Lunch with an Author

Capturing Jonathan Pollard
How one of the most notorious spies in American history was brought to justice

Ronald Olive

Over the course of eighteen months in the mid-1980s, Jonathan Jay Pollard, an intelligence analyst working in the U.S. Naval Investigative Service's Anti-Terrorist Alert Center, systematically stole highly sensitive security secrets from almost every major intelligence-gathering agency in the United States. He sold to Israel more than one million pages of classified material enough to fill a six-by-ten-foot room stacked six feet high. No other spy in the history of the United States has stolen so many secrets, so highly classified, in such a short period of time.

Pollard was caught, arrested, and sentenced to life in prison. But because his case never went to trial and so much of the information surrounding it remains classified many questions have arisen about it. Most of the books and articles that have been written about Pollard denounce his life sentence as unjust.

This is the other side of the story. Ronald J. Olive was the assistant special agent in charge of counterintelligence in the Washington office of the Naval Investigative Service who led the whirlwind investigation against Pollard, and garnered the confession that led to his arrest in November 1985. Here is Olive's account from deep inside the espionage investigation that gives details of Pollard's confession immediately following his arrest and describes Pollard's behavior before and during the time suspicion about his activities was mounting. Revealed are countless other details that have never before been made public.

Calling the Pollard story an extreme example of a counterintelligence failure, Olive writes that mistaken assumptions and leadership failures enabled Pollard to ransack America's defense intelligence long after he should have been fired. The author hopes the vital insights his book offers will serve as a lesson in history, prevent similar problems in the future, and provide an antidote to the uncertainty that has fueled speculation, rumor, and lies surrounding the Pollard case.

Serving in a U.S. Marine Corps recon company, he won the bronze star with combat for valor in the former Republic of South Vietnam. Mr. Olive has thirty years experience in law enforcement, counterintelligence and special operations. He has extensive domestic and International field experience and held many counterintelligence and criminal law enforcement management positions in Washington, D.C. While assigned as the assistant special in charge of counterintelligence for the NCIS Washington Field Office, he personally led the initial whirlwind espionage investigation and garnered the confession of Israeli spy, Jonathan Pollard.

Early in his career during the cold war he developed, planned and initiated his first counterespionage double agent operation. This operation terminated with the arrest and conviction of an East German spy. This was the first foreign intelligence officer in U.S. history to be convicted of spying against the United States without setting foot on U.S. soil until his arrest. The conviction culminated in the largest spy swap in the history of the United States.

While assigned to Naples, Italy he initiated another counterespionage operation targeting the KGB in Rome, Italy. This operation ultimately led to the defection of the highest-ranking KGB officer ever to defect to the United States. The operation was declassified sixteen years later and was a feature article in the November 2000 issue of Gentleman's Quarterly (GQ) magazine. Also while assigned to Italy, he was one of the few American special agents ever allowed to interview two arrested members of the Red Brigade and Prima Linea terrorist organizations. This resulted in information which averted a planned assassination of the Commander of Southern Allied Forces Europe.

During a one year period, while serving as the headquarters division head for oversight and policy for all worldwide counterintelligence investigations, his division handled close to four thousand investigations of security violations, resulting in nine Navy convictions for espionage and four convictions for serious breaches of security violations. He also developed, planned and successfully implemented the first Systems Technology Protection Program for the Department of the Navy. In 1991, he was asked to lead a team of special agents into Italy and Crete on a Counter-Terrorist Surveillance Detection Operation for Navy installations and personnel, against threats posed by Saddam Hussein during operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm. Upon retirement from NCIS in January 1999, Mr. Olive became the first recipient of the Counterintelligence Career Achievement Award.