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Capturing Jonathan Pollard: How One of the Most Notorious Spies in American History Was Brought to Justice. By Ronald J. Olive. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2006. 299 pages. $27.95. Reviewed by W. Andrew Terrill, Research Professor of National Security Affairs, Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College.
Jonathan Pollard is the former US Navy intelligence analyst who was sentenced to life imprisonment for providing staggeringly large amounts of classified material to Israel for motives that are sometimes described as includingmoney, ideology, and a desire for excitement. His story represents a sad episode in US-Israeli relations that many in both countries would like to forget. By tackling such a sensitive subject, some authorsmay be seen as unnecessarily re-opening a painfulwound at best and gratuitous Israel-bashing at worst. Yet, anyone reading this powerful and sobering book, by the Navy counterintelligence special agent who led the effort to arrest Pollard, will quickly realize that this work is not primarily about US-Israeli relations. Rather, it is an expose of a broken and dysfunctional systemfor protecting some of the most important secrets that the United States possesses.
Jonathan Pollard is portrayed in this work as a bright, likable, and energetic intelligence analyst with high government security clearances. Yet, he is also described by Olive as a deeply immature person who had been a social outcast for much of his early life.As a naval intelligence analyst, he routinely lied to superiors on a number of important subjects and sometimes seemed to transition into a fantasy world when making judgments about his own courses of action. In one particularly memorable incident, Pollard...