Entering the testing area, I ran into Ben Johnson, supervisor of the polygraph program at the Washington field office, and informed him that Pollard wanted to talk with me before taking the exam. Johnson’s expression soured. Not only had he been waiting for the analyst for better than two hours, but he also had interviews of his own to conduct, part of a delicately balanced psychological lead-up to the polygraph test itself. I was about to foul this up. But I had seniority over Johnson, and in any event, my hands were tied. Pollard still hadn’t been charged with any crime, and because he was here voluntarily, I had to do everything in my power to keep him cooperating with us. I expected my interview to be a short one. I had no idea that it would turn into a full-blown interrogation.
“Is there an interview room I can use?” I said to Johnson. Disgruntled, he pointed to a space off the hallway.
As Pollard and I made our way there, we passed the testing room, its door open and a polygraph instrument sitting on the desk waiting for its next victim. Those were the days before digital technology. The machine was an intimidating metal box the size of a briefcase. Inside were numerous knobs and five or six long, ink-filled mechanical arms that recorded the subject’s reactions to questions on scrolling paper. Two pneumographs, accordion-like rubber tubes filled with air, would be connected to the interviewee’s chest and upper abdomen to measure respiratory rate. A cuff around the arm measured blood pressure and heart rate, while two tiny cuffs attached to the fingers—and sometimes a metal plate under the fingers—would gauge the amount of sweat. Electric cords connected all these gauges to the polygraph instrument, which was plugged into the wall. By the time polygraph operators had a subject hooked up, he or she already felt guilty about something. It was enough to make the Pope feel intimidated, and not surprisingly, out of the corner of my eye I caught Pollard staring at it uneasily.
We walked into a small, musty office equipped with nothing but three chairs and a World War II–vintage green metal desk, probably made in some federal prison. The space had no windows, just a single fluorescent tube overhead.
It is Department of Defense policy that when someone takes a polygraph test, he or she must be reminded of his or her Miranda rights warning against self-incrimination, and although I would not be the one to administer the test, it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to read Pollard his rights then rather than later. That would protect us both. I thought of going back to Johnson to get a copy of the NIS’s civilian waiver of rights form, but not wanting to leave Pollard alone, I looked in the desk drawer first. The metal screeched open and there, on top of a stack of papers, was the waiver form already filled out, with Brian Cropper and Ben Johnson listed as the agents who were going to advise Pollard of his rights.
Taking my pen, I scratched out their printed names and inserted mine above. On the line identifying what Pollard was suspected of, someone had written the following: “I am suspected of the unlawful solicitation, acquisition, and possession of classified U.S government defense information and/or the unlawful disclosure of U.S. government defense information.” I read Pollard all of his rights, one by one.
1. I have the right to remain silent and make no statement at all.
2. Any statement I do make can be used against me in a court of law or other judicial proceeding or administrative hearing.
3. I have the right to consult with a lawyer prior to any questioning. This lawyer may be a civilian lawyer retained by me at no cost to the United States, or, if I cannot afford a lawyer, one will be appointed to represent me at no cost to me.
4. I have the right to have my retained or appointed lawyer present during this interview.
5. I may terminate this interview at any time, for any reason.
I asked Pollard if he understood what I had read. He indicated yes. Then I gave him the form to read and asked him to initial each advisement.
Next there was a paragraph that read: “I understand my rights as related to me and as set forth above. With that understanding, I have decided that I do not desire to remain silent, consult with a retained or appointed lawyer, or have a lawyer present at this time. I make this decision freely and voluntarily. No threats or promises have been made to me.”1 Pollard verbally waived all his rights and said he didn’t have a problem talking with me.
It was already 1:34 PM when Pollard signed the overall advisement waiver. The day was growing short. At last we began to talk. In retrospect, I suspect that Pollard wanted to speak with me because he was following Yagur’s order to stall, but at the time I knew nothing about that and had to wonder what he thought a pre-interview interview would accomplish.
I asked him where he had intended to take the documents the night before. Circling the question, the analyst launched into a drawn-out story about his favorite subject, arms sales to South Africa and through South Africa to Afghanistan. This was déjà vu, but I was willing to see where he was going with it. It dawned on me that our supposed chat was turning into an interview, and putting aside my reservations about Ben Johnson sitting in his office waiting for me to finish, I groped around in the desk drawer, came up with a pad of legal paper, and began scrawling as fast as my fingers would go. Pollard went on and on, spilling individuals’ names I couldn’t pronounce, much less spell. I was having trouble keeping up with him and had to interrupt several times so that he would repeat what he had just said. This went on for about half an hour.
With almost two decades of law enforcement experience under my belt, I enjoyed conducting interviews—that’s what I called them, not interrogations, which sometimes carried negative connotations of verbal and physical abuse—and through repeated practice I had built up a good reputation for garnering confessions from suspects and gleaning information from witnesses. In Pollard, however, I had more than met my match.
Suddenly, in the midst of his grandiose story about international weapons sales, it hit me right between the eyes. What in the Sam Hell are you doing, Olive? I said to myself (a phrase my late mother, a dear, deeply religious woman, used to utter both in jest and in earnest, except that she changed the e in Hell to an i). Pollard was the type of person who, when asked a question about anything, could make the answer last as long as the hours in a day. With just minimum knowledge of any subject, he could relate his views seamlessly, making things up as he went along and eventually convincing you that what he said was solid fact.
In my enthusiasm and desire to get information, any information, I had let my subject gain control of the interview. Rather than answering my question, he was just wasting my time and everyone else’s.
As Pollard rambled on, his confidence rising, I slammed my hand down on the old metal desk, which startled him. “Wait a minute,” I said abruptly, looking him straight in the eye. “This story has nothing to do with those documents. I don’t give a damn about South Africa and their arms shipments to Afghanistan. I want to know where you were taking those documents, and I want to know now.”
One of the interview techniques I’d learned over the years was that when you raised your voice, you should do so only briefly, to shock the suspect and get his attention. If you kept on yelling, you risked losing his respect. I paused, letting my words sink in, while Pollard just stared at me.
Apparently, he realized he had to deliver some grain of truth to string me along, for now he changed course, veering into a story about how two and a half years earlier he had been introduced at a party to a person by the name of Kurt Lohbeck. Lohbeck was a freelance photographer and reporter covering the war in Afghanistan and, Pollard claimed, he was under the control of a Pakistani defense attaché in Washington. According to the analyst, Lohbeck had asked him for sensitive information about Soviet forces in Afghanistan and Pollard agreed to his request. He said Lohbeck became his friend, and that he would drop a few pieces of classified material off to him once every week or two. “I wasn’t paid for the material,” Pollard emphasized. When I asked him how the documents were classified, he told me they were coded confidential and secret.
“Are you sure you didn’t get paid?” I asked.
“Yes, I’m sure,” he replied.
He continued in this vein for another minute or so, at which point I stopped him and in a sincere tone, appealing to his apparent need for recognition, told him he was one of the most intelligent people I had ever met in my life. I praised him for his intellectual resilience and analytical brilliance. However, I continued, there was one thing he might not know as much about as I did, and that was counterintelligence, criminal investigations, security violations, and espionage.
“I’ve been in this business a long time, Jay,” I said, “and I know you’re lying when you say you haven’t gotten paid for classified material. You walked out the door last night with TS/SCI documents in your hand and you’re telling me you had the intention of giving them to this Lohbeck guy for nothin’?”
Pollard just gave me another blank look. I kept pressing him, and eventually he did admit to having passed top secret material to Lohbeck about once a month and receiving a small amount of money.
“How much?”
“About a hundred dollars.”
“That’s bullshit, Jay! You don’t get a measly hundred dollars for giving someone top secret information.”
Briefly, the image of Ben Johnson impatiently waiting outside flitted through my mind, but I couldn’t break off the interview just then. It would be an egregious violation of standard procedure to interrupt a suspect who had started to confess—to leave the room and give him time to think. And so I kept firing questions at him, calmly, persistently, challenging every answer that sounded like a lie. Every time I confronted him, the number of classified documents he claimed to have sold multiplied tenfold, as did the amount of money he had received.
I kept the pressure up, determined not to stop until I was reasonably certain he was telling me most of the truth. Well into the interview, about three hours later, Pollard claimed to have received $2,500 a month in exchange for passing thousands of secrets to Lohbeck, and said his contact had paid him a total of about $30,000 for expenses and travel. He named a few of the documents by exact title and provided detailed information from them, and he told me where he had obtained them, from collections that included the intelligence libraries of the NSA, the DIA, the CIA, the FBI, the NISC, and the ATAC.
Supposedly, he dropped the documents off at Lohbeck’s girlfriend’s house biweekly and later picked them up and returned them to their respective libraries. The most recent payment from Lohbeck, he maintained, had been received on 26 October 1985—left on his girlfriend’s coffee table—and the last time Pollard had dropped off a batch of information was Friday, 15 November. The thousands of pages of classified message traffic Pollard didn’t have to sign for, he said, Lohbeck kept.
What Pollard had told me so far, if we proved it, could land him and Lohbeck in prison with life sentences. The analyst had confessed to espionage, and I had to inform NIS headquarters what was going on. It was then around four thirty and people would start leaving work soon. This information couldn’t wait any longer. I had no choice but to interrupt the interview and leave the room.
Telling Pollard I had to make a call and would be right back, I left and hurried into Johnson’s office. He was sitting behind his desk, looking steamed. I couldn’t blame him. Agent Johnson was extremely capable. He could have conducted an interview with Jonathan Pollard and come away with similar or better results, and yet here I was, three hours after telling him I was just going to have a short talk with the suspect, emerging from the interview room with a ream of notes. It didn’t help matters that I stayed in Johnson’s office only long enough to bark out an order.
“Call upstairs and get Lisa Redman and Gerry Nance—I need them down here, now!” Then I vanished back into the interview room.
Within a minute, Agent Redman appeared. I told her to sit with Jay for a couple of minutes, that he had just confessed to providing top secret information and getting paid about $30,000 for it. Redman’s face turned slightly red. She performed every aspect of her job with the utmost discretion, but I could see by her expression that she shared my thoughts about Pollard.
I closed the door behind me and gave Agent Nance, who was waiting right outside, a brief account. “Gerry, I want you to drive over to Suitland headquarters as fast as you can and inform McCullah of the situation,” I said.
There was no way I was going to personally tell the assistant director for counterintelligence what had occurred. My excuse, certainly a valid one, was that I couldn’t leave Pollard because I had to get a statement from him down on paper. But I knew, too, that Lanny McCullah’s blood was going to boil, and I didn’t want to be in his crosshairs. Later Nance described McCullah’s reaction to me. Apparently, cursing to high heaven, the assistant director hurled his inbox off his desk and kicked it across the room, sending it crashing against the wall. I probably would have done the same thing if I’d been in his shoes. After all, he’d had a spy operating right under his nose.
I poked my head into the interview room and asked Redman to wait while I called my FBI counterpart Nick Walsh. This was not over yet. Not by a long shot.
I confess to having harbored, at the time, a somewhat cynical view of the FBI. It was notorious among most federal, state, and local police departments for gathering criminal and counterintelligence information from other agencies, taking over cases, and after a conviction, taking every bit of credit for the investigation, arrest, and final outcome. Ironically, now, when I most needed the agency, it had backed out on me. Nonetheless, I had a good working relationship with the FBI in general, and I had had the pleasure of working with some of its most outstanding managers and street agents, people willing to collaborate for a common cause. Numbered among them were two assistant special agents in charge of counterintelligence at the FBI’s Washington field office, Nick Walsh and Joe Johnson.
FBI agent Lydia Jechorek —RON OLIVE
Walsh was a kind, soft-spoken supervisor without an attitude. When I informed him that Pollard had just confessed to espionage, he wanted to know the country involved. The information might be going to Pakistan, South Africa, Afghanistan, maybe other countries, I couldn’t be sure. Walsh said he would send an agent over right away. Expecting a small squad, I was dumbfounded when, about half an hour later, I found myself face to face with Agent Lydia Jechorek. After what had happened the night before my trust in her and her supervisor had dipped, but I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
As the case came together over the days and months that followed, Lydia Jechorek proved to be a top-notch FBI agent. Except for a two-year stint in the FBI’s Chicago office, she had been in the Washington field office working foreign counterintelligence and espionage investigations, and would eventually pass up many opportunities to fill supervisory positions at FBI headquarters so as to continue working on the street.2
After I had filled her in, we proceeded with the formal statement of confession from Pollard. This was critical, because Jechorek gave me no assurances that the FBI would place Pollard under arrest any time soon. We didn’t need to get everything—that would take days—just the essential elements of the crime, the information that would prove and convict him of espionage: knowingly passing national defense information to a foreign government or an agent of that government; understanding that the information, based on its classification level, would do harm to the national security of the United States or work to the advantage of a foreign nation; and recognizing that passing national defense information to a foreign government or agent of that government was against the law. We also needed a brief description of what Pollard had passed, where it had come from, and how much compensation he had received in return.
We had Pollard move to another room where we had a computer. I told him I could type out his statement as he relayed it, but the analyst preferred to record it himself in longhand. I agreed, and as Pollard scribbled away, Jechorek and I asked questions to ensure that he included the essential facts.
In addition to identifying most of the libraries and archives from which he had taken classified information, Pollard recorded the classification levels and titles of various materials, explained how he was able to obtain them, and included his cover stories. Below is a summary of the collections and materials he mentioned.
• From the navy’s SPINTCOM center he had taken all Mediterranean littoral operations intelligence summaries, all TS/NOFORN (top secret/no foreign dissemination) documents, and various WNINTEL (warning notice: intelligence sources and methods involved).
• From the NISC’s sensitive-intelligence libraries and all departments within the NISC he had removed documents of every classification level from secret to TS/SCI. These were primarily lines-of-communication studies on the Middle East and intelligence-data-input studies dealing with Soviet equipment that might appear in South Asia.
NIS unclassified civilian suspects acknowledgement and waiver of rights form signed by Jonathan Pollard —NIS
• From the National Security Agency he had taken the TS/SCI-classified RASIN manual with updates and the Non-Morse Operator’s Handbook, allegedly to help the Pakistanis break Soviet communications in Afghanistan. For this heist he simply contacted an unwitting woman at the central document disbursement office who provided either originals or copies. Pollard passed his clearances, showed his courier card, signed for the documents, and walked out the front door. Two or three of the manuals he checked out were never returned. He claimed to have lost them.
• From the CIA he had taken documents dealing with Pakistani and Iraqi nuclear developments, their classifications ranging from secret to TS/SCI.
• From the DIA’s Genser Library he had removed an Iraqi ground forces intelligence study, and from the DIA’s Special Intelligence Library, intelligence summaries classified TS, NOFORN, WNINTEL, and ORCON (originator controlled).
• From the FBI he had taken quarterly counterintelligence summaries classified secret and NOFORN periodical reviews copied from classified summaries distributed by the FBI to intelligence agencies around Washington. He received these not from a library but from individual authors. He would contact an author and have him mail the materials directly to his office at the ATAC.
• From the ATAC he had taken intelligence summaries classified secret and TS/SCI.3
While he was writing all this out, Pollard rattled on about Lohbeck and his adventures in Afghanistan, and the drop-offs and pickups he had made at Lohbeck’s girlfriend’s apartment. The analyst actually appeared to pride himself on his crimes, and to relish the act of recording them.
When he finished the statement, eleven pages long, I had him swear that its contents were true. After signing it, he agreed to come back the next day and embellish what he had written about his methods of contacting Lohbeck.
Perhaps Pollard thought he was ahead of the game. He had avoided the dreaded polygraph machine and produced a confession that was a big red herring. No doubt he believed that before the next day arrived—before his promised return to the NIS interview room—he would be winging his way to Israel.
It was now about ten in the evening. Before leaving, Jechorek called her office to inform Nick Walsh that we needed a full surveillance on Pollard. That was a huge relief to me. Then the three of us climbed into my car and I drove Pollard home. Although we had a confession of espionage, we still needed solid proof. Furthermore, we needed to know what foreign country or countries were involved before an arrest could be made.
When we reached our destination, FBI agents were already in place surveilling Pollard’s residence. This struck me as odd. I had never seen the FBI respond so fast to a surveillance request, and certainly not at such a late hour. At the time, I had no idea that they were also watching Ronald Pelton down the street.
Heading home that night, I mulled over the lengthy interview with Pollard and the confession he had made. Though convinced that for the most part the analyst was telling the truth, part of his story bothered me, and that was the involvement of Kurt Lohbeck. Why would a freelance photographer and news reporter become embroiled in a major espionage case? In all my years of experience in law enforcement, I’d never heard of a journalist taking reams of TS/SCI material and paying huge sums for it. It didn’t make sense. There had to be a crucial part to the story Pollard had intentionally left out.
We had a confession, but we couldn’t get a conviction on a confession alone. What we needed was hard evidence proving the act of espionage. Arriving home bleary-eyed, I dragged myself inside and fell into bed, thankful for an end to the day, however belated.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, Pollard had managed to elude FBI surveillance and get himself to a pay phone. Earlier that day, before my agents picked him up for the polygraph, he had had Anne walk around their neighborhood in the hopes that someone would bump into her and slip her an escape plan. That hadn’t happened, and now, concerned about not being contacted by the Israelis—what was taking them so long?—he put in a call to Yagur. The phone rang and rang and rang, but no one answered. Perplexed, Pollard contacted the Israeli embassy. As soon as he got through to someone, he identified himself and began explaining his situation. He needed help, now. But the Israeli on the other end of the line, who didn’t have a solid command of English, told him to call back the next day.
Growing alarmed, Pollard returned to the apartment. The next day, a Wednesday, he sent Anne out one more time to walk around the neighborhood. Surely someone from the Israeli embassy would pass her a note with the instructions that would save them.
