1997-05-16: Pollard-Haver |
||||||
|
|
|||||
|
|
By
Donald H. Harrison
San Diego (special) -- A top-ranking U.S. intelligence officer declared in San Diego that Jonathan Jay Pollard had tried to sell U.S. military secrets to South Africa and to Australia before Israel became his customer, and that Pollard's claims to have been a patriot for Israel are phony. "Jay Pollard started out not working for the Israelis; he wanted to work for the South Africans and then he wanted to work for a variety of other people," Richard L. Haver told an overflow crowd at the downtown San Diego Rotary Club during a question and answer session Thursday, May 8, in which he also discussed a variety of other national security issues. Haver, whose job as a national intelligence officer for special activitiesin
"His devotion to Zionism, his idea of leveling the playing field for
Israel--
The intelligence officer's version contradicted the reporting by Wolf Blitzer in the 1989 book Territory of Lies that Pollard had been motivated by a desire to help Israel. "Having interviewed Pollard, his family, friends and scores of others
Blitzer, then diplomatic correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, reported that Pollard believed the United States was not giving its ally, Israel, all the intelligence it needed to defend against Soviet technology coming into the Middle East. When Pollard passed information to an Israeli officer, the officer insisted
Blitzer continued, "As he (Pollard) has himself admitted, the money provided by the Israelis eventually did corrupt him -- as they no doubt knew it would. He liked the higher standard of living. The Israelis knew he would get hooked and continue to work for them as a result. Still, the sums werenot all that significant and his financial profiting was only a by-product of his original motivation." On the contrary, Haver said in his San Diego appearance: "The problem
with
"Jay Pollard actually tried to sell his espionage talents to, of all
people,
"Jay is a bad actor," Haver said. Haver said because Pollard pleaded guilty and did not have a trial,
neither
As to the question of whether Pollard possesses information that still couldbe harmful to U.S. security interests today, Haver said: "Pollard's damage to the country with every year actually of course gets less and less because what he knows gets staler and staler." "The real issue is that Jay Pollard is a traitor," Haver said. "Jay
Pollard recently was granted Israeli citizenship and a consular official
In what is purported to be a new espionage case, the Washington Post reported last week that American intelligence has alleged that an unidentified official in the executive office of the Clinton Administration had passed to the Israelis correspondence between the State Department and Yasser Arafat concerning the Middle East Peace Process. |