Amnesty for Spies.

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.

What happened in the past year or so is that wildcat web drillers went out exploring and found that there were sites here and there that logical owners had failed to notice and to register. The results are various, and can be commercially valuable. The man who got cocacola.com, assuming Coke hadn't got there first, might offer it up for sale for, say, $1 million.

There has been, as one might expect, a political exploitation of this first-come-first-served protocol. Thoughtful, civilized arrangements would presuppose that abrahamlincoln.com would belong only to Abe, but in fact it wouldn't; not if he, or his mother, didn't get around to reserving it for him. But suppose they took care of that sequestration, but forgot to register abelincoln.com? Or abraham.linc.com? Or any variety of the same?

What has mostly been noticed is the young man who got in there and registered gwbush.com. Political junkies would hit upon gwbush.com simply roaming around the Bush name. But the cyberworld makes it more tempting than that. Because around the word "bush" what you get, and what is a superb epistemological convenience, is "link" sites. What your computer is telling you is that if you are interested in Bush, you may be interested in other sites that are centered about the word "bush." You are given, e.g., bushwatch, georgebush2000, littlegeorgebush, bushcampaignhq, and bushlite.com.

So what did the original prankster do with his gwbush?

He amused himself, and not a few others, by conjuring a narrative. It goes in part as follows:

"May: Life begins at 40! Gov. Bush will raise the age at which juveniles can be tried as adults to 40.

"June: Bush turns himself in for past drug crimes.

"July: As Gov. Bush sits in jail, awaiting trial for past drug crimes, he is flooded with letters of solidarity from other prisoners of the drug war."

Well, Karl Rove, Gov. Bush's top political strategist, decided this kind of thing was more nearly scandal than fun. The very old question arose, What are the limits of free speech done at the expense of someone else? Obviously Gov. Bush is not going to sue over the misrepresentations of gwbush. But then are there steps to be taken to limit the damage?

Well, apparently the Bush people thought they should inquire to see what other Bush-related potential website titles were lying around. To the heated dismay of another cyber-swashbuckler looking about to see what more damage might be done, the Bush people got hold of, and have now tucked safely out of harm's way, www.bushsucks.com, www.bushblows.com, and www.bushbites.com. If you tap out those letters, it is complained by the frustrated garbage collector, you are led to the orthodox Bush Presidential Campaign site. The infuriated hacker who evidently looked for those titles just too late, settled for bushsuckz.com, whence he will fire off any darts or stink bombs not already used up by the gwbush.com man. But he is very angry and urges viewers to protest Mr. Bush's constriction of the dartboard thought essential to a spirited political campaign.

Now the other side has its own problems. Algore.com was spirited to safety early on, but the scavengers have come up with other titles, for instance albore.com. That finding gives such "news" items as Gore Under Fire for Russian Problem, White House Brief on Russia Money Probe, and then Letterman-like fusillades: "Top Ten Signs Al Gore is Loosening Up" begins with "Appeared on Larry King Live without pants" and ends with "Loosens tie during sex."

It is very old sport, and no one can deny there is fun in it. Visitors to the home of the Prince Regent (later George IV) in Brighton will see on display cartoons about the royal family which even in our jaded age seem raw, and back then there were such things as criminal libel, which has disappeared from the American scene. But we are reminded, for the 100th time, of the defenselessness of people who are willing to make a try for public office. It has to be wrong to suppose that a belief in free speech authorizes www.bushsuckz.com.

A Return to Isolationism?

NEW YORK, OCTOBER 15

The same day's news brought exclamations of indignation from Sen. Mitch McConnell and President Bill Clinton. Sen. McConnell looked Sen. John McCain in the face and asked, Who is corrupt? His point rested on a logical formulation. If there is corruption in the Senate owing to financial contributions ("soft money"), then somebody has to be corrupt. Who? Sen. McCain declined to specify, and probably could not if he had to. But it is a fine example of syllogistic vulnerability. The proper formulation would be: Where substantial funds are year after year in hot pursuit of genial legislative or regulatory treatment, one reasonably assumes that the donors are getting satisfactions, even if we can't make out individual instances of compliance. But as a polemical point, McConnell's was pretty good, a version of put up or shut up.

At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, Bill Clinton was having a fit. He declared that the failure of the Senate to ratify his test-ban treaty was a blow against the children of the world, an incitement to nuclear holocaust, and a spiteful, vindictive, self-mutilating, politically motivated tragedy. Of course, it isn't any of these things, but it was a conservative-quite conservative-reaction against the kind of wistful internationalism that suggests that wispy treaty arrangements are guarantors of desired ends. McConnell should have been on the scene at the White House to ask: What country is now likelier to test nuclear weapons, the treaty having been defeated?

What might Clinton have responded? At the heavyweight level we are talking about China, Iran, Pakistan, and India. But, of course, three of the four countries already have nuclear weapons, and for them, useful testing would have to do with delivery systems, which are not banned by the defeated treaty. If Iran found itself short of a nuclear weapon, pending an actual test, it is inconceivable that that arrogant government would be restrained by a treaty commitment. India and Pakistan would have no greater difficulty in proceeding with tests they thought vital than they had in developing the nuclear weapons they exploded last year, in defiance of international understandings.

At the small-power end there is, of course, primarily North Korea. We have now almost 50 years' experience with two generations of North Korean leadership. Except that North Koreans do not laugh, they would all be laughing, in Pyongyang, at the suggestion that they would be deterred by a treaty which they haven't even signed, let alone ratified. And the list goes on.

The suggestion that what we have here is a revival of isolationism is drastically to misunderstand the motives of the senators who voted nay. It is useful to recall that it was the vote of Republican senators that was responsible for passing the thoroughly non-isolationist GATT agreement. It was the preponderant Republican approval of the Senate that backed our intervention in Iraq under President Bush.

What the Republicans react against is the restoration of one-worldism, which doesn't work and which could freeze genuine progress aimed at enhanced national security. As the senators contemplated this new prospective restriction, they'd have done well to reflect on the ABM Treaty. That was done in 1972 and now, 27 years later, we are hindered in moving energetically on anti-missile development by its provisions. Even Ronald Reagan, the SDI visionary, quailed at rescinding a treaty that stood in the way of full progress in his enterprise. The coils of useless, even harmful treaties, aimed mostly at obliging internationalist superstitions, tend to harden. Although there is no earthly reason not to test anti-missiles in space, we don't do so because of the continuing overhang of the ABM.

And tomorrow, if there were a felt need to test weapons for whatever reason, the proposed treaty, which was promulgated without even a sunset provision, would keep us from considering our primary obligation to look after the national security. It is hardly isolationist to reject international entanglements which prejudice our own liberties to act, among other things, to continue scurrying about the world, helping out in such places as England, France, Germany, Italy, Lebanon, the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Grenada, Haiti, Cuba, and Somalia, when the going gets tough for them.

-Universal Press Syndicate