Jonathan Jay Pollard is a former intelligence analyst for the U.S. government. In 1987, he pleaded guilty to spying for and providing top-secret classified information to Israel. He was sentenced to life in prison for violations of the Espionage Act. Pollard was released on November 20, 2015, in accordance with federal guidelines in place at the time of his sentencing. On December 30, 2020, he and his wife moved to Israel, and he will be eligible for parole again in November 2020, when all restrictions on his parole will be removed.
About Jonathan Pollard in brief
Jonathan Jay Pollard is a former intelligence analyst for the U.S. 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 sentenced to life in prison for violations of the Espionage Act. Pollard was released on November 20, 2015, in accordance with federal guidelines in place at the time of his sentencing. On December 30, 2020, he and his wife moved to Israel, and he will be eligible for parole again in November 2020, when all restrictions on his parole will be removed. He is the only American who has received a life sentence for passingclassified information to an ally of the United States. He claimed that his father was a CIA operative and to have fled as a child during the Prague Spring in 1968 when his father’s role there was discovered. None of these claims were true, but Pollard’s future wife, Anne Henderson, also moved to Washington, D.C. to live with her husband, who was a dual citizen of the US and Israel. She was granted Israeli citizenship in 1995, and the couple have a daughter, a son, and a daughter-in-law who were all born in Israel. The couple has a daughter who was born in 2010, and they have a son who was also born in 2011, and is expected to be born in 2012, when Pollard will be able to return to Israel for the first time since the birth of his first child. The family moved to South Bend, Indiana, in 1961, where his father, Morris, an award-winning microbiologist, taught at the University of Notre Dame.
He later enrolled in several graduate schools, but never completed a post-graduate degree, but instead went to Stanford University, where he completed a degree in political science in 1976. While there, he is remembered as having boasted to have worked for Mossad, claiming to have attained the rank of colonel in the Israel Defense Forces. He also claimed to have killed an Arab guard while on duty at a kibzadzad in the fall of 1978, but none of this was true. The Israeli government acknowledged a portion of its role in Pollard’s espionage in 1987, and issued a formal apology to theU.S., but did not admit to paying him until 1998. In defense of his actions, he declared that he committed espionage only because “the American intelligence establishment collectively endangered Israel’s security by withholding crucial information.” He admitted shopping his services—successfully, in some cases—to other countries. Some of the accusations against Pollard can be traced to a CIA mole named Aldrich Ames, who allegedly caused a shift to “blame Mr. Pollard for exposing the American agents to clear himself of suspicion.’’ Pollard grew up with what he called a “racial obligation” to Israel and made his first trip to Israel in 1970, aspart of a science program visiting the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot.
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This page is based on the article Jonathan Pollard published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 30, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
