Spy Paid $2,500 a Month for Passing on Secret Information to Israel

Jonathan Pollard, the Navy counterintelligence analyst arrested last Thursday on espionage charges, told U.S. agents he had been paid $2,500 a month and two trips to Europe for passing on secret information to Israel over an 18-month period, according to testimony yesterday from a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent attached to the case.

The FBI agent, Eugene Noltkamper, said at a bail hearing for Pollard and his wife, Ann Henderson-Pollard, who was arrested the day after her husband for unauthorized possession of classified U.S. documents, that highly classified material found in a search of their apartment contained information on the military and intelligence-gathering capabilities “of foreign countries.”

The only country of those which were the subjects of the seized documents specifically cited by the agent was the People’s Republic of China. Presumably, the papers Pollard said had already been turned over to the Israeli authorities contained intelligence information on the military capabilities of pro-western Arab countries, such as Egypt and Jordan, which the U.S. does not provide Israel, within the framework of the close intelligence-sharing relationship the two countries enjoy.

Pollard said a suitcase seized by agents from his apartment after Mrs. Pollard allegedly attempted to have a friend remove the suitcase for destruction between the time FBI agents had first apprehended her husband and the time he was arrested, contained documents which had already been turned over to the Israeli Embassy and were to be returned to his workplace, according to Noltkamper.

Mrs. Pollard, the FBI agent said, had told the friend that the suitcase contained classified documents to be used for “a presentation” at the Chinese Embassy in Washington. Other secret papers were found in Pollard’s possession when he was first apprehended by agents three days before his arrest and subsequently in boxes in his apartment, in Mrs. Pollard’s purse and in the suitcase.

According to Noltkamper, Pollard said the payment to him was made by his “handler,” but no name was given, nor was it clear whether Pollard has named anyone from the Israeli Embassy in his interviews with the agents.

Earlier yesterday, the State Department denied any knowledge concerning reports from Israel that two or three Israeli diplomats had been recalled from the Embassy in Washington, in connection with the Pollard case.