Such acts of disloyalty were therefore not as rare as one might have originally imagined. Morality does not exist in the world of intelligence. What is more, Israel was able to make serious breaches to its alliance with the US when its own interests commanded it. In 1967, during the Six Day War, Israeli forces did not hesitate to attack a US navy ship that was sailing too close to its shores: more than thirty sailors on board perished. However, most of these cases were classified and have not been pursued further. Besides, it was important to look after the Israeli ally who was much needed in the Middle East. This why the Pollard Affair was the most spectacular, mainly because it was made public.
There was definitely an American desire behind this disclosure of information. Having said that, the case was so big that it could not be kept quiet or hidden away like so many others. It is likely that in making the affair public, the Americans wanted to send some kind of warning to the Israelis. Furthermore, even within the government, not all minsters were on the same wavelength. If President Reagan was decidedly pro-Israel (it was under his presidency that several agreements promoting military cooperation were signed, with $3.5 billion donated to Israel every year), the same cannot be said for other members of the White House administration. For example, the Secretary of State for Defense, Caspar Weinberger, was certainly not pro-Israel. He was to play a big role in this case and one might even suggest that he was not a complete stranger to the revelations made in the press.
Jonathan Pollard was an employee of the US Naval Intelligence Service and thus under the command of Weinberger. Coming from a Jewish family that had settled in Indiana, the relative affluence of his family had allowed him to study at a good university. Yet he was a very strange character and had trouble separating truth from fiction. He was an inveterate liar and a fantasist, he even told his friends at Stamford University that he had links with Mossad or that he was the son of a former CIA agent.
The young man was obviously already obsessed with the secret services. More worryingly, he also had a serious drug addiction, with those who knew him well even arguing that it was cocaine. This meant he was someone who was not only not very unbalanced mentally, but also led a lot of people to be suspicious of him.
After university, Pollard tried to join the CIA but was rejected: his lie detector test was disastrous and he had clearly underestimated his drug problem. So Pollard turned to the navy, which also had an intelligence unit. Any investigation into his personal life had to be brief, if not botched, as his application was accepted. After all, maybe the recruiting officers felt that the subordinate analyst position he was offered would not give him access to any secret data.
Yet Pollard proved to be a very good analyst. After the terrible attack on the US Marine's building in Beirut, he was promoted and transferred to a new organisation that acted as a terrorism warning centre, close to Washington, which was answerable to the US Navy.
In 1984 he was promoted again and now looked at ‘threat analysis'. This meant that he had access to terrorism information deemed ‘classified' or ‘top secret', which came from all branches of the US intelligence network. It also allowed him to see the top secret databases of these organisations. Information that would go far beyond the strict framework of terrorism...
Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman
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How Pollard's American employers could ignore his strange behaviour and his boasts and his lies as a student remains a mystery. Pollard had unsuccessfully requested to join the CIA in 1977, two years before he joined the Navy. The DIS, the investigative department of the Ministry of Defence, made its routine background checks before enlisting him in the navy intelligence: they questioned his father as well as some former classmates from Fletcher High School. But the CIA did not provide the file that they had on Pollard, which concluded by saying that he was ‘an inveterate liar, a show off, a zealous Zionist and a drug addict'. In 1981, the Navy restricted his access to secret documents due to his psychiatric problems as evidenced by his bizarre behaviour. Pollard even claimed to have a friend in South African intelligence, but his bosses soon discovered this was a lie when the man in question came on an official visit to the US. They invited Pollard to see a psychiatrist, but he spent six months battling the administration and finally had the decision annulled on the grounds that they had no concrete evidence against him.
In 1984, during a party at the home of a Jewish businessman from New York, Pollard met a colonel in the Israeli Air Force, Aviem Sella. The meeting was certainly not a coincidence. Sella was a brilliant pilot who had come to the US to study computer science. Pollard was very impressed with him, a man who had had countless military exploits in Israel. There was now a real-life hero in front of him! Yet the hero was to make him a spy: Sella, the brilliant Israeli officer, was also occasionally linked to his country's secret services. The Israelis had been keeping an eye on Pollard for many years, and now believed the time was right to recruit him.
The service behind this endeavour was at that time relatively unknown: the Lekem was a secret Israeli intelligence organisation that mainly dealt with gathering scientific information. It had been created on the initiative of Shimon Peres while he had been Defence Minister, and played
