Cites Detailed Requests for Data : Top Israelis Knew of Spying, Pollard Says

Convicted spy Jonathan Jay Pollard, portraying himself as a loyal American who helped Israel, on Friday cited “extremely detailed” requests for U.S. intelligence data as evidence of Israel’s “highly coordinated” espionage effort.

He said some secrets he provided led directly to an Israeli attack on the PLO in 1985.

Pollard said in a lengthy pre-sentence statement that he gave Israel military intelligence to help it maintain an up-to-date defense against hostile neighbors, notably Syria.

“In my mind, assisting the Israelis did not involve or require betraying the United States,” Pollard said in the statement filed in U.S. District Court. “I never thought for a second that Israel’s gain would necessarily result in America’s loss.”

Disputes Israeli Claim

Pollard, who has expressed bitterness that Israel denied him political asylum before his 1985 arrest, disputed the Israeli government’s statement that the spy ring was a “renegade operation.”

“The type of collection guidance I received suggested a highly coordinated effort between the naval, army and air force intelligence services,” he said.

“At the end of each month, I was given an extremely detailed list of materials which was needed by the various organizations that included an explanation of why the information officially transferred (by the U.S. government) did not satisfy their requirements,” Pollard wrote.

The former civilian Navy intelligence analyst faces a possible life sentence for his guilty plea last June to espionage charges. He was arrested on Nov. 21, 1985, outside the Israeli Embassy here after unsuccessfully seeking political asylum.

Sentencing Due Wednesday

Pollard, 32, and his wife, Anne Henderson-Pollard, 26, who pleaded guilty to lesser charges, are scheduled to be sentenced Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Aubrey Robinson.

“The number and type of Israelis who were associated with this affair suggest a high degree of government awareness, if not intimate supervision of their behavior,” Pollard said in the memo.

Pollard said that even though the separate Israeli military services submitted requests on “dissimilar paper and formats . . . there was always one prioritized list which had evidently been agreed upon by the respective military chiefs of intelligence and bore their combined seal.”

Pollard contended he was congratulated on at least three occasions by “the highest levels of the Israeli government” for the top secret U.S. documents he turned over on “their outer ring of enemies, namely Libya, Algeria, Iraq and Pakistan.”

Propels Raid on PLO

Specifically, Pollard said he was credited with propelling the Israeli raid on Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization headquarters in Tunis in the fall of 1985. The attack allegedly destroyed the PLO’s attack force.

“I spent two hectic weeks collecting information pertaining to Libya’s air defense reporting system and the PLO’s disposition of anti-aircraft weapons, which evidently contributed significantly to the mission’s success,” Pollard told the court.

He cited as evidence of high government knowledge the routine technical assessments he received of the secrets he had passed to the Israelis.

“The turnaround time for these assessments was very quick and when I inquired how this was accomplished, I was told that a special team of analysts had been established back in Israel just for the purposes of evaluating the operational applicability of all the new information collected.”