Pollard Asked to Name Spies, Parents Say

The parents of convicted spy Jonathan Jay Pollard said Friday that Navy investigators showed him a list of names of 25 American Jews and asked him to identify those who helped him commit espionage for Israel.

“They kept badgering him to indicate which of those on the list was involved in the spy plot,” said Morris Pollard, a professor of microbiology at the University of Notre Dame.

Molly Pollard said that, when the list of 25 names was shown to her son and he was told they were prominent members of the American Jewish community, he recognized only one name. She did not know what that name was.

Denies Having Accomplice

The senior Pollard and his son both denied that the convicted spy had an accomplice. Their statements came after the Washington Post reported that government investigators had concluded that someone in the CIA or Defense Department also had spied for Israel.

Justice Department sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said views within the department differ on the question of another spy. Although there appear to be some solid indications of another operative, some officials have doubts about whether that is the case, the sources said.

The Navy, the Justice Department and the department’s Bureau of Prisons had no immediate comment on the Pollards’ charges.

“We can neither confirm nor deny this,” said Lt. Janet Mescus, a spokeswoman for the Navy. Justice Department spokesman Terry Eastland declined to comment.

The Post story quoted unidentified sources as saying that government investigators have dubbed the alleged second spy as “Mr. X.”

Admitted Selling Secrets

But Jonathan Pollard, a former civilian intelligence analyst for the Navy who was sentenced in March to life in prison, said he knew of no “Mr. X.” He admitted selling American defense secrets to Israel over a period of 15 months until his arrest in November, 1985, outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington.

His wife, Anne Henderson-Pollard, was sentenced to five years in prison for helping him.

“I gave no information suggesting the existence of a ‘Mr. X’ in government,” Pollard said by telephone from prison to his mother, who conveyed the statement to the Associated Press. Under a plea-bargaining agreement, Pollard is not allowed direct contact with the news media.

“This was confirmed by nine months of polygraphing. Having said that, I obviously have no knowledge of whether any other person or persons was helping Israel,” the statement said.

Pollards’ parents said their son had been held in a psychiatric ward at the federal prison in Springfield, Mo., for 10 months as Navy investigators tried to force him to implicate others.

Bid to ‘Break’ Him Charged

His parents said the authorities hoped to “break” their son by surrounding him with mental patients. His attorney, Richard Hibey, said he believed that the idea was to keep Pollard in protected surroundings to prevent him from revealing national security secrets.

George Diffenbaucher, head of the prison’s social services department, said Pollard was assigned to the Diagnostic and Observation Unit, a psychological evaluation and treatment unit. He said Pollard was not “a mental patient” but “there are other considerations for keeping him there.”

Hibey said prosecutors had told him that they were satisfied that Pollard had told them all he knew about the affair during nine months of polygraph exams and debriefings.