On Tuesday morning, 12 November, Assistant Director McCullah arrived early to work so he could get his foot in Director Flynn’s office before anyone else. Flynn was a colorful figure who had attended schools in Ireland, France, and Spain before graduating from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1959. After spending thirty years with the navy SEALs, he was promoted to rear admiral and took over as head of the NIS.
After briefing Admiral Flynn on what had taken place since Friday, McCullah said he didn’t know whether a foreign government was involved, but something was definitely wrong—so wrong that Flynn would probably have to tell the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral James D. Watkins, and Secretary of the Navy John Lehman. Following his talk with Flynn, McCullah arranged a meeting with the FBI for late Tuesday morning.
Special Agent Lisa Redman —RON OLIVE
NIS headquarters called that morning and summoned me to an urgent meeting. Because of the Rabin detail and other pressing commitments, I asked if someone else could attend in my place. In that case, I was told, I should send one of my best agents.
Special Agent Elizabeth “Lisa” Redman, not on the Rabin detail, was without doubt one of my best agents. I had once wondered what made a quiet, seemingly timid woman like her become a federal agent in the first place. Then something happened she didn’t like—an investigation gone awry—and it was as if a fire had been lit under her. Without yelling, she made her point of view known. Agent Redman was extremely competent and thorough in everything she did, which was why, years later, she became the assistant inspector general for investigations with the Department of Homeland Security.
I told her about the meeting at headquarters in Suitland and asked her to attend in my place. She was to brief me upon her return. Others at the meeting that Tuesday morning were Agent McCullah and his deputy, Agent Lance Arnold; Commander Agee; Lieutenant Commander Thomas Connelly, an NIS attorney; and several FBI agents.1
After Commander Agee briefed everyone on the events that had unfolded since Friday evening, Agent McCullah told the FBI he wanted them to open an investigation on Pollard. Their response was lukewarm. They had other cases in the works, they said, and couldn’t spare the manpower. What they didn’t mention was that these included two major spy cases that were about to break wide open.
McCullah was adamant. The NIS was dealing with a serious security violation at the least—espionage, at the worst. He wanted the FBI to open an investigation and surveil Pollard, using helicopters or fixed-wing aircraft in the air and its Special Surveillance Group on the ground. The FBI agents insisted they couldn’t spare the time.
According to McCullah, one supervisor from FBI headquarters asked if Pollard was at work. When informed that he was, the agent said, “Let’s just pull him in here and talk to him about it. I’m sure he’ll have a reasonable explanation.”
McCullah, whose underlings affectionately called him the Prince of Darkness, prided himself on never chewing out anyone who didn’t deserve it. His management style was like Wyatt Earp’s. He held people to the highest professional standards but never asked anybody to do anything he wouldn’t do himself. When he heard the FBI agent suggest that they have a casual chat with a man suspected of possible espionage, his fist came slamming down on the table. “Damn it,” he exclaimed, “if you don’t want to conduct this in a professional manner, then we’ll handle it ourselves without you!”2
Taken aback, the FBI agents agreed to open a preliminary investigation; the meeting was adjourned.
In a preliminary investigation, the FBI’s procedure was to gather background information on the individual in question through the National Crime Information Center (NCIC). Not until FBI headquarters authorized a full-field investigation could the Washington field office obtain a search warrant or order wiretaps, which it did through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The problem was, it could take months for FBI headquarters to authorize a full-field investigation.
Later in the day McCullah asked Commander Connelly about the legality of putting a surveillance camera in Pollard’s work space. Would that intrude on his right to privacy? Connelly answered that there was no “expectation to privacy,” that Admiral Flynn could issue a command-authorized search based on probable cause. The equivalent of a federal search warrant from a magistrate judge, this would allow for a video camera, but no sound.
Unfortunately, Admiral Flynn had already left town on other business. Connelly would have to go up the chain of command.
The first thing out of Redman’s mouth when she came back to brief me was, “They think Jonathan Pollard might be a spy.”
“Gee-sus krist, you gotta be kidding me,” I said.
Having worked at NIS headquarters, I knew the people there had a tendency to make mountains out of molehills. Why would this be any different? But that didn’t matter. Mountain or molehill, once the investigation opened, my squad would be handling the case. NIS headquarters had oversight and made policy; investigations were usually left up to the field offices.
Personally, I never had a problem with the Prince of Darkness. If someone was right or presented facts that made sense, McCullah would usually listen and back down. Nonetheless, I didn’t want to find myself being chewed out on his red carpet, and to avoid that I vowed to continue at full speed with the investigation.
I told Agent Redman to open an initial action lead sheet, that is, a short report describing why Pollard was being investigated. Of course, being suspected of and committing a crime were two different things. The action lead sheet indicated that an inquiry was being initiated to prove or disprove the allegation. We didn’t have to wait for a green light from NIS headquarters to proceed; unlike the FBI, we could move forward with a full investigation.
To keep things quiet, I decided to classify the action lead sheet as a secret/no-foreign-dissemination document, and to provide it to headquarters through a back channel.
Redman informed me the FBI was opening a preliminary investigation. Since the FBI had jurisdiction over civilian cases like this, we usually had to follow their lead. With the FBI involved, this case could go on for months or years without closure or arrest. In normal espionage cases, evidence was gathered slowly, piece by piece, secret search warrant by secret search warrant, until a solid case could be made. I was somewhat relieved not to have to deal with it all. What I didn’t know was that NIS headquarters, Lanny McCullah to be exact, had a different idea of how this case was going to be conducted, an approach that would cause me many sleepless nights and repeated bouts of heartburn. Alka-Seltzer became my best friend.
On 13 November Agent Redman visited the FBI’s Washington field office at Buzzard’s Point, in a run-down neighborhood on the banks of the Anacostia River, to discuss the case. She also checked Pollard’s personnel records but found nothing of significance.
The command-authorized search was issued, allowing the NIS to place two pinhole video cameras in Pollard’s cubicle in the ATAC. The cameras were to be installed in the drop-ceiling panels. The first would give an overhead view of the entire cubicle: Pollard’s L-shaped desk, his desk drawers, and his safe. When Pollard worked at his computer, positioned at the inner corner of the L, the camera would show a left-side view of him. It would be placed in such a way as to catch him storing documents and other material. The second camera would give a view of a small passageway leading to Pollard’s cubicle. In this area, some ten feet from his cubicle, was a wooden mailbox with slots where ATAC members picked up message traffic and administrative materials. The camera’s eye allowed a side view of the mailbox.
The trick now was to find a way to install the cameras without causing suspicion in the ATAC. Being an SCI facility, it was manned around the clock with no fewer than two people in the spaces at any time. The ATAC never shut down. To get the cameras into place the NIS technical services branch, Code 26, was called into action. The agents in Code 26 were experts at covert surveillance. They devised a plan in which Commander Agee would inform ATAC employees that, owing to an increase in the electrical load from more and more personnel and computers, the power would be shut down and the ATAC rewired.
The bugging itself would actually be completed at night, when only two watch standers were on duty. This would minimize suspicion and prevent a total disruption of ATAC activity. And so, for about two hours on Wednesday, the ATAC shifted to another location, its staff limiting their work to answering phone calls. Later, the technicians ran wiring through the drop ceiling and rigged up the closed-circuit television cameras with a view of Pollard’s cubicle and the small passageway leading to it.
The camera monitor was set up in the office of Special Agent Jack Tuckish, assigned to photography and tech services. His office was almost directly across the hall from the ATAC and his doors were always locked. Both cameras operated around the clock, taping every minute, and the monitor was always on, its black and white split screen giving simultaneous views of Pollard’s cubicle and the small passageway. Because most of the field office was still on the protective service detail for Israeli Defense Minister Rabin, NIS headquarters took the job of rotating its agents to watch the monitor. Agent Redman set up the schedule.
NIS headquarters also wanted outside surveillance on Pollard. McCullah initiated this with headquarters personnel and told me about it as an afterthought. Special Agents Robert Cathcart and Pam Connelly were tasked to watch Pollard’s car in the parking lot and follow him in the event he went anywhere during his lunch hour.3 I was none too happy about the use of headquarters personnel for this task because it meant that headquarters would make some decisions outside of the field office. To compound the situation, my special agent in charge, John D’Avanzo, was still on vacation. Without him, I thought I wouldn’t have much influence with headquarters should a major decision have to be made.
At the surveillance monitor in Tuckish’s office, the agents watched black and white images of Pollard at work, putting papers in his desk and in envelopes and packages, but they couldn’t read any of the documents because of the poor resolution. This was 1985—the image was comparable to that produced by a camera recording a bank holdup.
On Thursday, 14 November, the analyst ordered a large batch of classified documents from the SPINTCOM center. Commander Agee arranged to withhold these from Pollard to see how he would react. In fact, I believe Agee stored the documents in his safe. He told someone at the center to make up an excuse as to why the documents were delayed—and to make it sound good. When Pollard called down to the communications center asking for the documents, he was told that because of a computer glitch his package wasn’t ready. He could pick it up on Monday. Reportedly, Pollard was furious.
Friday, the fifteenth, the camera monitor caught something significant.
It started at 10:51:00 in the morning, according to the monitor’s time clock. Pollard stepped into the passageway outside his office, glanced into the cubicle across from the mailbox, then walked out of sight of the hallway camera. Twenty-four seconds later he returned to his desk with a briefcase, which he placed upright on the floor, half under his desk. The briefcase was a standard size, some five inches deep. It had two roller combination locks on top, one on each side of the handle. Pollard left his cubicle and returned six and a half minutes later.
Then the following sequence of events occurred:
10:57:48 |
Pollard shoved the briefcase under his desk, out of sight of the person in the cubicle next to his, sat down, and appeared to open the briefcase. |
10:58:36 |
He opened the lower left-hand drawer of his desk, removed some papers, reached in again, pulled out a batch of documents about two inches thick (approximately five hundred sheets), then reached under his desk and placed the documents in the briefcase. |
10:58:58 |
He was removing a three- to four-inch stack of documents from the same drawer when suddenly, seeing something out of the corner of his eye, he stopped and started to close it. The analyst in the opposite cubicle entered the passageway and moved out of sight. Pollard went back to what he was doing, using both hands to pull a large bundle from the drawer, then bending over and reaching under his desk again. The coworker came back down the passageway and turned into her cubicle. Pollard, busy cramming documents into his briefcase, didn’t seem to notice her. |
10:59:11 |
He began shuffling papers in the drawer, then pulled out another stack and, with some difficulty, for now the briefcase was getting full, shoved it in. After much squirming and shifting about in his chair, he finally closed and locked the briefcase. Finally, he sat up, looked back in the drawer, which was still a little over half full, and quickly thumbed through the remaining pages. |
11:00:29 |
He closed the drawer and removed a folded piece of paper from his shirt pocket. (The NIS later inferred that this was a “shopping list” of documents the Israelis had requested.) After looking over the paper, he opened the drawer again, dropped the paper in, and closed it. |
11:00:56 |
Getting up from his desk, he tucked his shirt in and put on his sport coat. Finally, he slid the briefcase from under the desk and, bringing it along, briskly walked down the passageway and out of sight of the camera.4 |
Based on the standard of five hundred sheets in one ream of copying paper, it was estimated that in the short space of about three minutes, Pollard had removed up to three thousand pages of highly classified information.
Murphy’s Law states that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. The person assigned to the monitor for that period, whoever it was, happened not to be watching during this three-minute episode, and it wasn’t discovered until months later. I found out about it when everyone else did, during a viewing held for the assistant U.S. attorney’s office to determine if the film contained any evidence useful for a possible trial. “Gee-sus, tell me this isn’t so!” I exclaimed when I realized the oversight. I was just as shocked and angered as my colleagues.
To make matters worse, the surveillance agents outside had failed to pick up Pollard leaving the parking lot. As it turned out, the analyst departed early without permission from his supervisor and didn’t return to work that day.
The Israelis must have had a busy time copying material at the Van Ness apartment over the weekend. At least they got an earlier start on that particular Friday.
When Pollard failed to return to work on Friday afternoon, Lanny McCullah was fit to be tied. It didn’t help that the FBI hadn’t moved forward an inch on Pollard. While they were dragging their feet, he might have had a spy sitting right down the hall from his office. I received a call from Lance Arnold, McCullah’s deputy assistant director, informing me they wanted surveillance on Pollard after work on Monday. Arnold also called the FBI field office and FBI headquarters to inform them of the plan.
Throughout the weekend the hidden cameras were monitored, but Pollard didn’t return to the ATAC. That was fine with me. I had a chance to rest up, which proved to be a good thing. That weekend would be the last time I’d be getting any R&R for quite some time to come.
