A Look Back At The Convicted Spy Jonathan Pollard: My Piece On The Insider Threat - Lessons Learned From The Jonathan Pollard Case

A while back I interviewed former Ronald J. Olive, a former NCIS special agent who worked with and later arrested and interrogated Jonathan Pollard.

You can read my Counterterrorism magazine piece on the Jonathan Pollard case below:

 

Good Question: Why Is The U.S. Releasing Israeli Spy Jonathan Pollard?

Michael Weiss at the Daily Beast asks why the notorious convicted spy and oddball is being released from prison.

“It is difficult for me, even in the so-called ‘year of the spy,’ to conceive of a greater harm to the national security than that caused by the defendant in view of the breadth, the critical importance to the U.S., and the high sensitivity of the information he sold to Israel.”

Thus spake U.S. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger in 1986 in a still largely classified declaration, more or less sealing the life sentence handed down to Jonathan Pollard, a former analyst at the U.S. Navy’s Anti-Terrorist Alert Center who over a 17-month period in the mid-1980s passed along enough classified intelligence to Israel to fill, by his own admission, a 6x6x10-foot room.

After decades of trying in vain to get out of jail, Pollard will be released on November 20 after serving 29 years in a federal prison. The timing, coming so soon after the U.S. helped ink an arms control agreement with Iran, has raised eyebrows not least because anonymous U.S. officials told The Wall Street Journal last week that the Obama administration was planning to release Pollard as a salve to Israel to try and convince the Jewish state to tone down or abandon its fierce criticism of the Iran deal.

The administration has repeatedly denied that any such quid pro quo arrangement was being brokered and insisted that Pollard’s fate was entirely up to an independent parole board. “I haven’t even had a conversation about it,” Secretary of State John Kerry told reporters Tuesday.

However, while it’s true that Pollard was in any event due for a mandatory parole hearing this year under the terms of his sentence, the Journal scoop proved uncannily prescient.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/29/why-is-the-u-s-releasing-israeli-spy-jonathan-pollard.html

You can also read an earlier post on Pollard via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2015/07/convicted-spy-jonathan-pollard-could-be.html

Note: The above photo of Jonathan Pollard was released by the U.S. Navy.

Bad Idea: Convicted Spy Jonathan Pollard Could Be Freed Soon After Nearly 30 Years In Prison.

Convicted spy Jonathan Pollard may soon be released from prison, U.S. News & World Reports reports.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Jonathan Pollard, an American who was convicted of spying for Israel in a sensational espionage case that inflamed public sentiment, could be released from federal prison within months, his lawyer and the Justice Department said Friday.

Pollard becomes eligible for parole in November, on the 30th anniversary of his arrest on charges of selling classified information to Israel. He will be presumptively eligible for release unless the U.S. Parole Commission determines that he has a record of bad behavior in prison or is likely to commit new crimes.

U.S. officials say they're unlikely to oppose his parole. But the Justice Department says it expects Pollard to serve out his entire sentence. 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2015/07/24/convicted-spy-pollard-could-be-freed-from-prison-soon

You can also read my 1999 Philadelphia Inquirer piece on why Pollard should not be released from prison via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2014/04/dont-do-it-mr-president-my-philadelphia.html

And you can read my Counterrorism magazine piece on Ronald J. Olive, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) special agent who investigative Pollard via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2014/04/a-look-back-at-jonathan-pollard-spy-case.html