WASHINGTON — Charlie Winters was an unlikely soldier in the fight for a Jewish state 60 years ago. An Irish Protestant from Boston, he took up the clandestine cause from his perch in Miami and helped ferry military planes to Israeli fighters, even flying a B-17 bomber across the Atlantic Ocean himself in 1948.

The Israelis have long considered him a hero; Prime Minister Golda Meir hailed his efforts. Yet in the United States, he was a criminal, imprisoned for 18 months for violating the 1939 Neutrality Act and breaking an embargo on weapons to Israel.

But on Tuesday, President Bush pardoned Mr. Winters nearly a quarter-century after his death. In recent months, prominent Jews including Steven Spielberg and members of Congress mounted a campaign for clemency in Mr. Winters’s memory.

“This is a present for my father,” said Jim Winters, 44, a Miami businessman who knew nothing about his father’s imprisonment until after his death.

“This was a monumental challenge, but my dad’s favorite saying was ‘Keep the faith,’ and we did,” Mr. Winters said.

Mr. Bush issued 18 other pardons on Tuesday, as well as one sentence commutation, to people convicted for largely run-of-the-mill crimes. There were no big names on the list, despite speculation that the president might consider leniency for figures like I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former White House aide.

Others whose names had been speculated about for pardons but who were not on the list included the financier Michael Milken, the sprinter Marion Jones and Bernard J. Ebbers, the former chief executive of WorldCom.

For Mr. Winters’s survivors and supporters, the unexpected appearance of his name on the pardon list loomed large.

“This is a very good day,” said Reginald Brown, a Washington lawyer who represented the Winters family in the clemency petition to the Justice Department. “He did a heroic thing, and, at the time, the law didn’t reflect our values. The pardon allows the law to catch up with history.”

Mr. Winters, who died in 1984 at the age of 71, becomes only the second person on record to be granted a pardon posthumously, administration officials said. In 1999, President Bill Clinton issued a pardon to Lt. Henry O. Flipper, who was the first black graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1877 and then was convicted of thievery four years later on charges that appeared racially fueled.

Mr. Winters was among a group of several hundred Americans and Canadians referred to by the Israelis by the Hebrew acronym of “machal,” or “volunteers from outside Israel.” They secretly helped in Israel’s war of independence in 1948, a year after its creation as a Jewish state.

The United States banned the sale of weapons to Israel and to other countries in the Middle East, and Israel found itself isolated militarily as it struggled to hold on to its fledgling independence. Mr. Winters was rejected by the American military because of a limp left by polio, but he worked during World War II as a government purchasing agent — a trade he would put to use in helping the Israelis in 1948.

Mr. Winters, then 38, was recruited to the cause apparently by Al Schwimmer, a flight engineer who led American efforts to aid Israel’s military. Mr. Winters sold three B-17 “Flying Fortress” bombers to Mr. Schwimmer’s group to help fortify Israel’s air defenses, and he was credited with personally flying one of the planes to Czechoslovakia.

His motives remain something of a mystery, even to his family and friends.

In Mr. Winters’s obituary in The Miami Herald in 1984 — under the headline “Charles Winters, 71, Aided Birth of Israel” — one friend and fellow bomber pilot, Sy Cohen, said: “To the Jewish people in Palestine, this deed that he did was phenomenal. Why should an Irishman from Boston do such a thing?”

Whatever his motives, the Israelis recognized Mr. Winters’s efforts with a formal letter of appreciation from Meir, and they buried his ashes in the ancient Templars Cemetery in Jerusalem.

The United States was less appreciative. Mr. Winters, Mr. Schwimmer and a third American, Hank Greenspun, were prosecuted and convicted for violating the Neutrality Act in their support of Israel.

Mr. Winters was the only one of the three to be imprisoned for his crime and, until Tuesday, he was the only who had not received a pardon. (Mr. Schwimmer went on to lead Israeli’s biggest aviation company; Mr. Greenspun became a crusading Las Vegas newspaper publisher.)

Jim Winters said his father never said anything about his time in prison or his work for the Israelis, and he would never explain to his son why he was not allowed to own a gun. Only after his father died — and Jim Winters noticed the blue-and-white flowers sent to the funeral by the Israeli government — did the younger Mr. Winters begin to learn of his past.

“I think the whole prison sentence turned him off from talking about it,” Jim Winters said. “But he did what he did because he thought it was right.”

William C. Daroff, director of the Washington office of the United Jewish Communities, called Mr. Winters “a righteous gentile, a non-Jew who was looking to help out the state of Israel and was one of the unsung heroes of Israel’s war of independence.”

His pardon, Mr. Daroff added, should serve “to wipe away the stain of his conviction.”

The Associated Press contributed reporting.

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