Writing from Prison, Pollard Scores Israeli, U.S. Jewish Leaders

Convicted spy Jonathan Pollard claims the classified U.S. information he gave and sold to Israel was for an Israeli-sanctioned high and noble cause “pertaining to the covenant and survival.”

He adds in a 14-page handwritten letter from federal prison here, published by the St. Louis Jewish Light, that Israel unfairly repudiated him and left him and his wife Anne to take the rap.

Pollard’s letter is the first communication with a U.S. Jewish newspaper since he was transferred to prison here, according to the Jewish Light. All known Jewish prisoners in Missouri receive the newspaper.

“I wasn’t motivated by greed and I didn’t set out to become a martyr,” he writes. “…I don’t condemn the cause I served but only the cowardly leaders who decided to sacrifice us all on the twin altars of diplomatic and personal expediency.”

“ROGUE OPERATION”

Israeli leaders at first termed Pollard’s work a “rogue operation.” No proof to the contrary has been reported, yet official Israeli investigations have criticized the top governmental leadership for poor oversight of the now disbanded Lekem espionage agency that recruited and directed Pollard.

Jonathan Pollard, 32, received a life term in March for his espionage activities. A former civilian analyst for the U.S. Navy, he told the federal court that he had come to realize that rather than spy, he should have taken his concerns that Israel wasn’t receiving enough security information through the channels of the Navy and as far as the President.

He added that he regretted sacrificing his wife “on the altar of political ideology.” Anne, 26, was sentenced to two concurrent five-year terms for being an accessory to her husband’s espionage and receiving stolen government material. He claims the inadequate treatment she receives for a rare, painful gastrointestinal disorder keeps her in agony.

SAYS U.S. POLICY COMPELLED HIM

Pollard also contends that Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger’s “even-handedness policy” toward the Middle East–seeking to erode “the Israeli army’s military superiority over the Arabs”–“eventually precipitated my involvement with the Israelis.”

Pollard claims that Weinberger has “approved such a radical pro-Arab tilt in U.S. Middle East policy” by accepting the Arab claim that Israel’s strategic value is marginal, by selling “ultra sophisticated” arms and by denying Israel “critical information needed to neutralize the new generation of Soviet weapons being deployed along her northern border.”

Regretting that he broke the law, Pollard nonetheless writes that “after months of agonizing… I came to the conclusion that the choice I faced was between my belief in Israel’s right to continued security and my legal obligation to uphold Mr. Weinberger’s betrayal of the Jewish State. Having thus identified my options. I acted accordingly.” The convicted spy also attacks Morris Abram, chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, and other U.S. Jewish leaders “of his ilk.” He accuses them of being “glib apologists” who should “limit themselves to fund-raising and leave the less glamorous affairs such as intelligence gathering to those of us who are not afraid to be exposed as ‘unhyphenated’ Jews.”

He says Abram abetted the Arab cause by “endorsing Caspar Weinberger’s rather fanciful off-the-record assessment of my actions as having constituted ‘the gravest assault against the integrity of this country’s national defenses in over 200 years.”

Weinberger later repudiated that statement.

But above all, Pollard writes, “Abram’s outrageous claim that I had, in fact, subverted Israel’s interest struck me as being unaccountably naive… It would appear that salon Jews like Abram either can’t comprehend or accept the unfortunate dichotomy that exists between the noble halachic (Jewish legal) values for which Israel stands and the unpalatable means she must sometimes use in order to survive.”

Nevertheless, he declares that he and Anne “are still confident that the American Jewish community, if not its leaders, will one day conquer its fears and complexes long enough to correct the terrible injustice which has been visited upon our heads.”

Pollard also writes in defense of his reputation. He says he took no Israeli money until six months into his espionage, and then only at Israeli insistence. On the contrary, he claims that he and his wife bore the costs of their espionage, including a trip to Europe, until they could be reimbursed.

He contends that “perhaps in reaction to complaints being voiced by the Jewish community about the unjust nature of my sentence, the government appears set to unleash a stream of unattributable ‘leaks’ designed to smear my reputation to the point where nobody would be willing to stand up for me.”

He says he was forced to see psychiatrist after the failure of a Navy operation he was associated with, but the psychiatrist gave him “a clean bill of health.”