Pentagon Official an Israeli Spy?

FBI looks at Pentagon worker in Israel spy probe

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The FBI has evidence that a person who has been working at the Pentagon may be a spy for Israel, senior U.S. officials have confirmed to CNN.

The worker could have been in a position to influence Bush administration policy toward Iran and Iraq, one of the officials said on Friday.

However, another government official said the worker is "not in a level to influence policy."

"He is an analyst in an undersecretary's office," this official said.

A senior Pentagon official confirmed to CNN that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld "had been made generally aware that the Justice Department had an investigation going on."

The Pentagon issued a statement Friday, confirming it "has been cooperating with the Department of Justice on this matter for an extended period of time."

"It is the DOD [Department of Defense] understanding that the investigation within the DOD is limited in its scope."

Government officials said a decision has not yet been made to prosecute or not. They say there may not charges at all and if there are, there may not be espionage charges.

CBS News, which first reported the story, said the FBI had developed evidence, including photographs and conversations recorded through wiretaps.

The network said the alleged spy has ties to two senior Pentagon officials: Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith.

Israel, lobbying group deny allegations

David Siegel, a spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington, denied the allegations.

"The United States is Israel's most cherished friend and ally. We have a strong, ongoing, working relationship at all levels, and in no way would Israel do anything to impair this relationship."

An Israeli official in Washington said the U.S. government has not contacted the Israelis about any such investigation.

Despite the close relationship between the two countries, espionage against the United States on behalf of Israel would not be without precedent. Former U.S. Navy intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard is serving a life sentence for passing classified material to Israel.

Officials said the worker passed classified documents to Israel through the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a pro-Israel lobbying group.

But AIPAC released a statement late Friday calling the news reports "false and baseless."

The statement said AIPAC learned Friday that "the government is investigating an employee of the Department of Defense for possible violations in handling confidential information."

A designation of the material as confidential would indicate a much lower level of secrecy than if it had been designated as classified.

AIPAC said it "is cooperating fully" with government authorities, including providing documents and information and making staff members available for interviews. Sources told CNN that two AIPAC employees have been interviewed in the case by the FBI.

"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," the statement said.

"AIPAC is an American organization comprised of proud and loyal U.S. citizens committed to promoting American interests. We do not condone or tolerate any violation of any U.S. law or interests."

Washington insiders note that it is not unusual for friendly governments to have access to certain classified information, so even if the allegations are correct, not everyone involved may have thought they were involved in espionage.

Still, one U.S. source is calling the case "a very serious matter."

The Justice Department, speaking for the FBI, refused to comment, saying only, "We cannot confirm or deny the report."

An FBI spokesman said the bureau has no comment on the CBS report.

CNN's David Ensor, Barbara Starr, Kelli Arena and Terry Frieden contributed to this report.

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From Josh Marshall:
I haven't yet been able to comment on the breaking news last night that the FBI is investigating whether an employee at the OSD, Larry Franklin, passed classified US government information to Israel. That is because my colleagues and I have a piece coming out on the subject which will, hopefully, be appearing later today in The Washington Monthly.


A few thoughts though about this story.

I'm told the evidence the FBI has on Franklin -- at least on the narrow facts of the case -- is quite strong and involves wire tap information, though why a career DIA analyst like Franklin would allow himself to get tripped up on a phone call mystifies me.

The main focus thus far has been on the highly sensitive and troubling allegation that an ally, Israel, was spying on the United States or the recipient of classified information from a US government official.

However, I strongly suspect that as this story develops the bigger deal will be less the alleged recipient of the information, Israel, than the country that is the subject of the information, Iran.

I don't mean to imply that it's an either/or. It can very much be both. But the reportage thus far has understated the degree to which this is an Iran story -- it grows out of the simmering and unresolved administration battle over policy toward Iran.

 

F.B.I. Said to Reach Official Suspected of Passing Secret
By JAMES RISEN
NY Times

WASHINGTON, Aug. 28 - The F.B.I. is in communication with a Pentagon official suspected of passing secrets to Israel and is seeking to gain his cooperation in their espionage investigation, government officials said.

The Pentagon official, Larry Franklin, a midlevel analyst who works in the policy office of the Defense Department, has been in contact with investigators with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, officials said. It could not be learned whether he was talking with the bureau directly or through a lawyer.

Government officials say they suspect that Mr. Franklin provided classified documents to officials at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a major pro-Israel lobbying group in Washington, and that the group in turn handed the materials over to Israeli intelligence. Both the lobbying group and the Israeli government have denied any misconduct. [Page 22.]

Mr. Franklin could not be located for comment.

Government officials who have been briefed on the investigation said investigators had unspecified evidence that Mr. Franklin provided the Israelis with a sensitive report about American policy toward Iran, along with other materials. Mr. Franklin focused on Iranian issues in his work.

No arrests have been made in the case, however, and the F.B.I. apparently is seeking more information from Mr. Franklin. The investigation has been going on for more than a year, government officials said.

Michael Ledeen, a conservative scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who is a friend of Mr. Franklin, said Saturday that he believed the accusations were baseless.

"I don't believe a word of it," Mr. Ledeen said. "This story is incoherent, it makes no sense. Anyone who wanted to know about U.S. policy on Iran could just read The New York Times."

The work done in the Pentagon's policy offices often involves regional strategic planning like deliberations on what stance the government should take in dealing with other countries. A little more than a year ago, one policy pushed from within the Pentagon would have relied on covert support for Iranian resistance groups to destabilize Iran's powerful clergy. In internal deliberations, some even raised the possibility of a military strike against an Iranian nuclear facility at Natanz. The ideas, reported in the news media at the time, came up in the context of developing a draft directive outlining the administration's overall policy toward the regime in Tehran.

American policy toward Iran is now of critical importance to Israel, which is increasingly concerned by evidence that Tehran has accelerated its program to develop a nuclear weapon. The Bush administration has become concerned that Israel might move militarily against Iran's nuclear complex.

The investigation is the latest embarrassing incident involving Pentagon employees. In June, federal investigators began administering polygraph examinations to civilian Pentagon employees to determine who may have disclosed classified information to Ahmad Chalabi, the former Iraqi exile leader who was once a close ally of the Pentagon.

Pentagon officials have said that they are cooperating in the investigation regarding Israel. But some senior officials in the policy branch were not informed about it until Friday night, after it was reported on evening television news programs.

A government official who has been briefed on the investigation said that F.B.I. officials had earlier expressed an interest in interviewing two of Mr. Franklin's superiors, Douglas Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy, and Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, although there is no sign that they are a focus of the investigation.

It could not be learned whether the F.B.I. had decided to go ahead with those interviews.

Former government officials have also been contacted by the F.B.I. in recent days, apparently in an effort to gain a better understanding of the relationships among conservative officials with strong ties to Israel.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee said that it was "cooperating fully with the governmental authorities" and had "provided documents and information to the government and has made staff available for interviews."

One of the group's priorities is stopping Iran from obtaining nuclear arms and other unconventional weapons.

The 65,000-member group has long been regarded as one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington, cultivating close ties in Republican and Democratic administrations alike.

As recently as May, President Bush singled out the group for calling attention to "the great security challenges of our time," which include the "threat posed by Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons."

The F.B.I. inquiry is considered sensitive because of the case's potential political implications.

Mr. Feith and the work done under him have been the focus of intense criticism over the past year as questions have mounted about the justification for the war in Iraq. Before the war, Mr. Feith created a small intelligence unit that sought to build a case for Iraq's ties to Al Qaeda, an effort that has since been disputed by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Questions have also repeatedly been raised about work done by members of Mr. Feith's staff that skirted the normal bureaucracy. For example, Mr. Franklin participated in secret meetings with Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian who had acted as an arms deal middleman in the Iran-contra affair during the Reagan administration.

The secret meetings were first held in Rome in December 2001 and were brokered by Mr. Ledeen. He said he arranged the meetings to put the Bush administration in closer contact with Iranian dissidents who could provide information in the war on terrorism. But Mr. Ledeen said Saturday that Mr. Franklin was always skeptical that the back-channel meetings were useful.

Current and former defense officials said on Saturday that Mr. Franklin worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency until about three years ago, when he moved to the Pentagon's policy office, headed by Mr. Feith, to work on Iran and other Middle East issues.

Former colleagues said that Mr. Franklin was a Soviet analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency who transferred to the Middle East division in the early 1990's. He learned Farsi and became an Iran analyst, developing extensive contacts among Iranians who opposed the Tehran government.

"He was a good analyst of the Iranian political scene, but he was also someone who would go off on his own," said one former defense colleague.

Mr. Franklin also has a military background. A former defense official said Mr. Franklin had been a colonel in the Air Force Reserve who served two short tours at the United States Embassy in Tel Aviv.

Although Mr. Franklin worked as a Middle East policy officer, a defense official said he had no effect on United States policy and few dealings with senior Pentagon officials like Mr. Wolfowitz. At one point in the run-up to the Iraq war in early 2003, Mr. Franklin was brought in to help arrange meetings between Mr. Wolfowitz and Shiite and Sunni clerics across the United States, a defense official said.

 

This story is really growing now. Its really disturbing to think Israel is such a security/counter intelligence concern in Washington while having so much influence and contact within our Congress and White House.

Here are excerpts from the Washington Post. Click through to read the whole article. Below is just the last section of the piece containing new information:

...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.
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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, 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.

 

O.K. Hate to keep replying to myself, but Josh Marshall's article is now online. It contains a fair bit of speculation and a lot of information not revealed thus far. He is really laying some cards on the table. He is really emphasizing the Iran as the center of this deal. Click through to see the whole thing.

Iran-Contra II?
Fresh scrutiny on a rogue Pentagon operation.

By Joshua Micah Marshall, Laura Rozen, and Paul Glastris

On Friday evening, CBS News reported that the FBI is investigating a suspected mole in the Department of Defense who allegedly passed to Israel, via a pro-Israeli lobbying organization, classified American intelligence about Iran. The focus of the investigation, according to U.S. government officials, is Larry Franklin, a veteran Defense Intelligence Agency Iran analyst now working in the office of the Pentagon's number three civilian official, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith.

The investigation of Franklin is now shining a bright light on a shadowy struggle within the Bush administration over the direction of U.S. policy toward Iran. In particular, the FBI is looking with renewed interest at an unauthorized back-channel between Iranian dissidents and advisers in Feith's office, which more-senior administration officials first tried in vain to shut down and then later attempted to cover up.
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Note that in the Marshall article he notes that the shadowy Iran connections may be the work of a rogue group in the Pentagon without the knowledge of the White House.

Though some people who like the 2-team version of party politics may spin it this way, this may not be a partisan issue. This is about critical issues including Iran, intelligence leaks and foreign nations yeilding influence in our policy offices regardless of party denomination... I mean affiliation.

 

Not America but someone is listening to these foreign interest lobbying group. I doubt the Chinese, Israelis, etc. and domestic lobbying groups in Washington spend their money for for no reason.

Don't read me the wrong way. Don't overstate my following this story in your imagination. I am pushing no Jewish conspiracy theory. The thread title certainly is fodder for poisoning the well, but that was the story whn I first posted. The public story is evolving. Fact is there was a spy who worked for an official who worked around the CIA to gather his own intelligence. A spy who fed information regarding Iran to Israel--ac country some in Washington consider an intelligence threat. I find it interesting. If you find it tin-hattish, fine. Go bash Bush or Kerry or something productive like that. (Try bashing both for a change of pace.) Anyway, Israel may not be the most important/interesting part of this story.