Jonathan Pollard
Jonathan Jay Pollard is an American-born Israeli former intelligence analyst who was jailed for spying for Israel.
In 1984, Pollard sold numerous state secrets, including the National Security Agency's ten-volume manual on how the U.S. gathers its signal intelligence, and disclosed the names of thousands of people who had cooperated with U.S. intelligence agencies. He was apprehended in 1985, and in subsequent proceedings agreed to a plea deal, pleaded guilty to spying for and providing top-secret classified information to Israel. Pollard admitted shopping his services—successfully, in some cases—to other countries. In 1987, he was sentenced to life in prison for violations of the Espionage Act.
The Israeli government acknowledged a portion of its role in Pollard's espionage in 1987, and issued a formal apology to the U.S., but did not admit to paying him until 1998. Over the course of his imprisonment, Israeli officials, U.S.-Israeli activist groups and some American politicians continually lobbied for a reduction or commutation of his sentence. In defense of his actions, Pollard said the American intelligence establishment collectively endangered Israel's security by withholding crucial information.
Opposing any form of clemency for Pollard were many active and retired U.S. officials, including Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, former CIA director George Tenet; several former U.S. Secretaries of Defense; a bi-partisan group of U.S. congressional leaders; and members of the U.S. intelligence community. They maintained that the damage to U.S. national security due to Pollard's espionage was much more severe, wide-ranging, and enduring than acknowledged publicly.
Though Pollard argued that he only supplied Israel with information critical to its security, opponents stated that he had no way of knowing what the Israelis had received through legitimate exchanges, and that much of the data he compromised had nothing to do with Israeli security. Pollard revealed aspects of the U.S. intelligence gathering process, its "sources and methods". In 1995, while imprisoned, he was granted Israeli citizenship.
Pollard was released from prison on November 20, 2015, in accordance with federal guidelines at the time of his sentencing. On November 20, 2020, his parole expired and all restrictions were eliminated. On December 30, 2020, Pollard and his second wife relocated to Israel and settled in Jerusalem.
Since relocating to Israel, Pollard has endorsed Israeli far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and advocated a population transfer to relocate Gaza's Palestinians to Ireland.
Early life
Jonathan Jay Pollard was born in Galveston, Texas, in 1954, to a Jewish family, the youngest of three siblings born to Morris and Mildred "Molly" Klein Pollard. In 1961, his family relocated to South Bend, Indiana, where his father Morris, an award-winning microbiologist, taught at the University of Notre Dame.At an early age, Pollard became aware of the horrific toll the Holocaust had taken on his mother's family, the Kleins from Vilna in Lithuania, and shortly before his bar mitzvah, he asked his parents to visit the Nazi death camps. Pollard's family made a special effort to instill a sense of Jewish identity in their children, which included devotion to Zionism.
Pollard grew up with what he termed a "racial obligation" to Israel, and made his first visit to Israel in 1970, as part of a science program visiting the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. While there, he was hospitalized after a fight with another student. One Weizmann scientist remembered Pollard as leaving behind "a reputation of being a troublemaker".
After completing high school, Pollard attended Stanford University, where he completed a degree in political science in 1976. While there, he is remembered by several of his acquaintances as having boasted that he was a dual citizen of the United States and Israel, claiming to have worked for Mossad, to have attained the rank of colonel in the Israel Defense Forces, and to have killed an Arab while on guard duty at a kibbutz. He also claimed that his father, Morris Pollard was a CIA operative, and to have fled Czechoslovakia as a child during the Prague Spring in 1968 when his father's CIA role there was discovered. None of these claims were true. Later, Pollard enrolled in several graduate schools, but never completed a post-graduate degree.
Pollard's future wife, Anne Henderson, relocated to Washington, D.C., during the autumn of 1978 to live with her father, Bernard Henderson. During the summer of 1981, she moved into a house on Capitol Hill with two other women and, through a friend of one of her roommates, she first met Pollard. He later said he had fallen in love during their first meeting—they were "an inseparable couple" by November 1981, and in June 1982, when her Capitol Hill lease expired, she moved into Pollard's apartment in Arlington, Virginia. In December 1982, the couple moved into downtown Washington, D.C., to a two-bedroom apartment at 1733 20th Street NW, near Dupont Circle. They married on August 9, 1985, more than a year after Pollard began spying for Israel, in a civil ceremony in Venice, Italy. At the time of their arrest, in November 1985, they were paying US$750 per month in rent.
Early career
Pollard began applying for intelligence service jobs in 1979 after quitting graduate school, first at the Central Intelligence Agency and then at the U.S. Navy. Pollard was refused for the CIA job after taking a polygraph test in which he admitted to prolific illegal drug usage between 1974 and 1978.He fared better with the Navy, and on September 19, 1979, he was hired by the Navy Field Operational Intelligence Office, an office of the Naval Intelligence Command. As an intelligence specialist, he was to work on Soviet issues at the Navy Ocean Surveillance Information Center, a department of NFOIO. A background check was required to receive the necessary security clearances, but no polygraph test. In addition to a Top Secret clearance, a more stringent 'Sensitive Compartmented Information' clearance was required. The Navy asked for but was denied information from the CIA regarding Pollard, including the results of their pre-employment polygraph test revealing Pollard's excessive drug use.
Pollard was given temporary non-SCI security clearances pending completion of his background check, which was normal for new hires at the time. He was assigned to temporary duty at another NIC Department, the Naval Intelligence Support Center Surface Ships Division, where he could work on tasks that did not require SCI clearance. NOSIC's current operations facility and the NISC were co-located in Suitland, Maryland.
Two months after Pollard was hired, he approached the technical director of NOSIC, Richard Haver, and offered to start a back-channel operation with the South African intelligence service. He also lied about his father being involved with CIA operations in South Africa. Haver became wary of Pollard and requested that he be terminated. However, Haver's boss believed that Pollard's supposed connection with South African intelligence could be useful, and he reassigned him to a Navy human intelligence operation, Task Force 168. This office was within Naval Intelligence Command, the headquarters for Navy intelligence operations It was later discovered that Pollard had lied repeatedly during the vetting process for this position: he denied illegal drug use, claimed his father had been a CIA operative, misrepresented his language abilities and his educational achievements, and claimed to have applied for a commission as officer in the Naval Reserve. A month later Pollard received his SCI clearances and was transferred from NISC to TF-168.
While transferring to his new job at TF-168, Pollard again initiated a meeting with someone far up the chain of command, this time with Admiral Sumner Shapiro, Commander, Naval Intelligence Command, about an idea he had for TF-168 and South Africa. After the meeting, Shapiro immediately ordered that Pollard's security clearances be revoked and that he be reassigned to a non-sensitive position. According to The Washington Post, Shapiro dismissed Pollard as a "kook", saying later, "I wish the hell I'd fired him".
Because of the job transfer, Shapiro's order to remove Pollard's security clearances was neglected. However, Shapiro's office followed up with a request to TF-168 that Pollard be investigated by the CIA. The CIA found Pollard to be a risk and recommended that he not be used in any intelligence collection operation. A subsequent polygraph test was inconclusive, although it did prompt Pollard to admit to making false statements to his superiors, prior drug use, and having unauthorized contacts with representatives of foreign governments. The special agent administering the test felt that Pollard, who at times "began shouting and shaking and making gagging sounds as if he were going to vomit", was feigning illness to invalidate the test. He recommended against Pollard's being granted access to highly classified information. Pollard was also required to be evaluated by a psychiatrist.
Pollard's clearance was reduced to Secret. He subsequently filed a grievance and threatened lawsuits to recover his SCI clearance. While awaiting his grievance to be addressed, he worked on less sensitive material and began receiving excellent performance reviews. In 1982, after the psychiatrist concluded Pollard had no mental illness, Pollard's clearance was upgraded to SCI. In October 1984, after some re-organization of the Navy's intelligence departments, Pollard applied for and was accepted into a job as an analyst for the Naval Intelligence Command.
Espionage
Soon after Pollard began working at NIC/TF-168, he met Aviem Sella, a combat veteran of the Israeli Air Force. At the time, Sella was on leave from his position as a colonel to gain a master's degree in computer science as a graduate student at New York University. Pollard told Sella that he worked for U.S. naval intelligence, told him about specific incidents where U.S. intelligence was withholding information from Israel, and offered to work as a spy. Though Sella had wondered whether Pollard was part of an FBI operation to recruit an Israeli, he eventually believed him. Sella telephoned his air-force intelligence commander in Tel Aviv for further instructions, and the call was switched to the Air Force chief of staff. Sella was ordered to develop a contact with Pollard, but to be careful. He was warned that either the Americans were offering a "dangle" in order to root out foreign intelligence operations, or if this was a genuine spy, Sella would have to pay careful attention to his work.Within a few days, in June 1984, Pollard started passing classified information to Sella. He was paid $10,000 cash and given a very expensive diamond and sapphire ring, which Pollard later offered to his girlfriend, Anne Henderson, when proposing to her. Pollard was paid well by the Israelis: he received a salary that eventually reached $2,500 a month, and tens of thousands of dollars in cash disbursements for hotels, meals, and jewelry. In his pre-sentencing statement to Judge Robinson, Pollard said the money was a benefit that was forced on him. "I did accept money for my services", he acknowledged, but only "as a reflection of how well I was doing my job". He said that he had later told his controller, Rafi Eitan, a long-time spy who at the time headed Lekem, a scientific-intelligence unit in Israel, that, "I not only intended to repay all the money I'd received, but, also, was going to establish a chair at the Israeli General Staff's Intelligence Training Center outside Tel Aviv".
Naval Criminal Investigative Service investigator Ronald Olive has alleged that Pollard passed classified information to South Africa, and attempted, through a third party, to sell classified information to Pakistan on multiple occasions. Pollard also stole classified documents related to China on behalf of his wife, who used the information to advance her personal business interests. She kept these secret materials in the house, where investigating authorities discovered them when Pollard's espionage activity was revealed.
During Pollard's trial, the U.S. government's memorandum in aid of sentencing challenged the "defendant's claim that he was motivated by altruism rather than greed". The government said that Pollard had "disclosed classified information in anticipation of financial gain" in other instances:
The government's investigation has revealed that defendant provided to certain of his acquaintances U.S. classified documents which defendant obtained through U.S. Navy sources. The classified documents which defendant disclosed to two such acquaintances, both of whom are professional investment advisers, contained classified economic and political analyses which defendant believed would help his acquaintances render investment advice to their clients ... Defendant acknowledged that, although he was not paid for his unauthorized disclosures of classified information to the above-mentioned acquaintances, he hoped to be rewarded ultimately through business opportunities that these individuals could arrange for defendant when he eventually left his position with the U.S. Navy. In fact, defendant was involved in an ongoing business venture with two of these acquaintances at the time he provided the classified information to them ...
During the course of the Pollard trial, Australian authorities reported the disclosure of classified American documents by Pollard to a Royal Australian Navy officer who had been engaged in a personnel-exchange naval-liaison program between the U.S. and Australia. The Australian officer, alarmed by Pollard's repeated disclosure to him of data caveated No Foreign Access Allowed, reported the indiscretions to his chain of command. It recalled the officer from his position in the U.S., fearing that the disclosures might be part of a "CIA ruse". Confronted with this accusation after entering his plea, Pollard admitted only to passing a single classified document to the Australian; later, he changed his story, and claimed that his superiors ordered him to share information with the Australians.
, the full extent of the information Pollard passed to Israel has still not been officially revealed. Press reports cited a secret 46-page memorandum, which Pollard and his attorneys were allowed to view. They were provided to the judge by Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, who described Pollard's spying as including, among other things, obtaining and copying the latest version of Radio-Signal Notations, a 10-volume manual comprehensively detailing America's global electronic surveillance network.
After Pollard's release, the former deputy chief of the Mossad Ram Ben Barak publicly regretted Pollard, saying that the recruitment and operation "were unknown by the intelligence leadership and unauthorized" with the resultant damage to the US-Israeli relationship far outweighing the value of the intelligence Pollard provided. "Our entire relationship with the U.S. deteriorated because of this. People lost jobs over it", according to Barak. "It made for years and years of suspicion, with Americans suspecting he wasn't the only one, and feeling that they hadn't gotten the necessary explanations. They didn't believe it wasn't authorized. It caused huge, huge damage. They saw it as a betrayal of them."