Following Anne’s arrest, her attorney, James F. Hibey, and his assistant, Gordon Coffee, filed a motion with the court for her release on bond pending adjudication of the case. The government promptly submitted a motion in opposition. After the first hearing on 3 December 1985, the court gave her six days to come up with a proposal for release of some type of collateral, such as the family home. All she could produce was a single painting that belonged to her father-in-law and had no sentimental value to its owner. The government stated, “The loss of such a painting, even given its claimed monetary value, is unlikely to deter further efforts by the defendant to evade prosecution.”1
At the same time, Anne had her physician send letters to the court attributing her acute abdominal pain to a biliary tract dysfunction. She claimed she had not been permitted to receive proper medical treatment in jail. The chief judge, Aubrey E. Robinson Jr., of the U.S. District Court in Washington, finally ruled in her favor, and on 24 February 1986, Anne was released from jail on a $23,500 cash bond on the condition that she report to pretrial services once a week, call them daily, live in the Washington metropolitan area, obtain employment, report any change of address, and show up for court dates.
As for Pollard, he remained incarcerated in Washington, held without bond. The days were long, and he had plenty of time to mull over his situation. Apparently, he felt he had no options. He had confessed his espionage activities to the NIS and the FBI. The physical evidence against him was overwhelming. And his Israeli coconspirators had been cooperating with the government, telling them how he had been handled and how much he had been paid. Except for family and a handful of friends, everyone was against him. With his fate predetermined, a trial, it seemed, would be a waste of time. His lawyer, Richard Hibey—the brother of Anne’s attorney—probably advised him that he had no choice but to plead guilty and take his chances. If he cooperated, the prosecutors would most likely not charge Anne with being an accessory to his crimes or conspiring to commit espionage; they would file lesser charges.
After consulting with their attorneys, both Pollard and Anne decided to plea-bargain. They entered their pleas before Judge Robinson on 4 June 1986. That very morning the federal grand jury returned an indictment against both husband and wife.
Pollard pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit espionage. Judge Robinson informed him of three options: he had the right to a trial if he wanted one; the government would have to convince a jury of his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt; and there would be no trial if he, the judge, accepted the plea. Did Pollard know the possible maximum sentence for the offense to which he wished to plead guilty? Yes, Pollard replied. A life sentence and a $250,000 penalty.
Judge Robinson wanted to make another point perfectly clear: “And do you understand further that what the judgment of the court would be is entirely at the discretion of the court?” Again, Pollard said he understood.
“Have any promises been made to you with respect to what the sentence of the court will be?” Judge Robinson went on.
“No,” Pollard said.
The judge reiterated, “Any representations of any kind?”
“No, no sir,” Pollard replied. 2
Once it had been ascertained that Pollard and his attorney fully understood the potential consequences of pleading guilty, and the rights he would give up, Judge Robinson accepted his plea and remanded him to the U.S. marshals for continued incarceration until a sentencing date could be set.
Anne went through the same procedure, confirming that she understood the two charges against her: conspiracy to receive embezzled government property and accessory after the fact to possession of national defense documents. Having reaped monetary rewards from a foreign government involved in espionage against the United States; having most likely disclosed classified information to her supervisors at CommCore, the public relations firm for which she worked; and having presented a briefing to a senior minister at the Chinese embassy, Anne was getting off easy. She wasn’t prosecuted for any of these other allegations, and she remained out on bond until a sentencing date was set. It was Jonathan Jay Pollard the government had its sights set on.
The two plea agreements specified the conditions with which the Pollards would have to comply. These included:
• Submitting to more interviews and polygraph examinations and testifying before a grand jury.
• Responding to all questions put to them by federal law enforcement agents and other government representatives.
• Turning over to the government any property, documents, or information in their possession or control related to espionage activity.
• Testifying fully and truthfully during any grand jury, trial, or other proceeding in which their testimony was determined to be relevant.
• Submitting to a damage assessment by representatives of the military and intelligence communities.
If, after signing his plea agreement, Pollard failed in any way to fulfill these requirements, the agreement would be null and void, the government would prosecute him, if warranted, for espionage, perjury, false statement, obstruction of justice, and other charges, and Pollard would have to waive his right to a speedy trial. As for Anne, if before sentencing she failed to cooperate fully with these conditions, the government would be relieved of its obligation to her under that agreement.
In return for his cooperation in the investigation and damage assessment, when Pollard appeared before the court for sentencing, the government would bring to its attention—and, later, to the attention of the parole board—the extent of his readiness to comply. The government warned that it would recommend that the court impose a substantial sentence along with a monetary fine, and that it still had the discretion to impose the maximum sentence.
The final condition the government made in the plea agreement was that Pollard refrain from any unauthorized disclosure of classified information obtained while he was employed by the U.S. Navy. Should he write anything or “otherwise provide information for purposes of publication or dissemination,” he would have to submit it to the director of naval intelligence for prepublication review. Furthermore, Pollard would have to give the government the profits or proceeds from any publication or information describing his employment by the navy, his espionage activities, or the circumstances leading to his arrest.3
I assigned NIS Agent Redman to work with FBI Agent Jechorek on coordinating interviews with Pollard and his wife. Because she was out on bond, Anne had debriefings at her attorney’s office and the FBI field office, where Barry Colvert polygraphed her. Pollard’s initial polygraphs, before and after he was transferred to the federal detention center in Petersburg, Virginia, were conducted at the courthouse in Washington. Every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday morning, Redman and Jechorek would go to the detention center and pick him up, then drive him to a bungalow, or safe house, not far from the prison to be interviewed. Without fail, on each of these trips Pollard would say to the women agents sitting on either side of him, “How are my two bookends? I love my two bookends,” or words to that effect.4
Various intelligence agencies debriefed Pollard, and he basked in all the attention. According to Redman, when Thursdays came around, marking the end of another round of interviews, he seemed to grow despondent.
Among his first revelations were the identity of his handler Aviem Sella and the $300,000 the Israelis had planned to put into a Swiss bank account for Pollard. Proof that the Israelis had dissembled in this matter angered the Department of Justice, and before long the story was all over the news, setting off another flurry of diplomatic recriminations and prompting the department to consider rescinding its promise not to prosecute Rafi Eitan and the other coconspirators. The question now was how far up the conspiracy reached and how much Prime Minister Peres’s administration knew about it. The Americans also wanted to know why no disciplinary action had been taken against Eitan and Sella.
As the interviews continued, Redman gained insight into the dynamics of the relationship between Pollard and Anne. Pollard always asked how his wife was doing, while Anne would rarely mention her husband, much less ask about his welfare. She struck Redman as bitter, arrogant, and defiant. Polygraph examiner Colvert had the same impression. He said that, for the most part, Pollard was easy to interview and cooperative; his wife, on the other hand, was “tough.”
“You had to work hard in an interview with Anne, who thought everything out before she would answer,” Colvert recalled. She was cautious and didn’t want to contradict anything her husband said, while Pollard would just “spit it out.”5
For instance, during a pre-polygraph interview with Colvert, Anne told him about her sapphire ring and the subterfuge concerning Uncle Joe Fisher, but she wouldn’t say what had become of the ring. When the government arrested Anne, she hadn’t been wearing it and they couldn’t find it. She adamantly clung to her story that the ring was lost.
Redman and Jechorek didn’t buy it. When a woman has a ring priced at ten thousand dollars, it isn’t easily misplaced. They gave Anne two choices: either she turned the ring over to the government or they were going to have Colvert hook her back up to the polygraph machine. That did it. Anne admitted to stashing the ring, and during her next debriefing she handed it over to the government. An appraisal of the ring valued it at $5,400—slightly less than what it had originally cost the Israelis.
Following a polygraph session in which she revealed what she knew about Pollard’s operation and the Chinese documents, Anne asked her examiner if she was going to jail. Colvert looked her in the eyes and said, “If I were you, Anne, I’d pack my toothbrush.” Surprisingly, she thanked him, explaining that he was the only person who had leveled with her about her future.6
Pollard spent much more time taking polygraphs than Anne did, and over the many days and hours of exams, Colvert earned his trust. Near the polygraph room in the courthouse there was a small coffee shop. On occasion, to establish a rapport with Pollard, Colvert invited him there for coffee and pastries. (Colvert had obtained permission from U.S. marshals to take Pollard there.) Pollard took him up on the offer, telling his examiner that he was the only person who treated him like a human being. Colvert’s talents won over both Pollards.
During his interviews with Colvert, Pollard admitted to passing classified information to countries besides Israel and to individuals other than Israelis, but still the government preferred not to prosecute Pollard for those offenses.
It was Colvert’s conviction that Pollard committed espionage not so much for greed or ideology, but rather for recognition. Although he described Pollard as intellectually arrogant and cocky, he had a desperate, childlike craving for recognition. Giving secrets to the Israelis, Pollard confessed, made him dream of being a hero in “the lead tank in a parade going into Jerusalem.” That is what the Israelis did for him—they treated him like a hero.
According to Redman, Pollard repeatedly claimed to have been an “Israeli soldier left in the field alone,” who was paid only because all Israeli soldiers are paid. He said he took classified documents for ideological reasons, to help Israel, and not for money. Pollard also revealed that following his trip to Israel, he had seriously considered changing jobs. He maintained he had cultivated an attaché at the Saudi embassy and that the Saudis might hire him as an analyst. Saudi Arabia would be a “cleaner” espionage target than the United States. Pollard believed that if he could establish himself with the Saudis, the Israelis might turn him over to Mossad for future operational use. He didn’t believe his activities with the Israelis constituted disloyalty to the United States, but he did consider them “dishonest,” and the fact he was “living a lie twenty-four hours a day was causing him to burn out.”7
When the FBI and NIS agents finished their initial debriefings, all the other intelligence agencies had a crack at Pollard, including the DIA, the CIA, the NIC, and the NSA. Gradually, it became clear that the analyst didn’t know much about the contents of the majority of the documents he had taken. Not even a man of Pollard’s prodigious intelligence could come close to remembering the titles and contents of such a huge volume of material. “If I could see it and touch it, you can assume I got it,” Pollard told his interviewers. “My only limitation was what I couldn’t physically carry.”8
Right up until the day Judge Robinson handed his sentence down, memorandums in aid of sentencing went flying back and forth between the defense and the prosecution. In Pollard’s memorandums to the court, he made excuses for what he had done and denied some statements made earlier to investigators during debriefings.
In an unusual sixty-one-page motion prepared in August 1986—but not submitted to the prosecution until early March 1987, just prior to sentencing—Pollard relayed a personal story explaining why he had spied, what Israel had learned as a result of his spying, the pernicious effects of being paid for espionage, his remorse, and his personal plans to mitigate whatever damage people perceived he might have caused to the special relationship between the United States and Israel. His story, which began in the 1940s with the plight of the Jews during the Holocaust and included his analysis of the reasons Israel found itself embroiled in continuing conflicts, was passionate, yet bombastic.
His reason for spying, he claimed, was to save Israel and to hurt the Soviet Union. He also said he was motivated by anti-Semitism in his office. The purpose of every statement in the motion was to exonerate himself and to enlist the aid of the Jewish community. The government took exception to his arguments, claiming that in his attempt to cast his actions in a positive light as being for the good of Israel, he was trying to craft a “political solution” to criminal proceedings. Prosecutors reminded the court that in a statement Pollard made to the FBI, he had said that “he would commit espionage for Israel again if given the chance.”9
Pollard’s insistence that he didn’t commit espionage for financial gain spurred prosecutors to resolve the issue. FBI agent Colvert polygraphed Pollard again, asking him two questions: whether he had spied for Israel solely for personal financial gain, and whether he had intentionally lied about his true reason for spying. After he had said no to both questions, the polygraph indicated that his responses were deceptive. Pollard insisted he had started spying for ideological reasons, then admitted he was quickly corrupted by the remuneration. He told Colvert he developed an “addiction to money.”10 Among other points, prosecutors showed that in interviews he had admitted his motives were mixed.
On 15 February 1987, three weeks before Pollard’s sentencing, Wolf Blitzer came out with an article in the Washington Post that caused an uproar in Washington: “Pollard: Not a Bumbler but Israel’s Master Spy.”11 At the time Blitzer was a correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, and a similar article appeared in that newspaper, along with a cartoon depicting an Israeli soldier sprawled on the ground, being abandoned by four other soldiers walking away with an empty stretcher. Pollard was written next to the abandoned soldier.
Based on his interview with the incarcerated spy, Blitzer revealed what Pollard claimed to have provided the Israelis, including reconnaissance satellite photographs of Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) headquarters in Tunisia, specific capabilities of Libya’s air defense system, and movements of American, Soviet, and French ships in the Mediterranean, all of which, according to Blitzer, had allowed the Israeli air force to evade detection and bomb the PLO headquarters on 1 October 1985. Moreover, the author wrote, sources informed him that Pollard had also passed on intelligence about Iraqi and Syrian chemical-warfare-production capabilities; Soviet arms shipments to Syria and other Arab states, including specifics on SS-21 ground-to-ground and SA-5 antiaircraft missiles; and Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, along with satellite photographs of its facility outside Islamabad.
“In general,” Blitzer went on, “Pollard gave Israel the pick of U.S. intelligence about Arab and Islamic conventional and unconventional military activity, from Morocco to Pakistan and every country in between. This included both ‘friendly’ and ‘unfriendly’ Arab countries.”
The government was stunned by the disclosures. Clearly, Pollard was a loose cannon. If ever released from prison, he would be a much larger risk than they had ever imagined.
By allowing a reporter to interview him without a representative from the DNI’s office present—indeed, without any authorization at all from the DNI—Pollard had violated his plea agreement. The prisoner claimed he had obtained permission; the government denied it.
During a subsequent interview Pollard blamed the revelations on Blitzer, claiming he had only been confirming information the journalist asked him about. According to Colvert, when Pollard was asked about this in yet another polygraph test, he “blew” it.12 Soon thereafter, Pollard admitted he had been lying, that it was he who disclosed the information to Blitzer and not the other way around. In the end, the U.S. attorney’s office decided not to file papers with the court indicating that Pollard had broken the plea agreement.
As if the Blitzer article weren’t alarming enough, Pollard apparently convinced his wife to submit to an interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes. On Sunday evening, 1 March 1987, three days before her sentencing and still out on bond, Anne appeared in front of investigative reporter Mike Wallace before a nationwide audience. The Pollards must have believed that if Anne could explain their rationale for giving secrets to Israel, the American public—or at least Jewish Americans—would demand a more lenient sentence.
If that was their thinking, they were badly mistaken. One has to wonder where Anne’s lawyer was. What she failed to realize when she agreed to go on 60 Minutes was that she would be subjected to questions from a seasoned interviewer who knew how to get information out of anybody. Prior to the interview, many of us involved in the case felt Anne would get probation based on her first-time offense and the relatively minor charges against her. Her chance withered as soon as she admitted to Wallace that she had known exactly what her husband was getting into and that she had gone along with it from the beginning. Angry at Israel for not helping her and her husband after all he had done for them, Anne also blamed Rafael Eitan for not allowing the Israeli embassy to give them asylum.
Wallace quoted aloud from a court document: “[T]he breadth and volume of the U.S. classified information sold by defendant Pollard to Israel was enormous, as great as any reported case involving espionage on behalf of any foreign nation.”
“Let’s look at that, I mean, any person can logically look at that and say, this is absurd,” Anne remarked. “Number one, he was not spying against the United States. Number two, he was not spying on behalf of our worst and bitter enemy, the Soviet Union.”
The interviewer cut her off. “So what you’re saying is that citizens who believe that they know better than their own government what should be given . . . to an ally should simply take the law into their own hands, Anne?”
“I’m not saying people should take the law into their own hands, but I am saying that when people have a moral belief and are adamant about it, they are expected to do what they can do to better and help those people. My husband felt that it was necessary to do this, no one else had done it.” She went on to say that Pollard was paid because he was a “soldier in the field.” When Wallace commented that Israeli soldiers were not paid $2,500 dollars a month, Anne agreed, saying, “The amount is determined by their handler.”
Anne continued making excuses for herself and Pollard until, finally, Wallace said, “Listening to you, Anne, I get the impression that you feel that everyone else is wrong and you and your husband are right.”
“I feel my husband and I did what we were expected to do,” she replied, “what our moral obligation was as Jews, what our moral obligation was as human beings, and I have no regrets about that.”13
Hearing Anne’s statement, I recalled what Pollard had said to me about how Jews should not be given high clearances because they would do anything for the love of Israel. It seems as though both husband and wife believed their moral obligation as Jews was to spy against their own country. It was an insult to the American Jewish community. In just three days, she would stand before a judge asking for leniency. Her lack of remorse would come back to haunt her.
In another turn of events, two days after the 60 Minutes broadcast, the U.S. government indicted Aviem Sella on three counts of espionage, each carrying a life sentence and hefty fines. Israel wouldn’t let Sella be interviewed unless the United States gave him immunity, as it had for the other coconspirators, but in light of Israel’s earlier lack of cooperation, the government didn’t agree to this condition.
Following the indictment, Sella was promoted to brigadier general and put in charge of one of Israel’s largest air bases. Moreover, Israel awarded Rafael Eitan with a high-level position as head of Israel Chemical, a large government-owned company.14 It was a sharp slap in the face, and Congress reacted by threatening to discontinue aid to Israel amounting to billions of dollars. Eitan was given a job to oversee the Cuban water treatment system, and Sella stepped down from his new prestigious position. Because Israel will not extradite citizens wanted for crimes committed in the United States, to this day Aviem Sella is still under federal indictment for espionage against the United States, a criminal fugitive from justice.15