This is a cross post from Marc’s Words:
It is disgraceful that the crank who lied his way into US Naval intelligence has come to be seen by so many people as a hero. It’s time to wake up and realize that Pollard was not a Zionist hero but a bumbling amateur looking for quick cash.
The Pollard affair damaged the relationship between Israel and the United States; even worse, it has consequences for any US Jews aspiring to a career in the world of intelligence. And from the moment Pollard claimed he had spied for Israel because he was a Jew everyone of the same faith working in intelligence would have become instantly suspect.
Now, recruiters to the CIA, Naval Intelligence and other US agencies will always ask themselves if the Jew sitting before them is going to end up being another Jonathan Pollard.
The commander of Naval Intelligence from 1978-82, Sumner Shapiro, summed up his frustrations with the attitude taken by Jewish organizations towards Pollard:
“We work so hard to establish ourselves and to get where we are, and to have somebody screw it up… and then to have Jewish organizations line up behind this guy and try to make him out a hero of the Jewish people, it bothers the hell out of me…”
The truth is that men like Shapiro are the true heroes, both of the Jewish people and the United States. Shapiro was a professional who worked hard to protect his country from enemies foreign and domestic. Instead of selling secrets to a foreign power he did his job to the best of his ability.
He chose the path of honour.
Shapiro met briefly with Pollard before he began spying for Israel, according to Shapiro, Pollard had a scheme that involved using South Africa as an intelligence back channel, the details haven’t been made public but whatever it was shook Shapiro so much that he instantly ordered Pollard’s security clearance to be reduced and that he be transferred.
This was by no means the only time that Pollard embarrassed himself, he refused to take the mandatory polygraph test when applying for the CIA, later claiming that his prolonged drug use would have been detected. The Office of Naval Intelligence had no polygraph requirement for applicants at the time.
Seymour Hersch has written a fantastic critique of the whole Pollard affair here included is an anecdote that sums the man up and is worth recounting in full;
In the early nineteen-eighties, Lieutenant Commander David G. Muller, Jr., who ran an analytical section at Suitland, had an opening on his staff and summoned Pollard for an interview. “I had respect for him,” Muller recalled recently. “He knew a lot about Navy hardware and a lot about the Middle East.” An early-Monday-morning interview was set up. “Jay blew in the first thing Monday,” Muller recounted. “He looked as if he hadn’t slept or shaved. He proceeded to tell me that on Friday evening his then fiancee, Anne Henderson, had been kidnapped by I.R.A. operatives in Washington, and he’d spent the weekend chasing the kidnappers.” Pollard said that he had managed to rescue his fiancee “only in the wee hours of Monday morning” — just before his appointment. Of course, Pollard did not get the job, Muller said, but he still wishes that he had warned others. “I ought to have gone to the security people,” Muller, who is retired, told me, “and said, ‘Hey, this guy’s a wacko.’ “
I can’t begin to imagine Shapiro’s frustration when he watched a hero made out of this traitor. No country in the world (minus Israel) has been better to the Jews than the United States, and this is how he repaid that great country?
Pollard sold his country’s trusted secrets to a foreign power for cash and he got caught. He wasn’t a brave James Bondstein, and after receiving over $50,000 in cash and jewels over the period of 18 months he wasn’t working for love of Israel.
Perhaps there are those who think that the information he passed on was worth risking our relationship with our best friend in the international community; perhaps those same people believe that it is still worth risking that relationship in order to free this sick old man from prison.
Those people are wrong.
Pollard’s intelligence handlers were wrong to recruit him, and they realized it the instant he turned up at the embassy, seeking asylum, which is why they refused to let him through the door.
Spying is a dangerous game, and the stakes are always high. Pollard made his own bed, and it is not a comfortable one. But, then, the cost of betrayal is high. The trained agents of Israel’s security services are the ones protecting us in Israel; not those who see an opportunity to make money by selling national secrets to them.
Don’t feel bad for Pollard. He doesn’t deserve it.
Oh and for those of you arguing that those who have committed similar crimes have served lesser sentences, check your facts that simply isn’t true.
