Every word of this story is true except those which are not.
The year is 1977 and I’m at Tufts pondering whether to major in International Affairs (IR), History, or just Poli Sci. Poli Sci was easier of the two, History more interesting, and International Relations sexy sounding. Due to an embarrassing lack of discipline, I eventually dropped IR due to the language requirement. For most of the time, IR was it.
Although I’m recalling events of nearly 50 years ago, they come back quite vividly. I took the entry-level International Relations class taught by a professor, John Gibson, whose Brooks Brothers’ sartorial splendor was only exceeded by his arrogance. This was a large lecture, conducted in Tuft’s Cohen auditorium, and everyone who was anyone in the aspiring world of diplomacy was there. I generally sat by and studied with a good friend, Jung Ho Song, who smoked Dunhills and whose father was the Korean ambassador to Venezuela.
There were subsections for those large lectures taught by graduate students from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. I held those people in awe.
My teaching assistant was an odd duck, Richard Feen, a Jewish fellow from Michigan who was getting a Ph.D. from Fletcher in, as I recall, something related to birth control. Everyone thought that was strange. Among other things, Richard introduced me to the phrase ‘Michigoyim State’ to refer to his undergraduate alma mater, a term I still use.
I liked Richard. A lot. One thing led to another, and I probably started the friendship at the Fletcher cafeteria because it was better than the others at Tufts, more like a restaurant, and I could hobnob with Fletcher students. It was at a table with Richard that I met his then-roommate, a fellow by the name of Jonathan Pollard — Jay to his friends. I soon became one of those.
Jay, like Richard, was a quirky Jew. He grew up in Indiana where his father was a full professor at Notre Dame of all places, went to Stanford, did a year of law there, and then moved about. He would say he’d been in South Africa and Israel and hint at connections with the military and intelligence establishments. I was intrigued, enamored, and taken in. Here I was, a younger but similarly nerdy Jewish guy with older fellows, more like brothers in some respect, who took me under their wings. Richard was more down-to-earth, anxious about his career, ill at ease with women, and for many months depressed over an unrequited crush he had.
Jay was cooler though hardly cool in the conventional sense. When speaking about important matters – and they all were important even if merely discussing where we’d eat dinner – he’d close his eyes, dip his head, raise a finger and opine. One favored spot was a vegetarian place called The Peasant Stock in Cambridge where Richard worked as a host and referred to it as The Peasant Schlock. We’d go for free meals. I, in turn, would treat the two to coffee and pastries at my place of work, Piroschka Café on Dunster Street, also in Cambridge. I seem to recall those two were there a lot. Certainly, no one else was as the summer job was deadly quiet.
How good a friend was he? Good enough to introduce him to my sister when she was in grad school at Harvard. We had drinks at the Spinnaker on top of the Hyatt Regency in Cambridge. Bev was fine, charming even. Jay seemed out of place. I realized I’d never seen him talking to a woman let alone a Harvard woman. The attempt at match-making proved a one-off event. Bev thought him suspicious and odd. She got that right. Though I wonder if they wouldn’t have made a nice couple. I can almost see Bev in place of the woman who Jay married in the photo at the very bottom of this story.
When Jay-bird was closing in on his degree, we talked about his future – with those closed eyes, dipped head, and index finger in the air – which was always a bit of a mysterious topic. I remember well that he and I discussed a trip to Europe, touring battlefields, imagining how the women would flock to us, especially on the BMW motorcycles we’d be riding. And execute former Nazis. Left out of that was the fact I had no money for either travel or a motorcycle, let alone a BMW, and had never ridden one anyway. But it was fun to dream.
Jay left Fletcher to join Naval Intelligence and moved to Alexandria Virginia. Richard went off to do PR or something for the US Holocaust Memorial and then PR for Freddie or Fannie, then HUD. His LinkedIn profile says he’s a “senior corporate and Federal Agency thought leader, executive visibility and communications director.” His last job ended in 2018 landing him squarely in the “Where Are They Now Department?”
Jay was always very respectful of me, very encouraging, and had more confidence in my future than I had. This was very important to me then and now. He drove me to Newport where I interviewed at the Naval War College, contemplating Officer Candidate School. He put me in touch with people whom I’m not sure really knew him, but at least were in the intelligence community. That led me to someone whom I think was named Pensovsky and had been a CIA agent but then was in recruitment in Boston.
Pensovsky must have seen something because he forwarded the results of tests he gave to Langley, CIA HQ. I was called in for another set of tests and interviews, including the infamous polygraph tests as well as a barrage of language, math, spatial reasoning, you name it, exams. The job they had in mind was for the PCTP – Pre-Career Training Program. I was to spend two years in Washington, then go to “The Farm” which is the spy school at Quantico to learn things like escape and evasion, codes and secret writing, and a host of other such tricks of the trade. Dating myself, my assignment was to be on the Soviet and East European Desk.
And I like my martinis shaken, not stirred.
In the meantime, the CIA got to work. The FBI sent agents around Delmar and Medford checking up on former teachers, professors, neighbors, and friends asking about my habits, proclivities, politics, and general demeanor. Of course, why they were interviewing me was all very hush-hush as my role involved a high-security clearance. No one was fooled. My Tufts advisor, Gibson, came to me with less arrogance than usual to relay “The Feds were asking about you.” He seemed impressed. My Delmar neighbors said the same to my mother though expressed concern that I might be in trouble. I obviously passed muster because I got a letter inviting me down to HQ for further dialog.
In Washington, I stayed with my good friend and now reference for the application: Jonathan Jay Pollard.
I was allowed to take my host to dinner according to CIA expense account rules. We went to a Vietnamese place, rare in those days, in Georgetown and drank French beer Jay assured me was favored by the Foreign Legion and regaled me with stories about his interviewing process and what to expect.
“When they hook you up to the polygraph, they’ll leave the room saying they need to replace the paper or ink and leave you there for an hour to sweat it out. There’s a mirror there, a two-way, and they’ll be looking at you,” he said.
“What do I do? Twiddle my thumbs?” I asked.
“Don’t pick your nose,” he laughed. “Look around, try to remember what’s in the room, and breathe deeply…you’re on the machine.”
They’ll ask about marijuana and drugs, he warned.
I wasn’t much of a drug user by the standards of the time but had toked here and there and got nervous. No worries, he said, just be honest. He told me he’d smoked a joint the night before his test and when he brought it up to the interrogators he told them it was with the CIA station chief from someplace.
He was that cool if you could get over the paunch, balding head, and that raised finger when he held forth.
I took a cab from his place to Langley wearing a trench coat, what else, and carrying my suitcase. The cabbie, a kind of nice redneck, was beside himself when we got to the security gate and I flashed my visitor pass. The guard at the gate gave a salute. “Wow,” said the cabbie. “I ain’t never been here. Must be so cool to work here. You work here?”
“Sometimes,” said I.
That generated a double wow. He then asked me where I was going what with the suitcase and all to which I dramatically responded, “Out of town.” What a tool I was.
This was the day of the polygraph.
I was dressed in a wool suit, three-piece if I recall correctly, made in Yugoslavia for the Harvard Coop with the buttons on the vest slightly askew to center forcing me to constantly tug on one side to line them up properly. It was a grey flannel thing, cuffs, and at the age of 22 or so I managed to look like an 18-year-old dressing up in his father’s suit.
I checked in at security, lax by current standards, and was escorted to a waiting room with a dozen men or so, several of them in uniform, including a one-star general, who were laughing over some shared joke. They left for their briefing, and I was left with about eight men sitting about and just waiting. I got to talking to one fellow, careful not to reveal too much as if I had anything to say. He had been in Iran, in the Peace Corps he said, was fluent in Farsi and, wow, I figured him to be a shoo-in. He left and a dapper fellow sat next to me and started to ask all sorts of things – where was I from, what college, wasn’t this all so very exciting. I assumed he was a plant, the first test of the day, to probe for cavities so to speak. I said to him that I’d love to have a long chat about these matters but given where we were and what we might be there for, it was best to keep mum. He readily agreed and then went to speak to someone else.
A woman came into the room, walked right over to me, asked for my letter and told me to follow. She walked me down various halls, doubling back in some I’m sure, to distract me in confusion before we went through a door with some undecipherable government code like G87-37H-TK11. There was a desk with a contraption that proved to be the lie detector, a roll of green graph paper hanging off one end, wires connected to some interfacing box, on top of a dull grey-coated metal desk. In front of the desk, facing away, was a simple chair, also metal, without armrests. To the right of the chair was a large mirror and in front of the chair was another door with a small sliding door at eye level like you might imagine in a prison where it would open for a guard to keep an eye on the occupant.
I was told to sit and wait for the inquisitor, excuse me, tester. I was there for about fifteen minutes looking around, closing my eyes, looking around again, and at one point, hands in pockets, rising to look at the polygraph, curious. Just as I leaned into it, the door with the sliding peephole opened, and in walked a guy in a cheap – cheaper than mine anyway – brown suit with unfashionably wide lapels, a wider tie, wiry brown hair, and a trim mustache. He said hello, nothing more, then went to the desk to fiddle with the machine, probing it this way and that as if I had played with it and changed the settings. Of course, I hadn’t touched it.
He didn’t give me his name, shake my hand, or say anything either comforting or threatening, though the lack of even a smile shook me. I introduced myself, and he pulled out a folder, scanned its contents, and readily agreed that I was David Ader.
He told me to take a seat and went to it. He put a strap around my chest that both held me in place and, I presumed, measured my breathing, attached some electrodes to various parts of my body, and put something like a blood pressure cuff around my arm. It may very well have been measuring my blood pressure along with the strap around my chest monitoring my breathing rate and those electrodes there to reveal if I was sweating. Alternatively, this being the CIA, they could give me a shock to get me to reveal some deep secrets of the sort only a 21 soon-to-graduate college student could have. Or maybe it was just to measure the perspiration.
With my back to the desk, he fidgeted with the paper and said, “I need to get a new roll.”
He was gone for a long while leaving me, trussed up, on my own. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t get up. I couldn’t use the bathroom. I couldn’t reach the cheap leather case that held my few belongings and a copy of Soldier of Fortune. Jay had warned me about all this. Through the suspect mirror, I suspected I was being watched to see how I’d deal with the situation.
What I did was close my eyes, breathe evenly and deeply, and remember not to pick my nose despite an intense itch that begged to be scratched. After a few minutes, I opened my eyes to look about and stare into the mirror in an attempt to look curious, confident, and a bit cynical, before returning to the meditative state.
How did they expect people to react? Were they looking for someone to unhook themselves, scrounge in the desk like a spy would, talk to themselves? I can’t imagine there was a goal other than just seeing how a recruit would handle a bit of discomforting stress. Or maybe the guy really needed to replace the graph paper and Jay’s advice was merely his imagination at work.
The man in the brown suit returned with a new roll, played with it, and started the process. He told me he’d ask some questions, he might ask them in different ways, and I was to answer truthfully. Duh, I was on a lie detector for goodness sake.
The initial questions were prosaic. Was my name X? Was I a student? Blah blah. Then the fun questions conformed to the moral issues of the day; did I use drugs ever, how many times, what type. Was I attracted to men, no kidding, had I ever stolen anything? Lied? And details following up on all that.
I’ll admit my life to that point was pretty clean and drugs were not much part of my it, nor were affairs with women, let alone men. Still, I panicked. Had I ever stolen anything? Well, yes as a matter of fact I had. There was candy from the Red Balloon, a shop in Armonk when I was eleven. I took a broken watch from Butch Adams who lived across the street in Wellesley when I was about eight. More recently, while in Vienna, I had absconded with a cappuccino mug from a Viennese coffee house because the waiter was, I’m sure, an ex-Nazi and I liked the mug.
Drugs? Well, there wasn’t much of that unless one thought nitrous oxide, whippets, was a drug which I suppose it is and which I had ample amounts at my disposal for making whipped cream at my job the summer before at Piroschka Café. Why not?
Marijuana? “Yeah, a bit.”
How much? “Maybe ten times.”
Be specific. “Less than twenty times.”
Did you smoke marijuana less than twenty times?
Panic. Okay, so maybe it was in the 20s.
“Less than thirty times.”
Did you smoke marijuana less than thirty times?
More panic. I didn’t think so, but maybe I forgot. By the time we were done with the drugs, I had smoked marijuana no more than sixty times in my life and, oh, there was the valium my mother gave me before I had to give a speech when I was running for class vice-president in my sophomore at Byram Hills, which I won by the way, so I guess that’s an illegal drug or anyway not prescribed for me.
Attraction to men? Of course not, not in the least, but I mean, was I? No, not at all. Phew, we got over that issue not that there’s anything wrong with it.
Theft? Just those trinkets when I was a child. Oh, and, well, I did take a book from the school’s library, did that count?
Back and forth, forth and back, detail after detail and the sad thing is I have such a good memory all this stuff flooded back. I was sure he’d have to change the pads on the electrodes I was sweating so much.
Eventually, it came to an end. He got up, took the roll of paper dripping onto the floor along with my perspiration left me for a good 15 minutes before returning to say I was up for my next interview.
“How’d I do?” asked.
“Fine,” he answered.
I never did get his name.
The next interview was with a matronly psychologist who had looked over the test results from the written exam and it went so smoothly I don’t remember a single question other than “would you like something to drink?” This may have been a ploy stemming from the polygraph where I confidently had said I wasn’t much of a drinker – a beer here and there but nothing much more until I recalled Mai Tai’s and Zombies at Aku Aku but only remembered that later in the process when I really need one. Of each.
From there it was to a guy, on the verge of retirement, who wanted to talk more about himself than me which was fine. He did ask me if there was an assignment I wouldn’t feel comfortable with and I said I might feel funny about spying on Israel – we had discussed our religious backgrounds – and then said, no, I’ll go where I was needed. “Mazel Tov,” he said.
Actually, he didn’t say that; he just said good answer but in my head I heard Mazel Tov.
Another fellow who struck me as very effeminate – an odd demeanor for an organization that seemed to frown on such things – next followed with general questions and, more interesting, a description of the role they had in mind. In this case, it was in the Directorate of Operations. The people there were the Spooks, the CIA operatives stationed overseas whose job it was to gather information in part by, essentially, bribing people to betray their countries. There’s more to it than that, but recruiting foreign nationals was a key part of the job.
This maricon had been stationed in Mexico and South American countries and told me about embassy parties, trips he took with his contacts, and a gift given to him by State Department officials upon his departure. He had been, we would all be, a State Department official as his cover. We’d have diplomatic protection in the event such was needed. There were allusions to a cover as a journalist or small business guy or even a student, but almost as an afterthought. My role would be with the State Department after my initial stint at Langley and the course at the Farm.
I turned the job down.
Why? I’d been accepted at Columbia for grad school (and UVA and Johns Hopkins) and if I took the job with a Master’s degree I’d be in a higher GS income bracket instead of the $14,000 my mere BA would pay. Plus, Pippa and I were getting serious, and she’d have to be my first recruit in the sense that she’d have to be a US citizen if we were to stay together. The Master’s, by the way, was worth another $4,000 — real money in those days.
After I graduated from a wasted two years at Columbia (other than to have an Ivy-league degree, with honors) I set about looking for work in the middle of a desperate recession and included the CIA expecting that I’d be a shoo-in. It was back to Langley for more of the same with a more specific role in mind: Warsaw or Budapest.
On the next trip down things got funny. I couldn’t stay with Pollard, but rather in a cheap motel registered under the name Andrew Heller. That night, another man in a brown suit (different man, same suit) came to the motel with a portable polygraph and grilled me about the same topics I had been grilled over a couple of years earlier. I’d left marijuana behind – oh maybe one or two intervening tokes – and had gained confidence about my earlier thievery. It had all been so innocent and, anyway, I was a child.
But this creep nailed me. “You’re lying,” he said more than once. “No, I’m not,” I replied. “There! You lied again.” It was a Monty Python sketch.
My pleas to the contrary, my demand to go over the questions, again and again, didn’t satisfy him and he said I’d be hearing from them. I couldn’t imagine what had gone wrong.
That is, I couldn’t imagine until the following day after a set of tense meetings at Langley and return to NYC where I took a cab to Bev’s minuscule apartment. There sitting before a TV were Bev and Pippa, eyes wide in a state of semi shock, turning from me to the TV.
“Did you hear?” asked Bev.
“What? Is it Dad?” I had this sense that maybe my father had suffered a heart attack.
I recall Pippa pointing to the TV where a mustached Jay Pollard was glaring from the back of a car owned, I assume, by the FBI, with his arms behind his back suggesting he was handcuffed. To say the least.
Jay had been arrested that very day for espionage. And not espionage for the US but against the US for, of all places, Israel.
Bear in mind that not only had Jay been listed on one of my earlier expense accounts but he was, gulp, a reference in my file.
I sometimes think I couldn’t make up some of the stories in my life. There was the meeting with Paul and Ringo in the men’s room in London. The wave to Henry Kissinger while eating a corn muffin with Alexa Crowe down near the UN. He waved back. Did I not meet Andie MacDowell before she was famous when I caught her escaping dog in Central Park and exchange phone numbers? Was it really me who early one Sunday morn road my bike to Windsor Castle and, with only a gate attendant near me, bowed to the Queen and the then Lady Diana who I swear gave me a smile? And how many people can say they forced a transatlantic flight to the ground to deal with his heart attack or climb Kilimanjaro for a TV show precisely because he’d had that heart attack?
Not too many I can assure you.
But to use a spy as a reference for a job at the CIA, a spy working against the US of A, surely takes the cake. No wonder the polygraph guy didn’t dress better.
It didn’t take too long, maybe a week or two, before I got a call telling me I might be called again to discuss certain matters. What could those possibly have been? I called another reference who happened to be one of New York’s top criminal lawyers, my close friend Eric’s father Gus Newman, to ask for advice. Mr. Newman – although I knew him for over 45 years he was always Mr. Newman – advised in no uncertain terms 1) I wasn’t going to get the job, 2) don’t contact Jay lest I expose myself to investigations and audits, 3) if they called me in, tell the truth, and be aware they’ll ask the same question in different ways so listen and be consistent, and 4) could I drop off the automatic garage opener I took when Eric and I were at his home the Berkshires, followed by 5) best to Pippa.
Mr. Newman was right; I didn’t get the job.
I got the second call soon thereafter confirming that prediction. I never was called into the Jacob Javits Federal Office Building for further talks, but I imagined them for many a sleepless night. Before me would be two young FBI agents, not much older than me, dressed in blue suits with white shirts, a suspicious bulge near their breast pockets, asking me how I knew Jay, did he know I was applying to the CIA, if he encouraged me to apply, and shaking their heads at my answers repeating, “And you used him as a reference. Really?”
Pollard was sentenced to life but got out after nearly thirty years and moved to Israel. Along the way, he became far more religious than when I knew him, but I suppose what else is there to do with thirty years in high-security prisons.
Me? Well, that’s a longer story.
PS I still have a very long letter Jay wrote to me with a prescient illustration on its first, of several, pages.
