@@ Spy case reveals Jews are running U.S. policy on Iran @@
Arash
October 2, 2004
Cloak and Swagger
The Larry Franklin spy probe reveals an escalating fight over control of
Iran policy.
By Laura Rozen & Jason Vest
la...@warandpiece.com
To Washington's small and sometimes fractious community of Iran experts, it
was becoming obvious: What to do about Iran and its fast-developing nuclear
program was set to rival Iraq as the most pressing foreign-policy challenge
for the person elected president in 2004. By the spring and early summer of
this year, the city was awash in rival Iran task forces and conferences.
Some recommended that Washington engage in negotiations with Tehran's
mullahs on the nuclear issue; they drew scorn from the other side, which
preached regime change or military strikes.
In late July, as this debate raged, a Pentagon analyst named Larry Franklin
(http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Larry_Franklin) telephoned an
acquaintance who worked at a pro-Israel lobbying group, the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee (http://www.antiwar.com/cole/?articleid=3467). The
two men knew each other professionally from their long involvement in the
Washington Iran and Iraq policy debates. A Brooklyn-born Catholic father of
five who put himself through school, earning a doctorate, as an Air Force
reservist, Franklin had served as a Soviet intelligence analyst at the
Defense Intelligence Agency until about a decade ago, when he learned Farsi
and became an Iran specialist. At their July meeting, Franklin told the
AIPAC (http://www.antiwar.com/reese/?articleid=3551) employee about his
frustration that the U.S. government wasn't responding aggressively enough
to intelligence about hostile Iranian activities in Iraq. As Franklin
explained it, Iran had sent all of its Arabic-speaking Iranian agents to
southern Iraq, was orchestrating attacks on Iraqi state oil facilities, and
had sent other agents to northern Iraq to kill Israelis believed to be
operating there. Iran had also transferred its top operative for Afghanistan
to the Iranian Embassy in Baghdad. The move, Franklin implied, signified
Tehran's intention to cause more trouble in Iraq.
A couple of weeks after this meeting, in mid-August, the AIPAC
(http://www.etherzone.com/2004/lang090304.shtml) official was visited by two
FBI agents, who asked him about Franklin. From the line of questioning, it
wasn't clear to the AIPAC
(http://www.tompaine.com/articles/aipac_of_spies.php) official whether
Franklin was being investigated by the FBI for possible wrongdoing or if he
was simply the subject of a routine background investigation for renewal of
his security clearance.
But on August 27, when CBS broke the story that the FBI was close to
arresting an alleged "Israeli mole" in the office of the Pentagon's No. 3
official, Douglas Feith, it became clear that Franklin was in trouble. News
reports said that the FBI had evidence that Franklin had passed a classified
draft national-security presidential directive (NSPD) on Iran to AIPAC.
What's
more, reports said, the FBI wasn't just interested in Franklin. For the past
two years, it had been conducting a counterintelligence probe into whether
AIPAC had served as a conduit for U.S. intelligence to Israel, an
investigation about which National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was
briefed shortly after the Bush administration came into office.
In the flurry of news reports that followed, the scope of the FBI
investigation seemed potentially enormous. Citing senior U.S. officials, The
Washington Post reported that "the FBI is examining whether highly
classified material from the National Security Agency . was also forwarded
to Israel," and that the investigation of Franklin was "coincidental" to
that broader FBI probe. Time magazine reported that Franklin had been
enlisted by the FBI to place a series of monitored telephone calls (scripted
by the FBI) to get possible evidence on others, including allies of Ahmad
Chalabi, a favorite of Pentagon neoconservatives. Chalabi was alleged to
have told his Iranian intelligence contacts that the United States had
broken their communications codes -- a breach that prompted a break in U.S.
support for Chalabi last spring -- and the FBI wanted to know who had shared
that highly classified information with Chalabi. What's more, an independent
expert on Israeli espionage said he had been interviewed by the FBI in June
and in several follow-up calls, and that the scope of the senior FBI
investigators' questioning was broad and extremely detailed.
In the wake of the first news reports, AIPAC
(http://www.wrmea.com/html/aipac.htm) strongly denied that any of its
employees had ever knowingly received classified U.S. information. Israel
also categorically denied that it had conducted intelligence operations
against the United States since the case of Jonathan Pollard, a U.S. Navy
intelligence analyst who was convicted of spying for Israel in 1987.
At the time the CBS report aired in late August -- incidentally, on the
Friday evening before the opening of the Republican national convention --
custody of the Franklin investigation was being transferred from the head of
the FBI counterintelligence unit, David Szady, to U.S. Attorney Paul
McNulty, a Bush appointee, in Alexandria, Virginia, as the case moved to the
grand-jury phase.
And then, in mid-September, news of the Franklin investigation went dark.
The classified document that Franklin allegedly passed to AIPAC concerned a
controversial proposal by Pentagon hard-liners to destabilize Iran. The
latest iteration of the national-security presidential directive was drafted
by a Pentagon civilian and avid neocon, Michael Rubin, who hoped it would be
adopted as official policy by the Bush administration. But in mid-June,
Bush's
national-security advisers canceled consideration of the draft, partly in
response to resistance from some at the State Department and the National
Security Council, according to a recent memo written by Rubin and obtained
by The American Prospect. No doubt also contributing to the administration's
decision was the swelling insurgency and chaos of postwar Iraq.
Rubin, in his early 30s, is a relative newcomer to the neoconservative
circles in which he is playing an increasingly prominent role. Once the Iraq
and Iran desk officer in the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans and later a
Coalition Provisional Authority adviser in Iraq, these days the
Yale-educated Ph.D. hangs his hat at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI)
and serves as editor for controversial Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes'
magazine, The Middle East Quarterly.
In an article published in the Republican-oriented quarterly Ripon Forum in
June, Rubin suggests that the administration resolve its Iran waffling by
turning against the current regime. "In 1953 and 1979," he wrote,
"Washington supported an unpopular Iranian government against the will of
the people. The United States should not make the same mistake three times."
In other words, President Bush should step up his public condemnation of the
Iranian regime and break off all contact with it in hopes of spurring a
swelling of the Iranian pro-democracy movement. In short, Rubin, like his
fellow Iran hawks, urges the administration to make regime change in Iran
its official policy.
This invocation of "moral clarity" has a long intellectual pedigree among
neoconservatives. It's the same argument they made to Ronald Reagan about
the Soviet Union more than 20 years ago. "If we could bring down the Soviet
empire by inspiring and supporting a small percentage of the people,"
Michael Ledeen, a chief neoconservative advocate of regime change in Iran
and freedom scholar at AEI, recently wrote in the National Review, "surely
the chances of successful revolution in Iran are more likely."
Was it to this end that Franklin was allegedly observed by the FBI passing
the draft NSPD on Iran to AIPAC? Was he trying to inform AIPAC, or Israel,
about the contents of the draft NSPD? Or rather, and perhaps more plausibly,
was he trying to enlist the powerful Washington lobbying organization in
advocating for a Iran-destabilization policy? In other words, is the
Franklin case really about espionage, or is it a glimpse into the ugly
sausage-making process by which Middle East policy gets decided in
Washington and, in particular, in the Bush administration?
Arguably past the apogee of its power, AIPAC nonetheless remains one of
Washington's most influential organizations. Successor to the Eisenhower-era
American Zionist Council of Public Affairs, AIPAC came into its own during
the Reagan years, thanks largely to the efforts of former Executive Director
Thomas Dine. When Dine assumed his post in 1981, the organization had an
annual budget of a little more than $1 million, about two dozen employees,
and 8,000 members; when he left in 1993, a budget of $15 million was being
administered by a staff of 158, and the committee had 50,000 members.
An assiduous networker and fund-raiser, Dine also quickly became
indispensable to the Reagan White House as a promoter of various
neoconservative foreign-policy initiatives. He also forged alliances between
AIPAC and other interests, including the Christian right. (Another former
AIPAC executive director, Morris Amitay, has long been active in
neoconservative ventures, as both a business partner to Feith and Richard
Perle and co-founder, with Michael Ledeen, of the Coalition for Democracy in
Iran.) By the mid-'80s, AIPAC had been a prime mover in the defeat or
crippling of initiatives and legislators not to its liking, and the passage
of billions in grants to Israel. It had also taken on an increasingly
pro-Republican (and pro-Likud) tilt.
While many regarded AIPAC's power as lessened during the Clinton
administration, since 2001 AIPAC has been powerful enough that even the Bush
administration couldn't get the committee and its congressional allies to
tone down language in a 2002 resolution in support of Israeli military
actions against the Palestinians. AIPAC's 2002 annual conference included 50
senators, 90 representatives, and more than a dozen senior administration
officials; this year's conclave boasted President Bush himself, plus House
Majority Leader Tom DeLay and an array of State and Defense department
officials.
But while AIPAC is a powerhouse, it is not clear that it would have been the
perfect vehicle for the kind of Iran-destabilization lobbying that some in
Washington have been pushing. There are a wide variety of Israeli positions
on how to deal with Iran. Many of Washington's Middle East hands who are
pro-Israel believe destabilization will not likely succeed, and they fear it
will not deal with what they consider the real threat from Iran: nuclear
weapons.
"If you mean trying to promote the peaceful overthrow of the regime in Iran,
I think the prospects for success are highly uncertain," says Patrick
Clawson, deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a
pro-Israel think tank. Pro-Israel activists in Washington want to make sure
that the United States considers Iran's nuclear program first and foremost
an American problem, the response to which could include, if necessary, air
strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities. Iran's nuclear program, one such
activist recently told the Prospect, "has to be seen as Washington's
problem."
There are other competing positions within the Israel-policy community. One
Israeli official in Washington this summer for diplomatic meetings discussed
regime change in Iran with a reporter from The American Prospect on the
condition that his identity not be disclosed. He believes that Iran is ripe
for democratic revolution, that it has one of the most pro-Western
populations in the region, and that Iranian opposition forces would be
electrified by a vigorous show of U.S. presidential support. But he believes
that any sort of military intervention in Iran would set back considerably
these promising regime-change forces. Still another group of Israeli
policy-makers seem more inclined toward a military option, as evidenced by
Israel's well-publicized purchase of 500 "bunker-buster" bombs from the
United States in September and its failed efforts to launch a spy satellite
to monitor Iran's nuclear-program developments.
Yet another policy position became evident in Seymour Hersh's article in The
New Yorker in June, in which Hersh reported that Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon, sensing that the U.S.-created chaos in Iraq could leave an
opening for anti-Israel efforts in Iran, was pursuing a "Plan B" that had
Israeli operatives covertly training and equipping Kurds in Iraq, Iran, and
Syria for possible future covert action to counter any such measures
(http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040628fa_fact). As Hersh reported:
"Israeli intelligence and military operatives are now quietly at work in
Kurdistan, providing training for Kurdish commando units and, most important
in Israel's view, running covert operations inside Kurdish areas of Iran and
Syria. . Some Israeli operatives have crossed the border into Iran,
accompanied by Kurdish commandos, to install sensors and other sensitive
devices that primarily target suspected Iranian nuclear facilities."
The Israeli government insisted the story wasn't credible, and that it was
sourced by Turkey, which is panicked, as ever, about foreign designs on
Kurdistan. But a source told the Prospect that Franklin expressed the
conviction that the United States has intelligence that affirms Hersh's
report to be largely accurate. A second former U.S. diplomatic official who
recently visited the area told the Prospect that there are Israeli
intelligence officials operating in Kurdish Iraq as political advisers, and
others under the guise of businessmen.
All of which raises questions, like what exactly was in the draft NSPD that
Rubin wrote and Franklin allegedly shared with AIPAC? And does the
destabilization plan pushed by neoconservatives in the draft NSPD in fact
advocate that the United States or its proxies arm the Iranian opposition,
including the Kurds, as part of its efforts to pursue regime change?
The public statements by the neoconservatives emphasize that regime change
in Iran would not require U.S. military force. Then again, the
neoconservatives' inspiration for the Iran plan has its roots in Reagan-era
NSPDs that, while providing nonmilitary support to Poland's Solidary
Movement, also had the CIA aggressively arming and training the Afghan
mujahideen, the Nicaraguan Contras, and other anti-communist rebels. There's
also no denying that some of the chief advocates of the Iran regime plot
come out of the Pentagon, America's military command center. And some of
those same Iran hawks have discussed the Iran regime-change issue, for
instance, with Parisian-based Iran Contra arms dealer Manucher
Ghorbanifar -- not exactly the kind of go-to guy for a nonviolent regime
change plan, one might think.
Whatever the nuances, the neocons are facing one of their biggest challenges
in Washington today: persuading the administration to adopt their
regime-change policy toward Iran even while their regime-change policy in
Iraq appears to be crumbling. Since the Iraq invasion, Feith's office has
come under the intense scrutiny of congressional investigators,
investigative journalists, and Democratic critics for its two controversial
prewar intelligence units, the Office of Special Plans
(http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/01/12_405.html) and the Policy
Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group. It was those units that had helped
convince the Bush White House of an operational connection between Saddam
Hussein and al-Qaeda -- a claim since disproved by the independent September
11 commission, among others. Those secretive intelligence units had also
been among the administration's strongest champions of Chalabi, who
allegedly told Iranian intelligence agents that the United States had
penetrated Iranian communications channels.
An FBI counterintelligence investigation of who had leaked this information
to Chalabi was reportedly under way by spring 2004, and many of Chalabi's
neocon allies were incredibly anxious: Misjudgment about Chalabi's virtues
or postwar Iraq planning was one thing; passing secrets to another nation
would be an accusation of an altogether graver magnitude.
All of these investigations put Franklin and other neoconservatives
associated with Feith at the white-hot center of a raging controversy: What
would any second-term Bush foreign policy look like? Would controversial
neocon figures like Feith remain in power? Or would it mark the rise of
pragmatists and realists? For the neoconservatives, the fight to clear
Franklin and themselves has become a fight against their internal
administration rivals. And they're fighting it in classic neocon fashion:
dirty and disingenuously.
Among intelligence professionals, it's hardly a state secret that even
nations whose relationships go beyond mere alliance and constitute
friendship spy on one another. That's one reason nations have
counterintelligence capabilities as well. As such, investigations of
espionage and mishandling of classified documents are not uncommon in
Washington; the Bush administration's Justice Department, for example, has
opened investigations to probe allegations of Chinese, Taiwanese, and Saudi
espionage, including ones that involve ranking officials at the FBI and
State Department. With the investigations into AIPAC and Franklin, the
Justice Department has renewed its interest in snooping by our ally, Israel.
Since the Pollard case, U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement sources have
revealed to the Prospect that at least six sealed indictments have been
issued against individuals for espionage on Israel's behalf. It's a
testament to the unique relationship between the United States and Israel
that those cases were never prosecuted; according to the same sources, both
governments ultimately addressed them through diplomatic and intelligence
channels rather than air the dirty laundry. A number of career Justice
Department and intelligence officials who have worked on Israeli
counterespionage told the Prospect of long-standing frustration among
investigators and prosecutors who feel that cases that could have been made
successfully against Israeli spies were never brought to trial, or that the
investigations were shut down prematurely. This history had led to informed
speculation that the FBI -- fearing the Franklin probe was heading toward
the same silent end -- leaked the story to CBS to keep it in the public eye
and give it a fighting chance.
But the pro-Israel lobby and some neoconservatives, fighting for their
political lives, have turned the leak on its head. They claim that the AIPAC
and Franklin investigations have nothing to do with the substance of the
Iran-related leaks. Rather, they say, investigators are going after Jews. In
the current probes of Franklin and AIPAC, Michael Rubin has led the strident
charge. On September 4, during the media flap over the investigations, Rubin
sent an e-mail memo -- obtained by the Prospect -- to a list of friendly
parties targeting two of Washington's more respected mainstream journalists,
calling them key players in an "increasing anti-Semitic witch hunt." The
memo fingered Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage as one likely
source of the leaks about the investigation, and also urged that, if the
accusations had any merit, the White House demand the evidence be made
public. "I'm increasingly concerned about the leaks spinning off from the
Franklin affair," Rubin wrote. "It was bad enough when the White House
rewarded the June 15, 2003, leak by canceling consideration of the NSPD. It
showed the State Department that leaks could supplant real debate. .
Bureaucratic rivalries are out of control." Rubin's memo showed up in a
similar form almost a month later in the op-ed pages of The Washington Times
under the byline of National Review staffer Joel Mowbray, and echoes of it
can be seen in the pages of the neocon-friendly Jerusalem Post.
Meanwhile, Franklin was involved in some pushback of his own. In late
August, the Franklin case was referred from Szady to U.S. Attorney Paul J.
McNulty, a Bush-Ashcroft appointee who heads the U.S. District Court for the
Eastern District of Virginia. A grand jury was seated on the case in
September and had subpoenaed at least some witnesses to testify about
Franklin. Then, on October 1, The New York Sun reported that Franklin had
fired his court-appointed attorney (whom he had presumably retained for
financial reasons), halting grand-jury proceedings while he found new
counsel. On October 6, the Los Angeles Times reported that Franklin had
stopped cooperating with the FBI entirely. He had hired a high-profile
lawyer, Plato Cacheris (of Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen fame), and had
rejected a proposed plea agreement whose terms Franklin considers "too
onerous," according to the Los Angeles Times.
Who pushed Franklin -- who for months seemed vulnerable -- to stop
cooperating? And who is paying for his expensive new lawyer? At this
writing, we do not know. Also unknown is the status of the larger FBI
counterintelligence probe of alleged Israeli espionage into which Franklin
stumbled. But we do know that his recent decisions would seem to immensely
help any of the people against whom he could have testified. At least for
now, that's a round won by a clique intent on pushing freelance
crypto-diplomacy to its limits.
Laura Rozen reports on foreign-policy and national-security issues from
Washington, D.C. Jason Vest is a Prospect senior correspondent.
http://www.warandpiece.com/
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=8764
DSP
SURPRISE" IMMINENT
By Wayne Madsen
According to White House and Washington Beltway insiders, the Bush
administration, worried that it could lose the presidential election to
Senator John F. Kerry, has initiated plans to launch a military strike on
Iran's top Islamic leadership, its nuclear reactor at Bushehr on the
Persian
Gulf, and key nuclear targets throughout the country, including the main
underground research site at Natanz in central Iran and another in Isfahan.
Targets of the planned U.S. attack reportedly include mosques in Tehran,
Qom, and Isfahan known by the U.S. to headquarter Iran's top mullahs.
The Iran attack plan was reportedly drawn up after internal polling
indicated that if the Bush administration launched a so-called
anti-terrorist attack on Iran some two weeks before the election, Bush
would
be assured of a landslide win against Kerry. Reports of a pre-emptive
strike
on Iran come amid concerns by a number of political observers that the Bush
administration would concoct an "October Surprise" to influence the outcome
of the presidential election.
According to White House sources, the USS John F. Kennedy was deployed to
the Arabian Sea to coordinate the attack on Iran. Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld discussed the Kennedy's role in the planned attack on Iran when he
visited the ship in the Arabian Sea on October 9. Rumsfeld and defense
ministers of U.S. coalition partners, including those of Albania,
Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Georgia,
Hungary, Iraq, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Mongolia, Poland, Qatar,
Romania, and Ukraine briefly discussed a very "top level" view of potential
dual-track military operations in Iran and Iraq in a special "war room" set
up on board the aircraft carrier. America's primary ally in Iraq, the
United
Kingdom, did not attend the planning session because it reportedly
disagrees
with a military strike on Iran. London also suspects the U.S. wants to move
British troops from Basra in southern Iraq to the Baghdad area to help put
down an expected surge in Sh'ia violence in Sadr City and other Sh'ia areas
in central Iraq when the U.S. attacks Iran as well as clear the way for a
U.S. military strike across the Iraqi-Iranian border aimed at securing the
huge Iranian oil installations in Abadan. U.S. allies South Korea,
Australia, Kuwait, Jordan, Italy, Netherlands, and Japan were also left out
of the USS John F. Kennedy planning discussions because of their reported
opposition to any strike on Iran.
In addition, Israel has been supplied by the United States with 500 "bunker
buster" bombs. According to White House sources, the Israeli Air Force will
attack Iran's nuclear facility at Bushehr with the U.S. bunker busters.The
joint U.S.-Israeli pre-emptive military move against Iran reportedly was
crafted by the same neo-conservative grouping in the Pentagon and Vice
President Dick Cheney's office that engineered the invasion of Iraq.
Morale aboard the USS John F. Kennedy is at an all-time low, something that
must be attributable to the knowledge that the ship will be involved in an
extension of U.S. military actions in the Persian Gulf region. The
Commanding Officer of an F-14 Tomcat squadron was relieved of command for a
reported shore leave "indiscretion" in Dubai and two months ago the
Kennedy's commanding officer was relieved for cause.
The White House leak about the planned attack on Iran was hastened by
concerns that Russian technicians present at Bushehr could be killed in an
attack, thus resulting in a wider nuclear confrontation between Washington
and Moscow. International Atomic Energy Agency representatives are also
present at the Bushehr facility. In addition, an immediate Iranian Shahab
ballistic missile attack against Israel would also further destabilize the
Middle East. The White House leaks about the pre-emptive strike may have
been prompted by warnings from the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency
that an attack on Iran will escalate out of control. Intelligence circles
report that both intelligence agencies are in open revolt against the Bush
White House.
White House sources also claimed they are "terrified" that Bush wants to
start a dangerous war with Iran prior to the election and fear that such a
move will trigger dire consequences for the entire world.
"Arash" <A7...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:ukwdd.4169$Cb5....@newscontent-01.sprint.ca...
------------ And now a word from our sponsor ------------------
Do your users want the best web-email gateway? Don't let your
customers drift off to free webmail services install your own
web gateway!
-- See http://netwinsite.com/sponsor/sponsor_webmail.htm ----