[Website
comment: Caught with their pants right down. Is
the real axis of evil Washington - Tel Aviv. Our
estimate on the countdown to Holocaust-USA --
twenty years or less now.]
Saturday -- Sunday, August 28-29,
2004Alleged
Leak to Israel Probed for a Year
By Curt
Anderson
WASHINGTON -- The FBI has
spent more than a year covertly investigating,
including with the use of electronic
surveillance, whether a Pentagon analyst
funneled highly classified material to Israel,
officials said Saturday. Prosecutors were still
weighing whether to bring the most serious
charge of espionage.
Charges could be brought in the case as early
as next week, said two federal law enforcement
officials speaking on condition of anonymity
because the investigation is ongoing. The case
has taken so long in part because of diplomatic
sensitivities between the United States and its
close ally Israel, they said.
Although the information involved -- material
describing Bush administration policy toward
Iran -- was described as highly classified,
prosecutors could determine that the crime
involved falls short of espionage and could
result in lesser but still serious charges of
mishandling classified documents, the officials
said.
They said the still-classified material did
not detail U.S. military or intelligence
operations and was not the type that would
endanger the lives of U.S. spies overseas or
betray sensitive methods of intelligence
collection.
The target of the probe was identified by the
two officials as Larry Franklin, a senior
analyst in a Pentagon office dealing with Middle
East affairs. Franklin, who did not respond to a
telephone message left at his office Saturday,
formerly worked for the Defense Intelligence
Agency.
Efforts to find a home telephone number were
unsuccessful.
In a statement late
Friday, the Defense Department, without
identifying anyone by name, said the inquiry
involved someone at the "desk officer level,
who was not in a position to have significant
influence over U.S. policy. Nor could a
foreign power be in a position to influence
U.S. policy through this individual."
Franklin
works in an office overseen by Douglas J.
Feith, (right) the defense undersecretary
for policy. Feith is an influential aide to
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld whose
previous work included prewar intelligence on
Iraq, including purported ties between Saddam
Hussein's regime and al-Qaida terrorism
network.
In August 2003, Franklin and a Pentagon
colleague were in the news after it was
disclosed they had met two years earlier with
Manuchar Ghorbanifar, who was among the
Iranians who suggested to the Reagan
administration in the 1980s that profits from
arms-for-hostages deals be funneled into covert
arms shipments to U.S.-backed Contra rebels
battling the leftist Nicaraguan government.
The investigation centers on whether Franklin
passed classified U.S. material on Iran to the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the
highly influential main Israeli lobbying
organization in Washington, and whether that
group in turn passed them on to Israel. Both
AIPAC and Israel deny the allegations.
[Website note for
British readers: Mandy
Rice-Davies].
The U.S. law enforcement officials stressed
that the investigation is not yet complete and
it remained possible that others could be
implicated. They would not comment on whether
that might include officials at AIPAC, which
said it has been cooperating in the
investigation.
"Any allegation of criminal conduct by AIPAC
or its employees is false and baseless," AIPAC
said in a statement.
In
Israel, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
(left) issued a statement Saturday saying
that Israel has no connection to the matter.
Israeli officials say their government halted
all espionage activities in the United States
after the 1985 arrest of Navy analyst Jonathan
Pollard on charges of passing secrets to
Israel.
"Israel does not engage in intelligence
activities in the U.S. We deny all these
reports," the statement said.
The investigation is being handled by U.S.
Attorney Paul McNulty, whose Virginia
district includes the Pentagon and whose office
regularly deals with classified material,
terrorism and other sensitive matters. The FBI's
counterintelligence division and
counterespionage prosecutors at the main Justice
Department in Washington are also involved in
the case.
The law enforcement officials said that until
the past few weeks, the investigation has been
kept under tight wraps and included use of
sophisticated electronic surveillance techniques
they would not further describe. They also would
not say whether such surveillance was conducted
inside the Pentagon itself, although it has
involved at least one computer of Franklin's,
they said.
The United States has strongly backed Israeli
efforts to block nuclear development in Iran,
with President Bush including Iran with Iraq and
North Korea as part of an international "axis of
evil."
Yet his administration has battled internally
over how hard a line to take toward Iran. The
State Department generally has advocated more
moderate positions, while more conservative
officials in the Defense Department and some at
the White House's National Security Council have
advocated tougher policies.
Sharon's government has pushed the Bush
administration toward more toughness against
Iran.
Israel in recent months has repeated
expressed concerns about Iran's nuclear
ambitions, with some senior officials accusing
Iran of developing nuclear weapons in violation
of promises made to the United Nations. Last
week, Iran threatened to destroy Israel's Dimona
nuclear reactor if Israel attacks Iran's nuclear
facilities.
Controversy's
No Stranger to AIPAC
By William C
Mann
WASHINGTON -- AIPAC, the
Jewish
lobbying juggernaut,
operates in such high-stakes politics that it
inevitably has been unable to avoid occasional
unpleasantness. But almost universally, the
largest pro-Israel lobby has found all the
friends its has needed in Congress.
More often than not, the politician who tried
to face down the American Israel Public Action
Committee came out the worse for it.
In 1975, for example, President Ford
was angered because Israel refused to end its
eight-year occupation of Egypt's Sinai Peninsula
and ordered a reassessment of the United States'
relationship with the Jewish state. Largely
because of AIPAC, the move ended with 76
Senators reaffirming the special U.S.-Israeli
bond.
Even friends in high places, however, have
not made a perpetually smooth ride for AIPAC
over the years.
The latest scrape came with word Friday
[August 27, 2004] that FBI investigators
suspect AIPAC has acted as middleman to funnel
to Israel details of secret Bush administration
deliberations about Iran, a murky assertion
adamantly denied by the group.
Founded half a
century ago, AIPAC claims 65,000 members --
in all 50 states -- and says its central
mission is to support U.S. interests in the
Middle East and to advocate for a strong
relationship with Israel.
It has a hold on the
mechanisms of power that has been called
mystical. Douglas Bloomfield, a former
legislative director of the organization, says
it's more mundane than that.
"AIPAC is successful because it represents
American national interests, and it works within
the political forces," Bloomfield said Saturday
in an interview.
On its Web site, AIPAC lists an agenda topped
by this: "Stopping Iran From Acquiring Nuclear
Weapons."
The item says: "AIPAC works with Congress to
enact even more comprehensive legislation to
contain Iran and to expand U.S.-Israel strategic
cooperation to build a defense against this
threat."
Both Israel and AIPAC have denied the
allegations that a Pentagon official has
compromised U.S. policy deliberations about Iran
to Israel. The Pentagon, where the purported
leak originated, has said little except that the
person being investigated was not in a
policy-making position.
Even in its denial of any such activity,
AIPAC gave no indication of second thoughts
about its procedures or policies.
"As American
citizens concerned about the enduring
strength of the U.S.-Israel relationship,
AIPAC has and will continue to have
discussions with policy-makers at all levels
of government," the statement said.
"The right to petition our government is one
of the fundamental rights of American citizens,
which AIPAC members proudly exercise every
day."
That they do. The organization says its
representatives hold every year more than 2,000
meetings with members of Congress and guide
through the legislative process more than 100
pro-Israel initiatives.
The organization's affinity with Congress has
paid off handsomely over the decades, but during
the 1980s new leaders turned away from relying
almost totally on lobbying Congress to working
with administrations as well. Conflict over
which side would prevail was given then as a
reason for Bloomfield's 1988 resignation as the
Reagan administration was ending and the first
President Bush was about to take office.
AIPAC was reeling from allegations that it
had violated its nonpartisan mandate in that
November's congressional elections and had
mapped out a campaign
[to] smear the Rev. Jesse
Jackson, a candidate for the Democratic
presidential nomination.
Also, signs of discord were emerging in
Israel's all-important relationship with the
United States. The Reagan administration had
decided to deal for the first time with
Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine
Liberation Organization, after Arafat declared
his recognition that Israel had a right to
exist.
"The partisanship that is perceived as
creeping into AIPAC's decision-making will hurt
them in the long run," then-Rep. Lawrence
Smith, a Florida Democrat, said. "They have
to understand that the real bedrock of support
for Israel is the Congress. Administrations come
and go. We're pretty constant and reliable."
AIPAC was at the time in a bitter campaign
against a proposed Reagan administration arms
sale to Saudi Arabia. That was one of the few
such battles AIPAC lost, on a 52-48 Senate
vote.
Analyst Who
Is Target of Probe Went to Israel
By Thomas E. Ricks and
Robin Wright
THE FBI investigation into
whether classified information was passed to the
Israeli government is focused on a Pentagon
analyst
who has
served as an Air Force reservist in
Israel, and the probe has
been broadened in recent days to include
interviews at the State and Defense departments
and with Middle Eastern affairs specialists
outside government, officials and others
familiar with the inquiry said
yesterday.
At the center of the investigation, sources
said, is Lawrence A. Franklin, a career
analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency who
specializes in Iran and has served in the Air
Force Reserve, 
rising
to colonel. Early in the Bush administration,
Franklin moved from the DIA to the Pentagon's
policy branch headed by Undersecretary
Douglas J. Feith, where he continued his
work on Iranian affairs. Officials and
colleagues said yesterday that Franklin had
traveled to Israel, including during duty in the
Air Force Reserve, where he served as a
specialist in foreign political-military
affairs. He may have been based at the U.S.
Embassy in Tel Aviv on those tours, said a
former co-worker at the DIA but was never
permanently assigned there.
Messages left at Franklin's Pentagon office
were not returned yesterday, and nobody answered
the door at his house in West Virginia. FBI
officials have been quietly investigating for
months whether Franklin gave classified
information -- which officials said included a
draft of a presidential directive on U.S.
policies toward Iran -- to two Israeli lobbyists
here who are alleged to have passed it on to the
Israeli government. Officials said it was not
yet clear whether the probe would become an
espionage case or perhaps would result in lesser
charges such as improper release of classified
information or mishandling of government
documents.
On Friday, Pentagon officials said Franklin
was not in a position to have significant
influence over U.S. policy. "The Defense
Department has been cooperating with the
Department of Justice for an extended period of
time," a Pentagon statement said. "It is the
DOD's understanding that the investigation
within DOD is very limited in its scope." At the
Pentagon and elsewhere in Washington yesterday,
people touched by the case said they were
baffled by aspects of it. Colleagues said they
were stunned to hear Franklin was suspected of
giving secret information to a foreign
government. And foreign policy specialists said
they were skeptical that the pro-Israel group
under FBI scrutiny, the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee, would jeopardize its work
with classified documents from a midlevel
bureaucrat when it could find out almost
anything it wanted to by calling top officials
in the Bush administration.
"The whole thing makes no sense to me," said
Dennis Ross, special envoy on the
Arab-Israeli peace process in the first Bush
administration and the Clinton presidency. "The
Israelis have access to all sorts of people.
They have access in Congress and in the
administration. They have people who talk about
these things," said Ross, now a senior fellow at
the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office
yesterday issued a statement saying Israel was
not involved in the matter and conducts no
espionage in the United States. AIPAC has
strongly denied any wrongdoing and said it is
"cooperating fully" with the probe.
The FBI
investigation was touched off months ago when
a series of e-mails was brought to
investigators' attention, said a U.S.
official familiar with the case.
The investigation moved into high gear in
recent days, another official said. On Friday,
Justice Department officials briefed some
Pentagon officials about the state of the
inquiry. "I think they are at the end of their
investigation and beginning to brief people in
the chain of command, partly to make sure that
the acts weren't authorized," one official
said.
Pentagon co-workers expressed shock at the
news. "It's totally astonishing to all of us who
knew him," said a Defense Department co-worker
who asked not to be identified by name because
of the investigation. "He is a career guy, a
mild-mannered professional. No one would think
of him as evil or
devious."
Franklin works in the office of William J.
Luti, deputy undersecretary of defense for
Near Eastern and South Asian affairs. For years
a bureaucratic backwater, the office has been in
the thick of the action since 2001 because it
formulates Pentagon policy on Iraq. It played a
central role as the U.S. military prepared for
the spring 2003 invasion and since then as the
Pentagon has overseen the occupation.
Luti's office is part of the policy operation
under Feith.
Feith
has been a controversial figure in U.S.-Israeli
affairs since the mid-1990s, when he was part of
a study group of American conservatives, then
out of government, who urged Israel's then prime
minister, Binyamin Netanyahu,
(right), to abandon the Oslo peace
accords and reject the basis for them -- that
Israel should give up land in exchange for
peace.
More recently, Feith has been a target of
criticism from Democrats who claim that two
offices in his branch -- the Office of Special
Plans, headed by Luti, and the Counterterrorism
Evaluation Group -- sought to manipulate
intelligence to improve the Bush
administration's case for war against Iraq.
House and Senate intelligence committee
investigators found no evidence for allegations
that the Pentagon offices tried to bypass the
CIA or had a major impact on the prewar debate.
But in the Senate panel's report on prewar
intelligence, three Democratic senators --
John D. Rockefeller IV (W.Va.), Carl
M. Levin (Mich.), and Richard J.
Durbin (Ill.) -- specifically criticized
Feith's operation. In Kearneysville, W.Va.,
about 80 miles from the Pentagon, neighbors of
the Franklins interviewed yesterday said they
did not know the family well. Though nobody
answered the door, voices were heard in the
house, which had a "God Bless Our Troops"
sticker and an American flag in the window.
People who know Franklin from different
phases of his life offered contrasting accounts
of his political views.
A U.S. government official familiar with the
investigation said Franklin was very outwardly
supportive of Israel, for example. But a former
co-worker at the DIA disputed that
characterization, saying that he did not recall
in years of working with him any strong
political statements about Israel or anything
else. Franklin, he said, was a solid, competent
analyst specializing in Iranian political
affairs, especially the views of top leaders and
the course of opposition movements.
In February 2000, Franklin wrote an op-ed
piece for the Wall Street Journal's
European edition that was sharply critical of
Iranian President Mohammad Khatami,
arguing that the leader was launching a "charm
offensive" that was simply a "ruse" to make the
Iranian government look better to Westerners
while it continued to abuse human rights.
Details of Franklin's Air Force service, and
especially his time in Israel, could not be
learned yesterday. A spokesman for the U.S.
Embassy in Tel Aviv declined to comment.
In Israel yesterday, Sharon's office issued a
statement. "Israel
does not engage in intelligence activities in
the U.S. We deny all these reports," the
statement said, according to the Associated
Press. That followed a strong statement Friday
by the Israeli Embassy in Washington denying any
wrongdoing.
One Israeli official familiar with the
situation said yesterday that his government had
checked "every organ here" to make sure that no
part of government was involved. "We checked
everything possible, and there's absolutely
nothing. It's a nonevent, from the Israeli point
of view. Someone leaked this to [hurt] .
. . the president, AIPAC and the Jews on the eve
of the Republican convention," he
speculated.
He added that Israel would not have been
involved in such activities, "because we have a
trauma here in Israel. It's called Pollard."
That
was a reference to the case in which a U.S. Navy
intelligence analyst, Jonathan
J. Pollard, left, admitted in 1987 to
selling state secrets to Israel. Pollard was
sentenced to life in prison, and Israeli
officials have said since then they do not
conduct espionage against the United States. At
AIPAC, spokesman Josh Block said the
organization had no comment yesterday beyond its
Friday statement that the organization and its
employees denied any wrongdoing and were
cooperating with the government. A former AIPAC
employee also said he was baffled by the news of
the FBI investigation. "I have a hard time
figuring out what this is about," he said. If
the Israelis or their supporters want to know
about deliberations in the Bush administration,
he said, "all they have to do is take people to
lunch."
Others in Washington, however, maintained
that Israel does present a problem for the
United States in certain aspects of
intelligence, such as sensitive defense
technologies and Iran policy.
Israel sees Iran as the single biggest threat
to its existence, and so closely monitors all
possible moves in Washington's Iranian policy --
especially as the Bush administration presses
Tehran to disclose more about the state of its
nuclear program. One former State Department
officer recalled being told that U.S. government
experts considered the countries whose spying
most threatened the United States were Russia,
South Korea and Israel. "I also know from my
time in Jerusalem that official U.S. visitors to
Israel were warned about the counterintelligence
threat from Israel," he said.
Taking a slightly different view, others
speculated that the very closeness of the
relationship between the United States and
Israeli governments -- and especially the tight
connections between the Israelis and Feith's
policy office -- may have led officials to
become sloppy about rules barring release of
sensitive information.
Staff writers John Ward Anderson
in Jerusalem, Dan Eggen, Amit R. Paley,
Steven Ginsberg and Jerry Markon in
Washington and staff researcher Madonna
Lebling contributed to this report.
© 2004 The
Washington Post Company
Friday, August 27, 2004
AIPAC
Statement on Recent Events
Today,
AIPAC learned that the government is
investigating an employee of the Department of
Defense for possible violations in handling
confidential information. News stations tonight
reported that the investigation centers around a
supposed "mole" in the Department of Defense who
allegedly disseminated internal White House
policy deliberations on Iran to Israel through
two AIPAC staff members.
Any
allegation of criminal conduct by AIPAC or our
employees is false and baseless. Neither AIPAC
nor any of its employees has violated any laws
or rules, nor has AIPAC or its employees ever
received information they believed was secret or
classified.
AIPAC
is cooperating fully with the governmental
authorities. It has provided documents and
information to the government and has made staff
available for interviews. We will continue to
offer our full cooperation and are confident
that the government will find absolutely no
wrongdoing by our organization and its
employees.
AIPAC
is an American organization comprised of proud
and loyal U.S. citizens committed to promoting
American interests. We take our responsibilities
as American citizens seriously. We do not
condone or tolerate any violation of U.S. law or
interests, and we have and will continue to
follow the law in all its facets.
As
American citizens concerned about the enduring
strength of the U.S.-Israel relationship,
AIPAC
has and will continue to have discussions with
policymakers at all levels of
government.
The right to petition our government is one of
the fundamental rights of American citizens,
which AIPAC members proudly exercise every
day.
We
will not let any innuendo or false allegation
against AIPAC distract us from our central
mission-supporting America's interests in the
Middle East and advocating for a strong
relationship with Israel.
© 2004 The
Washington Post Company
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