Israeli Spy Jonathan Pollard Released From U.S. Prison After 30 Years

(He already apparently has a finance job in NY, where he and his wife are expected to live.) The Jerusalem Post reported that he will have to check in with his parole officer for a year and could be returned to prison for violating the terms of that parole.

“Throughout the years, we have felt Jonathan’s pain, and felt responsible and obliged to bring about his release”, Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin said in a statement Friday.

It’s a case that’s complicated US – Israeli relations for as many years as Pollard served behind bars. “After three long and hard decades, Jonathan has been reunited with his family”, Netanyahu said in a statement Friday.

Three days later, he and his wife, Anne Henderson Pollard, were arrested outside of the Israeli Embassy in Washington after the embassy refused to accept their request for asylum, according to the Central Intelligence Agency. “The president has no plans to alter the forms of his parole”, Benjamin J. Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser, told reporters on Air Force One en route to Malaysia, where the president was traveling.

Over the course of decades, Pollard’s prison cell became a kind of pilgrimage site for conservative Israeli politicians, who elevated Pollard’s case rather than helping him keep a low profile.

For U.S. officials he was seen as an unreliable Walter Mitty figure who had betrayed his country for financial gain, and American politicians, particularly those with intelligence interests, have lobbied against his release.

The disagreement over whether Pollard had committed “serious crimes” or was a well-meaning ideologue fretting over Israel’s vulnerability has been the crux of one of the longest-lasting tensions between the United States and Israel.

Under the terms of his parole, Pollard is also forbidden from giving interviews to the media, and there apparently were no rallies or other public events to be held to celebrate Pollard’s release.

Over the years Israeli right-wing activists have sought to turn Pollard into an icon, a fierce defender of Israeli security, even when it meant spying on Israel’s closest ally.

“We write today to ask that DOJ give Mr. Pollard’s request the fair consideration it deserves”.

While the Obama administration didn’t facilitate his early release, it also chose not to object to granting him parole, but it denied that it was attempting to assuage Israel after a rupture over the president’s nuclear deal with Iran. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987 by a USA court.

“There is no basis whatsoever to treat Mr. Pollard in that manner, and doing so is vindictive and cruel, as well as unlawful”, lawyers Eliot Lauer and Jacques Semmelman said.

After those five years of parole, though, he’ll be free to go back to Israel, where he’s now a citizen.

Pollard was born in Texas, but grew up in the mostly-Christian community of South Bend, Indiana, after his family moved there so his father Morris could take up a position at Notre Dame University.

Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard leaves federal court holding hands with an unidentified woman, Friday, November 20, 2015 in NY. Diagnosed with severe diabetes, Pollard wears orthropedic stockings for the “chronic swelling in his legs and ankles”, making it “dangerous” for him to wear an ankle bracelet, the petition says.

Speaking in 2007, she said: ‘I realized early on that he was totally cut off from information and very vulnerable, so I knew that any relationship had to be totally honest in terms of making sure that Jonathan always knew what was really going on and was always in command of the facts’.

“The decision I made was based on fear and concern…those were emotions that got the better of me”, he said.