News Compass

Thursday, May 05, 2005

Pentagon "Mole" Arrested for Passing US Security Information to Pro-Israel Jewish Lobby AIPAC

by

Yitzhak Benhorin

RELATED ARTICLE

CLICK HERE to read ARREST WARRANT OF LARRY FRANKLIN deposited in the District Court of Virginia in .pdf format. (Needs Acrobat Reader, download HERE)

According to the arrest warrant, Franklin compromised:

38 documents which were classified 'Top Secret.' ;

37 documents which were classified 'Secret,'" and

8 were marked "Confidential."

The dates of these documents spanned THREE decades.

Must read article on insider review "The Larry Franklin / AIPAC Case - A Memo to the Media "
4 May 2005

Edited article

Read here full article by Yitzah Benhorin in Ynet

Larry Franklin, former Analyst for the Iran desk in the Pentagon was arrested by FBI Wednesday for passing information to the U.S. pro-Israel Jewish lobby AIPAC.

Franklin turned himself in to the FBI yesterday morning and was placed under arrest. He made a brief appearance in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., and was released on $100,000 bond on condition he surrender his firearms and passport. A preliminary hearing was set for May 27. If convicted he faces up to 10 years in prison.

Franklin is said to have passed on a classified Presidential Directive, and possibly otherwise sensitive documents pertaining to US deliberations on foreign policy regarding Iran, to AIPAC , who in turn allegedly provided the information to Israel.

An FBI official said Franklin passed confidential information to:

Steve Rosen, AIPAC's Director of Research and Keith Weissman, AIPAC's Iran expert. Both were sacked by AIPAC in a move by AIPAC to dissociate itself from the evolving scandal that threatens to engulf the whole organization.

Naor Gilon, a senior diplomat in the Israeli embassy in Washington. Gilon has just ended his three-year tenure in the Washington office.

Last year, Israeli officials admitted that Franklin had met repeatedly with Naor Gilon, head of the political department at the Israeli Embassy in Washington and a specialist on Iran's nuclear programs. A Newsweek report indicates that Gilon was under FBI surveillance and that Franklin only became a target after these meetings. The US Justice Department said that the investigation is continuing and will likely focus on Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, as well as on the activities of the AIPAC.

The (FBI official) added that the charges were partially based on a meeting Franklin had with AIPAC representatives and the Israeli diplomat in June 2003.

The investigation was launched after FBI officials suspected truth behind rumors of a senior double agent in the Pentagon. A Pentagon official had reported then that Iran analyst Larry Franklin, who worked at the office of Deputy Secretary of Defense, was the mole.

The Israeli Spy Scandal

Read here for more on Israeli spy ring in US

On August 27, 2004 CBS News broke a story about an FBI investigation into a possible Israeli spy in the US Department of Defense. The story reported the FBI had uncovered an Israeli spy working as a policy analyst under Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz. He was identified as Larry Franklin.

According to Newsweek:

It was just a Washington lunch — one that the FBI happened to be monitoring. FBI agents were monitoring a conversation between an Israeli Embassy official and a lobbyist for AIPAC, as part of a probe into possible Israeli spying.

Suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, in the description of one intelligence official, another American "walked in" to the lunch out of the blue. Agents at first didn't know who the man was. They were stunned to discover he was Larry Franklin, a desk officer with the Near East and South Asia office at the Pentagon.

On December 1, 2004 FBI agents raided the offices of AIPAC and seized computer equipment and files of Howard Kohr, the Executive Director, Richard Fishman, Managin Director, Renee Rothstein, Communication Director and Raphael Danziger. Research Director.

According to an article published in the Washington Post on 9 December,2004, all are suspected as agents who picked up information from Franklin and passed it on to Israel.

There have been instances of Israeli espionage in the United States before Franklin. Jonathan Pollard, an Israeli spy who worked in the Naval Anti-Terrorist Alert Center, pleaded guilty to espionage and was sentenced to life in prison in 1987. Read here for more on the Pollard spy case

Larry Franklin

Larry Franklin was an Air Force reserve officer served two short stints in Israel, at the the US Embassy's defense attache office in Tel Aviv . He was also an officer of the US Defense Intelligence Agency. When Franklin was promoted to the Pentagon policy division as a specialist on Iran, U.S. law enforcement officials said he consistently argued for a hard-line stance against the Iranian government.

Franklin also was a key link between the Defense Department and Iraqi National Congress Leader Ahmed Chalabi, according to the officials and Chalabi aides.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld confirmed that Franklin was one of two Pentagon officials who met in 2001 with Manucher Ghorbanifar, the Middle Eastern arms dealer and onetime intermediary in the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s.

Ghorbanifar, who has said he remained in contact with Franklin and the other official until last year, is seeking US support to overthrow Iran's government.

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