Pollard

U.S. Spies: Israeli Agent Jonathan Pollard Could Spill More Secrets—Even After 30 Years Behind Bars

U.S. spies don’t easily forgive, and they don’t forget.

Current and former intelligence officials hold Pollard in especially strong contempt to this day, both for the scale of his treachery and the acute risk it posed to U.S. interests at the time.

In recent statements to the Parole Commission, the U.S. government has said that “the breadth and scope of the classified information that [Pollard] sold to the Israelis was the greatest compromise of U.S. security to that date” and included “thousands of Top Secret documents to Israeli agents which also threatened U.S. relations in the Middle East among the Arab countries.”

“I think what he did is exceeded only by our friend Edward Snowden,” retired Adm. Thomas Brooks, the former director of naval intelligence, said in an interview in 2014, when Pollard’s parole seemed possible.

Pollard has said he only intended to help Israel defend itself by providing security information that the U.S. was unwilling to share with its key Middle East ally.