Free Pollard? History says, ‘not today, not tomorrow, not the next day’

Even Israel’s strongest supporters have opposed releasing the Israeli spy, as testimony from Ariel Sharon’s chief of staff and a memo from former US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld show

Mitch Ginsburg is the former Times of Israel military correspondent.

Israeli youth groupers protest at the US Consulate in Jerusalem against Jonathan Pollard's imprisonment, June 2012. (photo credit: Nati Shohat/Flash90)
Israeli youth groupers protest at the US Consulate in Jerusalem against Jonathan Pollard's imprisonment, June 2012. (photo credit: Nati Shohat/Flash90)

President Shimon Peres and US President Barack Obama share close personal ties — but when Peres asks Obama to free jailed Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard on Wednesday evening, the exchange is likely to be terse and tense.

Pollard’s activities and his subsequent harsh prison sentence have long been a bone of contention between Israel and the United States, as illustrated by a candid and strongly-worded document available in former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld’s archive, and confirmed by former chief of staff and chief liaison to the White House for prime minister Ariel Sharon, attorney Dov Weisglass.

President Shimon Peres and US President Barak Obama meet in Washington in April. (photo credit: Moshe Milner GPO/Flash90)
President Shimon Peres and US President Barak Obama meet in Washington in April. (photo credit: Moshe Milner GPO/Flash90)

On March 16, 2001, early in president George W. Bush’s first term in office, his secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, addressed an email to the president under the subject heading “Jonathan Jay Pollard – Spy.”

Rumsfeld sent copies to the vice president, the national security adviser and the secretary of state.

He informed Bush that representatives of the Israeli government would soon be arriving in Washington, DC, and they would likely ask the president to free Pollard. “Visits from Israelis have frequently included such requests. Indeed it tends to happen repeatedly during the course of an Administration,” he wrote.

To acquiesce, according to Rumsfeld, “would be enormously damaging to our efforts to keep spies out of our government.”

Rumsfeld, widely considered to be pro-Israel, recommended the following: “to come on very forcefully and say not no, but definitely no– no today, tomorrow and the next day, and that it is not a matter that you would consider during your administration. The advantage of being forceful the first time they visit the subject is that it might set them back on their heels and give them pause about bringing the subject up to you ever again. And, more important, it might also give them pause about trying to organize support in the United States to put political pressure on you for such an action, which you don’t need.”

Weisglass, who served as chief of staff under Sharon, confirmed Wednesday that the memo “very much reflects the reality” that he and other Israeli officials encountered when broaching the subject with the president and his advisers.

“There was firm opposition to the matter,” he said.

Israelis demonstrate at the Western Wall for the release of Jonathan Pollard in 2005. (photo credit: Nati Shohat/Flash90)
Israelis demonstrate at the Western Wall for the release of Jonathan Pollard in 2005. (photo credit: Nati Shohat/Flash90)

Nearly each Israeli prime minister’s visit to the White House includes a formal request for freedom for Pollard, who has been in jail for over 26 years. The procedure is fixed. Israeli and American chiefs of staff discuss the topics that each leader intends to raise. White House officials never objected to Israel discussing Pollard, Weisglass said, but they always made clear that they did not believe the answer would be positive.

In the actual meeting, he said, the president would be courteous but inflexible. “You know how it is with Americans. They are polite but they send you the heck out of there. Their position was frightfully firm,” he continued.

As Rumsfeld’s letter indicates, much of the opposition to a presidential pardon for Pollard has come from within the American defense establishment: CIA director George Tenet famously threatened to resign if president Bill Clinton granted Pollard a pardon as part of the Wye Accords and Rumsfeld himself attached a letter signed by seven secretaries of defense.

Yet Weisglass, who said Pollard’s extremely long term of incarceration had reached the point of being “ridiculous,” indicated that he felt the end was near.

“I don’t know if it will be in two weeks or two years but it will come in the near future and it won’t be because of some request from Peres or letter from Netanyahu.”

Instead, he believes, it will spring from the United States’ inherent sense of justice and rationality.

MK Ronit Tirosh, who co-heads the Knesset lobby for Pollard along with MK Uri Ariel, acknowledged the American defense establishment’s long-standing opposition to a presidential pardon but remained hopeful.  “That’s why we sent our biggest gun,” she said in a phone interview, “and that’s Peres.”

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