He Should've Been A Korean
October 11, 1996 - Si Frumkin - Heritage Newspaper
Editor's Note:
Jonathan Pollard is currently married to Esther Zeitz Pollard. The reference below is to his former wife.So they have arrested another spy at the Office of Naval Intelligence, the same place where Jonathan Pollard worked 11 years ago. In case you haven't heard about it, the man's name is Robert C. Kim and he has been arrested for having passed highly classified materials to South Korea.
There are quite a few fascinating and puzzling aspects about the case of Mr. Kim and I would just love to have someone clear up the confusion it has created in my mind, and I am certain, in the minds of many others.
For example, I would love to know how our current secretary of defense, William J. Perry, feels about Mr. Kim. The last-known spy who was caught at the Office of Naval Intelligence was Jonathan Pollard, and the then-secretary of defense Caspar Weinberger, practically foamed at the mouth, furious at Pollard and his wife and accusing both of them of treason, of betrayal, of crimes that deserved the death sentence, and so on and so forth.
Doesn't the current SecDef Perry care about our secrets going out to South Korea? Wouldn't he like to see Mr. Kim hanged? Why not? Isn't he as much of a patriot as Mr. Weinberger?
Since I would hate to think that Secretary Weinberger was motivated by anything as low as anti-Semitism or a dislike of Israel, I am just at a loss for an explanation. . .
And yes, speaking of Jonathan Pollard's wife, I am curious why none of the news accounts that I have seen mention whether there is a Mrs. Kim. You may recall that Anne Pollard was sentenced to five years in prison for harboring classified materials, in other words for living in the same apartment with her husband, who would bring home classified materials and store them their prior to passing the information to the Israelis.
Everyone was quite satisfied that Mrs. Pollard knew nothing about strategic deployment, Iraqi poison gas factories or any of the other stuff that the U.S. was supposed to share with Israel and didn't, and which Pollard transmitted in violation of his sworn duty to keep quiet when an ally is being betrayed. Still, she was tried and sentenced, I suppose to set an example.
Adm. Bobby Inman, the former director of Naval Intelligence, said years later that
information was withheld from the Israelis because they were getting too big for their britches and had to be put in their place.
I suppose that Mrs. Pollard too was getting uppity;five years in prison was one way to teach her a little humility
. Mrs. Kim, on the other hand, if there is a Mrs. Kim, is probably a properly submissive and respectful wife who knows her place and probably kept the classified documents her husband brought home nicely dusted and neatly stacked.The almost apologetic tone of the news articles about Mr. Kim's wrongdoing shows that America has become a gentler and kinder country since
Pollard was railroaded into a life sentence by a slew of broken government promises, was subjected to an exhausting series of non-stop interrogations in an attempt to get him to link prominent American Jews to an alleged Jewish spy ring in the U.S., was induced to waive his right to a jury trial by a promise of a minimum sentence for himself and freedom for his wife, and eventually was confined, without an explanation, in a prison for the criminally insane, and then for six years in an underground solitary cell.
In Mr. Kim's case, the news accounts say that "while the case was potentially embarrassing for both countries, the classified material that Mr. Kim is suspected of giving the South Koreans did not appear to grievously jeopardize national security." Right.
So how about letting us know, 11 years after the fact, what it was that was so "grievously jeopardizing national security" in the material passed on by Pollard? After all, it's been 11 years, so what can still be so secret?
Could it be that there was nothing so grievous and jeopardizing? Could it be that the Washington emperor has no clothes and is too embarrassed to admit it, even at this late date?The news stories say that Mr. Kim may be sentenced, after conviction, to a maximum of ten years. If so, this will be more than the sentences imposed on dozens of others who have been found guilty of spying for friendly countries.
Most have been sentenced to about five or six years and released after two or three.
My guess is that if all goes according to plan among the high and mighty in Washington,
Mr. Kim will be freed long before Pollard. After all, didn't a highly placed Washington insider say that Pollard would never see the light of day? And didn't President Clinton decline to listen to his "chaver," the late Prime Minister Rabin and to the current Israeli P.M. Netanyahu when they pleaded for Pollard's release?
Unfair you say? Right,
it is unfair
. It is also real. I wish that Pollard was Korean - or Japanese, South African, Lithuanian or Egyptian,anything but a Jew who spied for Israel.
He would have been freed a long time ago.