In 1981, while Pollard was waging his battle to secure an SCI clearance, he met Anne Henderson. The analyst was smitten. Anne was an intelligent, attractive redhead with large blue eyes and a magnetic smile. She became infatuated with Pollard because of his keen mind, articulate conversation, and gentle manner. In the summer of 1982 she moved into his apartment in Arlington, Virginia. Now Pollard had everything he wanted—his job back, a promotion, his SCI clearance, additional responsibilities, and a beautiful woman. Just when everything seemed to be on the right track, however, problems began to surface.
Although Pollard had been receiving outstanding performance reports, he was showing more signs of instability. His coworkers often wrote off his odd behavior as harmless, the reflection of a brilliant mind. Not everyone was so ready to overlook it.
In the previous year, around the summer of 1981, Lieutenant Commander David G. Muller Jr. was assigned to the NFOIO, the part of the ONI responsible for analysis of foreign naval operations and tactics. He formed a world navies branch that dealt with the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, North Korea, and various Middle Eastern countries. Pollard, whose office was upstairs, often came down to talk with Muller and his staff about what they were working on. He impressed Muller, who thought “he was bright, very positive, and had good information.”
An opening came up for an analyst in Commander Muller’s branch, in 1982, and when Pollard expressed interest in the position, a pleased Muller promptly scheduled a formal interview. Based on Pollard’s past interactions with the commander, he was a shoo-in for the job.
When the analyst came in for his interview, Commander Muller almost did a double take. “He was bedraggled, he looked physically exhausted and stressed, and his clothes were all askew,” Muller later told me, adding that Pollard must not have taken a shower in a couple of days. The first thing Pollard said when he walked in was, “I’m sorry I’m late. You won’t believe what I’ve been up against this weekend.” When Muller asked what was wrong, Pollard told him that some members of the Irish Republican Army had kidnapped Anne. Muller sensed it was a blatant lie, yet Pollard seemed genuinely upset. He had spent the entire weekend without sleep, he claimed, chasing the terrorist thugs around the greater Washington area and engaging them in quick negotiations by phone. He had just rescued Anne a few hours earlier and barely made it to the job interview.
Astonished, Muller glanced at Pollard’s dirty wrinkled shirt. No doubt there was something terribly wrong, but it had nothing to do with the IRA or Anne being kidnapped. This guy is really strange and I don’t want him in my branch, Muller thought. He cordially thanked the interviewee for coming in, hastily putting an end to Pollard’s bid for the job. Muller didn’t remember Pollard coming around his branch anymore after that.1 In retrospect, Muller told me, he could kick himself for not taking it a step further and going to security.
In the winter of 1982–83 Pollard and Anne moved to the Dupont Circle area of Washington, D.C., into apartment 304 on 1733 20th Street. Later, after his arrest, Pollard admitted that he and Anne had smoked marijuana and used cocaine on several occasions at Washington-area parties.2 Pollard was living on the edge. Drug use is a red flag for security and counterintelligence investigators, and if the analyst’s supervisors had found out, his SCI clearance could have been revoked. Fortunately for Pollard, if not for the United States, no one reported him during this period.
At least, no one with a name. In late 1983 an anonymous caller did telephone the NISC’s Consolidated Security Office alleging that he had witnessed an altercation involving Pollard at a Georgetown bar. The caller claimed that Pollard had identified himself as an intelligence analyst. Pollard’s department head at the time counseled him regarding the episode and reported it up the chain of command, but it never reached Captain William Charles Horn, the navy’s new special security officer for SCI clearances, and nothing ever came of the incident.
The Nelson, Pollard’s apartment in the Dupont Circle area of Washington, D.C. —MONICA JENNINGS
In the meantime, although he had been promoted to a GS-12 step 1 and now made thirty-plus thousand dollars a year, Pollard was starting to have problems managing his money. It was common knowledge that he had credit card debts, loan debts, debts on rent and incidental items. He missed his rent payment on 1 December 1983, paid it at the end of the month, then missed subsequent payments due on 1 March and 1 April 1984. The landlord initiated legal action to have Pollard and Anne evicted. At the end of April they paid up again and the landlord stopped the eviction process. Some of Pollard’s coworkers were aware he was having financial difficulties, but no one informed his supervisors.3
To help him out of his financial mess, the analyst borrowed money from a coworker. After several months of not paying the money back, Pollard began writing checks to the coworker to cover the loan, but all the checks came back from the bank marked “insufficient funds.” Then the lender told Anne Henderson about the situation. Within hours, Anne had repaid the entire loan in cash.4
Pollard was growing reckless. Highly intelligent, he nevertheless apparently didn’t possess enough sense to realize that this sort of behavior could invite suspicion and spell the end of his SCI clearance.
None of these red-flag incidents was reported to Pollard’s supervisors or any security or counterintelligence professionals, however. Now that Pollard wasn’t being closely monitored, the only way his activity could be uncovered was through a special background investigation. These were undertaken just once every five years for people holding TS and SCI clearances.
Perhaps more significant, the analyst who had previously received so many outstanding performance reports began to slack off on the job. His demeanor and attitude changed, and a number of coworkers and supervisors started regarding him as a problem employee. He paid no attention to his assigned work, instead concentrating on projects that he found personally interesting. He failed to meet deadlines. He ignored administrative paperwork. He complained about his work being excessively edited. He even questioned the professional competence of his immediate supervisors, expressing his dissatisfaction to his peers and those above his supervisors in the chain of command.5 Oddly, he continued to receive excellent performance reports.
During all this turmoil, Pollard continued to put in long hours and work weekends. On many occasions he was alone in the NISC’s SCI facility. The facility was under twenty-four-hour security protection, and strict guidelines had to be followed for handling documents. For example, no copied, printed, or written material could be removed without the permission of a supervisor or destroyed without two people present. Despite the security wall, all the extra time Pollard spent alone in the SCI facility should have been cause for concern. The truth is, no one was paying attention, and certainly no one was reporting suspicious behavior.
As Pollard continued his downward spiral in 1983 (and into the spring of 1984), world events were reshaping the way the Department of the Navy collected intelligence. Who could have predicted that as the department streamlined and improved its efforts, the result would help Pollard fulfill his wildest dream?
On 18 April 1983, a suicide bomber drove a van filled with two thousand pounds of explosives into the U.S. embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, ripping open the façade of the seven-story building and killing sixty-three people, including seventeen Americans. Exactly six months after the attack on the U.S. embassy, a terrorist bomb destroyed the U.S. Marine Amphibious Unit Compound at Beirut International Airport on 23 October. A lone Hezbollah terrorist driving a Mercedes Benz stake-bed truck accelerated through a public parking lot south of the battalion headquarters, barreled over barbed- and concertina-wire obstacles, and passed between two Marine guard posts without being engaged by fire. Entering through an open gate, the truck bypassed one sewer pipe barrier and moved between two others, flattened the sergeant of the guard’s booth, penetrated the lobby of the building, and blew up while the majority of the occupants inside were sleeping. The TNT packed an explosive force of more than twelve thousand pounds as it ripped the building from its foundation. Two hundred twenty Marines and twenty-one other service members died as a result, and more than one hundred were injured.
The assault on the Marine barracks was one of the largest foreign terrorist attacks against the United States in history, and the DNI lost no time calling a meeting in response. Although at first it wasn’t clear how intelligence collection should be overhauled, the Navy Department came to the conclusion that it needed a means of accessing, analyzing, and getting “all source” information to fleet and navy installations—that is, a central repository of intelligence that could give advanced warning to U.S. Navy and Marine Corps commands about pending terrorist attacks.
It was a tremendous undertaking, one that should have been done long before. The NIS took on the task. Along with the ONI, it began working feverishly to set up a center with computers that had secure links to all military intelligence collection commands. The new NIS unit was called the Anti-Terrorist Alert Center (ATAC).
Start-up personnel were being drawn from various NIC components. In May 1984 Captain Duane Feuerhelm, the NISC’s executive officer, discussed the possibility with Pollard of his being assigned, at least temporarily, to one of the analytical positions in the ATAC. Frustrated in his current position, Pollard thought it might be a good idea to try something new, so he expressed an interest.6 This was good news for the NISC. Though Pollard was still receiving positive evaluations from the supervisors about whom he was so bitterly complaining, the analyst had been a thorn in their side for a long time.
NIS Seal belonging to author.
Over the next six to eight weeks, a group consisting of five officers and five enlisted personnel began working in the ATAC’s research and development division. Rich Perkins from the DNI’s office was put in charge of the unit. NIS Special Agent Richard Sullivan reported to Perkins, and Perkins reported to Special Agent George Bedway and Bill Worochock, the NIS’s deputy assistant director of counterintelligence. Secure computers and teletypes were set up along with terminals giving direct access to highly classified information coming in from the navy’s Special Intelligence System. The first “watch standers” for this new makeshift analysis division were Sullivan and Lieutenant Ron Brunson, who worked twelve-hour shifts reading operational intelligence reports and intelligence information reports coming in from all over the world, including naval attaché message traffic from the Middle East. The U.S. Navy did not want to be caught off guard again.
With TS/SCI coming in on the secure networks, access to the area was highly restricted, the ATAC was turned into an SCI storage facility, and security procedures were implemented.
After several months the officers and enlisted personnel were scheduled to return to their original commands unless strings could be pulled to keep them at the ATAC longer. In June 1984 Pollard transferred to the ATAC for a six-month tour as a watch stander; officially, he still worked for the NISC. His watch-standing duties consisted of answering phones and reading intelligence traffic, intelligence information reports, and attaché reports coming in from everywhere. This information would be summarized in an ATAC report, turned over to a regional analyst for evaluation and approval, then dispatched daily to the fleet. Though the position was less prestigious than being an analyst—analysts assessed intelligence information and decided which commands had a need to know—Pollard didn’t mind. Working as a watch stander gave him plenty of access to SCI information. In fact, after thinking it over, he decided that he just might like this job full time.
From June to October Pollard reported to Rich Sullivan, who thought Pollard was pretty savvy and solid—a “real sharp” analyst, a fellow who acted as if he’d been around the intelligence community most of his life. After Pollard had been a watch stander for four months, seven positions opened for regional analysts in the ATAC’s threat analysis division. He promptly applied. Sullivan was on the review board, along with Bedway and Tom Filkins, a civilian employee of the NIS.
“My recollection is that I didn’t want to hire Pollard, but I may in fact have voted for him. I can’t be sure, but I’d like to think I said no,” Sullivan told me.7 Whichever way Sullivan voted, Pollard got the job. As a member of the board responsible for hiring him, Sullivan remains bothered to this day that he did not check the analyst’s clearances. Apparently, employees nominated for duty in the ATAC were not vetted against NIS investigative or counterintelligence files; only their personnel records were reviewed.8
The NISC’s civilian personnel office produced Pollard’s official file, which contained nothing concerning his grievances, his fitness-for-duty evaluation, or his affiliation with TF 168 or NIS. There were no red-flag espionage indicators, only promotions, performance reports, his application for employment, and the personal qualifications statement he had completed to obtain his clearance. No one reviewing his official records noticed the inconsistencies in the dates of employment entered in his personal qualification statement and his personnel file.9
The records were quickly evaluated for signs of poor performance or anything that might stand out as a potential problem. According to his performance reviews, the candidate was highly intelligent and possessed an excellent analytical mind.
No one who had worked at NIS headquarters in 1980 still did in the fall of 1984. For one reason or another, all the managers and supervisors who might have provided more insight into Pollard had either left the organization or moved on to other assignments. Every person in the Code 22B division—the division that had handled the polygraph test Agent Addison administered to Pollard—was new, but that was immaterial. It wouldn’t have occurred to the ATAC review board to check the files at this elite, highly secretive division. Furthermore, no one from Pollard’s command had ever informed the navy special security officer of the analyst’s work with TF 168. No one thought to check the files of TF 168 any more than they thought to check Code 22B files. It just wasn’t common practice.
And so, on 14 October 1984, the NIS hired Pollard permanently as a desk analyst responsible for reviewing and interpreting classified information concerning potential terrorist activity in the Americas, which included the Caribbean and the continental United States.
Pollard was given a courier card, renewable annually, signifying that he had an SCI clearance, and his credentials were forwarded from the NIC to various government agencies, including the CIA, the DIA, and the NSA. The courier card allowed him unfettered access to all government libraries housing sensitive information. With it, Pollard could carry TS/SCI code-word material—provided it was properly wrapped—without fear of being searched.
In addition to free access to intelligence agencies, Pollard had access to data explaining sophisticated intelligence-gathering systems and to intelligence collected by those systems. ATAC personnel could use the repositories housing this information and retrieve sensitive data for specific reasons, but only if they had a need to know for a given job or project. They were basically operating on an honor code, meaning the government trusted them to limit their access on a need-to-know basis. Even though Pollard worked the Americas desk—one of his responsibilities was to cover domestic terrorism, another was to produce intelligence reports for deployed U.S. battle groups—he continued to access highly classified documents having to do with the Middle East. He violated the code with abandon.
Once again, Pollard had slipped through the cracks. The NISC had eliminated a headache, and now that headache fell once again on the NIS.
