Jonathan Pollard

Jonathan Jay Pollard (born August 7, 1954) is an American former intelligence analyst who was jailed for spying for Israel.

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 (Kahn) Pollard.

Pollard's future wife, Anne Henderson (born 1960), moved to Washington, D.C., in the fall of 1978 to live with her (recently divorced) father, Bernard Henderson.

In 1961, his family moved 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 immediate family, on his mother's side of the family, the Kleins (Kahns) 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 the cause of Israel.

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 grew up with what he called a "racial obligation" to Israel, and made his first trip 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".

Pollard was turned down for the CIA job after taking a polygraph test in which he admitted to prolific illegal drug usage between 1974 and 1978.

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 (even sending himself a telegram addressed to "Colonel Pollard"), and to have killed an Arab while on guard duty at a kibbutz.

Pollard began applying for intelligence service jobs in 1979 after leaving graduate school, first at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and then at the U.S. Navy.

He fared better with the Navy, and on September 19, 1979, he was hired by the Navy Field Operational Intelligence Office (NFOIO), an office of the Naval Intelligence Command (NIC).

As an intelligence specialist, he was to work on Soviet issues at the Navy Ocean Surveillance Information Center (NOSIC), 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' (SCI) clearance was required.

In 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.

In 1984, Pollard sold numerous closely guarded 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.

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.

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, US-Israeli activist groups and some US 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 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 far more severe, wide-ranging, and enduring than publicly acknowledged.

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 on November 20, 2015, in accordance with federal guidelines in place at the time of his sentencing.

On November 20, 2020, his parole expired and all restrictions were removed.

On December 30, 2020, Pollard and his second wife moved to Israel and settled in Jerusalem.