Hurrah.

Jay Pollard has been released on parole on strict conditions after a full 30 years in a US prison. In 1986 he was sentenced to life imprisonment in the USA for spying for Israel. He has served his full term, despite the generally close US/Israel relationship and numerous public and private requests by Israel at the highest level to have him released.

The problem for Pollard was the sheer volume of material he passed to the Israelis – the ‘agencies’ insisted that an example be made of him, warning successive Presidents very bluntly against Pollard’s release:

The most far-reaching of Pollard’s haul was the 10-volume Radio and Signal Intelligence Manual (RAISIN), which detailed the American global electronic signal network. That theft alone reportedly cost the United States billions of dollars, since the compromise of these secrets required the complete restructuring of the country’s capabilities…

In the course of pilfering thousands of documents for the Israelis, Pollard also stole five classified documents that gave background information about Chinese diplomats and intelligence activities in the United States. He gave these documents to his wife, who used them as background material for a pitch to win a public-relations contract from the Chinese Embassy in Washington (though she did not disclose any of this material to the Chinese)

My interest in this?

I was a student contemporary of Jay Pollard at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, from 1977-79.

This was a period deep in the Cold War, with Fletcher known then for hosting some hawkish anti-communist academics who warned in an unfashionable but – as it turned out – wise and prescient way of nationalist and other tensions in the communist world.

Pollard was very much part of a hard-line ‘bombs and missiles’ group of US students who would argue over lunch that the USA should have used tactical nukes to win the Vietnam war.

One of this group’s favourite pieces of kit was a circular slide-rule needed by would-be Bombers and Missilers to measure the devastation likely to be caused by nuclear and other massive explosions according to such factors as (a) size of explosion, (b) density of buildings and (c) local population. At a student fancy dress party one of them came dressed in a costume made up as one of these slide-rules. Cool!

When the CIA and other agencies came for recruitment awaydays, Pollard was in the queue. He eventually signed up with Naval Intelligence. The rest is history.

When I visited the Fletcher School again in 1999 during my sabbatical year at Harvard I met some students and mentioned Fletcher’s most infamous graduate. None of them knew that he had been at FSLD. Maybe Pollard never formally completed his degree there, so has been quietly airbrushed out of the School’s history?

Jay Pollard: a supreme example of someone who is very smart – and stunningly stupid.