“Anyone who is upset at Pollard being released but doesn’t care particularly about the Chinese having stolen the personal records of some 20 to 25 million Americans has his priorities very, very screwed up”. Department lawyers did not contest his parole bid, which was granted following a hearing this month before the Parole Commission.
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Oded Eran, a senior research fellow at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies who has served as a senior official in Israel’s Foreign Ministry, said Pollard has lost his value as a bargaining chip between the United States and Israel.
It is possible that federal authorities will tell Mr. Pollard he can’t leave the U.S. for a period of years after he is released. What Pollard’s release won’t do, officials and analysts say, is make most Israelis feel any better about the nuclear deal with Iran.
“Immense joy”, Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked wrote in Hebrew on her Facebook page, adding that “30 years of suffering will come to an end this November”. However, as some observers have pointed out, the Obama administration would be unlikely to want to create a linkage between the Iran deal and the release of Pollard when four American prisoners are still stuck in Iranian jails. “What I said in The Wall Street Journal essentially was that if anybody is hung up over the fact that he’s an American Jew or that he’s Israeli, just pretend that he’s a South Korean and set him free”. His attorneys said they have already secured him accommodation in New York City. For more than 12 years after his arrest, senior Israeli officials told their American allies that Pollard had been a ” rogue” who had no contact with the Israeli government.
Pollard also provided a year’s worth of memos by intelligence officers in the U.S. Navy’s 6th Fleet, recording all their observations of Soviet planes, ships, and submarines in the Mediterranean Sea.
“From his point of view, he was trying to help Israelis”, Bergman said. At the same, Pollard’s lead attorney is hopeful that an exception will be made in his case and Pollard may be allowed to stay outside the U.S.
Pollard, 60, has battled health problems in recent years and is being held in a North Carolina prison. “I’m counting the days, the hours, the minutes, the seconds until I can take him into my arms and we can close the door on the past behind us, to begin to heal and to rebuild our lives”.
Under federal sentencing rules in place at the time, he became eligible for parole in November, the 30th anniversary of his arrest.
Convicted of spying for Israel in 1987, Pollard has endured a punishment that long ago outweighed the crime. So she said the U.S. showed no generosity or kindheartedness on the issue.
Pollard’s supporters had said he was being punished too harshly since Israel is a US ally and much of the classified information he passed on caused no damage to the US and was intelligence to which Israel previously had access. Portions of the Weinberger document that have been declassified state that Pollard admitted passing to his Israeli contacts “an incredibly large quantity of classified documents” and that U.S. troops could be endangered because of the theft.
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“There is no proof he harmed the security of the United States”.
