On Nov. 21, 1985, at 10 a.m., Jonathan Pollard and his then-wife arrive at the Israeli Embassy in Washington. He still recalls what happened in those moments, second by second, as if they had happened only yesterday. 

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He describes FBI surveillance, including agents with rifles and a helicopter. He says he got to the embassy and flashed the car's lights at the guard, and the gate opened, saying, "They knew who we were." He went in, and the gate closed behind him, leaving his FBI tail outside. 

He got out of the car and asked, "Is this it? Am I home? This is sovereign Israeli territory." And he was told: "Everything is fine. You're home."

Then, Pollard says, someone came out of the embassy and called over the security guard. A group of five or six people was speaking, and he saw them distance themselves from him, after they had been gathered around him, patting him on the shoulder.

"This isn't good," he said to himself. "They don't want to be caught in the crossfire." 

Then the security guard told Pollard that under orders from Jerusalem, he was to use the main gate. Pollard told him he wouldn't make it to the main gate, that there were 20 FBI agents waiting for him outside. 

"Do you know what they'll do to me?" he asked. "And he said, 'Sorry, you have to leave.'" 

Q: What did you feel at that moment? Disappointment, fear, anger? 

"It was mostly confusion. Real confusion. So I said to him, 'Do you know what they are going to do to me when I leave?' Yes. 'Do you know what they are going to do to my ex-wife?' Yes. And I said, 'You're still telling me to leave?' Those are the orders from Jerusalem. Leave. So I looked at him and I said, 'Then shoot me.' 

"I said, 'I know what's going to happen and I'm not prepared for this. Just shoot me. You'll say that you thought I was a terrorist and it was a car bomb. Just do it now, quickly. Don't think about it.' And no, obviously, he didn't want to do that, so as I turned around to go into the car he said, 'Excuse me,' and I said yes, he said, 'Your boss wants your last report.'

"So I stood there, thinking about this, and the only thing I was weighing at the time in my mind was my duty to Israel and my anger at this guy for his chutzpah."

Pollard gave the guard a code word relating to his last report, then got in his car and left the embassy grounds. 

The FBI stopped him immediately.

"They were very polite," he said, recalling that as he cuffed him, he looked up "at our flag flying. It's a slate grey sky, cold, bitterly cold, and all the curtains in the embassy are coming down, the Venetian blinds are coming down. Like an eye closing. … And the only thing that I thought of at that time, strangely enough, was a song that the British played when they marched out of Yorktown. The world turned upside down, that's what they played." 

Q: If you had said you refuse to leave, do you think the Israelis would have forced you out? 

"They would have physically removed me. They had orders. They were good soldiers also."

'Everyone wants a selfie'

March 2021. Jonathan and Esther Pollard greet us on a quiet street in central Jerusalem and take us to their apartment, where they have been living since they arrived in Israel some three months ago. The government rented the apartment for them for a year from its owner, a Jewish American. 

Pollard says the people in his new neighborhood are "wonderful." When he needs to, he goes out to the small market on the corner, and sometimes he and his wife, Esther, go grocery shopping together. It's hard for him to walk because of back pain and leg pain, he says, but it's "hard to describe" the wonder of taking a walk with Esther.

"Everything is so wonderful, the sky is blue and beautiful," he says. People talk to them, he says, and from the conversations, he gets the sense that "they know" that "someone was willing to sacrifice his life for them."

One thing puzzles him: Why do people ask to take selfies with him? He laughs at the "nonsense."

"When I went to prison, there were no smartphones and no selfies. Esther and I are both very private people, and privacy is important to us," he says.

Esther adds: Friends invited us to come to them for Shabbat. But after Jonathan didn't have a Shabbat table for 30 years, he prefers his own." 

Israel Hayom's conversation with the couple lasts seven hours, over the course of three meetings. It's hard to jam everything into one article, and certainly to lay out an affair that lasted 35 years, with so many details and changes. But what we heard was even harder.

Pollard, 66, speaks mostly in a calm voice. Only twice during the interview does his voice crack: when we speak about the children he and Esther did not have, and the horrors he experienced in prison. 

He handles the questions we ask and goes into details about everything. Although he is trying to put the past behind him, because now he is "starting a new chapter, and this interview isn't the end, but just the beginning," he says that in his new life, there are "too many things" that reopen the wound. 

Dozens of times during the conversation, he stresses that now he is home. And when he says, "We've come home," he means to Israel, not his personal home. 

A day before the interview, the couple visited the Western Wall for the first time. Then, they went to Har Hamenuhot, to the grave of former Chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu, who threw his support behind Jonathan for the beginning. 

Pollard was excited that things have come full circle. He says it was "hard" to see the Western Wall plaza divided into pods because of COVID, but at the grave of Rabbi Eliyahu, he was deeply moved. "He treated me like a son and Esther like a daughter. Even better," he says, adding that at the grave, he had the experience he had "hoped for." 

He knows only a few words of Hebrew but learns new ones each day. He is starting to take in what it means to live in Israel, including exhausting contact with the local bureaucracy, such as taking out an Israeli driver's license. 

"The last time I drove was on Nov. 21, 1985," he smiles. Senior officials in the Prime Minister's Office, under Cabinet Secretary Tzachi Braverman, are handling his matters personally. Read more at Israel Hayom