WASHINGTON, 4 September 2004 — Yuval Steinitz, the chairman of the Israeli Parliament’s foreign and defense committee, responding to the recent Israeli spy scandal with the United States, said recently, “I’m 100 percent confident — not 99 percent, but 100 percent — that Israel is not spying on the United States.” As the scandal broke, a friend of mine who formerly served in the US diplomatic corps e-mailed me the following: “Years ago, I asked an Israeli friend of mine why his guys kept on running spy operations against us when they could get 99 percent of our secrets from loyal Jewish-Americans for nothing. He laughed and said Israelis want 100 percent.”
Former Sen. Jim Abourezk and I spoke a few days ago. He commented: “My gosh, over 25 years ago you came to my office in the US Senate and told me you had just overheard a strange conversation between an American government employee and a group of Israelis in a Washington, D.C. restaurant and you didn’t know who to report it to. I told you that I thought that AIPAC (American Israeli Public Affairs Committee) was probably involved in that conversation. That incident turned into an Israeli spy scandal. And the Israeli spy scandal, the Larry Franklin case, that erupted this week, started with an American government employee and a group of Israelis in a Washington, D.C. restaurant with AIPAC involved. Are there any more similarities between the two cases?”
“Yeah”, I told him, “They just announced that Nathan Lewin, the attorney for that government employee 25 years ago, is the attorney for AIPAC in the case today.”
In 1978, the conversation that I overheard in the restaurant and the subsequent reporting of what was said to the FBI, led to an investigation of that government employee, Stephen Bryen, and a recommendation from the FBI investigators that the matter be brought before a grand jury with charges of espionage for Israel. That case was then mysteriously dropped. I wrote a book about this case and the investigation details titled “The Armageddon Network” which was published in November of 1984. Major characters in the book in addition to Stephen Bryen and Nathan Lewin, included Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen and Elliot Abrams. Those same names have been all over the news again in the current spy scandal.
When I reported the facts of the 1978 Israeli spy scandal, I initially met with John Davitt, who was then the chief of the Justice Departments Internal Security Division. Davitt had essentially run the counterespionage section of the Justice Department from the end of World War II through the Cold War and up until the late 1970s. Davitt later told me and the New York Times that, up to that point, after the Soviet Union, the second most active espionage service investigated for spying on the United States was Israel. Yet through all of this spying and many Israeli espionage cases investigated, the Bryen case was the first made public and no one had been brought to trial. Bryen not only got off without being formally charged, but he also later became a high official in the US Defense Department. Richard Perle hired him in 1981.
In late 1985, American government employee Jonathan Pollard was arrested on espionage charges as he tried to take refuge in the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C. Initially, the Israelis denied any knowledge of Pollard’s activities and said that they didn’t need to spy on a friend and ally. Israeli spokesman stated that they were 100 percent sure that Israel couldn’t have been involved in the Pollard case. Pollard later pleaded guilty to the charge of espionage for Israel and is now serving a term of life imprisonment in an American penal institution. The Israelis finally were forced to admit that they were spying on the US through Pollard, but attempted to call it a “rogue operation”. The Israelis granted Pollard Israeli citizenship while he was in prison and have tried numerous times to have him released from prison and sent to Israeli reportedly to be welcomed as an Israeli hero.
Now what about the current Larry Franklin Pentagon Israeli spy scandal? Are we likely to see another Pollard-like situation or will we see more cases swept under the rug like the Bryen case and scores of other investigations of Israeli espionage against the United States? Author Stephen Green wrote the foreword to “The Armageddon Network” and later wrote two books of his own, “Taking Sides” and “Living by the Sword” in the mid and late 1980s, about Israeli espionage against the United States. Green wrote an article in early 2004 about five current and former American government employees, Stephen Bryen, Michael Ledeen, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz. Through extensive research and years of Freedom of Information requests to the US government, Green had compiled files that proved that each of these five individuals had been investigated at some time during their government careers for passing information to a foreign government, namely Israel. Over twenty mainstream American publications, most of which had previously published Green’s works, rejected the article for reasons given that ranged from “nothing new here” to “this is anti-Semitic”. One pundit said, “You can’t publish something like that about Israel in an election year”. Finally the article was published on an Internet publication, CounterPunch, in late February. Green has been receiving numerous requests lately for copies of his article as the names of the five individuals that he wrote about are reappearing in the current Franklin spy scandal.
Congressman John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee has written to the chairman of that committee calling for a special investigation of this Israeli spy scandal and its possible connections to the Ahmad Chalabi/Iran information leakage case and misinformation regarding the US invasion of Iraq. And the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), one of the largest Jewish organizations in North America, has called on the Bush administration to immediately appoint a special counsel to investigate the circumstances of leaks to the American media regarding suspicions of an alleged Israeli “mole” in the Pentagon. That’s right, the ADL is calling for an investigation because they feel that the leak was made with malicious intent to defame Israel, its American supporters and AIPAC. The ADL and its head, Abraham Foxman, claim that the allegations of spying for Israel are “baseless.”
I say “Let’s Roll”. Bring ‘em on. Jim Abourezk, the American public and I have been waiting a long time for this.
— Dr. Michael Saba is the author of “The Armageddon Network” and is an international relations consultant.
