Jonathan Pollard

Jonathan Jay Pollard (b. 7 August 1954 in Galveston, Texas) is a former American, now Israeli Jew, officer, spy and traitor. On 29 December 2020, together with his second wife Elaine "Esther", née Zeitz, he emigrated to Israel, whose citizenship he has held since 1996. They settled in Jerusalem.

Life

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. After completing high school, Pollard attended Stanford University, where he completed a degree in political science in 1976.

During university, Pollard, an insecure show-off and liar, claimed to have worked for Mossad, to have attained the rank of colonel in the Israel Defense Forces (even sending himself a telegram addressed to "Colonel Pollard"), and to have killed an Arab while on guard duty at a kibbutz. He also claimed that his father, Morris Pollard was a CIA operative, and to have fled Czechoslovakia as a child during the Prague Spring in 1968 when his father's CIA role there was discovered. None of these claims were true. Later, Pollard enrolled in several graduate schools, but never completed a post-graduate degree.

Pollard began applying for intelligence service jobs in 1979 after quitting graduate school, first at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and then at the U.S. 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. On 19 September 1979, he was hired by the Navy Field Operational Intelligence Office (NFOIO), an office of the Naval Intelligence Command (NIC). In October 1984, after some re-organization of the Navy's intelligence departments, Pollard applied for and was accepted into a job as an analyst for the Naval Intelligence Command.

Pollard provided Israel with top secret information while he was employed by the United States Navy. Pollard was caught and arrested for his actions. According to author Daniel Halper in his book Clinton Inc: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attempted to trade tapes of Monica Lewinsky for Pollard's release.In December of 2020, Netanyahu met Pollard on the tarmac at Ben Gurion airport where Pollard immediately fell down and kissed the ground upon arrival.