Early Release — Jonathan Pollard is Israel’s most notorious spy. So why are Washington and Jerusalem talking about freeing him?
▻http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/03/31/early_release
Jonathan Pollard, who has been imprisoned for nearly 30 years after giving U.S. military and intelligence secrets to Israel, may be released within the next two weeks as part of what two officials familiar with the discussions described as an effort to salvage the flailing Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. In exchange, these people said, Israel would consider releasing 14 Israeli-Arab prisoners who’ve also been jailed for decades as well, potentially, as Marwan Barghouti, a prominent Palestinian militant.
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“Much of what he took, contrary to what he’d have you believe, had nothing to do with Arab countries or the security of Israel, but had everything to do with U.S. collection methods, to include most specifically against the Soviet Union,” retired Adm. Thomas Brooks, the former director of naval intelligence, said in an interview. Pollard worked for Brooks in 1980 when Brooks was in charge of a Navy intelligence office based at Ft. Meade, Md, which is also the headquarters of the National Security Agency.
Among the highly-prized secrets that former officials say Pollard gave away while working as a civilian intelligence analyst for the Navy were technical details of sophisticated U.S. spy satellites; analyses of Soviet missiles systems; and information about eavesdropping equipment used by the NSA to intercept foreign governments’ communications, including all ten volumes of a highly-classified manual known as “the Bible” that spelled out how the United States intercepted Soviet communications.
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“I think what he did is exceeded only by Edward #Snowden,” said Brooks, drawing an analogy between Pollard and the former #NSA contractor who gave millions of pages of classified documents about eavesdropping systems to journalists, and who’s now living in Russia under a grant of political asylum.