AIPAC Scandal: TWO Jewish American Citizens to be Charged for Spying for Israel

AIPAC Scandal: TWO Jewish American Citizens to be Charged for Spying for Israel

 

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Read here full article by Nathan Guttman in The Haaretz(Israel)

May 30, 2005

Edited article

The U.S. Justice Department is expected to file indictments against two former senior American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) staffers - Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman - and, according to sources familiar with the affair, the charges will be subsumed under the 1917 Espionage Act. ( AIPAC is one of the most powerful lobby groups in Washington.)

Rosen and Weissman are American citizens.

The fact that they handed information to an official representative of a foreign power, while knowing it was classified, is incriminating under the 1917 Espionage Act, which defines as a crime receipt of classified information for the purpose of helping any foreign entity.

Steve Rosen was the former head of foreign policy for AIPAC and Keith Weissman was responsible for the Iranian brief in AIPAC. Rosen had been under FBI surveillance for at least four years.

The case involved receipt of classified defense information from Larry Franklin, a Pentagon official, and its transfer to the representative of a foreign country, Naor Gilon, who heads the political department at the Israeli embassy in Washington.

Franklin is suspected of handing over the classified information. The grand jury is expected to hand down its indictment against Franklin this week.

The classified material is said to involve information about Iranian intentions to harm American soldiers in Iraq. This classified information was supposedly given by Franklin to the two former AIPAC staffers during lunch in Virginia on June 26, 2003. By then, Franklin was already cooperating with the FBI.

He agreed to take part in a sting operation. The sting would involve Franklin giving Rosen and Weissman the classified information and the investigators would then follow them.

1. Franklin called Weissman and asked for a meeting to discuss an important subject.
   
   
2. At the meeting, in a mall near the Pentagon, Franklin told Weissman that Iranian agents were trying to capture Israeli civilians working in the Kurdish area in northern Iraq. Around the same time there had been conflicting reports in Washington about an Israeli presence in Kurdish Iraq. Journalist Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker had written that Israelis were operating there, but Israel - and the Americans - denied it.
   
   
3. At the meeting, Franklin told Weissman that the information was classified. This is significant in terms of the investigation, since it prevents the AIPAC men, who are American citizens, from claiming in their defense that they did not know they were dealing with state secrets.
   
   
4. Weissman left the meeting and went straight to Rosen's AIPAC office at Capitol Hill. He said it was a matter of life or death, and that Israeli lives were in immediate danger.
   
   
5. The two made three phone calls:

   (a) to an administration official,
   
   (b) to Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post, and
   
   (c) to Gilon, at the embassy.

6. Rosen told Gilon about the information and the Israeli official promised he would look into it.

All those calls were wiretapped by the FBI and are part of the case against Rosen and Weissman.

Plato Cacheris, Franklin's lawyer, confirmed to The New York Sun this weekend that his client indeed took part in the sting operation and said that the investigators appealed to Franklin's sense of patriotism to win him over.

AIPAC will presumably be discussed in the actual trials. But right now, at least, it does not appear the organization itself will be charged.

AIPAC leaders have taken a series of steps to cut themselves off from the two former officials suspected in the case.

Sources close to the case say the prosecution posed four conditions to AIPAC, which would guarantee that it would not be involved in the indictments:

a change of working methods to ensure that such incidents don't happen again;

the firing of the two officials and public disassociation from them;

no offers of high compensation or anything else to make it appear the two quit of their own volition;

and no financing of their defenses.

AIPAC has abided by the first three conditions - and the severance pay offered the two was considered very low, considering the many years they worked for the lobby. But it is said to be helping with their legal fees, indirectly, through its own law firm.

AIPAC's decision to cooperate with the investigators' demands and to fire the two officials was made after it became evident that the FBI had tape-recordings showing that Franklin explicitly said that the material was secret.

AIPAC's assessment was that it would be difficult for the organization to continue working on Capitol Hill, and with the administration, while two of its senior officials are facing such charges.

Although the inquiry is not focused on AIPAC, it is possible the organization will be dragged into the affair when the trial begins. If the two fired staffers are put in the dock, they will try to prove that they only did what was routine and conventional work for their organization.

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