Following his initial meeting with Colonel Sella, Pollard immediately set out to locate documents that would impress the Israelis and convince them that he was serious. Sella returned to New York and briefed Yagur about the meeting. Yagur in turn briefed the man in charge of the operation, Rafael Eitan. Born in 1926, Eitan had a long, colorful history. Reportedly he had fought in the Jewish underground in the 1940s and in the war for Israel’s independence in 1948–49, during which he was severely wounded. Eitan had run secret intelligence operations for Mossad for twenty-five years, most notably the operation that captured Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann in Buenos Aires, Argentina, thus making Eitan an Israeli national hero.
Though Eitan gave Sella permission to proceed with the operation, he told the colonel to be watchful and gauge whether Pollard could really produce. Within a week or so, as planned, Sella called and gave Pollard the Hebrew letter for one of the phone booths close to his apartment. The analyst ran all the way and picked up the phone, out of breath. They arranged to meet again at the Hilton near Pollard’s apartment.
Rafael Eitan —DANIEL BAR-ON, BAUBAU PHOTOWIRE
This second meeting occurred on a Saturday in July 1984. Pollard drove to the nearly deserted ATAC, gathered a briefcase stuffed with TS/SCI material, returned home, then walked to the Hilton with the briefcase. When he met Sella in the lobby the colonel said he wanted to go somewhere else to talk, and Pollard suggested Dumbarton Oaks.1 Dumbarton Oaks is a famed research library with an adjoining public park situated on the crest of a wooded valley in Georgetown. In the hotel garage was Sella’s rental car with New York plates. The two men went downstairs, got into the car, and set off. When they reached their destination, they parked the car and found an out-of-the-way picnic table near the back of the park where they could talk without being overheard.
Pollard opened his briefcase and pulled out a bulky three-volume series on Saudi Arabian ground forces and a ground logistics study classified TS. Scanning this material, Sella couldn’t believe his eyes. “I’ve never seen anything like this before,” he remarked to Pollard. The most sensitive documents Israel possessed on Saudi Arabia were Exxon maps.2
With the enthusiasm of a child, Pollard reached into the briefcase again. Watching Sella for his reaction, the analyst pulled out his prize: satellite photographs from the pilot’s raid on the nuclear reactor facility in Tuwaitha, Iraq. Because the photographs still had satellite-positioning information in the margins, they were marked TS. Sella’s mouth dropped open. This fellow really did have access.
Sella proceeded to specify what sort of technical and scientific information Israel needed. For example, “air defense information on other countries, such as cockpit layouts, uplink and downlink communication systems, radar and navigation beacons.” He stressed, however, that Israel “did not need much terrorist information from the United States.”3 (This is something Pollard’s handlers would tell him repeatedly in the future because he persistently turned a deaf ear and insisted on supplying such information.)
Presently Sella brought up the issue of money, but nothing was decided. The colonel gave all the documents back to Pollard with the exception of the satellite photographs, which he kept. Maybe these were souvenirs, or maybe he wanted to show Yagur an example of what Pollard could produce for Israel.
Pollard wasted no time preparing for his next meeting, gathering highly classified message traffic on anything he could get his hands on that the Israelis might want. If he couldn’t copy it, he would write it out. Over the next two weeks he took numerous Middle East and North African summary (MENAS) traffic messages. He also accessed every national intelligence daily message from the NISC. He took an NSA study on Egyptian air defenses classified TS and screened every hard copy report from U.S. defense attaché offices in the Middle East. All this and more Pollard stockpiled near his desk with what appears, in retrospect, to have been reckless abandon. He would later explain that he was able to get away with this because stacks of TS/SCI material were lying all over the ATAC offices.4 It was common practice to amass such material and no one thought twice about it.
Pollard was sweating bullets to impress the Israelis. This was no longer child’s play. He had reached the point of no return.
About a week after their second meeting, Sella called Pollard again. This time, he told the analyst to bring his documents to the Holiday Inn in Chevy Chase, Maryland. On or around 21 July, Pollard duly met Sella in the garage there, parked his vehicle, and climbed into the same rental vehicle the colonel had driven before.5 Carefully watching to make sure no one was trailing them, they headed to a house on Deborah Street in Potomac, Maryland. Sella told Pollard to remember the route so that in the future, he could drive there by himself.
Seasoned spies often use the “dry-cleaning” process to shake off possible pursuers. In dry cleaning, the spy employs both fixed-point surveillance, pulling over and parking, and mobile countersurveillance, taking a circuitous route before heading to a meeting site. It is doubtful the two neophytes practiced dry cleaning.
You would think, at the very least, that Pollard and his Israeli handler would have devised a more sophisticated system for passing secrets. During the Cold War, one of the tried-and-true methods was to deliver an envelope containing classified documents, or film taken of classified material, to a drop site, or dead drop, for later pickup by the handler. As for payment, the handler would leave money at either the dead drop, or some other designated location, with a marker—such as a small piece of tape on a mailbox, or a brand-name soda can at a specific location on the side of the road—indicating that it was ready to be picked up. This reduced the risk of exposure because the spy and the handler didn’t meet each other.
Not so with Sella and Pollard. Incredibly, for their third meeting the analyst brought with him, not just a bulging briefcase, but two large suitcases stuffed full of highly classified national defense information, as if he had just arrived in town and was settling in for a long stay. This, despite the fact that he had attended several counterintelligence awareness briefings given by the NIS that alerted the audience to various methods spies used to deliver documents to their handlers. Subtlety was not Pollard’s forte.
As they entered the residence, the analyst noticed that all the blinds and curtains had been drawn. A man came up to Pollard and greeted him without introducing himself. Not until later would Pollard learn that the man was Ilan Ravid, scientific consular at the Israeli embassy in Washington. Ravid and Sella began rummaging through the contents of the suitcases, astounded by the wealth of materials.
Soon a third, unknown person began shuttling documents to the second floor for copying. Pollard informed his handlers that they needed to return just the highly classified documents, those code-worded TS/SCI which he had to sign out from the intelligence agencies. He would return those documents and manuals the following Monday morning. The Israelis could keep the rest of the material, the message traffic, because he didn’t have to sign for them. There would be no paper trail.
Pollard and Sella sat at the dining room table discussing Israel’s current state of readiness—Sella gave him a lengthy briefing on this subject—and reviewing the documents. After each was reviewed, the unknown man took it upstairs for copying. Pollard noticed a large Hasselblad camera in his possession. At one point the man took color film out of the refrigerator before going back upstairs. He also photocopied Pollard’s NIS analyst credentials and courier card.
Sella told Pollard that he would have to make a trip abroad to meet the man in control of the field operation, Rafael Eitan. “The old man,” as Sella called him, would define more precisely Israel’s collection priorities. Pollard was warned that at the meeting Eitan would also try to replace Sella with a new handler, Yosef Yagur. The colonel, who didn’t want to be removed from the operation, asked Pollard to intervene and try to persuade the old man not to make the switch. Pollard agreed.
At the same meeting, Sella said, Eitan would determine the compensation Pollard was to receive. How much did Pollard need? The analyst jokingly told Sella two hundred thousand would be nice. That wasn’t going to fly, Sella told him flatly. Ravid questioned Pollard about his current salary and instructed him to bring his government pay stub and Anne’s, without her knowledge, to the next meeting. (At the time Anne was working in the press room of the National Rifle Association producing brochures on firearms safety for hunters, among other duties.) They discussed a “salary” based on Pollard’s income of thirty thousand without going into specifics.6
As they continued to sit at the dining table, Sella explained that a meeting in Paris was scheduled for November 1984. He instructed Pollard to make plane reservations for himself and Anne, to whom he had become engaged on the Fourth of July. Pollard should book a suite at the Paris Hilton Hotel. The Israelis would reimburse him. It was impressed upon Pollard that Anne must not know a thing about the operation, and he lied, assuring them she did not. As for how Pollard should explain his newfound wealth and the trip, Sella told him to tell Anne that a rich relative who owned a jewelry business was paying for the trip, and this was to be an engagement gift. The Israelis would get Anne a good-paying job with a Jewish firm when this was over, Sella promised.
Before the trip to Paris, Sella wanted Pollard to arrange a dinner meeting at the Four Ways restaurant near his apartment so that the colonel and his wife could meet Anne and better assess her. Sella would introduce himself as an old college chum and a potential business contact.
After all the copying was done, Pollard packed up his two suitcases and departed with Sella. Later, he would have to bring a whole stack of the same classified documents back to Ravid’s house because the original film had been overexposed.
LAKAM was daring beyond belief—or simply incompetent. It was bad enough that they had an American spying against their close ally on that ally’s home turf, but to bring him into an Israeli consular’s residence with suitcases full of highly classified material was incomprehensible. Furthermore, the operational security was blatantly flawed, violating every clandestine contact procedure and other spy modus operandi. One can only conclude that the Israelis felt it was safe because the FBI didn’t conduct surveillance of embassy personnel from allied countries. LAKAM must have believed that no one would ever suspect Israel of betraying its trust by spying against the United States of America in its own backyard. They were right.
Not long after the first meeting at Ilan Ravid’s house, Pollard called Anne in Ohio, where she was attending a business meeting, to ask her if she could cut her trip short and return to Washington. He had set up a dinner meeting with Aviem Sella and his wife, and they wanted to meet her. Shortly afterward Anne caught a flight back to Washington. In addition to assessing Anne’s devotion to Israel, Sella wanted their future contacts overseas to be relaxing. Anne should feel comfortable with Yehudit (Judy) when Pollard was in meetings.
Four Ways Restaurant, Washington, D.C. —NIS PHOTO
This was the first time Anne was to play her part, feigning ignorance of the operation. In fact, Pollard had already disclosed to his fiancée the plan to go to Paris and meet “the old man” in charge. On 28 July, the two couples met at the Four Ways restaurant, not far from Pollard’s apartment.7 The dinner was a success. As Pollard knew she would be, Anne was impressed with Sella and Yehudit, and, likewise, Sella approved of Anne. The colonel informed her that a business trip to Paris was being planned and she would be invited to accompany Pollard. Later, he cautioned Pollard again that Anne could not be told anything about the operation.
Sella and Pollard began making deliveries at Ravid’s house every two weeks or so, and there was no attempt to be any more discreet than during the initial trip. Again, instead of a single briefcase, Pollard toted suitcases filled with highly classified documents. The deliveries included three separate, running intelligence summaries the Israelis wanted: the MENAS originated by the NSA, the Indian Ocean littoral summary, and the Mediterranean littoral summary, the latter two originated by the navy’s Sixth Fleet ocean surveillance information facility in Rota, Spain. From the Sixth Fleet facility alone, Pollard took away thousands of highly classified messages—in fact, every message the facility generated, from the time the ATAC was placed on distribution in early August 1984 until his arrest in November 1985.8
Meanwhile, Pollard’s financial troubles worsened. On 5 July 1984, while he was still on temporary duty at the ATAC and officially employed by the NISC, the Suitland, Maryland, branch of the Consolidated Civilian Personnel office had received a letter of indebtedness regarding an employee named Jonathan Jay Pollard. The letter, from the Navy Federal Credit Union, specifically stated that “his payments for a personal loan and a line of credit loan were both three months in arrears.” The navy personnel office forwarded the letter from the credit union to the NISC with a reminder that “the employee should be informed of the navy’s policy concerning indebtedness and that failure to pay a just debt may result in adverse action.”9 Although the letter did not specify what, the rules allowed for disciplinary action and even removal of an SCI clearance. The NISC in turn requested that Pollard’s command counsel him on this matter and forward the results to the personnel department at the Suitland branch.10
In theory, if not always in practice, the U.S. government does not allow people who cannot take care of their own finances access to its most sensitive information. The command later counseled Pollard, and he signed a memorandum to that effect. Under pressure to make good on his loans, on 30 July he paid the credit union $300 for the share check loan and $592.80 for the line of credit loan. Both payments were made in cash.11 While Pollard was being transferred from the NISC to the ATAC, no one at the NISC provided copies of Pollard’s letter of indebtedness to the navy special security officer or to anyone at the NIS.12 Another red flag was ignored.
In November and December 1984 Pollard again missed his rent payments. While the apartment manager was preparing to file an eviction notice, Pollard made good on the payments. That winter, the NIS security officer asked Pollard to submit a new statement of personal history to initiate an updated special background investigation because his TS clearance had expired. He never complied with this request.13
Pollard returned home one night and found a tag hanging on his doorknob informing him that maintenance had been performed in his apartment. Furious that someone had gone into his apartment without his or Anne’s knowledge, he immediately went to the manager with his complaint. Apparently, a maintenance man had fixed some windows. Pollard told the manager never to allow anyone in his apartment again without him being present because he had “some stuff in there.” He worked for the government, he explained, and sometimes brought home classified material.14 The manager had no legal responsibility to report Pollard’s admission to having classified documents in his apartment. Once again, fate seemed to smile on the amateur spy: no call was ever made.