Thirty-seven years after working for Israel, Jonathan Pollard, who spied for Israel from the heart of American intelligence, tells his story for the first time as a free man in a special interview to Israel Hayom, to be published in full on Friday.
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In a series of meetings at his home in Jerusalem, Pollard went into the details about his decision to hand over to Israel vital information for its security, his conversations with Rafi Eitan, head of the Bureau of Scientific Contacts, who was responsible for his handling, the moments when he was taken out of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, the decades of imprisonment in the US, and his new life in Israel.
Pollard recounts the evening he called his then-wife, Anne, and apologized about not coming home for dinner, reciting the code words the couple had made up just a few days earlier: She needed to "water the cactus." That meant, he said, that she needed to leave town because he had been caught. Anne Pollard evaded the FBI and managed to get to Aviem Sella, his handler, who left the country.
Sella left Anne behind, but that's "another story," Pollard says, explaining that she was supposed to have been taken outside the US.
Moving to the present day, after his release, Pollard says the people in his new neighborhood are "wonderful." When he needs to, he goes out to the small market on the corner, and sometimes he and his wife, Esther, go grocery shopping together. It's hard for him to walk because of back pain and leg pain, he says, but it's "hard to describe" the wonder of taking a walk with Esther.
"Everything is so wonderful, the sky is blue and beautiful," he says. People talk to them, he says, and from the conversations, he gets the sense that "they know" that "someone was willing to sacrifice his life for them."
One thing puzzles him: Why do people ask to take selfies with him? He laughs at the "nonsense."
"When I went to prison, there were no smartphones and no selfies. Esther and I are both very private people, and privacy is important to us," he says.
The great tragedy
Pollard and Esther speak honestly about the heavy price they paid by not being able to have children while he was in prison for 30 years. Esther calls it "one of our greatest tragedies; one of the things that caused us the greatest grief."
Esther says that people in Israel are used to the idea that a person has a "basic right to have children – in the US, it's exactly the opposite." The moment you're convicted, she says, you no longer have rights – certainly not the right to have children. She says the couple "begged" the government to allow us the chance to have children, in any place and in any way. But in the US a wife is not allowed to be alone with her imprisoned husband, she says.
Pollard adds that anyone who says that men don't feel the same need for children that women do "is lying."
"Children are everything," he says.
Pollard, who was exposed and arrested in the fall of 1985, reveals in the interview that he and his former wife, Anne, are the ones who kept Sella out of the clutches of the FBI. He says the FBI stopped him outside his office, and he asked to be allowed to call Anne because Aviem and his wife were waiting for them at a restaurant to have dinner together. His main concern at that moment, he says, was to get Sella out of the country because he did not have diplomatic immunity.
He saw himself as disposable, whereas Sella was a hero, a "strategic asset" for Israel.
"I was just a soldier," he said.
Pollard describes the dramatic hours and days that preceded his capture by American authorities and his conversation with the security guard who brought him out of the embassy.
"The security guard told me, 'I'm sorry, Jerusalem told us that you need to go in and come out through the main gate.' I told him, 'I can't get to the main gate, 20 FBI agents are waiting for me outside. Do you know what they'll do to me?' And he said: 'Sorry, you have to leave.'"
In the interview, Pollard blames the late Rafi Eitan and his other Israeli handlers for his capture. He says that he was never trained as an agent, and there was no escape plan, and when he expressed concerns, Rafi brushed them off.
Pollard also discussed the many claims about him that were made over the years. He stresses that his only motivation for what he did was a desire to help Israel.
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Israel was under an intelligence embargo, he says. The Americans "stabbed Israel in the back" and didn't hand over information that they were obligated to under [existing] agreements. He says that not only was intelligence being kept from Israel, but Israel was being lied to. He says he was present in meetings where it happened.
"I know I crossed a line, but I had no choice," he says, pointing out that the threats to Israel were "serious." When an Arab state develops chemical weapons of mass destruction and the US hides that from Israel, every Jew should ask himself what "Never again" means, he says.
Rafi Eitan's family said in response to Pollard's comments that "Out of respect for his memory, total confidence in his integrity, wisdom, and motivation, which were solely for the sake of Israel – we as a family continue his path of refraining from any comment about Pollard."
Aviem Sella was unavailable for comment.
