WASHINGTON, 22 April 2005 — The American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, a powerful pro-Israel lobby has fired two of its senior officials involved in an FBI investigation of allegedly spying for Israel in the United States.
Policy director Steve Rosen and senior Iran analyst Keith Weissman had been on paid leave during the investigation.
Rosen, a political scientist by training, joined AIPAC from the Rand Corporation in the 1980s. As director of research, he is credited with turning the association into one of Washington’s most influential lobbying organizations.
AIPAC had been the subject of an FBI probe for allegedly passing documents to an Israeli diplomat in 2003 for several years, according to press reports.
Rosen and Weissman are among AIPAC officials targeted in an FBI investigation last year after suspicions that Pentagon analyst, Larry Franklin, transferred classified documents about US policy on Iran to AIPAC. This information was allegedly passed on to the Israelis. Deliberately transferring classified information to a foreign power is a breach of US espionage statutes.
One of the AIPAC pair then told diplomats at the Israeli Embassy in Washington about the ‘classified’ information, which claimed Iranians were monitoring and planning to kidnap and kill Israelis operating in the Kurdish areas in northern Iraq.
It is unclear whether the ‘classified’ information was real or bogus. AIPAC denies any wrongdoing.
Franklin, an Iran expert, was already under investigation by the FBI for allegedly passing classified information to AIPAC when FBI counterintelligence agents approached him to play a central role in the setup operation this past summer.
Justice Department sources told reporters that Rosen and Weissman were the AIPAC’s officials suspected of passing classified information from Franklin on to an Israeli diplomat. The government officials also said that the federal investigation into alleged wrongdoing at AIPAC started as early as 2001. Reportedly, the investigation focused on a secret White House draft on Iran that Franklin allegedly handed over to Rosen and Weissman in the summer of 2003.
Last December, FBI agents raided the AIPAC offices and issued subpoenas to four top executives who were later questioned at length.
Some observers believe the FBI set up AIPAC, and that federal agents used Franklin to draw the two senior AIPAC officials — who already knew him — into accepting what he described to them as ‘classified’ information.
AIPAC, whose ties with the US Administration are reportedly strained, as a result of the spying charges, is viewed as trying to distance itself from the on-going FBI investigation by firing the officials.
News of the initial Franklin-AIPAC lunch broke last summer: CBS led its August 27 Nightly News broadcast with a report of a ‘full-fledged espionage investigation under way,’ saying the FBI was about to ‘roll up’ a suspected Israeli ‘mole’ in the office of the secretary of defense in the Pentagon.
CBS’s sensational allegation immediately brought to mind bitter memories of the Pollard affair, the 1985 arrest and subsequent conviction in 1987 and life imprisonment for espionage of US naval intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard for passing classified information to Israel.
AIPAC is considered one of the five most powerful lobbies in Washington, alongside giants like the American Association of Retired Persons and the National Rifle Association.
