Jonathan Jay Pollard (Hebrew: יונתן פולארד, romanized: Yonatan Polard, born August 7, 1954) is an American-born Israeli spy and former intelligence analyst who was jailed for spying for Israel.
In 1984, Pollard sold numerous state secrets, including the National Security Agency's ten-volume manual on how the US gathers its signal intelligence and disclosed the names of thousands of people who had cooperated with US intelligence agencies. He was apprehended in 1985 and in subsequent proceedings agreed to a plea deal, pleaded guilty to spying for and providing top-secret classified information to Israel. Pollard admitted shopping his services—successfully, in some cases—to other countries. In 1987, he was sentenced to life in prison for violations of the Espionage Act.
The Israeli government acknowledged part of its role in Pollard's espionage in 1987 and issued a formal apology to the US, but did not admit to paying him until 1998. Over the course of his imprisonment, Israeli officials, US-Israeli activist groups and some American politicians continually lobbied for a reduction or commutation of his sentence. In defense of his actions, Pollard said the American intelligence establishment collectively endangered Israel's security by withholding crucial information.
Opposing any form of clemency for Pollard were many active and retired US officials, including Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, former CIA director George Tenet; several former US secretaries of defense; a bi-partisan group of US congressional leaders; and members of the US Intelligence Community. They maintained that the damage to US national security due to Pollard's espionage was much more severe, wide-ranging, and enduring than acknowledged publicly.
Although 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. Pollard revealed aspects of the US intelligence gathering process, including its "sources and methods". In 1995, while imprisoned, he was granted Israeli citizenship.
Pollard was released from prison on November 20, 2015. On November 20, 2020, his parole expired and all restrictions were eliminated. On December 30, 2020, Pollard and his second wife relocated to Israel and settled in Jerusalem.
Since relocating to Israel, Pollard has endorsed Israeli far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and advocated a population transfer to relocate Gaza's Palestinians to Ireland.
Jonathan Jay Pollard was born in Galveston, Texas, in 1954, to a Jewish family, the youngest of three siblings born to Morris and Mildred "Molly" Klein (Kahn) Pollard. In 1961, his family relocated to South Bend, Indiana, where his father Morris, an award-winning microbiologist, taught at the University of Notre Dame.
At an early age, Pollard became aware of the extent to which members of his mother's family, the Kleins (Kahns) from Vilna in Lithuania, had been murdered during the Holocaust. 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 Zionism.
Pollard grew up with what he termed a "racial obligation" to Israel, and made his first visit to Israel in 1970, as part of a science program visiting the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. While there, he was hospitalized after a fight with another student. One Weizmann scientist remembered Pollard as leaving behind "a reputation of being a troublemaker".
Later, Pollard enrolled in several graduate schools, but never completed a post-graduate degree.
Pollard's future wife, Anne Henderson (born 1960), relocated to Washington, D.C., during the autumn of 1978 to live with her (recently divorced) father, Bernard Henderson. During 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 $2,245 in 2025) per month in rent.
Pollard began applying for intelligence service jobs in 1979 after quitting graduate school, first at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and then at the US Navy. Pollard was refused for the CIA job after taking a polygraph test in which he admitted to prolific illegal drug usage between 1974 and 1978.
He fared better with the Navy, and on September 19, 1979, he was hired by the Navy Field Operational Intelligence Office (NFOIO), an office of the Naval Intelligence Command (NIC). As an intelligence specialist, he was to work on Soviet issues at the Navy Ocean Surveillance Information Center (NOSIC), a department of NFOIO. A background check was required to receive the necessary security clearances, but no polygraph test. In addition to a Top Secret clearance, a more stringent 'Sensitive Compartmented Information' (SCI) clearance was required. The Navy asked for but was denied information from the CIA regarding Pollard, including the results of their pre-employment polygraph test revealing Pollard's excessive drug use.
Pollard was given temporary non-SCI security clearances pending completion of his background check, which was normal for new hires at the time. He was assigned to temporary duty at another NIC Department, the Naval Intelligence Support Center (NISC) Surface Ships Division, where he could work on tasks that did not require SCI clearance. NOSIC's current operations facility and the NISC were co-located in Suitland, Maryland.
Two months after Pollard was hired, he approached the technical director of NOSIC, Richard Haver, and offered to start a back-channel operation with the South African intelligence service. He also lied about his father being involved with CIA operations in South Africa. Haver became wary of Pollard and requested that he be terminated. However, Haver's boss believed that Pollard's supposed connection with South African intelligence could be useful, and he reassigned him to a Navy human intelligence (HUMINT) operation, Task Force 168 (TF-168). This office was within Naval Intelligence Command (NIC), the headquarters for Navy intelligence operations (located in a separate building, but still within the Suitland Federal Center complex.) It was later discovered that Pollard had lied repeatedly during the vetting process for this position: he denied illegal drug use, claimed his father had been a CIA operative, misrepresented his language abilities and his educational achievements, and claimed to have applied for a commission as officer in the Naval Reserve. A month later Pollard received his SCI clearances and was transferred from NISC to TF-168.
While transferring to his new job at TF-168, Pollard again initiated a meeting with someone far up the chain of command, this time with Admiral Sumner Shapiro, Commander, Naval Intelligence Command (CNIC), about an idea he had for TF-168 and South Africa. (The TF-168 group had passed on his ideas.) After the meeting, Shapiro immediately ordered that Pollard's security clearances be revoked and that he be reassigned to a non-sensitive position. According to The Washington Post, Shapiro dismissed Pollard as a "kook", saying later, "I wish the hell I'd fired him".
Because of the job transfer, Shapiro's order to remove Pollard's security clearances was neglected. However, Shapiro's office followed up with a request to TF-168 that Pollard be investigated by the CIA. The CIA found Pollard to be a risk and recommended that he not be used in any intelligence collection operation. A subsequent polygraph test was inconclusive, although it did prompt Pollard to admit to making false statements to his superiors, prior drug use, and having unauthorized contacts with representatives of foreign governments. The special agent administering the test felt that Pollard, who at times "began shouting and shaking and making gagging sounds as if he were going to vomit", was feigning illness to invalidate the test. He recommended against Pollard's being granted access to highly classified information. Pollard was also required to be evaluated by a psychiatrist.