Larry Dub Letter to President's Legal Counsel

Dear Mr. Ruff,
Re: Review of the Jonathan Pollard Case

I am writing to request an urgent meeting with you to discuss the case of my client Mr. Jonathan Pollard.

May I remind you that, to date, I have not received the courtesy of a reply from President Clinton or yourself regarding my letter of December 4, 1998. In that letter I requested the right to review the material submitted to you by the Justice and Intelligence and Defense departments regarding my client, and the right to rebut obvious untruths and misrepresentations that are contained in those submissions.

I note with dismay that in spite of President Clinton's public assurances that he would impartially seek input both from advocates of Mr. Pollard's release and from opponents, to date the only the opinions that the President has been willing to entertain are from those officials with vested interests, and whose public opposition to my client's release has been vitriolic and egregiously false.

It strikes me as particularly un-American to allow US officials to try my client in the court of public opinion via the media, without ever allowing him to see the evidence against him or to face his accusers and defend himself. May I point out that Mr. Clinton himself is insisting on these very rights in his own case. It is therefore puzzling that such basic consideration has not yet been extended by Mr. Clinton to my client.

"Government officials" recklessly continue to leak false allegations to the media regarding my client with complete disregard for due process and basic fairness. For example, the blatantly false allegation by "government sources", that Jonathan Pollard gave Israel a 10 volume codes manual that gravely damaged US intelligence collection systems.

As you are aware, Mr. Ruff, if there were any truth to this allegation, then, clearly, 1) Jonathan Pollard would have had to be charged with intent to harm the United States, and he was not.; and 2) He would have had to have security clearances that allowed him access to cryptological data, and he did not.

In point of fact Mr. Ruff, the court record clearly shows that the document in question was NOT a codes manual, but a frequencies manual. Frequency/signals manuals without encryption codes are useless, as you know, and Mr. Pollard did not have access to such material.

As well, it is documented in the court record that Israel had received at least one-third of these manuals through official channels. The remaining two-thirds had been arbitrarily embargoed by Admiral Bobby-Ray Inman and Sec. of Defense Caspar Weinberger, following the Israeli air strike on Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981. If, as "government officials" now claim, this manual was so dangerous for Israel to have, why were they giving it to Israel officially in the first place?

Moreover, given the fact that on December 18 1998, an ex-NSA senior cryptologic traffic analyst, David Sheldon Boone, pled guilty in US District court in Alexandria VA, to having provided the Soviets with, among other things, a 400-page manual listing all US reconnaissance programs and signal collection systems, on or about the time that my client was sentenced, calls into question the motive of those "government officials" who continue to lay the blame for this crime on Jonathan Pollard.

The disregard for the basic legal rights of my client is paralleled only by the gross insensitivity being shown to Israel, a close friend and strong ally of the United States. American indifference to the personal appeals of 4 Prime Ministers of Israel and 3 presidents of Israel to extend mercy and justice to the people of Israel by sending Jonathan Pollard home, serves only to undermine the US - Israel special relationship. In a recent message to Mr. Clinton, Prime Minister Netanyahu appealed to the President to resolve the festering wound that this case has become between the two nations.

I am therefore appealing to you, Mr. Ruff, to work with me so that we may speedily find a fair, and equitable solution to this case that brings honor to both the United States of America and Israel.