Jonathan Pollard, Israeli Spy While Being American?

 Nadene Goldfoot                                             

Jonathan Pollard b: August 7, 1954 in Galvestan, Texas to a Jewish family. He was  the youngest of three siblings born to Morris and Mildred "Molly" Pollard. In 1961,  His family moved to South Bend, Indiana, where his father, Morris, an award-winning microbiologist, taught at the University of Notre Dame.

On his mother's side of the family, the Klein (Kahn) from Vilna in Lithuania, were killed in the Holocaust,  and shortly before his bar mitzvah, he asked his parents to visit the Nazi death camps. Pollard's family made a special effort to instill a sense of Jewish identity in their children, which included devotion to the cause of Israel.  

Jonathan Jay Pollard is a former intelligence analyst for the United States government. In 1987, as part of a plea agreement, Pollard pleaded guilty to spying for and providing top-secret classified information to Israel. He was then 33 years old.   He was sentenced to life in prison for violations of the Espionage Act, making him the only American to receive a life sentence for passing classified information to an ally of the U.S.

Though Pollard argued that he only supplied Israel with information critical to its security, opponents stated that he had no way of knowing what the Israelis had received through legitimate exchanges, and that much of the data he compromised had nothing to do with Israeli security. 

Three weeks before Pollard's sentencing, Wolf Blitzer, at the time a Jerusalem Post correspondent, conducted a jail-cell interview with Pollard. The interview formed the basis of Blitzer's newspaper article, which also ran in The Washington Post on February 15, 1987, under the headline "Pollard: Not A Bumbler, but Israel's Master Spy".

 Pollard told Blitzer about some of the information he provided the Israelis: reconnaissance satellite photography of Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) headquarters in Tunisia, which was used for Operation Wooden Leg; specific capabilities of Libya's air defenses; and "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." 

Prosecutor Joseph diGenova presented the Blitzer prison interview as evidence in his sentencing memorandum that Pollard had engaged in "unauthorized disclosure of classified information".He is known for promoting conspiracy theories about the Department of Justice and the FBI.

Pollard revealed aspects of the U.S. intelligence gathering process, its "sources and methods". He sold numerous closely guarded state secrets, including the National Security Agency's ten-volume manual on how the U.S. gathers its signal intelligence, and disclosed the names of thousands of people who had cooperated with U.S. intelligence agencies.

Within a few days, in June 1984, Pollard started passing classified information to Aviem Sella,  a combat veteran of the Israeli Air Force.. He was paid $10,000 cash and given a very expensive diamond and sapphire ring, which Pollard later offered to his girlfriend Anne when proposing to her.  Later, Mossad said they knew nothing about this and were not a part of it.                                     

Pollard's future wife, Anne Henderson (born 1960), moved to Washington, D.C., in the fall of 1978 to live with her (recently divorced) father, Bernard Henderson. In the summer of 1981, she moved into a house on Capitol Hill with two other women and, through a friend of one of her roommates, she first met Pollard. He later said he had fallen in love during their first meeting—they were "an inseparable couple" by November 1981, and in June 1982, when her Capitol Hill lease expired, she moved into Pollard's apartment in Arlington, Virginia. In December 1982, the couple moved into downtown Washington, D.C., to a two-bedroom apartment at 1733 20th Street NW, near Dupont Circle. 

They married on August 9, 1985, more than a year after Pollard began spying for Israel, in a civil ceremony in Venice, Italy. At the time of their arrest, in November 1985, they were paying US$750 (equivalent to $1,890 in 2021) per month in rent.

During the call to Anne, Pollard used the code word "cactus", signaling that he was in trouble, and that she should remove all classified material from their home. She attempted to do this, enlisting the help of a neighbor, so she knew all about what Pollard had done.  Anne was arrested the next day, November 22, 1985..

Anne Pollard was sentenced to five years, but was paroled after three and a half years due to health problems. Pollard filed for divorce after Anne's release. While he reportedly said that he expected to be jailed for the remainder of his life, and did not want Anne to be bound to him, Anne later told a reporter that the divorce papers were served with no warning or explanation of any kind.

ESTHER POLLARD makes a point during a conversation with then-president Shimon Peres in 2012, as she waged the battle for husband Jonathan’s release.  She was his 2nd wife.  

(photo credit: URI LENZ/FLASH 90)

After finalization of his divorce from Anne, Pollard married Esther "Elaine" Zeitz, a Canadian teacher and activist based in Toronto who had organized a campaign for his release. In 1996, she initiated a public hunger strike, but ended it 19 days later after meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who pledged to step up his efforts to secure Pollard's release. Media sources and Pollard family members have questioned whether Pollard and Zeitz are legally wed. Prison officials told Ha'aretz that there is no record of a marriage ceremony having been requested or conducted.   Esther Pollard, wife of convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, speaks to press outside her home in Jerusalem on July 29, 2015. (Flash90)

Esther Pollard, the wife of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, died on Monday from coronavirus-related complications at the age of 68.   Pollard, who battled breast cancer for years, was hospitalized at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Ein Kerem Medical Center over the weekend after she was infected with the virus and her condition deteriorated.                    

Pollard was released on November 20, 2015 when 61 years old, in accordance with federal guidelines in place at the time of his sentencing. On November 20, 2020, his parole expired and all restrictions were removed. On December 30, 2020, Pollard and his second wife, Esther,  moved to Israel and settled in Jerusalem.

After completing her parole, Anne Pollard emigrated to Israel, where she lived in Tel Aviv on a government stipend supplemented by occasional private donations.

Former Israeli spy, Jonathan Pollard, got engaged on Wednesday, 9/14/22 to Rivka Abrahams-Donin, who is the granddaughter of a British Jewish officer who was part of a team that tracked down and captured the Nazi commandant of Auschwitz.The first commandant of Auschwitz, SS-Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Höss, who was tried and sentenced to death after the war by the Polish Supreme National Tribunal, was hanged here on 16 April 1947.

Rivka, a 45-year-old Lubavitcher resident of the Gilo neighborhood of Jerusalem, made aliyah in 1996. Her late husband, Rav Yosef Eliyahu Donin, z’l, who for many years ran the tefillin stand at the Kosel and merited to help thousands of Jews don tefillin, was niftar in 2015, leaving Rivka alone with seven children, ages 2-18 at the time.  An interesting fact about Rivka is that her grandfather, British Sergeant Karl (Kalman Leib) Abrahams, z’l, helped capture the notorious Nazi commander Rudolf Hess as part of his role in a special intelligence unit of the British military police.

Resource:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Pollard

https://time.news/say-congratulations-jonathan-pollard-got-engaged/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_diGenova

https://www.theyeshivaworld.com/news/headlines-breaking-stories/2124741/its-official-hachasan-pollard-and-hakallah-rivka-abrahams-donin.html