The true story behind Jonathan Pollard

His book tour itinerary included lectures at the headquarters offices of Homeland Security, the Department of Energy, the Central Intelligence Agency and the American Society of Industrial Security.

Now Ron Olive, retired foreign counterintelligence agent and author of “Capturing Jonathan Pollard,” will be able to count Yuba City and Marysville among his stops.

On Thursday, he spoke at the Yuba City Kiwanis Club about his experience as a special agent in charge of investigating Pollard, the American-born Israeli spy. Pollard is 22 years into a life sentence for conspiracy to deliver national defense information to a foreign government.

“Everywhere I tell the story,” Olive says, “people sit there with their mouths open.”

The author is scheduled to appear at Amicus Books in Marysville today at 6 p.m.

Now an investigations consultant living in Phoenix, Olive came to the Mid-Valley this week to visit a sister, and decided to schedule the two local talks to promote his 2006 book, subtitled, “How One of the Most Notorious Spies in American History Was Brought to Justice.”

It is a subject about which he has much first-hand information.

Olive is credited with having deciphered much of Pollard’s espionage activity, and then coaxing the confession which led to his arrest in 1985.

By then, Pollard, a civilian intelligence analyst working at the U.S. Naval Investigative Service’s Anti-Terrorist Alert Center, had stolen what was, by all accounts, a prodigious amount of highly sensitive national security information.

Olive says his book is the story of how our national security system, “totally broke down ... and about the devastation he (Pollard) caused.”

In addition to his own account of events during Pollard’s pursuit, Olive drew on government documents, transcripts and surveillance tapes available through the Freedom of Information Act for the Pollard book, which is published by Naval Institute Press.

Israeli leaders and several American Jewish groups have continually excoriated the U.S. government for its delivery of the life sentence for Pollard, whose employer, the Israeli government was - after all - a U.S. political ally.

Calls persist for Pollard’s release from prison, and criticism - even accusations of anti-Semitism have trickled down to Olive’s own role in the saga.

The author summarily dismisses the rhetoric, and delivers a brief lecture on the realpolitik of espionage.

“He gave a foreign government our capabilities - that’s like giving the keys to the kingdom to a foreign government,” he says. “It costs billions and billions and billions of dollars to rebuild a system once it’s been stolen.”

Such theft, Olive asserts, “is happening right now as we speak. Espionage is not going away - it’s greater than it ever was.”

Appeal-Democrat reporter Nancy Pasternack can be reached at 749-4712. Or e-mail her at npasternack@appeal-democrat.com