Jonathan Pollard

Jonathan Pollard was born in 1954 in Galveston

Pollard was born in Galveston, Texas, in 1954, the youngest of three children in a Jewish family. His father Morris was a microbiologist who taught at the University of Notre Dame after the family moved to Indiana in 1961. Much of his mother's family was killed in the Holocaust, and he first visited Israel in 1970 for a science program at the Weizmann Institute.

He studied political science at Stanford University from 1972 to 1976. He then began law studies and later studied international relations at Tufts University, but left without a graduate degree.

The CIA rejected his application after a polygraph test. In 1979 the US Navy hired him as a civilian intelligence specialist. In 1984 he met Aviem Sella, an Israeli Air Force colonel, and began passing large numbers of classified documents to Israel.

He was arrested by the FBI on November 21, 1985, after leaving the Israeli embassy in Washington. Under a plea deal he pleaded guilty, and in 1987 he was sentenced to life in prison. Israel apologized to the US in 1987 and granted him citizenship in 1995.

Pollard was released on November 20, 2015, and his parole ended in 2020. In December 2020 he and his second wife moved to Israel and settled in Jerusalem.