Jonathan Pollard
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Jonathan Pollard is the U.S. Navy civilian intelligence analyst convicted in 1985 of spying for Israel. He is the canonical publicly proven case of Israeli espionage against the United States. John Kiriakou invokes Pollard's case in his account of his first appearance on Piers Morgan's program, in which he debated a former director of the MOSSAD who denied any post-1985 Israeli espionage against the United States. Kiriakou's counter: "Jonathan Pollard was caught in 1985, and you were spying on the United States in 1998, you know, or 2004." The former Mossad director declined to comment.

The case

Who he was, and what he took

John Kiriakou stated that Jonathan Pollard was a Navy intelligence analyst, not a CIA officer, who stole thousands of pages of top-secret documents and sold them to Israel. He has described him elsewhere as an American Navy analyst of Jewish faith caught in 1985. Kiriakou cites him as the standard example of a civilian U.S. naval intelligence asset who passed classified material to Israel, which Israel then disseminated onward. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger called the damage "grave."

Money, not ideology

Kiriakou is consistent that Pollard's motive was payment: money, not ideology, not religion, not love of Israel. He describes him as a Navy intelligence officer who stole thousands and thousands of pages of top secret, he stresses top secret, not secret, documents and sold them to Israel for money, "not for ideology or because he was Jewish or loved Israel."

He generalises the point from counterintelligence practice. Officials in the field, he says, will tell you that for 85 per cent of cases "it's the money. This is just a cash deal." A handful act for ideological reasons; a handful for revenge, passed over for promotion, hating a boss, angry at the government. "But for the most part, it's... a cash transaction."

Which service ran him

Kiriakou is precise about who Pollard actually worked for, correcting a common assumption in the course of a conversation about Israeli espionage: "he wasn't even Mossad. He was military intelligence", a service he places "very much below Mossad." The handler, he says, was Rafi Eitan, the longtime Mossad officer known for the operation that seized Adolf Eichmann. Kiriakou adds that Trump later pardoned Pollard's Israeli Mossad handler, who, unlike Pollard, had never been charged with or imprisoned for any crime.

The trade to Moscow

The element of the case Kiriakou returns to most often is what Israel did with the material afterwards, which he offers as illustrating the nature of the U.S.,Israel intelligence relationship. The Israelis, after receiving the classified Pentagon material from Pollard, traded that intelligence to the KGB in exchange for a planeload of Russian Jews being permitted to resettle as refugees in Israel. On a separate program he called it "the top secret documents that he stole from the Pentagon, traded them to the Soviet KGB in exchange for a plane load of Jewish refugees," adding that Pollard was "essentially spying for the KGB."

He has specified the subject matter and the consequence. The material was top-secret U.S. information on Soviet military movements, military and targeting information the United States had collected against the Soviet Union. The Israelis passed it to the Soviets "in exchange for a couple of planeloads of Russian Jews", and the Soviets used it to shut down American sources. "People were executed for that." It is, he notes, what the courts call grave damage to the national security.

Kiriakou offered the trade as context for why he believed Jeffrey Epstein was collecting classified defense documents from figures such as Peter Mandelson and Prince Andrew: "This is exactly what the Israelis have collected through history. Why would today be any different?"

The campaign for his release

On literally every visit to the Oval Office, regardless of which president was in office, Benjamin Netanyahu demanded: "Release Pollard." Every president said no. Kiriakou's fuller account of the pattern: "every single time Netanyahu would come to the country, no matter who was president, he would say you got to release Pollard," and "literally every head of every American intelligence agency said if you release Pollard, [I] will resign." He broadens the pattern beyond Netanyahu alone: "every single Israeli prime minister lobbied for [him] with every president", and every one refused, "he's doing every day of the 30 years. And he did every single day."

When Bill Clinton came closest to agreeing, George Tenet delivered an ultimatum: "If you release Pollard, I will resign, and the head of every intelligence agency in the American government will resign." Clinton backed down. Pollard served his full thirty-year sentence. The sentence itself was thirty years.

Release, and what followed

The Adelson jet

Upon release, Pollard flew to Israel on a private jet owned by Sheldon Adelson. He was met at the airport by Benjamin Netanyahu. He got off the plane and kissed the ground. Netanyahu bestowed Israeli citizenship on him at the airport. Kiriakou also says the Israelis "gave him citizenship, put him on a plane, and now he lives in Jerusalem," and that he had heard separately Pollard flew back to Israel "on Adelson's jet."

The nuclear interview

Pollard subsequently gave an interview to Israeli media in which he: (1) urged Israel to use nuclear weapons against the United States if the United States did not comply with Israeli demands; and (2) urged all American Jews holding security clearances to spy for Israel. In a similar retelling, Kiriakou says Pollard told an Israeli journalist that American Jews should take up arms against the American government.

The Knesset campaign

Pollard is running for the Knesset, Kiriakou says, "on a platform of we should be able to use nukes", an escalation he treats as insult added to injury, coming after "a parade and a hero's welcome and an Israeli passport." Asked whether the sequence angers him, Kiriakou's answer was short: "Yeah, very much so."

The embassy welcome, and the call for Huckabee's resignation

Following these statements, the U.S. ambassador met with Pollard at the American embassy, a reception widely seen as controversial. Kiriakou's stated reaction to the entire sequence: "I'm befuddled by the whole situation." Elsewhere he put it that an American ambassador welcomed him to the embassy "like some kind of conquering hero."

Returning to the episode in December 2025, Kiriakou described his own reaction first: on reading that Mike Huckabee had received Pollard for a private meeting at the American embassy, "I thought when I first read the report that it was a joke, that somebody was just playing a joke. But unfortunately it wasn't a joke."

His grounds for calling publicly for the ambassador's removal are Pollard's post-release conduct as he characterises it: a traitor who "has called for the use of Israeli nuclear weapons against the United States" and "has called on every American Jew with a security clearance to spy for Israel against the United States", and who was nevertheless "feted at the American embassy and treated like a VIP visitor." In his own telling, Huckabee personally ushered Pollard in to meet with him as a hero, prompting Kiriakou to tweet that morning that Huckabee was an embarrassment to the United States and should resign immediately.

"It didn't end with Pollard"

"The year of the spy"

Kiriakou sets the arrest in the atmosphere of the year that produced it: 1985 was the year Ronald Reagan declared "the year of the spy." He uses the date as the hinge of his standard rebuttal, Pollard was arrested in 1985, and five years later, on Kiriakou's first day at the CIA, the agency's head of security was briefing new officers on undeclared Israeli intelligence officers then operating across the United States. The claim that Israeli espionage stopped with Pollard therefore fails on the agency's own onboarding material.

The day-one briefing, January 1990

John Kiriakou described what he was told on his very first day at the CIA as a new hire. In an auditorium with approximately 300 other new employees, the CIA director of security gave a briefing. He stated that at the Israeli embassy in Washington, there are two declared intelligence officers: one from MOSSAD, one from Shin Bet. But the FBI had identified 187 undeclared Israeli intelligence officers operating across the United States, the majority attempting to infiltrate American defense contractors. The reason they were not arrested: the political relationship with Israel was too close and Congress would not permit it.

Pollard featured in that briefing not as a closed matter but as the counter-example. "It didn't end with the arrest of Jonathan Pollard," the director of security told the class, before ranking Israel a critical counterintelligence threat alongside Russia, China, Cuba and North Korea.

The record Washington disregards

Kiriakou raises the Pollard case in 2026 as part of the record he says American policy has chosen to disregard while writing permanent intelligence sharing into law. Israel, he notes, is "the same country that sold our talks top secret information to the Soviet Union through John that they that they acquired through Jonathan Pollard in order to bring a plane load of Russian Jews into Israel. Um and that's okay. We just have chosen not to pay attention to that."

He places it alongside the Defense Intelligence Agency's warning to its own staff about stepped-up Israeli espionage, see Israel's counterintelligence threat ranking.

Rebutting the "it stopped in 1985" claim

On a televised panel, an Israeli general offered Pollard's arrest as the end point of Israeli espionage against the United States: "when Pollard got caught, that's when the prime minister ordered us to stop spying on the United States." Kiriakou dates that to 1985 and rebuts it with his own experience five years later, a briefing from the CIA's director of security stating "that Israel was one of the most active countries engaged in espionage against the United States in the whole world." The general's response was "no comment."

He has made the same argument with the same figure on Piers Morgan's show, saying that Israel spies on the United States and that Pollard "was not an anomaly."

The embassy reception

John Kiriakou uses Pollard as the closing illustration of why the count of undeclared Israeli intelligence officers never translates into arrests. Pollard, he notes, "does every day of a 30-year sentence and then is welcomed like some kind of a conquering hero at the American embassy in Jerusalem."

His reaction to it is unqualified: "It made me sick to my stomach."

The yardstick

Kiriakou reaches for Pollard when he needs a number rather than an argument. Answering Alan Dershowitz's claim that an admission of Israeli espionage would have won Jeffrey Epstein a lighter sentence, he offered the only comparable American case and its full arithmetic: "Jonathan Pollard did every day of his 30 years. Of course, he's a hero in Israel now and he's running for the Knesset, but he did every single day of his 30 years."

The contrast between the two halves of the sentence is the point: the honours came afterwards and elsewhere, and did not shorten the sentence by a day.

See also

- MOSSAD
- AIPAC
