by Sally Denton
A distinguished chemical weapons expert, Dr. W. Seth Carus, told the Financial Times of London that the PC2 Iraqi project was intended for both civilian and military purposes. Weinberger, in his capacity as general counsel for Bechtel, was aware of the PC2 project. “We were hired by the government of Iraq to be the project manager for an ethylene plant,” a Bechtel senior vice president would later tell the British newspaper. The Bechtel spokesman denied that Hussein intended to make ethylene oxide—not only a precursor chemical for mustard gas but also a major ingredient in what a Senate investigative committee described as “fuel air explosive bombs.” The official said that Bechtel received “direct encouragement” for the PC2 project from the US Department of Commerce.
“I watched the threats to Israel’s existence grow and gradually came to the conclusion that I had to do something,” Pollard later wrote. “The Iraqis were secretly manufacturing nerve gas specifically to use against Israeli urban areas.” Once convinced that the United States was arming Hussein with chemical and biological weapons that could ultimately be used against Israel, Pollard felt he had no choice but to act. “As Diaspora Jews, our families instilled in us the vital importance of preserving human life through the deterrence of war,” wrote Pollard’s wife, Anne. “It was when Jay learned that a new generation of ultra sophisticated military equipment was being quietly positioned into the arsenals of our most despised enemies that he realized he could not stand idly by and witness the potential destruction of our racial homeland.”
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Born to Morris and Mildred Klein Pollard on August 7, 1954, the youngest of three children, Jay spent his childhood in Galveston, Texas, and his adolescence in South Bend, Indiana. His father, a world-renowned microbiologist and professor at the University of Notre Dame known for his research on prostate cancer, instilled a deep love for America in his family. “My parents never ceased in their efforts to portray this land [USA] . . . as a Godsend for Jews,” Jay recalled. His parents were also ardent Zionists. “The first flag I could recognize in my early youth was that of Israel, and for years our family took quiet pride in my late uncle’s decision to provide the fledgling Israeli Army in 1948 with military boots and medical supplies ‘liberated’ from the American Hospital in Paris, which he commanded at the time.”
Pollard admitted later that “he had begun dreaming about future emigration to Israel at age 12 when that country won a dramatic victory in the six-day war of June 1967,” the CIA reported. The Holocaust haunted the close-knit Pollard family, which lost seventy-five of their Lithuanian relatives in the Nazi death camps. Pollard “had traveled with his father to those then-silent camps and vowed he would never stand idly by if such threats were to surface again,” his father-in-law wrote. He visited the German concentration camp at Dachau and was affected deeply by the experience, which kindled an abiding loyalty to Israel and the Jewish people. Pollard had a “growing determination to assist Israel,” as the CIA put it.
Pollard had begun working in 1979 as an intelligence research specialist for the Naval Ocean Surveillance Information Center (NOSIC), where he “managed to gain the respect of most of his superiors” and achieved a series of rapid promotions. He was described as a “temperamental genius and a gifted person,” his work as a Middle East warship analyst was deemed “outstanding,” and he seemed to be flourishing in his position. All of that changed in 1981 when Ronald Reagan became president, and Pollard was assigned to one of the US intelligence teams supporting Weinberger’s so-called Interagency Contingency Operations Plan—a plan created in 1982 with three levels of US response to an anticipated Israeli invasion of Lebanon, including a limited military action. Pollard thought the plan “looked like a blueprint for an undeclared war against Israel,” according to one account. “It was widely known that Weinberger favored an ‘evenhanded’ arms sales policy in the Middle East,” Pollard told Wolf Blitzer, “and [Attorney General Edwin] Meese never hid his desire to have Israel placed on the ‘Criteria Country List,’ which would have categorized her with such pariah states as Libya, Cuba, and North Korea.”
June 1984 is when Colonel Aviem “Avi” Sella—an Israeli hero who was the fighter pilot that led the bombing raid on the Osirak reactor—initially recruited Pollard at a synagogue in the Washington suburbs. Sella, a former officer in the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, had legendarily led the team that captured the fugitive Nazi official Adolf Eichmann in Argentina in 1960. Soon, over cocktails at the bar in the Washington Hilton Hotel, the two men spoke in Hebrew. Pollard told Sella of his willingness to provide intelligence information to Israel. Sella accepted his offer, while emphasizing that Israel did not seek any information on US military capabilities. Rather, the Jewish state sought to obtain as much classified documentation as possible on Saudi Arabia, as well as on Soviet air-defense systems. Sella wanted photographs of the bomb-damaged reactor, which the CIA’s Casey had refused to share with Israel.
Sella established a secure procedure for their future clandestine meetings, involving several pay telephones within a few blocks of Pollard’s northwest Washington residence. He also taught the nascent spy to use a code containing Hebrew letters and numbers. A few days later, Sella drove Pollard to a remote outdoor location near the historic Dumbarton Oaks estate in Georgetown. Pollard brought with him a briefcase containing a massive, three-volume intelligence analysis of Saudi Arabian military forces and the much-coveted satellite imagery of the Osirak bombing taken only hours after the Israeli strike.
In November 1984 Pollard traveled to Paris to receive formal instruction from the Israelis. He was given a fake passport and the number of a Swiss bank account that had been opened for him under the alias Danny Cohen. He was told the Israelis would deposit $30,000 every year for the expected ten years of his espionage work. He was introduced to Rafael Eitan, the counterterrorism advisor to Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who headed Lekem—an intelligence agency run out of the Defense Ministry. Eitan, as the senior Israeli in charge of Pollard’s spying operation, directed him “to provide Israel with the best available U.S. intelligence on Israel’s Arab adversaries and the military support they receive from the Soviet Union.”
The Israelis told him of their “collection requirements, in descending order of priority: Arab (and Pakistani) nuclear intelligence; Arab exotic weaponry, such as chemical and biological weapons; Soviet aircraft; Soviet air defenses; Soviet air-to-air missiles and air-to-surface missiles; and Arab order-of-battle, deployments, readiness.” Eitan also asked Pollard to provide any “dirt” on Israeli political figures and to identify any Israeli officials who might be spying on Israel for the United States.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The Territory of Lies
Every other Friday, Pollard delivered briefcases full of classified intelligence information to a Washington, DC, apartment rented by a secretary who worked for the Israeli Embassy. He later described the Israelis’ needs as insatiable, and claimed he was assured that the items he provided were “known and appreciated by ‘the highest levels of the Israeli government.’ ” As “the urgency of their requests took on an almost infectious quality, my whole life seemed to be driven by a fear of overlooking something that might ultimately prove catastrophic,” he told a reporter during a jailhouse interview. “Literally everything I showed them set off alarm bells, particularly those things pertaining to nuclear and chemical warfare advances in the Arab world.”
Evidence of the Iraqi chemical warfare production facilities and the US transfer of weapons to Saddam Hussein—who had vowed to annihilate Israel—“shocked the hell out of them,” according to Pollard. “Everything I seemed to show them was like adding stones on top of a man desperately trying to remain afloat in shark-infested waters, and as each new revelation confronted them with seemingly insurmountable problems, another one arose to replace it. At times, it seemed as if I were becoming the traditional messenger of bad tidings, sowing the intelligence equivalents of the proverbial dragon’s teeth.”
Pollard and his handlers were especially anxious about the construction by Bechtel of the dual-use PC2 facility in Iraq that required waivers from the US Departments of Defense and State—agencies headed, respectively, by the former Bechtel executives Weinberger and Shultz. Pollard had firsthand knowledge that Saddam Hussein was building one of the world’s largest chemical warfare complexes. “What was I supposed to do?” he responded to an interviewer. He gave Israel satellite pictures of these factories, “together with U.S. intelligence assessments of what these factories were doing,” said a staff member from the Senate Intelligence Committee. At the same time, the Reagan administration was assuring the Israelis that there was no evidence that Iraq was building a poison-gas complex. Many of the US spy photos he supplied to Israel “were of a number of Iraqi chemical weapons manufacturing plants which the Reagan administration did not want to admit existed,” according to the Wall Street Journal.
Over the course of his short-lived spy career, Pollard reportedly provided Israel with an unknown number of classified documents. Pollard became so passionate about the urgency of the cause that he increased his document retrieval, letting down his guard and drawing attention from coworkers. At one point, he filled five suitcases with secret documents and spent four hours brazenly carrying them from his office to the car, with a NOSIC security guard helping him with the door. “Jay laughed about how easily he had sneaked the material past the lax security,” CBS war correspondent Kurt Lohbeck wrote. Eventually, though, an Anti-Terrorist Alert Center (ATAC) officer reported Pollard’s suspicious behavior, and the FBI opened a criminal investigation.
On November 21, 1985, Pollard sensed that his capture was imminent. Since his Israeli handlers had assured him repeatedly that they would protect him if his spy services were detected, he drove his green Ford Mustang to the Israeli Embassy in Washington to seek asylum. “Wiping away beaded perspiration from his forehead, and speaking at a fast pace, Jonathan spilled out his plight in both English and Hebrew,” telling the guards he was a spy who sought the “Law of Return,” which automatically grants Israeli citizenship to Jews. But as an undercover FBI surveillance team watched from outside the gates, embassy guards refused to let him enter. A guard yelled, “You must leave!” and shoved him toward his parked car off the premises—where diplomatic sanctuary did not extend. Pollard was in his car only a few minutes before US federal agents ordered him to “get out” and arrested him. Later revelations would show that Pollard’s own handlers, including Eitan, had abandoned him in order to avoid “headlines” that would create problems for the Israelis, as Eitan admitted nearly thirty years later. In fact, it was Eitan himself who, in an encoded phone call with the Israeli Embassy, ordered him thrown out of the compound.
A lover of spy novels, Pollard “told his parents that if they wanted to understand his mission, they should watch the Robert Redford thriller Three Days of the Condor.” As part of his guilty plea and relinquishment of his right to a fair trial—and in exchange for a guarantee that the prosecution would not seek a life sentence—Pollard agreed to cooperate with government investigators. His testimony was deemed accurate and was corroborated by polygraphs. But when it came time for sentencing, Prosecutor Joseph DiGenova gave Weinberger the opportunity to “deliver the knockout punch.” In a forty-six-page classified ex parte memorandum that Weinberger submitted to the sentencing judge, he wrote that it was difficult “to conceive of a greater harm to national security” than that caused by Pollard. He compared the case to the infamous 1950s spy case in which American Jewish citizens Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for passing information to the Soviet Union, and implored the court to impose “severe punishment” that reflected the “magnitude of the treason committed”—despite the fact that Pollard was never charged with treason.
Shultz did his part as well to insure that Pollard would face a long prison term. “As secretary of state, Shultz handled some of the earliest high-level contacts with the Israelis when the case first broke,” reported Gil Hoffman in the Jerusalem Post. “According to the . . . Eban Report by the Knesset committee that investigated the Pollard affair, Shultz requested and secured from then prime minister Shimon Peres a commitment to return the documents that Pollard had provided to Israel. These documents were then used by the Americans to indict Pollard, and served as the only evidence against him.”
In a federal plea deal, Pollard had been promised to have his sentence commuted to time already served in exchange for cooperating with the US government. So the life sentence that he received a year and a half after his arrest shocked him, his family, and his dozens of supporters. On a cold and overcast day, in the crowded Washington, DC, courtroom, Pollard embraced his wife so tightly and for so long that they had to be separated by federal marshals. Guards removed the portly thirty-two-year-old Texas native, who had once been “a slender child with an inquisitive mind”—a “mama’s boy” who had graduated from Stanford University with a degree in political science and was then rejected for a fellowship with the CIA because he admitted using marijuana. Pollard began his life sentence in a ward for the criminally insane—a freezing cell without a mattress, where he heard inhuman screams that “sounded like something straight out of Dante’s Inferno”—and then, for the next five years, spent twenty-three hours a day in solitary confinement. He would spend subsequent decades at the Federal Correctional Institutions in Marion, Illinois, and, ultimately, at Butner, North Carolina. “I would rather spend the rest of my life in jail than mourn for thousands of Israelis who died as a result of my cowardice,” Pollard described his devotion to the cause.
What became known as the Pollard affair—the epithet meant to be analogous with the historic Dreyfus affair, in which a French officer of Jewish descent was wrongly convicted of treason—inevitably divided the American Jewish community between those who felt America came first and those who saw their primary allegiance to Israel. The chasm prompted what one writer called “Jews judging Jews.” Pollard, as one Israeli put it, was the “American counterpart of Émile Zola . . . who shouted the famous words, ‘J’accuse.’ ”
Apparently feeling that even a life sentence without the possibility of parole was too lenient for Pollard, Weinberger told the Israeli ambassador to the United States that the spy “should have been shot.” His memo sabotaged Pollard’s plea bargain agreement with the government, prompting widespread speculation in both the United States and Israel about Weinberger’s motives. Pollard’s side felt the animus seemed too deep-seated and hardened to be attributed solely to Weinberger’s alleged anti-Semitism, believing that he was protecting exposure of both Bechtel’s corporate interests in the Arab world as well as Reagan’s erratic Middle East foreign policy.
The Weinberger memo was not shared with Pollard’s attorneys, and would remain sealed and classified over the next twenty-eight years under the auspices of national security. Pollard family members long contended that Weinberger was outraged that Pollard had told the Israelis about Bechtel’s PC2 plant in Iraq, which, if generally known, would have caused embarrassment not only to Bechtel and Weinberger but also to the Reagan administration, which was arming Iraq while publicly claiming neutrality. The pictures and intelligence assessments about the Bechtel PC2 plant in Iraq “contradicted what the US government was officially telling Israel. So the Israelis were coming to America, and in official meetings were calling people like Weinberger liars, which, of course, these officials did not appreciate,” according to a Senate staffer.
Such revelations might have been motivation enough for Weinberger’s obsession with the case. But Bechtel’s PC2 plant was only one of many secrets in the convoluted crossroads where Pollard, Weinberger, Bechtel, and Israel intersected during what the CIA called that “Year of the Spy.” While working for Israel, Pollard had stumbled into the middle of Reagan’s global covert wars being waged from the office of Vice President Bush. While Pollard was sleuthing in Bush’s covert world, the vice president was joining Weinberger,
Shultz, Henry Kissinger, and John McCone at Bohemian Grove as guests of the Bechtels.
Pollard’s job with the Naval Intelligence Anti-Terrorism Unit was to monitor the maritime movements of suspected arms shipments to terrorists. It was in that capacity that in the summer of 1984 he had detected an unusual series of vessels traveling back and forth from Greece to Yemen, where the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) had a base. Pollard tipped off the Israelis, who tipped off the Greeks, who then apprehended a ship loaded with arms for the PLO. Those arms, according to the Pollard camp, were to be exchanged for American hostages being held in Lebanon by Islamic terrorists.
Pollard had accidentally “busted the most secret White House operation of modern times,” as one account put it. “Neither Pollard nor the government of Israel was aware that they had smashed George Bush’s first shipment of arms to Iran.” If the 1984 Yemen-bound ship detected by Pollard was indeed part of what would become known as the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scheme, as the Pollard defenders claim, the beginning date of that illegal covert operation was a full year earlier than has been fixed by congressional investigators. Although Pollard didn’t yet know it, he had inadvertently detected, and might have exposed, what would become one of the most sensational foreign policy scandals of the twentieth century.
“Joseph DiGenova—the U.S. attorney who promised he would not seek life imprisonment for Pollard—has invoked the old canard of dual loyalty by Jews who support Israel,” wrote Alan M. Dershowitz, the controversial Harvard law professor who became one of Pollard’s most steadfast allies. “He has argued that a Jew who spies for Israel should receive a higher sentence than a non-Jew who spied for the former Soviet Union . . . This sort of soft-core anti-Semitism has resulted in the double standard being applied to Jews and non-Jews who work for American intelligence agencies.”
