New York, June 27, 2005Real Insiders A pro-Israel
lobby and an F.B.I. sting by Jeffrey
Goldberg  EVERAL
years ago, I had dinner at Galileo, a Washington
restaurant, with Steven Rosen, who was then
the director of foreign-policy issues at the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The
group, which is better known by its acronym, AIPAC,
lobbies for Israel's financial and physical
security.
Like many lobbyists, Rosen cultivated reporters,
hoping to influence their writing while keeping his
name out of print. He is a voluble man, and liked
to demonstrate his erudition and dispense
aphorisms. One that he often repeated could serve
as the credo of K Street, the Rodeo Drive of
Washington's influence industry: "A lobby is like a
night flower: it thrives in the dark and dies in
the sun." Lobbyists tend to believe that legislators are
susceptible to persuasion in ways that
executive-branch bureaucrats are not, and before
Rosen came to AIPAC, in 1982 (he had been at the
rand Corporation, the defense-oriented think tank),
the group focussed mainly on Congress. But Rosen
arrived brandishing a new idea: that the
organization could influence the outcome of policy
disputes within the executive branch -- in
particular, the Pentagon, the State Department, and
the National Security Council. Rosen began to court officials. He traded in
gossip and speculation, and his reports to AIPAC's
leaders helped them track currents in Middle East
policymaking before those currents coalesced into
executive orders. Rosen also used his contacts to
carry AIPAC's agenda to the White House. An early
success came in 1983, when he helped lobby for a
strategic coöperation agreement between Israel
and the United States, which was signed over the
objections of Caspar Weinberger, the
Secretary of Defense, and which led to a new level
of intelligence sharing and military sales. AIPAC is a leviathan among lobbies, as
influential in its sphere as the National Rifle
Association and the American Association of Retired
Persons are in theirs, although it is, by
comparison, much smaller. (AIPAC has about a
hundred thousand members, the N.R.A. more than four
million.) President Bush, speaking at the
annual AIPAC conference in May of 2004, said,
"You've always understood and warned against the
evil ambition of terrorism and their networks. In a
dangerous new century, your work is more vital than
ever." AIPAC is unique in the top tier of lobbies
because its concerns are the economic health and
security of a foreign nation, and because its
members are drawn almost entirely from a single
ethnic group. AIPAC's professional
staff -- it employs about a hundred people at
its headquarters, two blocks from the Capitol --
analyzes
congressional voting
records and shares the
results with its members, who can then
contribute money to candidates directly or to a
network of proIsrael political-action
committees. The Center for Responsive Politics,
a public-policy group, estimates that between
1990 and 2004 these pacs gave candidates and
parties more than twenty million dollars. Robert H. Asher, a former AIPAC
president, told me that the pacs are usually
given euphemistic
names. "I started a pac called Citizens
Concerned for the National Interest," he said.
Asher, who is from Chicago, is a retired
manufacturer of lamps and shades, and a member of
the so-called Gang of Four -- former presidents of
AIPAC, who steered the group's policies for more
than two decades. (The three others are Larry
Weinberg, a California real-estate developer
and a former owner of the Portland Trail Blazers;
Edward Levy, a construction-materials
executive from Detroit; and Mayer "Bubba"
Mitchell, a retired builder based in Mobile,
Alabama.) AIPAC, Asher explained, is loyal to its friends
and merciless to its enemies. In 1982, Asher led a
campaign to defeat Paul Findley, a
Republican congressman from Springfield, Illinois,
who once referred to himself as "Yasir Arafat's
best friend in Congress," and who later compared
Arafat to Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. "There was a real desire to help Findley out of
Congress," Asher said. He identified an obscure
Democratic lawyer in Springfield, Richard
Durbin, as someone who could defeat Findley.
"We met at my apartment in Chicago, and I recruited
him to run for Congress," he recalled. "I probed
his views and I explained things that I had learned
mostly from AIPAC. I wanted to make sure we were
supporting someone who was not only against Paul
Findley but also a friend of Israel." Asher went on, "He beat Findley with a lot of
help from Jews, in-state and out-of-state. Now, how
did the Jewish money find him? I travelled around
the country talking about how we had the
opportunity to defeat someone unfriendly to Israel.
And the gates opened." Durbin, who went on to win a
Senate seat, is now the Democratic whip. He is a
fierce critic of Bush's Iraq policy but, like
AIPAC, generally supports the Administration's
approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Durbin says that he considers Asher to be his "most
loyal friend in the Jewish community." Mayer Mitchell led a similar campaign, three
years ago, to defeat Earl Hilliard, an
Alabama congressman who was a critic of Israel.
Mitchell helped direct support to a young Harvard
Law School graduate named Artur Davis, who
challenged Hilliard in the Democratic primary, and
he solicited donations from AIPAC supporters across
America. Davis won the primary, and the seat. "I
asked Bubba how he felt after Davis won," Asher
said, "and he said, 'Just like you did when Durbin
got elected.' " Mitchell declined to comment. AIPAC's leaders can be immoderately frank about
the group's influence. At dinner that night with
Steven Rosen, I mentioned a controversy that had
enveloped AIPAC in 1992. David Steiner, a
New Jersey real-estate developer who was then
serving as AIPAC's president, was caught on tape
boasting that he had "cut a deal" with the
Administration of George H. W. Bush to
provide more aid to Israel. Steiner also said that
he was "negotiating" with the incoming Clinton
Administration over the appointment of a pro-Israel
Secretary of State. "We have a dozen people
in his" -- Clinton's -- "headquarters . . . and
they are all going to get big jobs," Steiner
said. Soon after the tape's existence was disclosed,
Steiner resigned his post. I asked Rosen if AIPAC
suffered a loss of influence after the Steiner
affair. A half smile appeared on his face, and he
pushed a napkin across the table. "You see this
napkin?" he said. "In twenty-four hours, we could
have the signatures of seventy senators on this
napkin."  ROSEN
was influential from the start. He was originally
recruited for the job by Larry Weinberg, one of the
Gang of Four, and he helped choose the group's
leaders, including the current executive director,
Howard Kohr, a Republican who began his
AIPAC career as Rosen's deputy. Rosen, who can be
argumentative and impolitic, was never a candidate
for the top post. "He's a bit of a kochleffl" --
the Yiddish term for a pot-stirrer, or meddler --
Martin Indyk, who also served as Rosen's
deputy, and who went on to become President
Clinton's Ambassador to Israel, says.
Rosen has had an unusually eventful private
life, marrying and divorcing six times (he is
living again with his first wife), and he has a
well-developed sense of paranoia. When we met, he
would sometimes lower his voice, even when he was
preparing to deliver an anodyne pronouncement.
"Hostile ears are always listening," he was fond of
saying. Nevertheless, he is a keen analyst of Middle
East politics, and a savvy bureaucratic infighter.
His views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are
not notably hawkish; he once called himself "too
right for the left, and too left for the right." He
is a hard-liner on only one subject -- Iran -- and
this preoccupation helped shape AIPAC's position:
that Iran poses a greater threat to Israel than any
other nation. In this way, AIPAC is in agreement
with a long line of Israeli leaders, including
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who fears
Iran's nuclear intentions more than he ever feared
Saddam Hussein's. (AIPAC lobbied Congress in
favor of the Iraq war, but Iraq has not been one of
its chief concerns.) Rosen's main role at AIPAC, he
once told me, was to collect evidence of "Iranian
perfidy" and share it with the United States. Unlike American neoconservatives, who have
openly supported the Likud Party over the more
liberal Labor Party, AIPAC does not generally take
sides in Israeli politics. But on Iran AIPAC's
views resemble those of the neoconservatives. In
1996, Rosen and other AIPAC staff members helped
write, and engineer the passage of, the Iran and
Libya Sanctions Act, which imposed sanctions on
foreign oil companies doing business with those two
countries; AIPAC is determined, above all, to deny
Iran the ability to manufacture nuclear
weapons. Iran was a main focus of this year's AIPAC
policy conference, which was held in May at the
Washington Convention Center. Ariel Sharon and
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, among
others, addressed five thousand AIPAC members. One
hall of the convention center was taken up by a
Disney-style walk-through display of an Iranian
nuclear facility. It was kitsch, but not
ineffective, and Rosen undoubtedly would have
appreciated it. Rosen, however, was not there. He was fired
earlier this year by Howard Kohr, nine
months after he became implicated in an F.B.I.
espionage investigation. Rosen's lawyer, Abbe
Lowell, expects him to be indicted on charges
of passing secret information about Iranian
intelligence activities in Iraq to an official of
the Israeli Embassy and to a Washington Post
reporter. A junior colleague, Keith Weissman, who
served as an Iran analyst for AIPAC until he, too,
was fired, may face similar charges. THE
person who, in essence, ended Rosen's career is a
fifty-eight-year-old Pentagon analyst named
Lawrence Anthony Franklin, who is even more
preoccupied with Iran than Steven Rosen. Franklin,
until recently the Pentagon's Iran desk officer,
was indicted last month on espionage charges. The
Justice Department has accused him of giving
"national-defense information" to Rosen and
Weissman, and classified information to an Israeli
official. Franklin has pleaded not guilty; a
tentative trial date is set for September. If
convicted, he will face at least ten years in
prison. I first met Franklin in November of 2002.
Paul Wolfowitz, then the Deputy Secretary of
Defense, was receiving the Henry M. (Scoop) Jackson
award from the Jewish Institute for National
Security Affairs, a conservative-leaning group that
tries to build close relations between the American
and Israeli militaries. In the ballroom of the
Ritz-Carlton Hotel at Pentagon City, a shopping
mall, were a number of American generals and the
Israeli Ambassador to the United States, Danny
Ayalon. Franklin, a trim man with blond hair and a
military bearing, is a colonel in the Air Force
Reserve who spent several years as an analyst at
the Defense Intelligence Agency. He has a doctorate
in Asian studies and describes himself as a capable
speaker of Farsi. In addition, he was a Catholic in
a largely Jewish network of Pentagon Iran
hawks. Franklin was particularly close to the
neoconservative Harold Rhode, an official in
the Office of Net Assessment, the Pentagon's
in-house think tank. Franklin was also close to
Michael Ledeen, who, twenty years ago,
played an important role in the Iran-Contra scandal
by helping arrange meetings between the American
government and the Iranian arms dealer Manucher
Ghorbanifar. Ledeen, now a resident scholar at
the American Enterprise Institute, is one of the
most outspoken advocates in Washington of
confrontation with the Tehran regime. The conversation at the banquet, and just about
everywhere else in official Washington at that
time, centered on the coming war in Iraq. "We may
well hope that with the demise of a truly evil and
despotic regime in Iraq, we will see the liberation
of one of the most talented peoples in the Arab
world," Wolfowitz said in his speech. Franklin did
not seem especially concerned with the topic at
hand. As we stood outside the banquet hall, he said
that Iran, not Iraq, would turn out to be the most
difficult challenge in the war on terror. Then, as now, the Administration was divided on
the question of Iran. Many of the political
appointees at the Defense Department hoped that
America would support dissidents in an attempt to
overthrow Iran's ruling clerics, while the State
Department argued for containment. Even within the
Defense Department, many officials believed that it
would be imprudent to make regime change in Tehran
a top priority. "There are neocons who thought Iran
should come sooner and neocons who thought it
should come later," Reuel Marc Gerecht, of
the American Enterprise Institute, told me. As for
Franklin, Gerecht, a former Iran specialist in the
C.I.A.'s Directorate of Operations, said, "It's
fair to say that Larry was impatient with Bush
Administration policy on Iran." In the Pentagon's
policy office, I learned later, it was sometimes
said that Franklin inhabited a place called Planet
Franklin. Gerecht referred to him as "sweet,
bumbling Larry." A year later, on a reporting assignment in
Israel, I ran into Franklin at the Herzliya
Conference, which is the Davos of the Israeli
security establishment. He said that he was there
on Defense Department business. We talked briefly
about Iraq -- it was eight months after the
invasion -- and, as we spoke, General Moshe
Ya'alon, then the Israeli Army chief of staff,
swept into the room surrounded by bodyguards and
uniformed aides. "Wow," Franklin said. We stepped outside, and he talked only about
Iran's threat to America. "Our intelligence is
blind," he said. "It's the most dangerous country
in the world to the U.S., and we have nothing on
the ground. We don't understand anything that goes
on. I mean, the C.I.A. doesn't have anything. This
goes way deeper than Tenet" -- George Tenet,
who was the director of central intelligence at the
time. He continued, "Do you know how dangerous Iran
is to our forces in the Gulf? We have great
force-concentration issues now" -- the presence of
American troops in Iraq -- "and the Iranians are
very interested in making life difficult for
American forces. They have the capability. You
watch what they're doing in Iraq. Their
infiltration is everywhere." Franklin seemed more frustrated with American
policy in Iran than he had the year before. "We
don't understand that it's doable -- regime change
is doable," he said. "The people are so desperate
to become free, and the mullahs are so unpopular.
They're so pro-American, the people." Referring to
the Bush Administration, he said, "That's what they
don't understand," and he added, "And they also
don't understand how anti-American the mullahs
are." Franklin was convinced that the Iranians
would commit acts of terrorism against Americans,
on American soil. "These guys are a threat to us in
Iraq and even at home," he said. Franklin was not a high-ranking Pentagon
official; he was five steps removed in the
hierarchy from Douglas Feith, the
Under-Secretary for Policy. For two years, though,
he had been trying to change American policy. His
efforts took many forms, including calls to
reporters, meetings with Rosen and Weissman and
with the political counsellor at the Israeli
Embassy, Naor Gilon. According to Tracy
O'Grady-Walsh, a Pentagon spokeswoman, he was
not acting on behalf of his superiors: "If Larry
Franklin was formally or informally lobbying, he
was doing it on his own." Franklin also sought information from Iranian
dissidents who might aid his cause. In December of
2001, he and Rhode met in Rome with Michael Ledeen
and a group of Iranians, including Manucher
Ghorbanifar. Ledeen, who helped arrange the
meeting, told me that the dissidents gave Franklin
and Rhode information about Iranian threats against
American soldiers in Afghanistan. (Rhode did not
return calls seeking comment.) Franklin was
initially skeptical about the meeting, Ledeen said,
but emerged believing that America could do
business with these dissidents. Franklin's meetings with Gilon and with the two
AIPAC men make up the heart of the indictment
against him. The indictment alleges that Rosen --
"CC-1," or "Co-Conspirator 1" -- called the
Pentagon in early August of 2002, looking for the
name of an Iran specialist. He made contact with
Franklin a short time later, but, according to the
indictment, they did not meet until February of
2003. In their meetings, according to several
people with knowledge of the conversations,
Franklin told the lobbyists that Secretary of State
Colin Powell was resisting attempts by the
Pentagon to formulate a tougher Iran policy. He
apparently hoped to use AIPAC to lobby the
Administration. The Franklin indictment suggests that the F.B.I.
had been watching Rosen as well; for instance, it
alleges that, in February of 2003, Rosen, on his
way to a meeting with Franklin, told someone on the
phone that he "was excited to meet with a 'Pentagon
guy' because this person was a 'real insider.' "
Franklin, Rosen, and Weissman met openly four times
in 2003. At one point, the indictment reads,
somewhat mysteriously, "On or about March 10, 2003, Franklin,
CC-1 and CC-2" -- Rosen and Weissman -- "met at
Union Station early in the morning. In the
course of the meeting, the three men moved from
one restaurant to another restaurant and then
finished the meeting in an empty restaurant." On June 26, 2003, at a lunch at the Tivoli
Restaurant, near the Pentagon, Franklin reportedly
told Rosen and Weissman about a draft of a National
Security Presidential Directive that outlined a
series of tougher steps that the U.S. could take
against the Iranian leadership. The draft was
written by a young Pentagon aide named Michael
Rubin (who is now affiliated with the American
Enterprise Institute). Franklin did not hand over a
copy of the draft, but he described its contents,
and, according to the indictment, talked about the
"state of internal United States government
deliberations." The indictment also alleges that
Franklin gave the two men "highly classified"
information about potential attacks on American
forces in Iraq. In mid-August of 2002, according to the
indictment, Franklin met with Gilon -- identified
simply as "FO," or "foreign official" -- at a
restaurant, and Gilon explained to Franklin that he
was the "policy" person at the Embassy. The two met
regularly, the indictment alleges, often at the
Pentagon Officers' Athletic Club, to discuss
"foreign policy issues," particularly regarding a
"Middle Eastern country" -- Iran, by all accounts
-- and "its nuclear program." The indictment
suggests that Franklin was receiving information
and policy advice from Gilon; after one meeting,
Franklin drafted an "Action Memo" to his
supervisors incorporating Gilon's suggestions.
Gilon is an expert on weapons proliferation,
according to Danny Ayalon, the Israeli Ambassador,
and has briefed reporters about Israel's position
on Iran. According to Lawrence Di Rita, a
Pentagon spokesman, it is part of the "job
description" of Defense Department desk officers to
meet with their foreign counterparts. "Desk
officers meet with foreign officials all the time,
not with ministers, but interactions with people at
their level," he said. The indictment contends,
however, that on two occasions Franklin gave Gilon
classified information.  The
issue of Israel's activities in Washington is
unusually sensitive. Twenty years ago, a civilian
Naval Intelligence analyst named Jonathan
Pollard (right) was caught stealing
American secrets on behalf of an Israeli
intelligence cell -- a "rogue" cell, the Israelis
later claimed. Pollard said that he was driven to
treason because, as a Jew, he could not abide what
he saw as America's unwillingness to share crucial
intelligence with Israel. Pollard's actions were an
embarrassment for American Jews, who fear the
accusation of "dual loyalty" -- the
idea that they split
their allegiance between the United States and
Israel.
For Israel, the case was a moral and political
disaster. And there are some in the American
intelligence community who suspect that Israel has
never stopped spying on the United States. Earlier this month, Ayalon told me that Israel
does not "collect any intelligence on the United
States, period, full stop. We won't do anything to
risk this most important relationship." In any
case, he said, there was no need to spy, "because
coöperation is so intimate and effective
between Israel and the U.S." Ayalon also said that
Gilon, who is returning to Jerusalem later this
summer, remains an important member of his staff;
in recent months, Gilon has attended meetings at
the State Department, the Pentagon, and the White
House. IN
June of 2004, F.B.I. agents searched Franklin's
Pentagon office and his home in West Virginia, and
allegedly found eighty-three classified documents.
Some had to do with the Iran debate, but some
pertained to Al Qaeda and Iraq. (A
separate federal indictment, citing the documents,
has been handed down in West Virginia.)
According to a person with knowledge of Franklin's
case, the agents told Franklin that Rosen and
Weissman were working against America's interests.
Franklin faced ruin -- the documents found in his
house could cost him his job, the agents said.
Franklin, who did not have a lawyer, agreed to
coöperate in the investigation of Rosen and
Weissman, although apparently he was not given in
return a specific promise of leniency. Soon, he was
wired, and was asked to contact the two AIPAC
employees. On July 21st, Franklin called Weissman
and said that he had to speak to him immediately --
that it was a matter of life and death. They
arranged to meet outside the Nordstrom's department
store at Pentagon City. A month before that meeting, The New
Yorker had published an article by Seymour
Hersh about the activities of Israeli
intelligence agents in northern Iraq. Franklin, who
held a top-secret security clearance, allegedly
told Weissman that he had new, classified
information indicating that Iranian agents were
planning to kidnap and kill the Israelis referred
to by Hersh. American intelligence knew about the
threat, Franklin said, but Israel might not. He
also said that the Iranians had infiltrated
southern Iraq, and were planning attacks on
American soldiers. Rosen and Weissman, Franklin
hoped, could insure that senior Administration
officials received this news. It is unclear whether
what Franklin relayed was true or whether it had
been manufactured by the F.B.I. The Bureau has
refused to comment on the case. Weissman hurried back to AIPAC's headquarters
and briefed Rosen and Howard Kohr, AIPAC's
executive director. According to AIPAC sources,
Rosen and Weissman asked Kohr to give the
information to Elliott Abrams, the senior
Middle East official on the National Security
Council. Kohr didn't get in touch with Abrams, but
Rosen and Weissman made two calls. They called
Gilon and told him about the threat to Israeli
agents in Iraq, and then they called Glenn
Kessler, a diplomatic correspondent at The
Washington Post, and told him about the threat
to Americans. A month later, on the morning of August 27,
2004, F.B.I. agents visited Rosen at his home, in
Silver Spring, Maryland, seeking to question him.
Rosen quickly called AIPAC's lawyers. That night,
CBS News reported that an unnamed Israeli "mole"
had been discovered in the Pentagon, and that the
mole had been passing documents to two officials of
AIPAC, who were passing the documents on to Israeli
officials. Within days, the names of Franklin, Rosen, and
Weissman were made public. The F.B.I. informed
Franklin that he was going to be charged with
illegal possession of classified documents.
Franklin was said by friends to be frightened, and
surprised. He said that he could not afford to hire
a lawyer. The F.B.I. arranged for a court-appointed
attorney to represent him. The lawyer, a former
federal prosecutor, advised him to plead guilty to
espionage charges, and receive a prison sentence of
six to eight years. At about this time, Franklin received a call
from Michael Ledeen, his ally in matters of Iran
policy. "I called him and said, 'Larry, what's
going on?' " Ledeen recalled. "He said, 'Don't
worry. Sharansky' " -- Natan Sharansky, the
former Soviet dissident -- " 'survived years in the
Gulag, and I'll survive prison, too.' I said, 'What
are you talking about?' He told me what was going
on. I asked him if he had a good lawyer." Ledeen
called the criminal-defense attorney Plato
Cacheris. "I knew him from when he served as
Fawn's attorney," Ledeen said, referring to Fawn
Hall, who was Colonel Oliver North's
secretary at the time of the Iran-Contra affair.
Cacheris has also represented Monica
Lewinsky and the F.B.I. agent Robert
Hanssen, who spied for Moscow. Cacheris offered
to represent Franklin pro bono, and Franklin
accepted the offer. AIPAC launched a special appeal for donations --
for the organization,
not for Rosen and Weissman. "Your generosity at this time will help
ensure that false allegations do not hamper our
ability or yours to work for a strong
U.S.-Israel relationship and a safe and secure
Israel," AIPAC's leaders wrote in the letter accompanying
the appeal. But in December four AIPAC officials, including
Kohr, were subpoenaed to testify before a grand
jury in Alexandria, Virginia. In March, AIPAC's
principal lawyer, Nathan Lewin, met with the
U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia,
Paul McNulty, who agreed to let Lewin see
some of the evidence of the Pentagon City sting.
According to an AIPAC source, an eleven-second
portion of the telephone conversation between
Rosen, Weissman, and the Post's Glenn
Kessler, which the F.B.I. had recorded, was played
for Lewin. In that conversation, Rosen is alleged
to have told Kessler about Iranian agents in
southern Iraq -- information that Weissman had
received from Franklin. In the part of the
conversation that Lewin heard, Rosen jokes about
"not getting in trouble" over the information. He
also notes, "At least we have no Official Secrets
Act" -- the British law that makes journalists
liable to prosecution if they publish classified
material. Prosecutors argued to Lewin that this statement
proved that Rosen and Weissman were aware that the
information Franklin had given them was classified,
and that Rosen must therefore have known that he
was passing classified information to Gilon, a
foreign official. Lewin, who declined to comment on
the case, recommended that AIPAC fire Rosen and
Weissman. He also told the board that McNulty had
promised that AIPAC itself would not be a target of
the espionage investigation. An AIPAC spokesman,
Patrick Dorton, said of the firing, "Rosen and Weissman were dismissed
because they engaged in conduct that was not
part of their jobs, and because this conduct did
not comport with the standards that AIPAC
expects and requires of its employees." When I asked Abbe Lowell, Rosen's lawyer, about
the firings, he said, "Steve Rosen's dealings with
Larry Franklin were akin to his dealings with
executive-branch officials for more than two
decades and were well known, encouraged, and
appreciated by AIPAC."
LAST month, I met with Lowell and Rosen in Lowell's
office, which these days is a center of Washington
scandal management. (He also represents the fallen
lobbyist Jack Abramoff.) Lowell had
instructed Rosen not to discuss specifics of the
case, but Rosen expressed disbelief that his career
had been ended by an F.B.I. investigation. "I'm
being looked at for things I've done for
twenty-three years, which other foreign-policy
groups, hundreds of foreign-policy groups, are
doing," Rosen said, and went on, "Our job at AIPAC
was to understand what the government is doing, in
order to help form better policies, in the
interests of the U.S. I've never done anything
illegal or harmful to the U.S. I never even dreamed
of doing anything harmful to the U.S." Later, he
said, "We did not knowingly receive classified
information from Larry Franklin." Lowell added,
"When the facts are known, this will be a case not
about Rosen and Weissman's actions but about the
government's actions." Lowell said that he would
not rehearse his arguments against any charges
until there is an indictment. Rosen said that he was particularly upset by the
allegation that, because he had informed Gilon that
Israeli lives might be in danger, he was a spy for
Israel. "If I had been given information that
British or Australian soldiers were going to be
kidnapped or killed in Iraq, I think I would have
done the same thing," he said. "I'd have tried to
warn them by calling friends at those embassies."
He wants to believe that he could return to AIPAC
if he is exonerated, but this does not seem likely.
AIPAC leaders are downplaying Rosen's importance to
the organization. "AIPAC is focussed primarily on
legislative lobbying," Dorton told me. Rosen's
severance pay will end in September, although
AIPAC, in accordance with its bylaws, will continue
to pay legal fees for Rosen and Weissman. Rosen's defenders are critical of AIPAC for its
handling of the controversy. Martin Indyk, who is
now the director of the Saban Center for Middle
East Policy, a think tank within the Brookings
Institution, thinks that AIPAC made a tactical
mistake by cutting off the two men. "It appears
they've abandoned their own on the battlefield," he
says. "Because they cut Steve off, they leave him
no choice." Indyk wouldn't elaborate, but the
implication was clear: Rosen and Weissman will
defend themselves by arguing that they were working
in concert with the highest officials of the
organization, including Kohr. Until there is an indictment, the government's
full case against Rosen and Weissman cannot be
known; no one in the Justice Department will
comment. The laws concerning the dissemination of
government secrets are sometimes ambiguous and
often unenforced, and prosecutors in such cases
face complex choices. According to Lee
Strickland, a former chief privacy officer of
the C.I.A., prosecutors pressing espionage charges
against Rosen and Weissman would have to prove that
the information the two men gave to Gilon not
merely was classified but rose to the level of
"national-defense information," meaning that it
could cause dire harm to the United States. Yet a reporter who called the Embassy to discuss
the same information in the course of preparing a
story -- thus violating the same statute -- would
almost certainly not be prosecuted. Strickland
continued, "Twice in the Clinton Administration we
had proposals to broaden the statutes to include
the recipients, not just the leakers, of classified
information. The New York Times and the
Washington Post went bat-shit about this
legislation. They saw it as an attempt to shut down
leaks." If American law did punish those who
receive, and then pass on, or publish, privileged
information, much of the Washington press corps
would be in jail, according to Lee Levine, a
First Amendment lawyer. So would a great many
government officials, elected and appointed, for
whom classified information is the currency of
conversation with reporters and lobbyists. Strickland, who said that he had spent much of
his career at the C.I.A. "shutting down" leaks,
called the AIPAC affair "uncharted territory." It
is uncommon, he said, for an espionage case to be
built on the oral transmission of national-defense
information. He also said, "Intent is always an
element. If I were a defense attorney, I would
argue that this was a form of entrapment. The
F.B.I. agents deliberately set my client up, put
him in a moral quandary." He added, however, that
although a jury might recognize the quandary, the
law does not. "Just because you have information
that would help a foreign country doesn't make it
your job to pass that information." Even some of AIPAC's most vigorous critics do
not see the Rosen affair as a traditional espionage
case. James Bamford, who is the author of
well-received books about the National Security
Agency, and an often vocal critic of Israel and the
pro-Israel lobby, sees the case as a cautionary
tale about one lobbying group's disproportionate
influence: "What Pollard did was espionage. This is
a much different and more unique animal -- this is
the selling of ideology, trying to sell a
viewpoint." He continued, "Larry Franklin is not
going to knock on George Bush's door, but he can
get AIPAC, which is a pressure group, and the
Israeli government, which is an enormous pressure
group, to try to get the American government to
change its policy to a more aggressive policy."
Bamford, who believes that Weissman and Rosen may
indeed be guilty of soliciting information and
passing it to a foreign government, sees the case
as a kind of brushback pitch, a way of limiting
AIPAC's long -- and, in Bamford's view, dangerous
-- reach. Other AIPAC critics see the lobby's behavior as
business as usual in Washington. "The No. 1 game in
Washington is making people talking to you feel
like you're an insider, that you've got information
no one else has," Sam Gejdenson, a former
Democratic congressman from Connecticut, says. When
Gejdenson opposed a proposal to increase Israel's
foreign-aid allocation at the expense of more
economically needy countries, AIPAC, he said,
responded by "sitting on its hands" during his
reëlection campaigns, despite the fact that he
is Jewish. "It's like any other lobbying group," he
said. "Its job isn't to come up with the best ideas
for mankind, or the U.S. It's narrowly
focussed." AIPAC officials insist that the case has not
affected the organization's effectiveness. But its
operations have certainly been hindered by the
controversy of the past year, and the F.B.I. sting
may force lobbyists of all sorts to be more careful
about trying to penetrate the executive branch --
and about leaking to reporters. And AIPAC now seems
acutely sensitive to the
appearance of dual
loyalty. The theme of this year's AIPAC
conference was "Israel, an American Value," and,
for the first time, "Hatikvah," the Israeli
national anthem, was not sung. The only anthem
heard was "The Star-Spangled Banner." 
. . . on this
website-
Our
dossier on the Mossad | FBI
turns up heat on AIPAC as confessed Pentagon spy
has stopped cooperating -
Two Suspected
Israeli Computer Hackers Face Extradition from
London -- a massive computerized commercial
espionage conspiracy-
Janes Intelligence on the Pentagon's Israeli
spies: A
Mole called Mega
 -
Alan Dershowitz The
Harvard Law Professor who sat on an Israeli
Assassination Target Review Panel
-
May 9, 2004: Israelis
with fake docs arrested in Tennessee, 'how to
fly' leaflet found; were seen to toss something
else out of Ryder truck, FBI called in
-
May 1, 2004: Crown
Prince Abdullah says Zionists behind Terror
attacks in Saudi Arabia
-
A
history of Mossad's overseas
bungling
|
write to David
Irving