[Shadow_Group] Fw: The Larry Franklin spy probe reveals an escalating fight overcontrol of

Sat Oct 30 21:24:40 PDT 2004

FYI 

 Cloak and Swagger 

The Larry Franklin spy probe reveals an escalating fight over control of
Iran policy.  

By Laura Rozen and Jason Vest 
Issue Date: 11.02.04  

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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 telephoned an acquaintance who worked at a pro-Israel lobbying
group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). 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 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 official
was visited by two FBI agents, who asked him about Franklin. From the
line of questioning, it wasn't clear to the AIPAC 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 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?  

* * *  

More-
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId<http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId>
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