Ex-Spy Pollard Arrives in Israel

Jonathan Pollard, the former United States naval intelligence researcher convicted of spying for Israel in 1985, arrived in Tel Aviv early Wednesday morning, ending a 35-year ordeal that at times threatened to irrevocably damage the US-Israeli relationship. Five years after his release and a month after his parole restrictions were lifted, Pollard and his wife Esther took off from Newark Airport aboard casino mogul Sheldon Adelson’s private Boeing 737. Upon landing, they were greeted on the tarmac at Israel’s Ben-Gurion International Airport by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who presented an Israeli ID to the ex-spy. Pollard had been charged with passing classified information to a friendly country without detriment to the United States, a charge his legal team and pro-Israel activists argued resulted in a sentence grossly disproportionate to sentences received by others charged with the same crime. But Pollard became a lightning rod for the American intelligence community, which vehemently opposed any leniency or lessening of the spy’s sentence to the point where then-CIA director George Tenet threatened to resign if President Bill Clinton were to include Pollard as a pot-sweetener during negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians in 1998. The Pollard case was a low point of ill feelings between the Israeli and American defense echelons, which have traditionally shared excellent relations. It spanned six US presidential administrations and 15 Israeli governments under seven prime ministers, and remains a trigger for accusations after three and a half decades.