On the subject of Pollarding, the case of Jonathan (Jay) Pollard is interesting.

Basically, JP in 1986 was sentenced to life imprisonment in the USA for spying for Israel. He is still in prison, despite the generally close US/Israel relationship and numerous public and private requests by Israel at the highest level to have him released. The Wikipedia entry and ‘his’ website give plenty of background.

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

His wife in turn campaigns tirelessly for his release, although some her arguments (eg that he was an Ideologue, not a Mercenary) are surely not exactly smart?

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 – prescient way of nationalist tensions in the communist world and the like.

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, huh?

When the CIA and other agencies came for recruitment awaydays, Pollard was in the queue. He 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?

Fletcher students! Remember the Pollard case!

And, if you have to end up as a spy, be a bit more modest than Jay was in what you hand over to the other side.