Jonathan Pollard

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1954-. Jonathan Jay Pollard. American who spied for Israel in the early 1980s.

Suspected high-level mole

Olive says that in the Pollard case the evidence indicated that the Israelis had supplied Pollard with the titles—and in some cases the serial numbers—of secret documents that they wanted Pollard to get for them. The fact that the Israelis allegedly asked their informants to acquire specific secret documents created deep suspicions among investigators that Israeli intelligence might have had a highly placed mole somewhere deep inside the U.S. government who could identify very sensitive secrets that more expendable informants could then steal, according to Olive. But Olive says U.S. investigators never discovered whether such a high-level Israeli source existed; nor did they try very hard to find him.[1]

Alleged Israeli-Soviet collusion

A number of officials strongly suspect that the Israelis repackaged much of Pollard's material and provided it to the Soviet Union in exchange for continued Soviet permission for Jews to emigrate to Israel. Other officials go further, and say there was reason to believe that secret information was exchanged for Jews working in highly sensitive positions in the Soviet Union. A significant percentage of Pollard's documents, including some that described the techniques the American Navy used to track Soviet submarines around the world, was of practical importance only to the Soviet Union. One longtime C.I.A. officer who worked as a station chief in the Middle East said he understood that "certain elements in the Israeli military had used it" -- Pollard's material -- "to trade for people they wanted to get out," including Jewish scientists working in missile technology and on nuclear issues. Pollard's spying came at a time when the Israeli government was publicly committed to the free flow of Jewish emigres from the Soviet Union. The officials stressed the fact that they had no hard evidence -- no "smoking gun," in the form of a document from an Israeli or a Soviet archive -- to demonstrate the link between Pollard, Israel, and the Soviet Union, but they also said that the documents that Pollard had been directed by his Israeli handlers to betray led them to no other conclusion.[2]

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