Spike Bowman on Jonathan Pollard

M.E. “Spike” Bowman, former senior counsel at the FBI and deputy director of the National Counterintelligence Executive, has an interesting piece in the Intelligencer opposing clemency for Jonathan Jay Pollard, the former U.S. naval intelligence analyst convicted of spying for Israel in 1987.  The article systematically rebuts a series of arguments put forth in support of releasing Pollard, who took a plea bargain in 1987 and is now serving the twenty-sixth year of a life sentence.  Jeff Stein highlights the Bowman piece in the Washington Post, but the full article is well worth a read. Bowman was the top legal adviser to Navy intelligence at the time of Pollard's arrest, and is very familiar with the case--and hence with the controversy as well. In response to the claim that the information Pollard shared was not very damaging, Bowman quotes a declaration of then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger submitted to the court in advance of a trial that never occurred:

That information was intentionally reserved by the United States for its own use, because to disclose it, to anyone or any nation, would cause the greatest harm to our national security. Our decisions to withhold and preserve certain intelligence information, and the sources and methods of its acquisition, either in total or in part, are taken with great care, as part of a plan for national defense and foreign policy which has been con­sistently applied throughout many administrations.

Pollard pled guilty under 18 U.S.C. §794, the section of the Espionage Act criminalizing the unauthorized disclosure of information that 1) results in the death of an agent of the United States or 2) "directly concerned nuclear weaponry, military spacecraft or satellites, early warning systems, or other means of defense or retaliation against large-scale attack; war plans; communications intelligence or cryptographic information." At the time, Pollard claimed:

At no time did I ever compromise the names of any U.S. agents operating overseas, nor did I ever reveal any U.S. ciphers, codes, encipherment devices, classified military technology, the disposition and orders of U.S. forces…or communications security procedures.

Bowman, pointing to the plea, writes that this is a claim "completely refuted by the facts."  Then he concludes by summarizing his opinion of Pollard:

In the final analysis, Jay Pollard is not a sympa­thetic character when one is given the full picture of his activities against this country. He was neither a U.S. nor an Israeli patriot. He was a self-serving, gluttonous character seeking financial reward and personal gratification. Without doubt, he is intense and intelligent, but also arrogantly venal, unscrupu­lous, and self-obsessed.