Life Magazine - Almanac
June 4, 1996
Jonathan Jay Pollard, a 41-year old Stanford graduate and former U.S. Navy intelligence officer, pleaded guilty to espionage 10 years ago today. (His co-conspirator and wife, Anne Henderson Pollard, pleaded guilty to lesser charges.) What marked the Pollard spy case was less the stolen American secrets than the client to whom they were sold: our ally Israel. The Israeli government, while officially apologizing to the U.S., shrugged off the incident as a "rogue operation." Pollard, serving a life sentence in North Carolina prison, remains a sympathetic figure to the many Israelis who feel he has been hung out to dry. He is the subject of a play called
Pollard: The Patriots
, which has been selling out in Tel Aviv for more than a year.N.B. 1. The information that was
passed
to Israel, not sold, concerned the buildup of non-conventional weapons by Iraq and others for use against Israel2. This is Jonathan Pollard's 11th year of a grossly disproportionate