San Diego (special) -- A top-ranking U.S. intelligence officer declared in San Diego that Jonathan Jay Pollard had tried to sell U.S. military secrets to South Africa and to Australia before Israel became his customer, and that Pollard's claims to have been a patriot for Israel are phony.

"Jay Pollard started out not working for the Israelis; he wanted to work for the South Africans and then he wanted to work for a variety of other people," Richard L. Haver told an overflow crowd at the downtown San Diego Rotary Club during a question and answer session Thursday, May 8, in which he also discussed a variety of other national security issues.

Haver, whose job as a national intelligence officer for special activitiesin
the Director of Central Intelligence's (DCI) office is to interrogate
suspected spies and assess what damage they caused, contended that Pollard came to the cause of Israel "late in life."

"His devotion to Zionism, his idea of leveling the playing field for Israel--
that was all invented after he was captured (in November of 1985)," said
Haver, who began his answer to a general question about Pollard by telling
the crowd: "Jay Pollard worked for me (while they both served in naval
intelligence) so I have very little unbiased statements about Jay Pollard."

The intelligence officer's version contradicted the reporting by Wolf Blitzer in the 1989 book Territory of Lies that Pollard had been motivated by a desire to help Israel. 

"Having interviewed Pollard, his family, friends and scores of others
involved in the case, I have no doubt that Pollard's original motivation was
to help Israel," Blitzer wrote. "His primary loyalty was to that country.
He saw information he felt Israel needed, and he decided to make it
available -- that was a horrible and tragic mistake." 

Blitzer, then diplomatic correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, reported that Pollard believed the United States was not giving its ally, Israel, all the intelligence it needed to defend against Soviet technology coming into the Middle East. 

When Pollard passed information to an Israeli officer, the officer insisted
that he receive pay -- standard espionage procedure to corrupt and entrap an agent, according to Blitzer. Pollard later received trips and an expense
account and lived the high life before being caught, Blitzer reported.

Blitzer continued, "As he (Pollard) has himself admitted, the money provided by the Israelis eventually did corrupt him -- as they no doubt knew it would. He liked the higher standard of living. The Israelis knew he would get hooked and continue to work for them as a result. Still, the sums werenot all that significant and his financial profiting was only a by-product of his original motivation."

On the contrary, Haver said in his San Diego appearance: "The problem with
Pollard is that he has now reinvented himself with a certain element of the U.S. population and the Israeli population as a patriot and a hero, which he is not.

"Jay Pollard actually tried to sell his espionage talents to, of all people,
the Australians, who said they weren't interested; they got all the
information they needed," he said.

"Jay is a bad actor," Haver said.

Haver said because Pollard pleaded guilty and did not have a trial, neither
the American people nor Israelis had a chance to learn his true character.
He was sentenced in 1987 to life imprisonment, and recent efforts to have
his sentence commuted were turned down by President Bill Clinton on the
recommendation of Attorney General Janet Reno.

As to the question of whether Pollard possesses information that still couldbe harmful to U.S. security interests today, Haver said: "Pollard's damage to the country with every year actually of course gets less and less because what he knows gets staler and staler."

"The real issue is that Jay Pollard is a traitor," Haver said. "Jay
Pollard should not be pardoned. Jay Pollard should do hard time. He is
presently making Navy dungarees in (federal prison in) North Carolina whichis where I think he ought to stay."

Pollard recently was granted Israeli citizenship and a consular official
visited him in prison. A succession of Israeli prime ministers and
presidents have spoken to U.S. presidents in his behalf. Recently, Pollard's lawyer petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court to win official acknowledgment from the Israeli government that his work had been at its behest.

In what is purported to be a new espionage case, the Washington Post reported last week that American intelligence has alleged that an unidentified official in the executive office of the Clinton Administration had passed to the Israelis correspondence between the State Department and Yasser Arafat concerning the Middle East Peace Process.