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Jonathan Pollard, the American spy for Israel sentenced to life in prison in 1987, is due to be released on parole this weekend after serving 28 years of that sentence.
Pollard’s exit from a federal prison in Butner, North Carolina — where the former intelligence analyst for the U.S. Navy reportedly befriended Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff — follows three decades of intrigue that have included charges of anti-Semitism against top U.S. officials, allegations that Pollard offered his services to other countries and his becoming a card in Middle East peace talks.
Those close to Pollard, 61, say security considerations keep them from revealing details of his release, and U.S. government officials are not returning calls.
Pollard was granted parole in July on a unanimous vote by a three-member panel of the U.S. Parole Commission, and the Justice Department did not raise objections. Under federal sentencing rules in place in the 1980s, he became eligible for parole this month, the 30th anniversary of his 1985 arrest for passing secret documents to Israel.
According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons website, Pollard is scheduled to be released on Saturday, Nov. 21. However, because Pollard is now a Sabbath observer, his lawyers have suggested that the parole commission has agreed to allow him to leave the day before.
His lawyers also have said that Pollard’s dream is to make aliyah. But he’ll need President Barack Obama’s say-so, and that’s not happening in the near term, the Washington Post reported last week.
“The president has the authority, as a goodwill gesture, to limit the sentence to 30 years and thereby end it completely, allowing Pollard to become a free man and to fulfill the dream he has told me about many times — to make aliyah to Israel,” Eliot Lauer, a Pollard lawyer, told the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot last month.
On Nov. 16, two Jewish congressmen from New York, Reps. Eliot Engel and Jerrold Nadler, both Democrats, wrote to Loretta Lynch, the U.S. attorney general, saying Pollard was ready to give up his U.S. citizenship in order to be allowed to travel immediately to Israel. Pollard was granted Israeli citizenship in 1995.
In any case, Pollard’s Israel plans will likely have to wait, given the parole commission’s restrictions on his movements and requirements that he report to a probation officer for at least a year.
Pollard’s lawyers have also said that they had “secured employment and housing for Mr. Pollard in the New York area.” Lauer, in an email to JTA, declined to be more specific. The New York Observer quoted “sources” saying that Pollard would live in Manhattan.
Whatever Pollard does, it will not be too strenuous. He has endured multiple hospital visits in recent years, at times to address kidney and liver ailments, according to his supporters. (A Knesset bill under consideration would have Israel paying for his medical and residential expenses, as well as providing him with a monthly stipend, the Jerusalem Post reported earlier this month.)
Wherever he ends up, Pollard and his second wife, Esther, who has been living in Israel, will be free together for the first time. Pollard divorced his first wife, Anne, who served three years on espionage charges, in part so she could forge a new and separate life. In 1994, his ninth year in prison, he married Esther, a Canadian who had been advocating for his release.
Though Pollard is reportedly looking forward to being active in the Jewish community, he’ll likely steer clear of mainstream communal officials. “During the course of this initiative, we got to know an awful lot of Jewish leaders here in the United States,” he told journalist Edwin Black in 2002. “And they fall into one of several groups in their response to me. Some ran away from it … others promised to do things but basically didn’t … and others did harm.”
The feeling is mutual. Pollard has alleged that his interrogators asked him to implicate a list of American Jewish leaders in his espionage; he refused to do so. The Jewish leaders told Black they believed the list was Pollard’s invention, a ploy to stir sympathy for his cause.
His release won’t end the competing narratives between Pollard’s defenders and accusers. Was Pollard a reluctant recruit driven to divulge to Israel a narrow set of data that would save Jewish lives but that U.S. officials, despite pledges to share such information, were keeping secret? Or was he, as his accusers have charged, greedy, delivering mountains of documents to Israel in exchange for a lavish lifestyle, and peddling his services to other nations, including apartheid South Africa?
The terms of Pollard’s parole will likely keep him mum on these questions.