

Jonathan Pollard is pictured in this May 1991 file photo, six years after his 1985 arrest. REUTERS

Jonathan Pollard could be released in November, the Justice Department announced Friday.

The release of Pollard, who was arrested in November 1985 after passing secret documents to Israel while working as a civilian analyst for the U.S. Navy, could mark an important moment in relations between the United States and Israel, which has long campaigned for Pollard's release.

Why is Israel so keen to have Pollard released? And why has the United States resisted releasing him for so many years?

Pollard's case is a remarkable one for many reasons. A Jewish American, Pollard is reported to have felt an extreme loyalty to the Israeli state. He was working as a research analyst at the Navy’s Field Operations Intelligence Office, specifically the Threat Analysis Division in the office’s Anti-Terrorist Alert Center, when he was recruited by Israel in the summer of 1984.

According to an Associated Press report from the time, Pollard was paid around $50,000 for his leaks, and he expected to eventually earn more than 10 times that amount. His leaks caught the attention of colleagues, who notified the FBI, and he was arrested while trying to request asylum at the Israeli Embassy in Washington. (His request was rebuffed.)

Pollard was sentenced to life for one count of espionage in 1987.

Why Israel wants him free

To his supporters in Israel and elsewhere, there are a number of key factors in the case that support releasing Pollard. For one thing, while Pollard has admitted he handed over a huge amount of documents to Israel, he has argued that he did it out of an idealistic loyalty to Israel (a key American ally), not malice, and that the information was about Arab states, Pakistan and the Soviet Union, not the United States.

A Web site dedicated to documenting Pollard's case for supporters argues that Pollard was simply breaking past an informal embargo that some U.S. officials had put on sharing intelligence with Israel. Another argument was made in a recent legal analysis published in the Jerusalem Post that found Pollard's sentencing was too harsh, pointing out that Pollard had cooperated with the investigation and accepted a plea deal in which the prosecution did not ask for a life sentence. (The judge in the case ordered it anyway.) Mordechai Kremnitzer, a vice president of research at the Israel Democracy Institute, also pointed out that other Americans convicted of spying had received far more lenient sentences.

For some Israelis, the idea that a Jewish American could be sentenced so harshly for service to Israel is horrifying, and there have been a number of campaigns to free Pollard. He was granted Israeli citizenship in 1995 after a request from his lawyer, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has played a specific role in support for Pollard, admitting in 1998 that Pollard was an Israeli source (though it has also been denied) and visiting him in prison in 2002 while Netanyahu was not in office.

Why the U.S. doesn't want him free

Many in the U.S. intelligence community feel strongly that Pollard should not be released prematurely: In 1998, George J. Tenet, then director of the CIA, apparently scuppered a deal with Israel on Pollard by threatening to resign if the spy went free.

There have been a number of arguments that Pollard's spying was actually far more damaging than others care to admit. In 1999 Seymour Hersh wrote an article for the New Yorker that argued Pollard's information may have ended up with the Soviet Union. Hersh spoke to experts who said the information was used:

... in exchange for continued Soviet permission for Jews to emigrate to Israel. Other officials go further, and say that there was reason to believe that secret information was exchanged for Jews working in highly sensitive positions in the Soviet Union. A significant percentage of Pollard’s documents, including some that described the techniques the American Navy used to track Soviet submarines around the world, was of practical importance to the Soviet Union.

In an op-ed for The Washington Post written in 1998, former past directors of naval intelligence, William Studeman, Sumner Shapiro, John L. Butts and Thomas Brooks argued that as Pollard's case never went to trial (due to his plea deal), it never became public that Pollard "offered classified information to three other countries before working for the Israelis and that he offered his services to a fourth country while he was spying for Israel." The op-ed also argued that the "sheer volume" of documents passed on by Pollard was almost unrivaled, and his support was only due to a "clever public relations campaign."

Even now, while his supporters portray Pollard as an ideologue, other critics in the United States point to reports of his drug abuse and history of grandiose lies. In 2013, Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal minced no words when he argued that Pollard's release is, in fact, not in Israel's interests:

It does not help Israel to make a hero of a compulsive liar and braggart, fond of cocaine, who violated his oaths, spied on his country, inflicted damage that took billions of dollars to repair, accepted payment for his spying, jeopardized Israel's relationship with its closest ally, failed to show remorse at the time of his sentencing, made himself into Exhibit A of every anti-Semitic conspiracy nut, and then had the chutzpah to call himself a martyr to the Jewish people.

What's happening now (and what might happen next)

Over the past few years, the Israeli campaign to release Pollard has gained momentum, with Netanyahu expressing official support, a number of petitions and protests outside the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv. President Obama repeatedly refused to contemplate releasing Pollard and refused to grant him leave for family emergencies. "As the president," Obama told Israeli television before visiting the country in 2013, "my first obligation is to observe the law here in the United States and to make sure that it's applied consistently."

However, there had been some signs of a shifting position on Pollard, who is now 59 and said to be in poor health. Some unlikely figures, such as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz), have publicly called for his release. His situation has been complicated by the leaks of Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, the latter of whom provided a document that reportedly revealed the NSA may have targeted Netanyahu himself.

In 2014, there were signs that the United States was considering pardoning Pollard to aid the Middle East peace process. The hope appeared to be that if America agreed to release Pollard, Israel might agree to release some Palestinian prisoners or impose a moratorium on new building in disputed territories, key sticking points for the Palestinian negotiators. However, Pollard was not released, and there was little progress made in peace talks.

What is happening now appears to be something different. According to the Justice Department, Pollard will become "eligible for mandatory parole" in November, meaning that Pollard would not need to be pardoned in order to be released. However, the timing of the news – just after the United States and other countries reached a controversial nuclear deal with Iran – has led some to speculate that a future release would be aimed at appeasing Israel.

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