Jonathan Pollard
 Jonathan Pollard     (spook) | |
|---|---|
| Born | Jonathan Jay Pollard August 7, 1954 Galveston, Texas, U.S. |
| Religion | Judaism |
Criminal charge | Violations of the Espionage Act |
Criminal status | Pleaded guilty on June 4, 1986, sentenced on March 4, 1987, incarcerated in the Federal Bureau of Prisons system Granted Parole July 7, 2015. Scheduled Release November 20, 2015 |
| Parents | Morris Pollard (father) Molly Pollard (mother) |
| Spouse | Anne Henderson Pollard |
Jonathan Jay Pollard is a US citizen who spied for Israel in the early 1980s.
Contents
Suspected high-level mole
Ronald Olive - the NCIS investigator who is credited with capturing Pollard - says that the evidence indicated that the Israelis had supplied Pollard with the titles—and in some cases the serial numbers—of secret documents that they wanted Pollard to get for them. The fact that the Israelis allegedly asked their informants to acquire specific secret documents created deep suspicions among investigators that Israeli intelligence might have had a highly placed mole somewhere deep inside the U.S. government who could identify very sensitive secrets that more expendable informants could then steal, according to Olive. But Olive says U.S. investigators never discovered whether such a high-level Israeli source existed; nor did they try very hard to find him.[1]
Alleged Israeli-Soviet collusion
A number of officials strongly suspect that the Israelis repackaged much of Pollard's material and provided it to the Soviet Union in exchange for continued Soviet permission for Jews to emigrate to Israel. Other officials go further, and say there was reason to believe that secret information was exchanged for Jews working in highly sensitive positions in the Soviet Union. A significant percentage of Pollard's documents, including some that described the techniques the American Navy used to track Soviet submarines around the world, was of practical importance only to the Soviet Union. One longtime C.I.A. officer who worked as a station chief in the Middle East said he understood that "certain elements in the Israeli military had used it" — Pollard's material — "to trade for people they wanted to get out," including Jewish scientists working in missile technology and on nuclear issues. Pollard's spying came at a time when the Israeli government was publicly committed to the free flow of Jewish emigres from the Soviet Union. The officials stressed the fact that they had no hard evidence — no "smoking gun," in the form of a document from an Israeli or a Soviet archive — to demonstrate the link between Pollard, Israel, and the Soviet Union, but they also said that the documents that Pollard had been directed by his Israeli handlers to betray led them to no other conclusion.[2]
Sexual blackmail
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used sexual blackmail as part of the campaign to release Pollard. During talks in 1998, Netanyahu told Clinton that they’d overheard him and Monica Lewinsky and had it on tape. "Clinton was told that the Israeli government had thrown the tapes away. But the very mention of them was enough to constitute a form of blackmail," author Daniel Halper wrote, adding that "according to information provided by a CIA source, a stricken Clinton appeared to buckle." Halper claims that Clinton brought the request before CIA director George Tenet. Tenet, however, threatened to resign his position if Pollard was released, and Clinton backpedalled on the idea.[3]
In 1999, UK author Gordon Thomas claimed that Mossad had collected some 30 hours' worth of phone sex conversations between Lewinsky and Clinton and was using them to blackmail the US or to protect a deeply-embedded mole in the White House. A 2000 article by the magazine Insight claimed that Israel had "penetrated four White House telephone lines and was able to relay real-time conversations on those lines from a remote site outside the White House directly to Israel for listening and recording.".[3]
The Pollard family version of the Affair
There is a vast amount of information on the Pollard family maintained website Justice for Jonathan Pollard [4] For serious students of the affair it is well worth spending time on the site.
Affiliations
Connections
- Rafi Eitan
- Kurt Lohbeck
- Irit Erb
- Yossi Yagur - Handler
- Aviem Sella
- Alan Dershowitz - Defence lawyer
References
- ↑ A New Twist on an Old Spy Case, Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, Newsweek, 22 April 2008.
- ↑ The Traitor: The Case against Jonathan Pollard, by Seymour Hersh, The New Yorker, 18 January 1999, via JYA.
- ↑ a b https://www.timesofisrael.com/netanyahu-said-to-have-offered-lewinsky-tapes-for-pollard/
- ↑ Justice for Jonathan Pollard website
