Jonathan Pollard Part I

 

Jonathan Jay Pollard (born August 7, 1954) is an American former intelligence analyst who was jailed for spying for Israel.

In 1984, Pollard sold numerous state secrets, including the National Security Agency's ten-volume manual on how the U.S. gathers its signal intelligence, and disclosed the names of thousands of people who had cooperated with U.S. intelligence agencies. He was apprehended in 1985, and in subsequent proceedings agreed to a plea deal, pleaded guilty to spying for and providing top-secret classified information to Israel. Pollard admitted shopping his services—successfully, in some cases—to other countries. In 1987, he was sentenced to life in prison for violations of the Espionage Act.

The Israeli government acknowledged a portion of its role in Pollard's espionage in 1987, and issued a formal apology to the U.S., but did not admit to paying him until 1998. Over the course of his imprisonment, Israeli officials, US-Israeli activist groups and some US politicians continually lobbied for a reduction or commutation of his sentence. In defense of his actions, Pollard said the American intelligence establishment collectively endangered Israel's security by withholding crucial information.

Opposing any form of clemency for Pollard were many active and retired U.S. officials, including Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, former CIA director George Tenet; several former U.S. Secretaries of Defense; a bi-partisan group of U.S. congressional leaders; and members of the U.S. intelligence community. They maintained that the damage to U.S. national security due to Pollard's espionage was much more severe, wide-ranging, and enduring than acknowledged publicly.

Though Pollard argued that he only supplied Israel with information critical to its security, opponents stated that he had no way of knowing what the Israelis had received through legitimate exchanges, and that much of the data he compromised had nothing to do with Israeli security. Pollard revealed aspects of the U.S. intelligence gathering process, its "sources and methods". In 1995, while imprisoned, he was granted Israeli citizenship.

Pollard was released from prison on November 20, 2015, in accordance with federal guidelines at the time of his sentencing. On November 20, 2020, his parole expired and all restrictions were eliminated. On December 30, 2020, Pollard and his second wife relocated to Israel and settled in Jerusalem.

Since relocating to Israel, Pollard has endorsed Itamar Ben-Gvir and advocated a population transfer to relocate Gaza's Palestinians to Ireland.

Early 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.

At an early age, Pollard became aware of the horrific toll the Holocaust had taken on his mother's family, the Kleins (Kahns) from Vilna in Lithuania, and shortly before his bar mitzvah, he asked his parents to visit the Nazi death camps. Pollard's family made a special effort to instill a sense of Jewish identity in their children, which included devotion to Jewish supremacy.

Pollard grew up with what he termed a "racial obligation" to Israel, and made his first visit to Israel in 1970, as part of a science program visiting the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot. While there, he was hospitalized after a fight with another student. One Weizmann scientist remembered Pollard as leaving behind "a reputation of being a troublemaker".

After completing high school, Pollard attended Stanford University, where he completed a degree in political science in 1976. While there, he is remembered by several of his acquaintances as having boasted that he was a dual citizen of the United States and Israel, claiming 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's future wife, Anne Henderson (born 1960), relocated to Washington, D.C., during the autumn of 1978 to live with her (recently divorced) father, Bernard Henderson. During the summer of 1981, she moved into a house on Capitol Hill with two other women and, through a friend of one of her roommates, she first met Pollard. He later said he had fallen in love during their first meeting—they were "an inseparable couple" by November 1981, and in June 1982, when her Capitol Hill lease expired, she moved into Pollard's apartment in Arlington, Virginia. In December 1982, the couple moved into downtown Washington, D.C., to a two-bedroom apartment at 1733 20th Street NW, near Dupont Circle. They married on August 9, 1985; more than a year after Pollard began spying for Israel, in a civil ceremony in Venice, Italy. At the time of their arrest, in November 1985, they were paying US$750 (equivalent to $2,193 in 2024) per month in rent.

Early career

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.

He fared better with the Navy, and on September 19, 1979, he was hired by the Navy Field Operational Intelligence Office (NFOIO), an office of the Naval Intelligence Command (NIC). As an intelligence specialist, he was to work on Soviet issues at the Navy Ocean Surveillance Information Center (NOSIC), a department of NFOIO. A background check was required to receive the necessary security clearances, but no polygraph test. In addition to a Top Secret clearance, a more stringent 'Sensitive Compartmented Information' (SCI) clearance was required. The Navy asked for but was denied information from the CIA regarding Pollard, including the results of their pre-employment polygraph test revealing Pollard's excessive drug use.

Pollard was given temporary non-SCI security clearances pending completion of his background check, which was normal for new hires at the time. He was assigned to temporary duty at another NIC Department, the Naval Intelligence Support Center (NISC) Surface Ships Division, where he could work on tasks that did not require SCI clearance. NOSIC's current operations facility and the NISC were co-located in Suitland, Maryland.

Two months after Pollard was hired, he approached the technical director of NOSIC, Richard Haver, and offered to start a back-channel operation with the South African intelligence service. He also lied about his father being involved with CIA operations in South Africa. Haver became wary of Pollard and requested that he be terminated. However, Haver's boss believed that Pollard's supposed connection with South African intelligence could be useful, and he reassigned him to a Navy human intelligence (HUMINT) operation, Task Force 168 (TF-168). This office was within Naval Intelligence Command (NIC), the headquarters for Navy intelligence operations (located in a separate building, but still within the Suitland Federal Center complex.) It was later discovered that Pollard had lied repeatedly during the vetting process for this position: he denied illegal drug use, claimed his father had been a CIA operative, misrepresented his language abilities and his educational achievements, and claimed to have applied for a commission as officer in the Naval Reserve. A month later Pollard received his SCI clearances and was transferred from NISC to TF-168.

While transferring to his new job at TF-168, Pollard again initiated a meeting with someone far up the chain of command, this time with Admiral Sumner Shapiro, Commander, Naval Intelligence Command (CNIC), about an idea he had for TF-168 and South Africa. (The TF-168 group had passed on his ideas.) After the meeting, Shapiro immediately ordered that Pollard's security clearances be revoked and that he be reassigned to a non-sensitive position. According to The Washington Post, Shapiro dismissed Pollard as a "kook", saying later, "I wish the hell I'd fired him".

Because of the job transfer, Shapiro's order to remove Pollard's security clearances was neglected. However, Shapiro's office followed up with a request to TF-168 that Pollard be investigated by the CIA. The CIA found Pollard to be a risk and recommended that he not be used in any intelligence collection operation. A subsequent polygraph test was inconclusive, although it did prompt Pollard to admit to making false statements to his superiors, prior drug use, and having unauthorized contacts with representatives of foreign governments. The special agent administering the test felt that Pollard, who at times "began shouting and shaking and making gagging sounds as if he were going to vomit", was feigning illness to invalidate the test. He recommended against Pollard's being granted access to highly classified information. Pollard was also required to be evaluated by a psychiatrist.

Pollard's clearance was reduced to Secret. He subsequently filed a grievance and threatened lawsuits to recover his SCI clearance. While awaiting his grievance to be addressed, he worked on less sensitive material and began receiving excellent performance reviews. In 1982, after the psychiatrist concluded Pollard had no mental illness, Pollard's clearance was upgraded to SCI. 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.

Espionage

Soon after Pollard began working at NIC/TF-168, he met Aviem Sella, a combat veteran of the Israeli Air Force. At the time, Sella was on leave from his position as a colonel to gain a master's degree in computer science as a graduate student at New York University. Pollard told Sella that he worked for U.S. naval intelligence, told him about specific incidents where U.S. intelligence was withholding information from Israel, and offered to work as a spy. Though Sella had wondered whether Pollard was part of an FBI operation to recruit an Israeli, he eventually believed him. Sella telephoned his air-force intelligence commander in Tel Aviv for further instructions, and the call was switched to the Air Force chief of staff. Sella was ordered to develop a contact with Pollard, but to be careful. He was warned that either the Americans were offering a "dangle" in order to root out foreign intelligence operations, or if this was a genuine spy, Sella would have to pay careful attention to his work.

Within a few days, in June 1984, Pollard started passing classified information to Sella. He was paid $10,000 cash and given a very expensive diamond and sapphire ring, which Pollard later offered to his girlfriend, Anne Henderson, when proposing to her. Pollard was paid well by the Israelis: he received a salary that eventually reached $2,500 (equivalent to $7,309 in 2024) a month, and tens of thousands of dollars in cash disbursements for hotels, meals, and jewelry. In his pre-sentencing statement to Judge Robinson, Pollard said the money was a benefit that was forced on him. "I did accept money for my services", he acknowledged, but only "as a reflection of how well I was doing my job". He said that he had later told his controller, Rafi Eitan, a long-time spy who at the time headed Lekem, a scientific-intelligence unit in Israel, that, "I not only intended to repay all the money I'd received, but, also, was going to establish a chair at the Israeli General Staff's Intelligence Training Center outside Tel Aviv".

Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) investigator Ronald Olive has alleged that Pollard passed classified information to South Africa, and attempted, through a third party, to sell classified information to Pakistan on multiple occasions. Pollard also stole classified documents related to China on behalf of his wife, who used the information to advance her personal business interests. She kept these secret materials in the house, where investigating authorities discovered them when Pollard's espionage activity was revealed.

During Pollard's trial, the U.S. government's memorandum in aid of sentencing challenged the "defendant's claim that he was motivated by altruism rather than greed". The government said that Pollard had "disclosed classified information in anticipation of financial gain" in other instances:

The government's investigation has revealed that defendant provided to certain of his acquaintances U.S. classified documents which defendant obtained through U.S. Navy sources. The classified documents which defendant disclosed to two such acquaintances, both of whom are professional investment advisers, contained classified economic and political analyses which defendant believed would help his acquaintances render investment advice to their clients ... Defendant acknowledged that, although he was not paid for his unauthorized disclosures of classified information to the above-mentioned acquaintances, he hoped to be rewarded ultimately through business opportunities that these individuals could arrange for defendant when he eventually left his position with the U.S. Navy. In fact, defendant was involved in an ongoing business venture with two of these acquaintances at the time he provided the classified information to them...

During the course of the Pollard trial, Australian authorities reported the disclosure of classified American documents by Pollard to a Royal Australian Navy officer who had been engaged in a personnel-exchange naval-liaison program between the U.S. and Australia. The Australian officer, alarmed by Pollard's repeated disclosure to him of data caveated No Foreign Access Allowed, reported the indiscretions to his chain of command. It recalled the officer from his position in the U.S., fearing that the disclosures might be part of a "CIA ruse". Confronted with this accusation after entering his plea, Pollard admitted only to passing a single classified document to the Australian; later, he changed his story, and claimed that his superiors ordered him to share information with the Australians.

As of 2014, the full extent of the information Pollard passed to Israel has still not been officially revealed. Press reports cited a secret 46-page memorandum, which Pollard and his attorneys were allowed to view. They were provided to the judge by Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, who described Pollard's spying as including, among other things, obtaining and copying the latest version of Radio-Signal Notations (RASIN), a 10-volume manual comprehensively detailing America's global electronic surveillance network.

After Pollard's release, the former deputy chief of the Mossad Ram Ben Barak publicly regretted Pollard, saying that the recruitment and operation "were unknown by the intelligence leadership and unauthorized" with the resultant damage to the US-Israeli relationship far outweighing the value of the intelligence Pollard provided. "Our entire relationship with the U.S. deteriorated because of this. People lost jobs over it", according to Barak. "It made for years and years of suspicion, with Americans suspecting he wasn't the only one, and feeling that they hadn't gotten the necessary explanations. They didn't believe it wasn't authorized. It caused huge, huge damage. They saw it as a betrayal of them."

Capture

Pollard's espionage was nearly revealed in 1984 when a department chief noted a report on Soviet military equipment and questioned why it was germane to the office. Pollard, to whom the report was traced, was asked about it, and he replied that he had been working on terrorist networks, which was accepted as valid. In 1985, a co-worker anonymously reported Pollard's removal of classified material from the NIC. The coworker noted that Pollard did not seem to be taking the material to any known appropriate destination, such as other intelligence agencies in the area. Although Pollard was authorized to transport documents and the coworker said the documents were wrapped properly, it appeared unusual that Pollard would be transporting documents on a Friday afternoon when there was little happening and people seemed to be focused on an upcoming long weekend. Ultimately, that report was not acted upon as it was felt it occurred within business hours and Pollard had business being in other offices. In another instance Pollard's direct superior, having to complete extra work at the office on a Saturday, had walked by Pollard's desk and noticed unsecured classified material. Taking the initiative to secure it, the supervisor glanced over it and saw it was unrelated to antiterrorism matters in the Caribbean, with which the section was concerned. Looking at more unrelated documents, the supervisor believed foreign intelligence might be involved, but was unable to determine which nation might be interested.

Pollard was stopped and questioned by FBI agents about a week later while removing classified material from his work premises. He explained that he was taking it to another analyst at a different agency for a consultation. His story was checked and found to be false. Pollard requested a telephone call to his wife to tell her where he was. As the interview was voluntary, the investigators had no choice but to grant the request. During the call to Anne, Pollard used the code word "cactus", signaling that he was in trouble, and that she should remove all classified material from their home. She attempted to do this, enlisting the help of a neighbor.

Pollard later agreed to a search of his home, which found the few documents which Anne had missed. At this time, the FBI decided to cede the case to Pollard's supervisors, since they had uncovered only mishandling of documents, with no proof that Pollard was passing classified information. The case broke wide open a few days later, when Pollard was asked by his superiors to take a polygraph test. Instead, he admitted to passing documents illegally, without mentioning Israel. The FBI again became involved. A brief time later, Pollard's neighbor, a naval officer, became concerned about safeguarding the 70-pound (32 kg) suitcase full of highly classified material that Anne had given him, and began telephoning around the military intelligence community asking for advice. He cooperated fully with the investigation and was never charged with any crime.

After his partial confession, Pollard was surveilled, but not taken into custody. On November 21, 1985, he and his wife tried to gain asylum at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., but they were ordered to leave by Israeli guards. FBI agents arrested Pollard as soon as he left embassy property. His handler, Rafi Eitan, stated in a 2014 interview that Pollard had been warned that he was uncovered and that he had given him a prearranged signal to leave the United States, but instead Pollard "wandered around for three days with them following him. He had many opportunities to do what I told him and he didn't do it." Eitan claimed that he had given the order to evict Pollard from the embassy.

After Pollard's arrest, Anne evaded an FBI agent who was following her, met Sella at a restaurant, and told him of her husband's arrest. As a result, three Israeli diplomatic personnel involved in the operation were also informed: science attachés Yosef Yagur and Ilan Ravid, and embassy secretary Irit Erb. LAKAM had not foreseen this turn of events nor crafted escape plans, and they were told to flee immediately. The apartment where the documents stolen by Pollard were kept and copied was cleared out, and all four immediately fled Washington. Sella and his wife took a train to New York and caught a flight to London, Yagur fled to Canada, Erb to Mexico, and Ravid to Miami, from where they caught connecting flights to Israel. All were out of the United States in 24 hours. Anne was arrested the next day, November 22, 1985.

Investigation

Prior to Pollard's plea bargain, the U.S. government began preparing a multi-count criminal indictment against him, which included drug offences and tax fraud along with espionage. The government alleged that Pollard used classified documents to unsuccessfully broker an arms deal with the governments of South Africa, Argentina, and Taiwan. FBI investigators also determined that Pollard met with three Pakistanis and an Iranian foreigner in an attempt to broker arms in 1985. Pollard eventually cooperated with investigators in exchange for a plea agreement for leniency for himself and his wife. Israel said initially that Pollard worked for an unauthorized rogue operation, which they maintained for more than ten years. They finally agreed to cooperate with the investigation in exchange for immunity for the Israelis involved.

When asked to return the stolen material, the Israelis reportedly supplied only a few dozen less sensitive documents. At the time, the Americans knew that Pollard had passed tens of thousands of documents.

The Israelis created a schedule designed to wear the American investigators down, including many hours per day of commuting in blacked-out buses on rough roads, and frequent switching of buses, leaving them without adequate time to sleep, and preventing them from sleeping on the commute. The identity of Pollard's original handler, Sella, was withheld. All questions had to be translated into Hebrew and answered in Hebrew, and then translated back into English, even though all the parties spoke perfect English. The Commander Jerry Agee remembers that, even as he departed the airport, airport security informed him that "you will never be coming back here again". After his return to the US, Agee found various items had been stolen from his luggage. The abuse came not only from the guards and officials, but also the Israeli media.

Sella was eventually indicted on three counts of espionage by a United States court. Israel refused to allow Sella to be interviewed unless he was granted immunity. The United States refused because of Israel's previous failure to cooperate as promised. Israel refused to extradite Sella, instead giving him commands of Tel Nof Airbase. The U.S. Congress responded by threatening to cut aid to Israel, at which point Sella voluntarily stepped down to defuse tensions.

During the morning of January 20, 2021, the last half-day of Donald Trump's first presidential term, the White House announced that Trump had granted a full pardon to Sella. The announcement stated that the State of Israel had requested the pardon and had issued a full and unequivocal apology. The announcement also stated that Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer, United States ambassador to Israel David Friedman and Miriam Adelson had endorsed Sella's request for clemency.

Trial

Pollard's plea discussions with the government sought both to avoid a life sentence for him and to allow Anne Pollard to plead to lesser charges, which the government was otherwise unwilling to let her do. The government, however, did eventually offer Anne Pollard a plea agreement provided that Jonathan Pollard assist the government in its damage assessment. As part of this process, he agreed to polygraph examinations and interviews with FBI agents and Department of Justice attorneys over a period of several months. During late May 1986, the government offered him a plea agreement, which he accepted. By the terms of that agreement, Pollard was required to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to deliver national defense information to a foreign government, which had a maximum prison term of life, and to cooperate fully with the government's ongoing investigation. He promised not to disseminate any information concerning his crimes or his case, or to speak publicly about any classified information, without first receiving permission from the director of naval intelligence. He further agreed that failure of Anne Pollard to obey the terms of her agreement entitled the government to void his agreement, and vice versa. In return for Pollard's plea, the government promised not to charge him with additional crimes.

Three weeks before Pollard's sentencing, Wolf Blitzer, at the time a Jerusalem Post correspondent, performed a jail-cell interview with Pollard. The interview formed the basis of Blitzer's newspaper article, which was also printed in The Washington Post on February 15, 1987, under the headline "Pollard: Not A Bumbler, but Israel's Master Spy". Pollard told Blitzer about some of the information he provided the Israelis: reconnaissance satellite photography of Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) headquarters in Tunisia, which was used for Operation Wooden Leg; specific capabilities of Libya's air defenses; and "the pick of U.S. intelligence about Arab and Islamic conventional and unconventional military activity, from Morocco to Pakistan and every country in between. This included both 'friendly' and 'unfriendly' Arab countries." Prosecutor Joseph diGenova presented the Blitzer prison interview as evidence in his sentencing memorandum that Pollard had engaged in "unauthorized disclosure of classified information".

Prior to sentencing, Pollard and his wife Anne gave further defiant media interviews in which they defended their spying and attempted to rally Jewish Americans to their cause, diGenova said. In a 60 Minutes interview from prison, Anne said, "I feel my husband and I did what we were expected to do, and what our moral obligation was as Jews, what our moral obligation was as human beings, and I have no regrets about that".

On June 4, 1986, Pollard pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to deliver national defense information to a foreign government. Prior to sentencing, speaking on his own behalf, Pollard stated that while his motives "may have been well meaning, they cannot, under any stretch of the imagination, excuse or justify the violation of the law, particularly one that involves the trust of government ... I broke trust, ruined and brought disgrace to my family." He admitted and apologized for taking money from the Israeli government in exchange for classified information. Anne Pollard, in her own statement, stated that she did "what at the time I believed to be correct" in helping her husband and attempting to conceal stolen documents, adding, "And I can't say that I would never help him again. However, I would look for different routes or different ways".

The prosecution answered these statements by saying that the Pollards had continued to violate numerous nondisclosure agreements even as the trial was occurring. The prosecutor, Joseph E. diGenova noted one in particular, which had been signed in June 1986, alluding to Pollard's interview with Wolf Blitzer. The prosecutor concluded:

[I]n combination with the breadth of this man's knowledge, the depth of his memory, and the complete lack of honor that he has demonstrated in these proceedings, I suggest to you, your honor, he is a very dangerous man.

"The government did something highly suspicious by forgetting to send anyone to monitor these interviews", Esther Pollard said. "Later, at sentencing, the prosecutor successfully inflamed the judge against Jonathan by falsely claiming that not only had the interviews been secretly arranged behind their backs, but that Jonathan had also disclosed highly classified material to Blitzer that compromised the intelligence community's sources and methods."

Sentencing and incarceration

The Pollards' sentencing occurred on March 4, 1987. While the prosecutor, in compliance with the plea agreement, recommended that Pollard receive "only a substantial number of years in prison", Judge Aubrey Robinson Jr. was not obliged to follow the recommendation. Noting that Pollard had violated multiple conditions of the plea agreement, he imposed a life sentence on the basis of a classified damage-assessment memorandum submitted by Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger.

Pollard was then moved from FCC Petersburg in Virginia, where he had been held since 1986, to a federal prison hospital in Springfield, Missouri, to undergo a battery of mental health tests. In June 1988, he was transferred to USP Marion and in 1993 to FCI Butner Medium at the Butner Federal Correction Complex in North Carolina. In May 1991, Pollard asked Avi Weiss to be his personal rabbi. Israeli Chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu was also an advocate of Pollard, and campaigned for his release from prison.

Anne Pollard was sentenced to five years, but was paroled after three and a half years due to health problems. Pollard filed for divorce after Anne's release. While he reportedly said that he expected to be jailed for the remainder of his life, and did not want Anne to be bound to him, Anne later told a reporter that the divorce papers were served with no warning or explanation of any kind.

After finalization of his divorce from Anne, Pollard allegedly married Esther "Elaine" Zeitz, a Canadian teacher and activist based in Toronto who had organized a campaign for his release. In 1996, she initiated a public hunger strike, but ended it 19 days later after meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who pledged to increase his efforts to secure Pollard's release. Media sources and Pollard family members have questioned whether Pollard and Zeitz ever legally wed. Prison officials told Ha'aretz that there is no record of a marriage ceremony having been requested or performed. After completing her parole, Anne Pollard immigrated to Israel, where she lived in Tel Aviv on a government stipend supplemented by occasional private donations.

Appeals

In 1989, Pollard's attorneys filed a motion for withdrawal of his guilty plea and trial by jury due to the government's failure to abide by terms of the plea agreement. The motion was denied. An appeals court affirmed the denial. Several years later, with a different attorney, Pollard filed a petition for habeas corpus. A panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled two-to-one to deny Pollard's petition, due primarily to the failure of Pollard's original attorneys to file his appeal in a timely manner. Judge Stephen F. Williams dissented, "because the government's breach of the plea agreement was a fundamental miscarriage of justice requiring relief under 28 U.S.C. § 2255".

In July 2005, Pollard again filed a motion for a new trial, this time on the grounds of ineffective assistance of counsel. He also sought access to classified documents pertinent to his new lawyers' efforts in preparing a clemency petition. The Court of Appeals rejected both arguments. During February 2006, his attorneys filed a petition for certiorari with the United States Supreme Court regarding access to the classified documents. They argued that the separation of powers doctrine is a flexible doctrine that does not dictate the complete separation of the three branches of Government from one another. The brief claimed that the Court of Appeals violated this principle in asserting sua sponte that the judiciary has no jurisdiction over the classified documents due to the fact that access was for the ultimate purpose of clemency, an executive function. The Supreme Court denied the cert petition in March 2006, ruling that the president's clemency power would be wholly unaffected by successor counsel's access to the classified documents, and that the classified documents were sealed by a protective order, a judicial procedure.

Israeli efforts to secure Pollard's release

In 1988, Israel proposed a three-way exchange, wherein Pollard and his wife would be released and deported to Israel, Israel would release Soviet spy Marcus Klingberg, and the USSR would exercise its influence with Syria and Iran to release American hostages held there by Syrian- and Iranian-sponsored terrorist groups.

In 1990, Israel reportedly considered offering to release Yosef Amit, an Israeli military intelligence officer serving a 12-year sentence for spying for the United States and another NATO power, in exchange for Pollard. Sources conflict on the outcome: according to one, Amit made it known that he had no wish to be exchanged. By another account, Israeli officials vetoed the idea, fearing that it would only cause more anger in the United States. (Amit served his sentence and was released in 1993.)

During the 1990s former University of Notre Dame president Theodore Hesburgh, a family friend of Pollard's, attempted to broker a deal whereby Pollard would be released, "be banished to Israel", and would renounce his U.S. citizenship. Mike Royko of the Chicago Tribune wrote columns in February 1994 endorsing the idea. White House officials expressed little enthusiasm for Hesburgh's plan, and he ceased further efforts.

During 1995, Israel again attempted to arrange a three-way exchange, this time involving American spies imprisoned in Russia: Israel would release Klingberg, the Russians would release U.S. agents who had remained in prison since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the United States would then free Pollard.

Israel's official stance until 1998 was that Pollard worked for an unauthorized rogue organization. During May of that year, Premier Netanyahu admitted that Pollard had in fact been an Israeli agent, answering directly to high-ranking officials of Lekem, the Israeli Bureau for Scientific Relations. The Israeli government paid at least two of the attorneys—Richard A. Hibey and Hamilton Philip Fox III—working for his release.

During campaigning leading up to the 1999 Israeli general election, Netanyahu and his challenger Ehud Barak disputed in the media over which had been more supportive of Pollard. In 2002, Netanyahu visited Pollard in prison. In 2007 he pledged that, if re-elected Premier, he would obtain Pollard's release.

In September 2009, Israeli State Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss released a report stating that repeated petitions for Pollard's release during a 20-year period had been rebuffed by the American government. The Pollard family criticized the report, terming it ”whitewash” of the Israeli government’s activities, although they agreed with its assertion that Pollard had been denied due legal process.

In June 2011, 70 members of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, endorsed the Pollard family's request that President Obama allow Pollard to visit his ailing father, Morris. When Morris died soon afterward, Netanyahu announced Israel's official endorsement for Pollard's request to attend his father's funeral. Both requests were denied.

In November 2014, Rafi Eitan, who directed Lekem from 1981 until its dissolution in 1986, admitted that he knew in advance of Pollard's impending arrest in 1985 and alerted then-Premier Shimon Peres and Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Eitan says it was his decision to refuse Pollard's request for asylum in the Israeli Embassy. When asked if Israeli officials were aware of Pollard's espionage activities, he replied, "Of course".