Ronald J. Olive Served
in a United States Marine Corps. During his service, Ronald J. Olive was assigned a recon company and won
the bronze star with combat for valor in the former Republic of South Vietnam. Ronald J. Olive has thirty years experience
in law enforcement, counterintelligence and special operations. He has extensive domestic and International field experience
and held many counterintelligence and criminal law enforcement management positions in Washington, D.C. While assigned as
the assistant special in charge of counterintelligence for the NCIS Washington Field Office, he personally led the initial
whirlwind espionage investigation and garnered the confession of Israeli spy, Jonathan Pollard. Ronald
J. Olive is the author of Capturing Jonathan Pollard: How One of the Most Notorious Spies in American History
Was Brought to Justice.
According to the book description of Capturing Jonathan Pollard: How One of the Most Notorious Spies
in American History Was Brought to Justice, “Jonathan Jay Pollard, an intelligence analyst working in
the U.S. Naval Investigative Service’s Anti-Terrorist Alert Center, systematically stole highly sensitive security secrets
from almost every major intelligence-gathering agency in the United States. Over the course of eighteen months in the mid
1980s, he took and subsequently sold to Israel more than one million pages of classified material, enough to fill a six-by-ten-foot
room stacked six feet high. No other spy in the history of the United States has stolen so many secrets, so highly classified,
in such a short period of time. Ronald J. Olive, the author of this book was the assistant special agent in charge of counterintelligence
in the Washington office of the Naval Investigative Service who led the whirlwind investigation against Pollard. Olive interrogated
Pollard and garnered the confession that led to his arrest in November 1985 and eventual life sentence.
During the twenty plus years that Pollard has spent in
prison, many questions have arisen about the case because it never went to trial and so much information surrounding it remains
classified. Most of the books and articles that have been written about Pollard denounce his life sentence as unjust.
This book tells the other side of the story. It
is an account from deep inside the espionage investigation that gives details of Pollard’s confession immediately following
his arrest and describes Pollard’s interaction with the author before and during the time suspicion about his activities
was mounting. Revealed are countless other details that have never before been made public. Calling the Pollard story an extreme
case of a counterintelligence failure, Olive writes that mistaken assumptions and leadership failures enabled Pollard to ransack
America’s defense intelligence long after he should have been fired. The author hopes the vital insights his book offers
will serve as a lesson in history and prevent similar problems in the future and provide an antidote to the uncertainty that
has fueled speculation, rumor, and lies surrounding the Pollard case.”