The Truth About Jonathan Pollard | Aish
Pollard's life sentence is based on a humongous Washington whopper of a lie.
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<iframe src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/ns.html?id=GTM-K33WTTX" height="0" width="0" style="display:none;visibility:hidden" aria-hidden="true"></iframe> Search for: ExploreLearnMoreEmail UpdatesDonate Aish.com > Current > IssuesThe Truth About Jonathan Pollard Advertisements TRENDING IN ISSUES The Time for Hiding Is Over 7 min read The Parchment May Burn, But the Letters Still Soar 6 min read Judaism Needs to be Chosen 6 min read Why Were the Graves of So Many Jewish GIs Marked by a Cross? 11 min read Advertisements by John Loftus < 1 min read Pollard's life sentence is based on a humongous Washington whopper of a lie. When American intelligence broke the Soviet wartime code, we learned that the Soviets had infiltrated the American government. The American intelligence community's penchant for secrecy and its refusal to admit that it had been infiltrated was so great that it failed to disclose this to President Harry S. Truman. This is how Daniel Patrick Moynihan described it: "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: They all were told a lie -- a humongous Washington whopper of a lie. The lie was first whispered in the "bubble," the secret intelligence briefing room on Capitol Hill, but it quickly spread. 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. Pollard had done something so horrible that it could never be made public. Several senior intelligence sources confirmed the message: No matter how harsh the sentence, Jewish leaders had to keep their mouths shut; don't make a martyr out of Jonathan Pollard. Washington insiders thought they knew the big, dark secret: secret documents confirming that Pollard's spying had resulted in the loss of lives of U.S. intelligence agents. 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 that was also true in Israel: The Mossad had been infiltrated by one or more Soviet spies. In the trade this is called a "false flag" operation: Your enemy poses as your ally and steals your secrets. In this case, the CIA reasoned in attempting to explain its horrendous losses, Pollard had passed the information to Israel he had stolen, which in turn fell victim to the "false flag" operation. Soviet agents in Israel, posing as Israeli intelligence agents, passed the information to Moscow, which then wiped out American human assets in the Soviet Union. 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. The Soviets could have attacked the United States without warning. Everyone who knew at the time (including me) blamed Pollard. Caspar Weinberger later said that he wished Pollard had been shot. 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. The prosecutors produced a secret letter and memo from Secretary of Defense Caspar "Cap" Weinberger referring to the "enormous" harm that Pollard had done to our national security. In his memo, Weinberger directly accused Pollard of betraying America's "sources and methods," which is to say, he had betrayed our spies in foreign countries. 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." Despite his plea agreement to the contrary with the government, Pollard was given the maximum sentence, life in prison. Weinberger later said that he wished Pollard had been shot. 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. Kalmanovich had been flying under a false flag. Washington insiders winked knowingly at one another: Pollard's contact in Israel had been cau...
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