This post was originally published on Truthout.org under a Creative Commons 4.0 license.
President Donald Trump’s ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, reportedly welcomed a man convicted of spying on the Navy for Israel into the U.S.’s Jerusalem embassy for a “friendly” meeting this summer.
The New York Times reports that Huckabee met with the spy, Jonathan J. Pollard, in July. Three U.S. officials discussed the incident with the Times, as well as Pollard himself, who said “it was a friendly meeting.” Pollard said he thanked Huckabee for calling for his release in 2011.
A former Navy civilian intelligence analyst, Pollard was sentenced to life in prison in 1987 for selling a huge cache of military secrets to Israel. He spent 30 years in prison. Israel granted him citizenship in 1995, and he now lives in Israel, having been warmly welcomed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu himself on the tarmac when Pollard and his wife arrived in Tel Aviv in 2020.
Huckabee neither confirmed nor denied the meeting in a statement, but said that the Times’s reporting was “filled with inaccuracies,” without specifying what he was referring to. Officials reportedly kept the meeting off of Huckabee’s official schedule, and officials said that the meeting caused alarm for the U.S.’s Central Intelligence Agency station in Israel.
The White House was apparently not notified of the meeting, and “senior officials there were alarmed when they learned it had taken place,” according to the Times.
Pollard is now preparing to run for the Israeli parliament, known as the Knesset, and said in an interview with the Jerusalem Post in August that his first loyalty is to Israel.
“Just as certain members of the Trump administration profess an ‘America first’ doctrine, I wholeheartedly embrace an ‘Israel first’ doctrine. And I went to jail for that for 30 years,” he said. Pollard is pushing for the annexation of Gaza as part of his platform.
Israel pushed for the release of Pollard for years, and many on the right in Israel and the U.S. lobbied for his release. He was released on parole in 2015, and, toward the end of his first term, Trump decided to allow Pollard’s parole restrictions to expire and granted a full pardon to his handler, Aviem Sella.
At the time of Pollard’s arrest, then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger wrote that Pollard had sent an “incredibly large quantity of classified information” to Israel — an amount so large, Weinberger wrote, that it was impossible for him to detail all of the information that was passed along to the court.
Former U.S. ambassador to Israel under President George W. Bush, Daniel Kurtzer, expressed disbelief at the incident, saying that there is no conceivable reason for Pollard’s meeting. “Why would the American representative in the State of Israel want to meet with Jonathan Pollard?” he said, per the Times. “It just defies any kind of logic.”
From his initial conviction to today, Pollard has been insistent that he did nothing wrong. He has maintained that he believed it was wrong that the U.S. would keep intelligence from Israel and that he “had no choice” but to hand over the information, though reports found that he was paid handsomely with a diamond and sapphire ring and in cash from Israeli contacts.
