Despite Pollard’s worries about getting caught, he continued to spread stories abroad that were a bizarre mix of fact and fiction. It is not clear what his motives were. In some cases he seemed to be trying to impress people, in other cases, trying to deceive them. And then there were stories so fantastic that they appeared merely to reflect the workings of a delusional mind. Whatever his motives, one thing was certain: Pollard was raising eyebrows.
One evening, around the time the analyst returned from his honeymoon, the NIS’s assistant director for counterintelligence, Lanny McCullah, was working in his corner office on the second floor of the NIC-1 building, some forty feet from the ATAC spaces. It was about five o’clock. Exhausted after a twelve-hour day, he was still doing paperwork when Pollard suddenly popped into his office. The analyst asked whether McCullah knew anyone who could help him. When McCullah asked what was wrong, Pollard told him that his fiancée had been kidnapped from a gun show and was being held hostage in a motel nearby. He said he had reported the license plate number to the FBI, but they weren’t doing anything. McCullah, too preoccupied to pay him much heed, glanced up, told Pollard to follow-up with the FBI because he wasn’t going to get involved with them, then turned back to his work. Pollard thanked him and left. McCullah told me years later that he wished he had paid more attention to Pollard’s comments. They would have signaled his instability.1
On another occasion Rear Admiral Cathal “Irish” Flynn, director of the NIS at the time, was in the ATAC making small talk with the analyst when suddenly Pollard told him that he had once been arrested in Damascus and thrown into jail, where he was tortured. He didn’t say for what. Israeli hero Eli Cohen was tortured by the Syrians and hanged for treason. Perhaps Pollard was fantasizing that he himself was Cohen. The name, after all, appeared on his fake passport. Or perhaps he was delusional. Whatever the case, Flynn was taken aback. Pollard seemed quite serious. Babbling on, the analyst claimed that he knew people in the Israeli security service and that the Israelis bugged hotel rooms.
Then, Pollard jumped to an entirely different subject: the NIS’s vulnerability assessments of port security. The assessments were nothing but a big joke, he told the admiral brazenly. This erratic conversation happened in the course of ten short minutes. Pollard, Admiral Flynn concluded, was disgruntled. In fact, he seemed to hate the NIS.
Not long afterwards, over dinner at a navy function, Flynn expressed his concerns to Jerry Agee, the ATAC commander. Agee shrugged it off, commenting, “That’s just Pollard.”2
According to Richard Sullivan, a supervisor in the ATAC at the time, Pollard told him that he had earned an advanced degree in mathematics, and that his father, Morris, had been the CIA station chief in Prague, Czechoslovakia, during the spring of 1960.
While Pollard continued to tell tall tales, his work, once highly praised by supervisors, began to go downhill. Though he worked the Americas desk, he was still obsessed with the Middle East. When he began neglecting his intelligence reports, Sullivan and two other analysts in the division, Ron Brunson and Robert Bouchard, repeatedly had to massage them in order to get intelligence out to the fleet. 3 Pollard was also missing deadlines for status reports and product reviews, and it was discovered that he was several months late in filling out a security update form. His supervisor, Tom Filkins, taking heat from Commander Agee, gave Pollard a verbal warning regarding his performance and said that if it didn’t improve, he would receive a written warning. To Pollard, however, warnings were like water off a duck’s back.
I didn’t know Jonathan Pollard in the summer of 1984 when I was transferred into a job with special operations at NIS headquarters. I had been assigned as a desk officer at Code 22B responsible for counterespionage operations against nations that were either Communist or hostile to the United States. I was never sure why I’d been transferred into special operations—probably because of my involvement in a string of successful operations as a counterintelligence squad leader in Naples, Italy. Personally, another field office would have been my choice, but I made the best of the transfer and quickly adapted to the headquarters way of doing business.
One project I became involved with—way out of my purview—was to make a Navy Department presentation on reporting suspicious activity. The old counterintelligence awareness briefings, called collector’s briefings, that presented the methods Communist and hostile countries used to try and recruit U.S. sailors and Marines were sorely outdated. I wrote a proposal for a short training film on counterintelligence awareness and submitted it. To my surprise, it was approved. The film featured a sailor who was tricked into committing espionage after falling in love with a “swallow” (spy lingo for a female agent who seduces people for intelligence purposes) KGB agent and explained how the trap worked. Ten months later the film was set to go into production.
In June 1985 I lived in Virginia and commuted to the office with Frank Bloomingberg, head of the NIS’s polygraph program, and Victor Palmucci, the NIS’s executive assistant director. The promotion board was to meet that day and Palmucci was a senior player on the board. Up for a promotion, I kept my thoughts to myself during the drive in.
I had been late getting up that morning, and in my haste I grabbed my shoes from the closet, shoved them on, and hurried out the door into the predawn darkness. It was Bloomingberg’s turn to drive that morning; Palmucci was sitting in the passenger’s seat, and I was alone in the back. When we had almost reached headquarters, the sun started to rise and I happened to glance down at my shoes. There, staring back up at me, was a black shoe on my left foot and a dark maroon shoe on my right. Both were the exact same style. You’ve got to be kidding me! I thought, my heart sinking. If there were any chance of my getting a promotion, it would be over when Palmucci saw this. I could just hear him saying, “You want to be promoted to a supervisory position and you can’t even match your shoes—forget about it!”
When we arrived at the office, we climbed out of the car and I let my fellow car-poolers walk about twenty feet in front of me, then hurried into my office and removed my shoes. It was seven o’clock, and the closest shoe store wouldn’t open until nine. For two hours I padded around the office in my socks, worried that my boss, Special Agent Phil Comes, would see me and spread the story of my stupidity all over headquarters.
Lucky for me, that didn’t happen. I ended the day on the promotion list, which was disseminated to all NIS offices and headquarters’ divisions, and a few weeks later was offered a job as assistant special agent in charge of counterintelligence at the NIS’s Washington Navy Yard field office. This was a prestigious position that carried with it major responsibilities. I was elated.
At the time, Pollard was working in the ATAC. We still hadn’t formally met, though I recall passing him in the hallway because the ATAC was located just down the corridor from the Code 22B offices. This was about three or four weeks before my August transfer to the field office. One day, out of the blue, Pollard showed up in the Code 22B spaces, introduced himself, and congratulated me on my pending promotion. No sooner had I thanked him than he launched into a story about—what else?—a good friend of his who was the naval attaché at the South African embassy in Washington. It was a drawn-out account of how this attaché might be able to get me information on arms sales to the mujahideen in Afghanistan.
The first thing that popped into my mind was, Is this guy a nut? But the more I listened, the more he sounded like someone who knew what he was talking about.
Pollard was still chattering away when I interrupted him to say that I didn’t think there would be a navy connection. Instead of information on arms sales to the mujahideen, would this attaché friend of his be able to give me anything on planned terrorist attacks against navy personnel and installations in the United States and around the world? That was the type of information I could use. (This reminded me of one of our missions in Naples. We were to collect information on terrorist threats against the Department of the Navy. The Italian police allowed Special Agent Joe Riccio and me to interview a member of the Brigate Rosso [Red Brigade] and a member of the Prima Linea [Front Line]—terrorist organizations at that time. The two members were under arrest and cooperating with the police. They gave us intelligence on their plan to ambush and kidnap or kill Admiral William J. Crowe Jr., commander in chief of Allied Forces, Southern Europe. It was a big coup for the Naples office and for us.)
Yes, Pollard said, the attaché could provide well-placed intelligence about planned terrorist attacks. Listening to him, I started imagining what a big impression I would make at the field office if I were to get my hands on some good intelligence. Of course, before using this attaché as a source of information, I would have to get permission from headquarters and the Department of Defense. In the meantime, I asked myself, what harm would it do just to talk to the guy? Pollard said he would approach his friend and arrange a meeting.
The story seemed too good to be true. After all, I didn’t know Pollard, and why would he want to help me? But hope overrode my natural inclination to be suspicious.
A week passed. By now we were on a first-name basis. Every time I ran into him in the hallway I would say, “Hey, how are you doing, Jay? Did you talk to your contact yet?” Every time his answer was no, and he had a different excuse.
One day he told me he was going to set up a meeting in a small movie theater somewhere in downtown Washington. Well, the only small movie theaters I had heard about in D.C. were devoted to porn. I told Jay that wouldn’t work because it would be too dark in a theater, we couldn’t have a proper conversation. I preferred a restaurant. He agreed and said he would let me know the details. The last time our paths crossed before my transfer to the field office, he said he would continue trying to set up the meeting, but it never materialized.
After my transfer in August I didn’t hear from Pollard again, nor did I try to call him for an update. He was nothing but a storyteller who liked to impress people with his supposed contacts, I concluded, and didn’t give the matter another thought. Besides, I had my hands full with my new job. Without knowing it, I adopted the same distorted thinking as everyone else who encountered Jonathan Jay Pollard. I wrote him off as harmless.
As assistant special agent in charge of counterintelligence, I had my work cut out for me. The educational film I had written on counterintelligence awareness, “The Waiting Man,” was now in production, and the director had me playing myself. My agents and others at headquarters appeared in portions of the film, while local professional actors played the main characters. Everyone did a great job of acting—everyone, that is, but me. Take the worst spaghetti Western you ever saw, then take the worst actor in it, and his acting would be Oscar caliber compared to mine. The film was later shown to U.S. Navy sailors and Marines around the world, and it took the better part of a year to live down my performance.
One other item on my agenda, besides supervising upwards of eighty counterintelligence investigations, was to conduct protective service details for foreign defense officials. This fell under “extra duties” at the field office. And it just so happened that in November the minister of defense for Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, was coming to town to conduct fundraisers for Israeli bonds.
To coordinate the detail, some of my agents and I met with the chief security officer at the Israeli embassy. The officer, whose name escapes me, was extremely difficult to work with. He kept demanding changes to our protocol, and he wanted to dictate where Israeli agents would be placed while Rabin was in motorcades and walking around. He seemed to forget that he was in our country, not his. I didn’t agree to most of his demands. After all, if something went haywire, it would be my reputation on the line. Furthermore, although there was a threat against Rabin’s life in the Middle East, there wasn’t the slightest hint of a threat against him in the United States. For that reason, I told the security officer, we could put only a third of our agents on the protective detail. The security officer said this was unacceptable.
Back at the office one of my agents, Rich Cloonan, told me to stand by. He said every time Israeli security was planning for the arrival of their minister of defense, it played out the same way. The NIS would try to reduce the detail owing to a lack of threat and, lo and behold, within forty-eight hours the ATAC would receive a phone call from the State Department indicating that an unidentified individual had made a threat. Sure enough, the threat came in no more than twenty-four hours later. Whether it was real, perceived, or contrived made no difference. I had to initiate a full detail with more than thirty agents, reducing our resources at the field office to a skeleton crew.
So far, I was doing well in my new job. It was much bigger than I had anticipated, but I liked challenges, and a challenge is exactly what was in store for me. Though there was no way I could have known it at the time, the Jonathan Jay Pollard case was about to blow wide open, right in the middle of my watch.