Posted on 01/29/22
| News Source: Arutz-7
Lydia Jechorek, the FBI agent who led the investigation into Jonathan Pollard, told an Israeli news outlet that Pollard was not discriminated against out of anti-Semitism.
"Throughout the years, because of the severe sentence Pollard received and the refusal of the US authorities to grant him an early release, a theory was developed that Pollard was discriminated against out of anti-Semitism," Jechorek told Yediot Aharonot. "And that's really not true. It's important for us to show that we treated this story exactly as we would have treated any other espionage saga. We just did our job."
In an interview ahead of the "Pollard" series on Kan 11, the agents who captured Pollard broke their years-long silence, and spoke about his capture and interrogation.
According to them, at first they did not suspect that there was any connection to Israel, and instead believed there was a connection to Russia or China.
"At first, obviously, we did not know that Pollard was spying for Israel," Jechorek recalled. "We only knew that he was taking confidential documents without permission from the office. That's why this case reached me."
"The investigators and agents were not even aware, according to them, that Pollard was a Jew. We had no idea. At this stage, because everything happens so quickly, we have no time to examine Pollard's personal file. In addition, he never said at his workplace that he was a Jew, and we did not have that information."
Lisa Redman, who was a senior agent at the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) in Washington, said: "Only later, during the interrogation, would Pollard claim that some of the reasons he was spying for Israel was that people in the office had made anti-Semitic remarks, something which made him very angry. We, in any case, did not find any testimony that there had been such remarks."
Jechorek told Yediot Aharonot that the whole Israeli connection seemed disconnected from the reality they were dealing with during those days, and recalled what happened in the interrogation room several minutes after his arrest.