The New York Times exposed on Nov. 20 that U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee had had a previously undisclosed meeting in July with Jonathan Pollard, the former U.S. Naval intelligence officer convicted in 1987 of selling thousands of pages of national secrets, including top-secret items, to Israel. The Times cited three U.S. officials familiar with the matter to report that the CIA station chief in Israel raised alarm after learning that Huckabee and his senior advisor, David Milstein, had brought Pollard into a secure American facility.
The meeting was kept off Huckabee’s official schedule, according to Reuters. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded to the Times story by saying: “The White House was not aware of that meeting, but the president stands by our ambassador….”
Pollard, whom Israel had made a citizen after the U.S. gave him a 30-year prison sentence, stated that he doesn’t regret spying against the U.S. for Israel, as there were matters that the U.S. was not sharing with Israel. (After Israel bombed the Iraqi nuclear plant in 1981, then-U.S. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger restricted intelligence-sharing.) Pollard claims that a history of anti-Semitism in the U.S. turned him against the country.
