Jonathan Pollard

The price was fifteen hundred dollars a month and a diamond engagement ring for his fiancée.

For that, between June 1984 and his arrest outside the Israeli embassy in November 1985, Jonathan Jay Pollard handed Israeli intelligence some of the most sensitive material the United States held. He was a civilian analyst for U.S. Naval Intelligence in Maryland with a Top Secret clearance and access across multiple intelligence disciplines, and for eighteen months he used it to empty the filing cabinets.

What went out the door

Israel’s shopping list was specific. It wanted American intelligence on its Arab neighbours and on the Soviet support they received: Arab and Pakistani nuclear work, chemical and biological weapons programs, Soviet aircraft and air defence systems, and the deployment and readiness of Arab armies.

Pollard delivered on it, and then some. Reconnaissance reporting on PLO offices in Tunisia. Iraqi and Syrian chemical warfare production. Soviet arms shipments to Syria. The capabilities of American spy satellites. Analyses of foreign missile systems. His handlers also asked for two things that had nothing to do with Arab armies: the details of NSA electronic surveillance operations, and the names of Israelis who were informing for American intelligence.

He should never have been in a position to do any of it. The CIA’s damage assessment records that his clearance was pulled shortly after he started in 1979, because in 1980 he had disclosed classified information to a South African defence attaché. He was reinstated, and kept his job.

What the Secretary of Defense told the judge

Caspar Weinberger filed an affidavit before sentencing. The operative sentence has been quoted ever since:

“It is difficult for me… to conceive of a greater harm to national security than that caused by the defendant in view of the breadth, the critical importance to the U.S. and the high sensitivity of the information he sold to Israel.”

The affidavit itself was classified Top Secret Umbra, the highest compartment for signals intelligence, which meant the full description of the damage could not be shown to the public and largely still cannot. Pollard pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit espionage in June 1986 and was sentenced to life in March 1987, the first American ever given life for spying on behalf of an ally.

To his credit in the record, he cooperated afterward. Lengthy debriefings, checked against document receipts and supported by polygraph, produced an account of what he had taken and why, and investigators judged the cooperation genuine.

The Soviet question

There is a second layer to this case that was raised formally in court and has never been closed.

The Justice Department told Judge Robinson, in a memorandum on the public file, that Pollard had sold Israel “numerous” analyses of Soviet missile systems, and that those documents contained material from human sources whose identities a competent analyst could work out. American officials assessed that Soviet intelligence had penetrated Israeli services. If that was right, then what Pollard gave Israel did not stop at Israel.

Prosecutors were careful about the limits of this, and so is this account. They could not prove the transfer. The concern was serious enough to put before the sentencing judge and it was never resolved either way.

One o’clock in the morning

Israel spent decades trying to get him out, and the most revealing episode came in 1998, during the Wye River negotiations, when Prime Minister Netanyahu made Pollard’s release a formal demand.

CIA Director George Tenet asked President Clinton for a private meeting at one in the morning and told him that if Pollard walked, Tenet would not be Director of Central Intelligence when the sun came up. He denied making the threat when it was first reported, then confirmed it years later in his memoirs. Clinton did not release Pollard.

That is an unusual thing for an intelligence chief to do over a single prisoner, and it is the clearest available measure of how the American intelligence community rated the damage. Not an embarrassment between friends. Something worth resigning over.

The homecoming

Israel publicly acknowledged Pollard as its agent in 1998, thirteen years after his arrest. Aviem Sella, the Israeli Air Force officer who recruited him, was promoted to brigadier general.

Pollard was paroled in November 2015 after nearly thirty years, under a curfew, wearing an electronic monitor, barred from leaving the country, and with any prospective employer required to install government monitoring software on its systems. When the parole conditions expired in 2020 he flew to Israel, where the Prime Minister met him publicly on arrival.

Why it matters

The case is the plainest available answer to the claim that allies do not run agents against each other. Israel ran one inside American naval intelligence for a year and a half, asked him for the identities of Israelis cooperating with the United States, and later promoted the officer who recruited him.

What gives the case its weight is not the sentence but the American reaction to every attempt to undo it. A Secretary of Defense who could not conceive of greater harm. A Director of Central Intelligence who put his job on the table at one in the morning rather than let it be traded away at a peace conference. Set against that: a man who served his sentence, went to Israel, and was welcomed by the head of government of the country he spied for.

Sources

• The Jonathan Jay Pollard Espionage Case: A Damage Assessment, CIA/DDAC, October 30, 1987 (declassified; archived at the National Security Archive, GWU, and the National Archives)
• Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Sentencing Affidavit, United States v. Jonathan J. Pollard, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Criminal No. 86-0207, January 7, 1987
• National Security Archive, GWU, Jonathan Pollard: Revisiting a Still Sensitive Case (document collection, 2012; updated 2020)
• George J. Tenet, At the Center of the Storm (HarperCollins, 2007), on the Wye River negotiations
• Wolf Blitzer, Territory of Lies (Harper & Row, 1989)
• Washington Post, “Israel Said to Have Passed U.S. Intelligence to Soviets,” October 21, 1991