By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, October 24, 1998; Page A20

Jonathan Jay Pollard, the former U.S. Navy intelligence analyst who has been jailed for 12 years for selling top-secret material to Israel, yesterday became a new chip in the Middle East Peace process.

President Clinton promised to review Pollard's sentence as a way to encourage Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to sign a new step in peace negotiations with the Palestinians.

Although Clinton's lieutenants said he made no commitments beyond looking over the case, a former U.S. official with experience in the area cautioned that the gesture established, for the first time, at least the appearance of a connection between Pollard's fate and the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

If Clinton's review results in Pollard's release or a reduction in his life sentence, he added, this move could be taken as a secret part of yesterday's deal. If Clinton decides not to grant any clemency, as he did just two years ago, Netanyahu can tell his conservative constituents that he will try again the next time the United States seeks to move the peace process along.

After Pollard's arrest in 1985, Israel denied any connection with him. Several years later, Israeli officials said he had been working for a rogue espionage operation and began quietly seeking his release. It was only recently, as support for Pollard's release increased among Jewish organizations in Israel and abroad, that Netanyahu granted him Israeli citizenship and acknowledged that he had worked for the government's intelligence apparatus.

The fervor in Israel to gain Pollard's release is matched by the anger and bitterness that some U.S. intelligence officials still direct against the former Navy analyst. Yesterday's reports that Clinton was even considering a release unleashed a quick, tough response.

Former CIA director R. James Woolsey told a National Press Club audience he recommended against a pardon for Pollard in 1994 because "even though he stole [secrets] for a friendly government, what he stole was so massive and so highly classified that I thought a lengthy penalty was entirely justified."

Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, fired off a letter to Clinton saying he was "deeply disturbed" that the matter was even being given serious consideration and registered his "strongest objections, now or in the future, to pardon Mr. Pollard."

Present and former CIA officials, who sharply object to the thought of trading Pollard for a peace agreement, see no problem in trading spy for spy, as was done many times during the Cold War. However, one official pointed out, the parallel in Pollard's case would have the United States trade him for an Israeli who was arrested for spying in his own country for Washington.

Pollard's spying activities for Tel Aviv lasted only 18 months. In that time, he provided thousands of documents, often taking hundreds of pages home over a weekend without being discovered. Among them were satellite photographs, intercepted messages about Arab states, sensitive code materials, and information about Iraqi and Syrian chemical warfare capabilities and Libyan air defenses.

In addition, when Pollard was first arrested, he refused to identify his Israeli handlers, thereby allowing them to flee. When he finally confessed and agreed to plead guilty and describe what he had stolen, the Justice Department said it would tell the court of his cooperation and seek less than a life sentence.

However, 1985 was the year of the spy. The country and the Reagan administration were outraged not only at Pollard's spying for a friendly country, but also at the outbreak of American government employees working for the Soviets. Former Navy warrant officer John A. Walker Jr. was arrested and charged with giving away codes of U.S. strategic submarines; Edward Lee Howard, the former CIA case officer, escaped arrest and fled to Moscow after selling secrets about the agency's operations in that city.

One result was that when it came to Pollard's sentencing, the U.S. government turned in a 64-page classified memorandum signed by then-Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger that described the loss caused by Pollard as greater than any other that had taken place and "deserving of severe punishment." Pollard was given a life sentence in 1987 and spent the first five years in a solitary confinement cell in the basement of the federal penitentiary in Marion, Ill.

It was in 1993 that Pollard's supporters first got an Israeli prime minister, in this case Yitzak Rabin, to raise the question with Clinton of commuting his sentence. Under the law, a president on his own can commute a federal prisoner's sentence, freeing him or her for time served or agreeing to set a release for a certain time in the future.

Pollard, 43, is an inmate at the Federal Correctional Institution in Butner, N.C. He divorced his first wife, Anne, who was arrested with him and served more than three years in prison after pleading guilty to conspiracy to receive embezzled government property and being an accessory after the fact to possession of state secrets. At a news conference in Los Angeles yesterday, she called on Clinton to release her ex-husband and pardon both of them, the Associated Press reported.

Pollard's second wife, Esther, lives in Toronto and has made his release her goal as well.

"All he wants to do is go to Israel," one source said of the confessed spy. "He wants to be treated like an Israeli soldier in the field."