than that caused by
the defendant."
A week after the sentencing, the Washington Times
reported that the United States had identified Shabtai
Kalmanovich as the Soviet spy in Israel who supposedly
worked for the Mossad but was actually working for the
KGB; he had betrayed American secrets to Moscow.
Just to make sure that Pollard was blamed, U.S.
intelligence sources, several months later, leaked
word to the press of the Kalmanovich connection.
But it was all untrue. Every bit of it. Pollard wasn't
the serial killer. The Jew didn't do it. It was one of
their own WASPs-Aldrich Ames, a drunken senior CIA
official who sold the names of America's agents to the
Russians for cash.
Ames was arrested in February 1994, and confessed to
selling out American agents in the Soviet Union, but
not all of them. It was only logical to assume that
Pollard had betrayed the rest of them, as one former
CIA official admitted shortly after Ames's arrest.
Would the Americans now admit that they had been
conned into blaming Pollard? Beltway bureaucrats do
not readily admit to mistakes of this magnitude.
Instead, they convinced themselves that Pollard might
still be at least partly to blame for the worst
debacle in U.S. intelligence history.
Such things had happened before. Once again, Washington insiders circled their alphabet agencies to fire back at the critics who dared to suggest that Pollard might have been innocent of the major charge against him. Meanwhile, deep inside the Navy's intelligence service, a low-level decision was made to re-examine the Pollard case in view of the convictions of Ames and Hanssen. With sickening chagrin, the Navy discovered that the evidence needed to clear Pollard had been under its nose all along. As my source in Naval intelligence explained, the list
of our secret agents inside Russia had been kept in a
special safe in a special room with a special "blue
stripe" clearance needed for access.
But Jonathan Pollard didn't have "blue stripe" clearance, according to intelligence sources I spoke with. That was the bombshell that would clear him of any possible connection to the deaths of our Russian agents. Just to make sure, I checked it out, even visiting Pollard in prison to confirm it. Sure enough, there is no way on earth Jonathan Pollard could have entered the file room, let alone the safe where the list was kept. But the intelligence community's failure to catch this
and thereby discredit a critical piece of
prosecutorial evidence was, to put it mildly, a bit of
an oversight. Some would say it was an obscene
blunder.
The lack of "blue stripe" clearance was the final proof that Pollard could not possibly have betrayed our Russian agents. It should certainly have gotten him a new hearing. As a former federal prosecutor, I can state that it would be hard to rebut this kind of evidence. The Justice Department, in one of its briefs, had specifically mentioned the "false flag" theory as grounds to support Pollard's heavy sentence, arguing in part, that spying even for friendly countries can be damaging if information ultimately falls into the wrong hands. In this, the Justice Department had unwittingly misled the judge. Weinberger also raised the "false flag" issue in his top-secret memorandum to the judge. The only possible way to uphold the sentence might be the "harmless error" doctrine. The government could admit that Pollard had never stolen the Russian agent list, but so what? Maybe he had passed other information that was equally damaging, so he would still deserve to remain in prison for the rest of his life. The problem with the "harmless error" strategy is that the rest of the material that Pollard gave the Israelis was itself pretty harmless. In fact, the original damage assessment from the
intelligence community confirmed that the impact on
our national security-of the release of information
other than the agent names-was not serious.
The reason America suffered so little harm is simple:
Pollard was stealing Soviet secrets for Israel, not
American secrets for the Soviets. Before the fall of
communism, the Soviets were shipping guns to nearly
every terrorist group in the Middle East.
In fact, as Pollard himself admitted in one of my
three prison interviews, many, if not most, of the
documents he handed over were cover sheets showing the
titles of files that the U.S. was supposed to share
with Israel, but were holding back.
After the government's "false flag" theory was blown
up by the "blue stripe" discovery, the anti-Pollard
members of the intelligence community had to come up
with a new PR campaign for damage control.
Seymour Hersh is a famous reporter and long-time
friend. (I was his secret source in his 1983 book The
Price of Power-Kissinger in Nixon's White House
(Summit Books).
So much for the crown jewels. If that is the best spin
the intelligence community can come up with, Pollard
is probably entitled to immediate release for time
served.
After 9/11, though, I began to realize that Pollard's
tale was only the beginning of a much bigger story
about a major America intelligence scandal, which is
the subject of a book I am now working on.
Pollard in fact did steal something that the U.S.
government never wishes to talk about. Several friends
inside military intelligence have told me that Pollard
gave the Israelis a roster that listed the identities
of all the Saudi and other Arab intelligence agents we
knew about as of 1984.
Since 9/11, however, Pollard's "blue book" is of
profound interest to everyone, including the U.S.
These particular agents are now a major embarrassment
to the Saudis and to the handful of American spy
chiefs who had employed these Saudi intelligence
agents on the sly.
In hindsight, we now know that Pollard stole the one book-that, incidentally, was alluded to in Weinberger's secret memorandum-that unquestionably proves that the Americans knew as early as 1984 about the connection between the Saudis and terrorist groups. How does this all fit together? During the Reagan-Bush
administrations, the National Security Council wanted
to throw the Soviets out of Afghanistan using Arab
soldiers instead of American. It seemed like a good
idea at the time, but no one thought about the
long-term consequences.
In 1982, I went on "60 Minutes" to expose Nazi war
criminals I had been assigned to prosecute who were
then working for the CIA. It was one of those Cold War
blunders. The CIA didn't have a clue it was dealing
with Nazi war criminals.
Sadly, the only lesson the intelligence bosses learned
was to put the bad guys on someone else's payroll (the
Saudis for one), and then reimburse them under the
table.
The Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989. The
naive Americans walked away from the Frankenstein
monster they had created, but the cynical Saudis kept
the terrorists on the payroll. From the Saudi
perspective, it was safer to keep paying the
terrorists groups to attack Israel, Bosnia or Chechnya
rather than letting them all back into Saudi Arabia.
In this "Keystone Cops" affair, one wing of U.S.
intelligence was hunting terrorists while another
winked at the Saudis' recruitment of them. I have
spoken to numerous FBI and CIA counter-terrorist
agents, all of whom tell a similar story.
I am not the only one to reach this conclusion. In his autobiography, Oliver North confirmed that every time he wanted to do something about terrorism, Weinberger stopped him because it might upset the Saudis and jeopardize the flow of oil to the U.S. John O'Neill, a former FBI agent and our nation's top Al Qaeda expert, stated in a 2001 book written by Jean Charles Brisard, a noted French intelligence analyst, that everything we wanted to know about terrorism could be found in Saudi Arabia. O'Neill warned the Beltway bosses repeatedly that if
the Saudis were to continue funding Al Qaeda, it would
end up costing American lives, according to several
intelligence sources. As long as the oil kept flowing,
they just shrugged.
Congress has been told repeatedly that American
intelligence never knew the identities of the Arabs
who threw the Soviets out of Afghanistan.
Inadvertently, Pollard stole the ultimate smoking gun
that shows exactly what the leaders of our
intelligence community knew and when they knew it.
In the ultimate irony, Pollard may have to be let out
of prison to testify before Congress about the
negligence of his own superiors. Like O'Neill, Pollard
had tried to warn his superiors that a wave of
terrorism was coming out of the Middle East, but no
one would listen.
Pollard never thought he was betraying his country.
And he never did, although he clearly violated its
laws. He just wanted to help protect Israelis and
Americans from terrorists.
From http://www.momentmag.com/features/feat1.html (Site is down.) Excerpts from Will Durant's The Age of Faith Pages 162-186 Pub. 1950
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