@@ Planners of strategy to use Zionist-Azaris to destabilize Iran @@
Arash
December 23, 2004
More details emerge on AIPAC Chalabi boosters targeted in FBI probe
http://www.bankingonbaghdad.com/images/Edwin.jpg
By Edwin Black
bobin...@edwinblack.com
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
A Pentagon Iran analyst, a Jewish CIA operative-turned-journalist and people
close to discredited Iraq war booster Ahmed Chalabi all figure in an
unfolding investigation of the capital's top Israel lobby.
The probe of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee
(http://www.aipac.org) appears to have intensified only after the FBI
monitored a call between Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin
(http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Larry_Franklin) and reporters
at CBS News last May, in which he allegedly disclosed information about
aggressive Iranian policy in Iraq.
http://www.richardsilverstein.com/tikun_olam/images/franklin_1.jpg
Larry Franklin
One of those reporters was Adam Ciralsky
(http://www.jta.org/page_print_story.asp?intarticleid=14536&intcategoryid=5),
a former attorney at the Central Intelligence Agency who sued
(http://www.jonathanpollard.org/ciralsky.htm) the CIA after he quit in 1999
on the grounds that he was harassed for his Jewish roots and connection to
Israel.
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Adam Ciralsky
After the call in May, the FBI's counterintelligence division, headed by
David Szady (http://www.fbi.gov/libref/executives/szady.htm), who also
supervised the alleged campaign against Ciralsky, confronted Franklin,
according to sources familiar with the case.
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David Szady
Threatened with charges of espionage and decades of imprisonment, Franklin
was deployed to set up a sting against AIPAC, the sources say.
According to sources, he was also involved in initiating contact with some
neoconservative defense experts, several of them Jewish, who supported Ahmad
Chalabi. Chalabi, the president of the Iraqi National Congress, had deep
ties to Bush administration officials.
Chalabi's political adviser, Francis Brooke [CIA agent & an evangelical
Christian] (http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Francis_Brooke),
who is not Jewish, was also targeted, according to sources.
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Francis Brooke (on the left)
Chalabi is at the vortex of a Pentagon-intelligence community squabble over
pre- and post-war policy in Iraq.
The FBI sting, first reported by Janine Zacharia in The Jerusalem Post,
allegedly directed Franklin to offer AIPAC officials supposedly urgent
classified information about Iranian plans to kidnap and murder Israelis
operating in northern Iraq. Whether the information was manufactured or
accurate is not clear.
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Janine Zacharia (second from the left)
The exact date and location of the sting, which came in the form of a
meeting, have not previously been disclosed, but according to sources with
access to prosecution information, it took place on July 21, 2004, at a
suburban Virginia mall.
Believing they had a life or death situation on their hands, AIPAC officials
reportedly contacted the Israeli Embassy, thereby prompting action by the
FBI counterintelligence division.
AIPAC officials declined all comment on the July meeting. A month later, the
FBI raided AIPAC offices, confiscating files from two senior staffers.
Most accounts of the AIPAC investigation, though, have focused on a Franklin
lunch with Steve Rosen, AIPAC's director of foreign policy issues, and Keith
Weissman, an Iran specialist. That meeting, it has been learned, occurred on
June 26, 2003, at the Tivoli restaurant in Arlington.
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Keith Weissman
However, one source familiar with access to the prosecution's case against
AIPAC asked, "If the June 2003 incident was strong enough to prosecute, why
did the government need Franklin to perpetrate a sting more than a year
later? Answer: The first encounter did not amount to anything. The FBI
needed more."
On Dec. 1, the FBI returned to the headquarters of the pro-Israel lobby,
searching staffers' offices. The FBI also issued subpoenas to four AIPAC
staffers to appear before a grand jury. Prosecutors aimed to have the grand
jury hearings by the end of December, but sources close to the investigation
said Wednesday that no date has been set yet.
The chronology is important, say several sources with direct access to the
prosecution's case, because it suggests that the June 2003 meeting produced
insufficient grounds for the FBI to pursue a case against AIPAC.
"We always wondered why there had been no contact by the FBI from June 2003
to August 2004," when AIPAC's headquarters were raided, said a source
familiar with the government's investigation. "That's more than a year."
At the Tivoli restaurant lunch with AIPAC, Franklin allegedly verbally
mentioned information from a classified Pentagon policy paper purportedly
written by defense expert Michael Rubin
(http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/rubin/rubin.php) while the latter was
still at the Pentagon.
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http://www.meib.org/images/ff_rubin_michael.jpg
Michael Rubin
But Franklin did not actually pass along the document -- a policy paper
reportedly proposing a U.S. strategy to destabilize Iran in the face of its
growing nuclear potential -- according to multiple sources familiar with the
document and the prosecution's case.
Rubin is now at the American Enterprise Institute
(http://www.aei.org/scholars/scholarID.83,filter./scholar.asp), a
conservative think tank.
The Tivoli lunch didn't trigger an immediate prosecution: No document was
passed, sources say, and while the verbal information allegedly was drawn
from a Pentagon document that did enjoy a low-security classification, much
of its content already had been aired in the media.
Franklin had been under increased scrutiny since disclosure of a secret
meeting in December 2001 with former Iranian spy and arms merchant Manucher
Ghorbanifar that some in the Washington establishment claimed was
unauthorized.
Franklin didn't know it, but the FBI's counterintelligence division was
monitoring his May 2004 phone conversation with the CBS reporters, including
Ciralsky.
In the conversation with CBS, Franklin's remarks reportedly revealed
sensitive intelligence intercepts, potentially compromising sources and
methods of intelligence gathering, according to some sources aware of the
call. Others aware of the call say the FBI would be hard-pressed to prove
Franklin's comments actually breached national security.
Friends and colleagues describe Franklin as a dedicated public servant
deeply concerned about growing Iranian influence in Iraq.
"He ran off at the mouth, and hated the intelligence community for what he
saw as recklessness," one colleague said. "He was willing to take matters
into his own hands for what he saw as the good of the nation."
Another who knows him added, "Franklin spoke to CBS reporters in an effort
to ring an alarm" about White House indifference to a looming threat, "but
it was clearly wrong if it involved classified information."
Shortly after the CBS call, agents from Szady's FBI counterintelligence
division confronted Franklin, sources say.
During this time, Franklin was not represented by an attorney, and the
government placed him on unpaid leave.
Franklin, who is the sole breadwinner for five children and a
wheelchair-bound wife, was terrified by the threats, according to multiple
sources familiar with his situation.
Szady's FBI counterintelligence division then devised a strategy to use
Franklin as a plant to set up AIPAC, according to sources.
FBI officials refused to discuss the matter.
Among those Franklin was directed to call as part of an alleged series of
sting operations was Brooke, Chalabi's political adviser in Washington.
Brooke said he turned aside Franklin's request for information on the
code-breaking Chalabi is accused of providing to Iran, telling him "it is
all horse dung."
During June, July and August, Franklin, still apparently being directed by
the FBI, made a series of calls to prominent personalities -- conversations
that have been labeled by the recipients as "weird," "curious" and "totally
out of keeping for Larry."
At least some of these calls were at the behest of Szady's
counterintelligence unit, according to several sources, but it is not known
which.
Around late June, Franklin called Richard Perle
(http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/perle/perle.php), an American Enterprise
Institute (http://www.aei.org/scholars/scholarID.49,filter.all/scholar.asp)
defense policy strategist and a key planner of the 2003 war in Iraq,
according to several sources familiar with the call.
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Richard Perle
Perle is former chair of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board and a close
associate of Paul Wolfowitz
(http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/wolfowitz/wolfowitz.php), the
undersecretary of defense.
Dashing out the door and readying for summer travel, Perle did not enter the
call into his telephone logs, the sources said. But he felt the call was
"weird" and took no action, according to one source.
Perle declined to comment on the call.
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Paul Wolfowitz
In August, Franklin also called Ciralsky, who by this time had moved to NBC
News, where he was covering security developments in Iran, sources said.
Franklin apparently tried to set up a meeting with Ciralsky, but no such
meeting ever occurred, according to sources familiar with the call. Ciralsky
declined all comment.
By the end of August, Franklin had been assigned a court-appointed attorney
whose name was sealed under court order, according to sources familiar with
Justice Department filings in the case. That attorney advised Franklin to
sign what sources familiar with the case termed "a really terrible plea
agreement" that would have subjected him to a very long prison term under
the most severe espionage laws.
In September, a friend referred Franklin to Washington defense attorney
Plato Cacheris. In the past, Cacheris has represented accused spies and even
Monica Lewinsky. Franklin fired his court-appointed attorney and Cacheris
began representing him pro bono.
FBI investigators who searched AIPAC's headquarters on Dec. 1 subpoenaed
four top officials to appear before a grand jury in Virginia later this
month. The four are Howard Kohr, the group's executive director; Richard
Fishman, the managing director; Renee Rothstein, the communications
director; and Raphael Danziger, the research director.
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Howard Kohr
An FBI source with knowledge of Szady's investigation bristled at the
intense media coverage of the counterintelligence division's tactic. Said
the source: "We are just following the evidence and seeing where it leads."
Meanwhile, four congressional Democrats have asked the Bush administration
to brief Congress on the FBI probe.
In a letter last week to President George W. Bush, U.S. Reps. Robert Wexler
(D-Fla.), Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), and Gary Ackerman
(D-N.Y.) said that with the case intensifying, Bush should clear up concerns
about the probe's integrity.
For his part, Franklin is doing menial outdoor labor to support his family,
and remains uncertain where the case against him is going. Said one source
who knows him: "He is literally shaking. He has been destroyed."
* Edwin Black of Rockville has covered allegations of Israeli spying in the
United States since the Jonathan Pollard case. Black's current best-seller
is "Banking on Baghdad" (http://www.bankingonbaghdad.com).
http://www.washingtonjewishweek.com/localstory.php?/wjw2/282240209046884.bsp