FBI Wades Into Obama’s Commutation Process
The Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel recently forced the CIA to release additional content from its 1987 Jonathan Pollard espionage damage assessment report (PDF). The National Security Archive – which appealed this declassification case to ISCAP – and many establishment media outlets characterize the partially released contents as something of an exoneration of the "cooperative" Pollard, whom the CIA debriefed under polygraph. They applaud the "good faith" of Pollard’s Israeli handlers who are said to have largely tasked the theft of classified U.S. documents that were of immediate and exclusive use defending Israel – but unfairly withheld by America despite intelligence sharing agreements. If this framing were true, it would make the ISCAP release extremely timely as the Obama administration moves into the final stages of Pollard’s for request for executive clemency. However, an examination of the still-heavily-redacted CIA report against other recently declassified files about the activities of other assets handled by Israeli spymaster Rafael Eitan – reveal is not quite the "get out of jail free" card so many claim. Other documents now in the declassification pipeline may further erode the benign portrayal of Pollard’s activities – though not necessarily in time to prevent his early release.
Although CIA’s damage assessment claims Pollard’s handlers "concentrated on providing Israel with US intelligence on the military forces and equipment of Arab and Islamic states and on Soviet military forces, equipment and technology" many such bullet points and assertions are followed by other large censored sections that leave readers wondering what other tasking was documented by the CIA. It may be that the blanked-out sections refer to other American assets run by Rafael Eitan – an Israeli spymaster who has probably done more damage to United states than any other Middle Eastern spy – that were better situated to deliver the goods. Pollard is far from Israel’s only successful spy. Eitan himself visited the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) in 1968, a facility that "lost" more weapons-grade uranium than any other nuclear fuel processor in the US. Eitan would have likely relied on NUMEC president Zalman Shapiro and other helpful American colleagues for advanced hydrogen bomb designs and other assistance in the early 1970s. Eitan’s involvement in obtaining source code of the PROMIS intelligence case management program, a system compromised with secret back doors that was to be installed at the Justice Department and various foreign intelligence services, would have been a good source for "dirt" the CIA report claims Eitan wanted but that Pollard’s more sensible handlers vetoed. Continue reading “Partially Declassified CIA Assessment Does Not Exonerate Jonathan Pollard”