Photo: U.S. Navy / Public domain (source: Wikimedia Commons)
My Take
Pollard is a figure I find impossible to file neatly under hero or villain. An American-born, Stanford-trained analyst who passed enormous volumes of classified material to Israel, he forced a brutal question onto everyone watching: where does loyalty truly belong? I do not excuse the betrayal of trust, but reducing him to a cartoon traitor feels lazy. His case sits at the raw intersection of identity, allegiance, and consequence, and decades of imprisonment show how a single choice can swallow a life. Rather than condemn from a distance, I am more drawn to understanding the convictions and rationalizations that led a clearly capable man down that road.
Overview
Jonathan Jay Pollard (Hebrew: יונתן פולארד, romanized: Yonatan Polard, born August 7, 1954) is an American-born Israeli spy and former intelligence analyst who was jailed for spying for Israel. In 1984, Pollard sold numerous state secrets, including the National Security Agency's ten-volume manual on how the US gathers its signal intelligence and disclosed the names of thousands of people who had cooperated with US i…
Summary adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
1. Profile
- Name (English)
- Jonathan Pollard
- Name (Japanese)
- ジョナサン・ポラード
- Reading
- じょなさん・ぽらーど
- Born
- August 7, 1954 (age 71)
- Zodiac / Chinese zodiac
- Leo / Horse
- Origin
- Galveston, Texas, United States
- Blood type
- Private
- Height
- Private
- Agency
- Private
- Occupation
- spy / political scientist / double agent / secret service officer
2. Background
- Elementary school
- Private
- Junior high
- Private
- High school
- Private
- University
- Stanford University
3. Relationships
- Spouse
- Private
- Children
- Private
- Parents
- Private
- Siblings
- Private
4. Personality
Motto
Private
6. Links
Political scientist — see all → · More people from United States →
7. About this entry
Tags
- Last updated
- 2026-06-02
Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public items are marked "Private / Unknown". English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.