How a spy was caught and why he still stands to profit

CAPTURING JONATHAN POLLARD: How one of the most notorious spies in American history was brought to justice

By Ronald J. Olive

Naval Institute Press, $27.95, 320 pages, illus.

REVIEWED BY JOSEPH C. GOULDEN

I’m about to ruin your Sunday morning, so please shove your coffee cup out of rage-range and take a deep breath.

Ready?

When the loathsome slug Jonathan Jay Pollard was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987 for stealing more than a million pages of highly-classified documents for the Israelis, U.S. Attorney Joseph diGenova told reporters outside the courthouse, “It is likely he’ll never see the light of day again.”

What Mr. diGenova perhaps did not know was that just prior to Pollard’s sentencing (on a guilty plea) there was an obscure rule change stipulating that persons sentenced to life must be paroled after 30 years if they maintained a good record in prison. Thus Pollard could walk out of prison on Nov. 23, 2013.

Take another deep breath; the best — or more accurately, the worst — is yet to come.

The Israeli government, after years of fudging, finally admitted in 1998 that Pollard “acted as an official Israeli agent.” The point is important. Hear the math of naval intelligence investigator Ronald J. Olive in his fascinating “Capturing Jonathan Pollard”: “It is alleged that Israel doubles the salary yearly for Israeli spies caught and imprisoned on foreign soil. If Pollard’s spy salary of $2,500 a month plus the promised $30,000 annual bonus were doubled [the figures came from Pollard] he would earn approximately $3.6 million over thirty years.

“To my knowledge, no other spy in history, in jail or released from it, has been so handsomely rewarded,” Mr. Olive writes, in a sentence dripping with disgust.

Although perhaps half a dozen books on the Pollard case have been published, Mr. Olive’s towers over the pack. He writes with insider knowledge gained as the counterintelligence agent of the Naval Investigative Service (NIS), which led the Pollard investigation, and obtained the confession that left him little choice but to plead guilty. To put it bluntly, the Pollard affair was not the U.S. Navy’s most shining moment. But Mr. Olive does detail how the NIS can do superb work once it centers in on a suspect.

Although readers of this newspaper know the thrust of the story, Mr. Olive provides new material on how Pollard finally came to grief. There is a hero in the sordid saga, albeit Mr. Olive leaves him anonymous by his own choice.

The afternoon of Friday, Nov. 8, 1985, a co-worker at the Anti-Terrorist Alert Center in Suitland, Md., noticed Pollard wrapping a thick batch of TS/SCI materials (top secret/special compartmented information), which he said he had received by mistake. He claimed to be preparing to return them to a documents center.

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