Amnesty for Spies - Jonathan Pollard

NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 17

It was bandied about last week that if President Clinton could grant the Puerto Rican community a pardon of the 14 terrorists, why couldn't he do something for the Jewish community? Like what? Grant a pardon to Jonathan Pollard.

Several years ago, after I addressed an annual gathering of Jewish New Yorkers who did me the honor of an award, a questioner at the end of the hour asked whether I agreed with her that Jonathan Pollard should be pardoned. I said no, I hoped, on the contrary, that he would be executed. There was some dismay on the part of the questioner, shared with most of the audience, I judged from the general (though by no means unanimous) moaning over my reply. In subsequent months, the case for Jonathan Pollard was widely advanced. What it said, essentially, was that 1) the information stolen from the Navy by Pollard was not really critical in importance, and 2) in any event, it was conveyed not to the Soviet Union, which was our enemy, but to Israel, which is our friend.

The gentrification of Mr. Pollard's offense was interrupted by a massive article last January in The New Yorker by Seymour Hersh which 1) described in devastating detail the importance of the information stolen by Pollard; 2) explained how the information even in the hands of an ally was greatly dangerous; and 3) revealed that the transaction had been commercial. Pollard was indeed pro-Israel. But his services were being paid for in cash. And anyway, United States law does not distinguish between giving state secrets to Moscow and giving them to Luxembourg.

The plea to let Pollard go was renewed at the time of the Wye Accords a year ago, when Mr. Clinton pressed upon Arafat and Netanyahu one of the episodic detentes. When it was learned that Mr. Clinton was leaning favorably to the request by Netanyahu to release Pollard, word got out that the head of the CIA and (reputedly) other high officials in the American intelligence establishment would resign in protest. Clinton backed down. The gravity of espionage is wilting.

And at another level, with the end of the Cold War the practice of treason has sprouted little retroactive buds of derring-do and childlike wantonness. The climax in the prettification of dishonor came last week with the preliminary revelation of the Mitrokhin Archive (documents from a Russian KGB official who defected to the West), about which Prof. Christopher Andrew, a Cambridge scholar, has written a book. He identifies a British spy whose description, age, activity, and motives are as from a novel by Agatha Christie.

Her name, if you can stand it, is- Melita Norwood.

How old is she?-Eighty seven.

Where does she live? In . . . Bexleyheath! Forsooth. That's southeast London.

How was she dressed, when last seen? "In a wide-collared lavender floral print blouse and gray tweed skirt."

Where did she do it-whatever it was that she did?

Well, she worked as a secretary for something called the British Non- Ferrous Metals Research Association, which is evidently the home of the tube-alloys project.

What on earth is the tube-alloys project?

It is a code name for nuclear-weapons research. Dear Mrs. Norwood, year after year, copied secret documents developed by British nuclear researchers and passed them along to the Soviet Union.

Why did she do that?

Because, she explained, after the war she concluded that Stalin was giving "ordinary people food and fares which they could afford, a good education, and a health service." Moreover, the Communist government was doing this for the people "at great cost." Mrs. Norwood did not describe that cost as including some 20 million dead of starvation and torture. She said only that she thought it important to provide a "counterbalance" to capitalism, and wrong for the West to have a monopoly on nuclear weapons. "In the war," she explained to a television interviewer, "the Russians were on our side, and it was unfair to them that they shouldn't be able to develop their own weaponry."

How many of these types are there around? Many more, successive revelations seem to be telling us, than Sen. McCarthy ever suspected. The Mitrokhin Archive will "unmask" a dozen more Britons who worked for Soviet intelligence including, writes Warren Hoge of the New York Times, "a former Scotland Yard officer and a person described tantalizingly by the author as 'a prominent public figure who is now dead.'"

But he didn't die on the gibbet. And no one will harm a hair of Norwood's head. And we do not know how many plans were ruined, security precautions thrown to the wind, lives imperiled by the activity of Jonathan Pollard, one of only a half-dozen of the family of Aldrich Ameses who thought it appropriate-for whatever reason-to write their own policy on national secrets.

Not-So-Much Fun

And Games

NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 21

The diligent reader will have learned that computer users have "websites." These are valuable property if the composition is the kind of thing that rolls quickly off the tongue, summoning a commercial product. For instance, we must assume that www.cocacola.com is the website of Coca Cola, Inc.