American who spied for Israel says he met Ambassador Mike Huckabee to ‘thank’ him for his support

Convicted Israeli spy Jonathan J. Pollard downplayed the controversy around his private meeting with U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, telling NBC News the visit was “personal” and “wasn’t done surreptitiously.”

The “main point” of the meeting at the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem in July, Pollard said, was to “thank” the ambassador for “his efforts on my behalf during my incarceration.”

Pollard, a former American intelligence analyst, spent 30 years in prison on espionage charges after being found to have passed critical security documents to Israeli intelligence in the 1980s. Israel made Pollard a citizen during his lengthy prison term, and he moved there in 2020, five years after his release on probation.

During Pollard’s detention, Huckabee was among several pro-Israeli politicians who advocated for his release, arguing that the sentence was too severe for someone who had been spying for an ally.

Pollard described his meeting as more of a social call and insisted the two didn’t discuss politics or Gaza. But the meeting comes amid a growing list of episodes in which the ambassador, a fierce champion of Israel, has appeared to deviate from official White House policy as the Trump administration deepens its involvement in Middle East diplomacy and peacekeeping.

The New York Times first revealed the meeting Thursday. In a statement, a spokesperson for the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem said the article “is filled with inaccuracies” and said Huckabee “has meetings each day with numerous people and as a matter of general policy we don’t comment as to the content of conversations.”

The embassy offered no further information and declined to offer a comment from the ambassador himself.

“The White House was not aware of that meeting but the president stands by our ambassador,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Thursday.

Pollard said the meeting was “a simple story” that “got far more complicated than it deserved.”

He told NBC News that he had arranged the visit simply by phoning up the ambassador’s office. “He had nothing to hide and I had nothing to hide,” Pollard said, adding that it was an “intensely personal visit to thank him” for his work while he was incarcerated.

But there were questions across the political spectrum for Huckabee over his decision to meet the notorious spy, whose long imprisonment drove a wedge between the U.S. and Israel.

Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, said in a post on X that Huckabee should not have met with “a convicted traitor,” while former Fox News host Tucker Carlson said Huckabee’s conduct was “shocking behavior from a United States ambassador.”

But this isn’t the first time that Huckabee, a two-time presidential candidate, former governor of Arkansas and self-described Christian Zionist, has ruffled feathers on policy.

The ambassador told Israeli media in early September that the U.S. would not stop Israel from annexing the occupied West Bank. The White House and several senior administration officials have since made it clear that the U.S. would oppose such a move.

Earlier this year, he told the Bloomberg news agency that the U.S. was no longer pursuing the goal of Palestinian statehood, which has long stood as a central feature of American diplomacy in the Middle East. A U.S.-backed plan for Gaza approved by the United Nations earlier this month restated support for a future “credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood.”

Huckabee has regularly used the religiously loaded term “Judea and Samaria” to refer to the West Bank, the mostly Palestinian enclave that Israel has occupied since 1967. In 2008, he said that “there is no such thing as a Palestinian” and that Palestinian nationhood is just a “political tool to try and force land away from Israel.”

In an interview with NBC News on Sunday before news of the Pollard meeting broke, he downplayed talk of a rift with the White House and struck a decidedly more obedient tone.

“I don’t get to make the policy. I simply carry it out as an ambassador,” Huckabee said. “I’ve had some very strong opinions on it, but my job here is not to be the chemist making the medicine. My job is simply to be the pharmacist and dispense it.”