August 7: Spying for Israel

Jonathan Pollard, an American intelligence analyst who was sentenced to life in prison in 1987 for passing classified secrets to Israel, was born on this date in Galveston, Texas in 1954. Pollard had a troubled career with the U.S. intelligence establishment: he was turned down for a CIA job, lied about his background and his skills in the course of his tenure with Navy Intelligence, and saw his security clearance downgraded and then upgraded. Admiral Sumner Shapiro, commander of Naval Intelligence, later described Pollard as a “kook” and said, “I wish the hell I’d fired him.” In 1984, Pollard began passing classified information to Aviem Sella, an Israeli colonel studying at New York University; Pollard was given $10,000 cash, a $1,500 monthly retainer, and two precious-stone rings. He was arrested at the gates of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC., but Israel downplayed Pollard’s crimes and for a decade insisted it was run by a “rogue operation.” After Pollard’s conviction, he told journalist Wolf Blitzer about some of the information he had provided the Israelis, including “the pick of U.S. intelligence,” reported Blitzer, “about Arab and Islamic conventional and unconventional military activity, from Morocco to Pakistan and every country in between.” In 1998, Prime Minister Netanyahu admitted that Pollard had been handled by high-ranking Israeli officials; in 2002, Netanyahu visited Pollard in prison. Many American Jews and a range of Israeli politicians have embraced the “cause” of gaining release for Pollard, who became an Israeli citizen and renounced his American citizenship in 1998. Yet “for all the sympathy Pollard generated in Israel,” wrote former President Bill Clinton, who was inclined to release him, “he was a hard case to push in America; he had sold our country’s secrets for money, not conviction, and for years had not shown any remorse.”
“We work so hard to establish ourselves and to get where we are, and to have somebody screw it up . . . and then to have Jewish organizations line up behind this guy and try to make him out a hero of the Jewish people, it bothers the hell out of me.” —Admiral Sumner Shapiro