http://www.upi.com/SecurityTerrorism/view.php?StoryID=20061113-113016-5218r

Analysis: Missed red flags on Israeli spy
By SHAUN WATERMAN
UPI Homeland and National Security Editor

WASHINGTON, Nov. 13 (UPI) -- The Navy counter-intelligence officer who garnered a confession from Israeli spy Jonathon Pollard says that U.S. agencies missed a forest of red flags about him and risk repeating the same mistakes today they made more than 20 years ago.

Ron Olive, the investigator who debriefed Pollard in 1985, says in a new book that "The warning indicators and the problems were clear from the beginning of (Pollard's) career" and even before, and that his bizarre behavior should have prevented him from ever working for the U.S. government.

"It's a wake-up call to U.S. intelligence today," he told United Press International, about his account: "Capturing Jonathon Pollard," published by the Naval Institute Press.

The book discloses what Olive says are fresh details about the sensational spy case -- a whirlwind 11-day-long investigation which eventually revealed that Pollard passed 360 cubic feet of "the most classified intelligence material the United States possesses" to his Israeli handlers.

Olive's book reveals that administrative convenience and bureaucratic bungling allowed Pollard to be recruited and promoted despite being "a dreamer, a fantasist," who repeatedly exhibited behavior that should have barred him from working for any U.S. government agency.

Among the red flags that investigators missed when Pollard was being considered for a top secret clearance from the Navy was his prior rejection by the CIA, where Pollard had applied for work in 1978.

Pollard told a CIA polygraph examiner that he had used marijuana 600 times and told nine foreign nationals that he was going to work for the agency. "Not surprisingly, he didn't get the job," Olive told UPI.

But when Defense Department investigators asked the CIA if they had any record of Pollard, they were told no.

"If they had told (background investigators) that Pollard wasn't hired because of drug use, he would never have been in the history books," Olive said, adding that "It was CIA policy at the time" not to disclose the results of pre-employment polygraph tests to other U.S. agencies. He said the policy was based on a misunderstanding of federal privacy law.

Following Pollard's guilty plea, Olive says the CIA agreed to change the policy and share that kind of information during background checks.

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