Jonathan Jay Pollard was born 7 August 1954, in Galveston, Texas, the youngest of three siblings in a close-knit, accomplished Jewish family whose patriarch, Dr. Morris Pollard, was a well-known research microbiologist. Before Jonathan reached his eighth birthday, Morris was offered a prestigious position as head of the Lobund Laboratory at Notre Dame University, and the family relocated to South Bend, Indiana.
A slender child with an inquisitive mind, Jonathan consumed books. He had a dimpled chin, thick brown hair always neatly combed from left to right, and full cheeks that were partially covered by owlish black-framed eyeglasses. Considered a sissy, he was an easy target at school. Bullies taunted him, chased him home, picked fights with him. As a result of the constant turmoil, his family decided to enroll Jonathan in a private Jewish school. There he flourished, playing the cello and reading every book he could lay his hands on.
His father traveled overseas extensively and often took the family along. While Jonathan was still in his early teens, they went to Germany and visited the concentration camp at Dachau. The experience shocked him, kindling a deep, enduring loyalty to Israel and the Jewish people. In 1970 Jonathan was accepted into the summer science school at the world-renowned Weizmann Institute in Israel. It was the most exhilarating time of his life, despite the trouble he had getting along with other students. One of his instructors alleged he was a troublemaker.
After finishing high school with honors, Pollard attended Stanford University, where he started using drugs and bragging about working as a secret agent for Mossad. Some of his classmates wrote him off as a kook, but others believed his crazy stories.
Naval Intelligence Support Center —NIS PHOTO
Pollard graduated with a degree in political science and was accepted into the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Boston. After attending Fletcher for two years, he failed to complete final papers in several courses and dropped out. This didn’t matter to Pollard. The young man, whose only exposure to espionage at this point was likely to have been a John Le Carré novel or a James Bond movie, was eager to jump-start his career as a secret agent.
While looking for a job, Pollard came across an opening for a graduate fellowship with the CIA, headquartered in Langley, Virginia. The CIA called Pollard for an interview. At the time, the CIA was one of the few government agencies that required a polygraph examination of prospective employees. The polygraph questions were designed to uncover any circumstances that might make an employee susceptible to compromise or blackmail.
Pollard easily skated through the security questions. No, he had never had access to classified information. Yes, he had used Thai sticks and hashish one time, and had smoked marijuana—not on just a few occasions, but about six hundred times, between July 1974 and March 1978.1 Needless to say, he was turned down for the job.
During the summer of 1979 Congress approved a grant for the navy to hire thirty intelligence analysts. Pollard applied for a position with the Navy Field Operational Intelligence Office (NFOIO) located in Suitland, Maryland, which was part of the NISC. Rear Admiral Thomas A. Brooks, U.S. Navy (Ret.), who was a captain at the time, informed me that he hired Pollard in September of that year as an intelligence research specialist to work on Soviet issues. Pollard, like most young analysts hired right out of college, had to be trained from the ground up.
His position required a security clearance for top secret (TS) and sensitive compartmented information (SCI) classifications. SCI clearances, which allow access to some of the United States’ most closely guarded defense secrets, are given only to military and civilian personnel with a “need to know” for their specific area of concentration. Pollard also had to undergo a special background investigation ensuring that he was trustworthy and stable enough to handle such highly sensitive information.
In those days the Defense Investigative Service, or DIS (now called the Defense Security Service), had the responsibility of conducting background investigations for personnel requiring special clearances. Background investigations took an enormous amount of time, and by mid-November 1979, the DIS wasn’t close to finishing Pollard’s. His first assignment was to get a feel for how the Soviets were thinking by studying Soviet history, culture, and publications. He spent a lot of time at the Library of Congress conducting research while waiting for the clearance to come through. At the end of the month, Pollard was granted an interim TS clearance after a national agency check revealed no criminal background and no incriminating information from any of the agencies consulted, including the CIA, the FBI’s National Crime Information Center and identification fingerprint division, and the Department of State’s passport office.
On 7 December the navy special security officer who authorized SCI clearances provided Pollard’s command with an interim waiver giving him temporary access to SCI as well. It is common practice to issue waivers; without them, commands could not immediately place hired personnel in the specific sensitive jobs they were initially hired for. In essence, however, this creates a “Catch 22” situation. The waiver would expire in August 1980, at which point, Pollard hoped, the background investigation would be complete. Immediately after being indoctrinated into several SCI programs, he was assigned as a watch stander in the Naval Ocean Surveillance Information Center (NOSIC), a component of the NFOIO.2
At one point during the background investigation, the DIS asked the CIA for any information it might have on Pollard. The CIA claimed—mistakenly, it turns out—that Pollard’s right to privacy prevented it from releasing information on him.3 Thus the DIS never learned that Pollard’s application for a position with the CIA had been outright rejected.
This job was his first exposure to extremely sensitive national security information. With it, Pollard entered the rarefied world of which he had only dreamed as a child, a world where he could physically lay his hands on defense secrets that just a select few in the United States, the most powerful nation on earth, ever had the occasion to share.
Admiral Brooks remembered Pollard at this time as being an impressive, smart, knowledgeable young man. Nothing had showed up in the background investigation that caused concern about his employment. “The CIA,” Brooks lamented, “didn’t tell the navy they had kicked him out.”4
At the time, Mr. Richard Haver was technical director of the NFOIO and the special assistant to then-Captain Brooks. Haver was the first person at the center to sense that Pollard was a potential danger.
One afternoon in the late fall of 1979, Pollard approached Haver outside the NFOIO and informed him that he had contacts with the South African government. He expressed concern that the navy was having problems keeping track of merchant vessels and gunrunners operating out of the South Atlantic. Pollard offered to solve the problem; all he needed was permission to run a back-channel collection operation against the South Africans. His father had been the CIA station chief at the American embassy in South Africa, Pollard claimed. As a renowned microbiologist, Morris Pollard traveled extensively overseas giving lectures and attending conferences, and he was on the board of several government agencies, including the Defense Department. What his son told Haver was patently false—Morris did not work for the CIA, nor was he ever assigned to the U.S. embassy in South Africa. Jonathan also told Haver that he knew a South African intelligence officer from college, which was true.
Haver was taken aback, not least because Pollard’s comment about his father was probably a downright lie. How could an analyst who was still wet behind the ears make such an absurd, brazen proposal?5 Haver had heard many stories about Pollard during the time he was waiting for his clearance to come through. Apparently, he had impressed some people with his intellectual capabilities; others just thought he was an oddball.
Haver listened politely to Pollard’s proposal, made some noncommittal answer, and promptly went to Captain Brooks, saying that he thought the analyst had the makings of a troublemaker and should be terminated. Brooks heard Haver out and told him he would look into the matter. Haver repeated his recommendation: Pollard should be fired, right then. After all, the analyst had been on the job for merely a couple of months. He was still on probation. All Brooks had to do was tell him his services weren’t needed and that would be the end of it.
Captain Brooks had a background in military human intelligence. Rather than heeding Haver’s warning about firing the analyst, Brooks decided that Pollard, because he had claimed to have a connection with South African intelligence, might be useful to Task Force 168 (TF 168), a secret outfit that ran operations to collect human intelligence for the navy. It operated under tight constraints and focused solely on collecting military intelligence from certain designated countries. The CIA coordinated its efforts and monitored it closely. TF 168, as I understand it, dealt strictly with positive intelligence collection, that is, using human sources to collect information.
In February 1980 Captain Brooks, apparently believing Pollard not to be a threat, turned him over to TF 168 as a possible recruit. Pollard was vetted by the outfit as a potential collection source while retaining his analyst position under Brooks. In vetting Pollard, TF 168 did a background interview instead of a background check. During the interview, Pollard claimed to have applied for a commission to become an officer in the Naval Reserve. This was false. He also misrepresented his educational accomplishments, overstated his language ability, failed to mention his history of drug use, and, again, lied about his father’s relationship with the CIA.6 TF 168 hired Pollard on.
A month later a position opened at the NISC’s surface ships systems division in Suitland, Maryland. Looking for a pay increase, Pollard applied for the position. Since his business with TF 168 was conducted on the side, he was able to work for both outfits simultaneously. He told TF 168 the story of his connection with a South African naval intelligence officer whom he had befriended in graduate school. Later the officer returned to South Africa, but not before introducing Pollard to the naval attaché at the South African embassy in Washington D.C.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the United States and most of the free world shut off South Africa from intelligence sharing because of that country’s official policy of apartheid and the atrocities associated with it. The one democratic country that allegedly refused to do so was Israel. Intelligence information and media reports claimed that the South Africans were getting ready to test Jericho missiles capable of carrying a nuclear device, and that Israel was very much interested in the results.
TF 168, the super-sleuth command of the navy, insisted that Pollard not tell anyone about their association. Pollard turned right around and told no less than four supervisors in the surface ships division. Moreover, he could not resist bragging to his coworkers about his personal encounters with official representatives of South Africa.7 Why, one might ask, did the man draw attention to himself with such reckless abandon? For, as it turns out, Pollard was engaging in more than just braggadocio. In fact, it was at this stage of his career that he first passed highly classified information to someone who had no need to know.
During his debrief session in July 1986 following his arrest and guilty plea, Pollard “said he approached the South Africans on his own initiative (1979/80) in order to obtain information on a Soviet ship transiting the South Atlantic that was of interest to the U.S. Navy. Pollard was given a photograph of the ship in question by the South African, and Pollard later gave the South African a photograph of a Soviet submarine stationed at Luanda (Pollard obtained the photograph from work). Pollard said he reported this contact to his Navy supervisor and was later put in contact with TF 168, which wanted to collect information on South Africa through Pollard.”8
Pollard hoped to convince the navy of his established relationship and therefore be given permission to mount an operation against the South Africans. It was after these contacts with South Africa that he approached his supervisor. Pollard never revealed to the Israelis his prior involvement with the South African embassy.
Pollard later contended in court records that he had never passed classified information to South African government officials without authorization from his handlers at TF 168. He was trying to cover himself. In an unclassified portion of an NIS briefing report, however, he did admit to disclosing classified information, without authorization, to a South African representative. The information concerned foreign ship and troop movements, and equipment and shipment of aircraft involving three separate countries.9 Pollard did this, he claimed, to curry favor with the South Africans.
In Pollard’s sentencing motion before the court, his comments relating to his association with South Africa—with the exception of one sentence—were redacted. In reply to Pollard’s motion, close to eight pages of the government’s response were also redacted and classified secret because they provided specific details about involvement with the South Africans.
No evidence has ever shown that Pollard took money from any South Africans, and the U.S. government never charged him with passing classified information to South Africa. He seemed to possess a sense of inflated importance and a keen desire for recognition—traits the CIA’s polygraph test hadn’t detected. It was just a matter of time before his ego burst any remaining constraints and took to the skies.
In March 1980 Rear Admiral Sumner Shapiro, then-director of naval intelligence (DNI), met Pollard for the first time at a party commemorating the anniversary of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). The affair was held at the plush Naval Officers Club in Bethesda, Maryland. Admiral Shapiro and his wife were fulfilling their duty in the receiving line, greeting people as they arrived, when along came Jonathan Pollard, accompanied by a young civilian friend. Planting himself in front of the admiral, Pollard began talking nonstop. Shapiro smiled and rattled off a few pleasantries, then turned to the next person in line. But Pollard would not stop talking. This kid is strange, Shapiro thought. Pollard almost had to be pried away from the receiving line. Later, the analyst and his companion approached the admiral again and rambled on for about half an hour.
It was obvious to Shapiro that Pollard was trying to suck up to the boss and impress his friend by talking with the DNI. He was “a young kid desperately seeking attention, very immature and loose with the truth,” the admiral told me.10 Though mildly annoyed, Shapiro didn’t give the incident much more thought.
Around the time of that anniversary party, Pollard was growing increasingly distressed. He had laid out his plans to initiate a collection operation against the South Africans, and TF 168 wasn’t listening. Pollard then demanded a meeting with the DNI to explain his plan of action. (Pollard evidently told the people at TF 168 that he personally knew the DNI, and if they didn’t listen to him, surely Admiral Shapiro would.) TF 168 caved in to the pressure, and on 16 April 1980, Pollard showed up at Shapiro’s door for a meeting.11
Somebody in the admiral’s chain of command had decided this meeting was important enough to schedule. Word had filtered up to Shapiro that there was a young civilian analyst claiming to have had contact with a South African attaché. Because relations with South Africa were strained, South African operatives might be trying to penetrate the ONI. The last thing the admiral needed was some young kid playing James Bond.12
Present at the meeting were Admiral Shapiro’s executive assistant, Commander Francis Carden, two representatives from TF 168, and two CIA representatives.13 As soon as Pollard walked into the office, Shapiro recognized him as the guy from the party in Bethesda who had made a pest of himself.
Pollard launched into a detailed account of how he had visited South Africa while his father worked there, presumably under the auspices of the CIA—the same old tale he had reeled off to Rich Haver and Captain Brooks. “We’ve got a kook on our hands!” the admiral exclaimed after Pollard had finished his presentation and left the office.14 At their first encounter Pollard had merely been a blip on the admiral’s radar. Now Shapiro was worried. Had South Africa recruited this fellow? He would have to check Pollard out and get him under control.
The admiral ordered Pollard moved to a job that didn’t require access to TS/SCI material.15 Captain Brooks, informed of Shapiro’s decision, immediately set the process in motion, informing the commander in charge of the NOSIC and the operations officer that he wanted Pollard moved out of the SCI environment.
According to the JAG manual investigation, arrangements were made to move Pollard within the same complex, to the Soviet/free world merchant ship division at the NISC, where he would be required to have only a secret clearance. During the same time period, however, Pollard was hired for the new GS-7 position in NISC-33 he had applied for previously. The problem the command faced was that in his new position, Pollard still needed an SCI clearance. He worked in the merchant ship division for merely two weeks before he formally changed jobs on 4 May 1980. He moved from his first position at NFOIO, a command dealing with operational intelligence, to NISC, where the focus was on scientific and technical intelligence.16 Pollard was right back in the middle of access to SCI information. The ball was dropped somewhere along the line, and Pollard managed to beat the system—if only temporarily.
Meanwhile, in response to a request from Admiral Shapiro’s office, TF 168 arranged to have the CIA assess Pollard’s operational trustworthiness. The CIA evaluators spoke with Pollard and listened to his story, trying to determine the potential for problems were he to conduct operational activities. Afterwards they informed Admiral Shapiro that in their opinion Pollard was a risk and shouldn’t be used in any collection operation. Precisely what they said is unknown because the full CIA assessment remains classified.
Admirals grow accustomed to people trying to butter them up. Sycophants pop up out of nowhere, and if an admiral is lucky, they vanish. Little did Admiral Shapiro know that the eccentric man who had tried to make a good impression on him in the receiving line at the Bethesda Naval Officers Club wasn’t going away any time soon. The name Jonathan Pollard would come to haunt him for decades.
