Beyond pardon - the spy US won't forgive

Somewhat belatedly, President Obama has issued his first presidential pardons - but don't hold the front page.

The nine recipients include a coin mutilator sentenced to a year's probation in 1963, an ex-serviceman who used cocaine and bounced the odd cheque, and a Utah man given two years on probation in 1972 for illegal possession of government property.

But despite considerable pressure, and no little expectation, he did not pardon Jonathan Pollard, the US naval intelligence analyst sentenced in 1987 to life in jail for passing secrets to Israel.

A quarter of a century on, Pollard's is the espionage case that never goes away, and he languishes in a North Carolina prison to this day. His best hope of release is now 2015, 30 years after he was arrested.

Obama is not the first president to reject Pollard's appeals for clemency. Although Bill Clinton scandalously pardoned Marc Rich, the fugitive financier and huge benefactor of Israel, on his last day in office on January 20, 2001, he turned down every plea for Pollard.

Likewise George W Bush, probably the most pro-Israeli president, was deaf to every clemency request for Pollard.

In Israel, the spy is a hero. A square in Jerusalem has been renamed after him, and supporters compare him as a victim of anti-Semitism with Alfred Dreyfus, the French officer convicted on trumped-up charges of treason in 1895 and later exonerated.

Pollard has admitted his guilt, but insists he was merely passing on vital security information that the US should have supplied under a 1983 memorandum with Israel, including details of Iranian, Iraqi and Libyan weapons of mass destruction targeted at Israel.

In early 1996, Israel granted Pollard's request for citizenship. Two years later, after long claiming he was a rogue operator, it acknowledged that he had been a paid agent of its security services.

Every Israeli prime minister since Yitzhak Rabin has sought Pollard's release; Benjamin Netanyahu, visited him in jail (though at the time, in 2002, Netanyahu was out of office).

In Washington, congressmen from districts with large Jewish constituencies often try to secure his freedom.

At least twice, he has been a bargaining chip in efforts to obtain a Middle East peace settlement.

This autumn, the idea of a Pollard release was floated again, this time as a quid pro quo for agreement by Netanyahu to extend the freeze on new settlements, allowing stalled talks with the Palestinians to resume.

If Obama was tempted, he did not bite.

The freeze is over, the "peace process" again lies in ruins, and Jonathan Pollard remains in jail.

So Pollard the spy must have been a big deal. But was he?

The problem is that the exact charges against Pollard and his then wife Anne were never made public. He was not convicted of treason, a crime that in the US applies only in time of war. Instead, after agreeing to co-operate with Government prosecutors, he pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to deliver national defence information to a foreign government.

Though that offence carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment, all seemed set for Pollard to receive a sentence of 10 or 15 years at most. But the judge deemed otherwise, and imposed a life term. As an accessory, Anne was given five years.

Two factors probably tipped the scales. One was the Pollards' claim as they awaited sentencing that as Jews they had been morally obliged to hand over the information, implying that they would do it again.

The other was a secret memorandum signed by then-Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger and seen only by the judge.

Pollard's supporters say the document grossly exaggerated the damage he did to US intelligence.

As well, they say, Pollard never caused the betrayal of an American agent; indeed, some of the leaks for which he was blamed came from the CIA mole Aldrich Ames, who was not detected until 1994.

Even so, Pollard apparently did hand the Israelis something close to the crown jewels - the detailed manuals of Raisin, or "radio-signal notations", a compendium of US military signals and data-collection systems around the world, as well as daily top-secret US appraisals of developments in the Middle East.

Worse still, some officials suspect Israel may have traded some of this information to the Soviet Union, in return for Moscow allowing Soviet Jews to emigrate.

If so, the Pollard case was a very big deal indeed.

This month, his former wife Anne, who had been living in poverty in New York, was flown to Israel.

It may be five years or more before her ex-husband makes his hero's return to his new homeland.

- The Independent