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US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice addresses the AIPAC conference in Washington, D.C. last week.
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05/30
Haaretz |
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| By Israel Insider staff and partners May 30, 2005 |
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A Virginia grand jury is now weighing evidence in the case involving two senior AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) staff members who may face charges under America's 1917 Espionage Act, which defines as a crime, receipt of classified information for the purpose of helping any foreign entity.
It is alleged that Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman received classified documents -- material said to involve information about Iranian intentions to harm American soldiers in Iraq -- supposedly given by Pentagon employee Larry Franklin to the two former AIPAC staffers during lunch in Virginia on June 26, 2003, who in turn passed the classified documentation to Naor Gilon, an Israel Embassy employee in the US capital.
Franklin is actually facing two charges: one for handing over the information in 2003, and the other for the illegal possession of 83 classified documents at his home in West Virginia. The maximum punishment for each of the charges is 10 years in prison.
But suspicions against Rosen and Weissman focus on a meeting a year later, on July 12, 2004. Franklin was cooperating by then with the FBI, which had threatened him with an indictment after tracking his earlier meetings with the AIPAC men, discovering the alleged hand-over of secret information. He agreed to take part in a sting operation in which he would give the two information and the investigators would then follow them.
Franklin called Weissman and asked for a meeting to discuss an important subject. At the meeting, in a mall near the Pentagon, Franklin told Weissman that Iranian agents were trying to capture Israeli civilians working in the Kurdish area in northern Iraq. Around the same time there had been conflicting reports in Washington about an Israeli presence in Kurdish Iraq. Journalist Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker had written that Israelis were operating there, but Israel and the Americans denied it.
At the meeting, Franklin told Weissman that the information was classified. This is significant in terms of the investigation, since it prevents the AIPAC men from claiming in their defense that they did not know they were dealing with state secrets.
Weissman left the meeting and went straight to Rosen's AIPAC office at Capitol Hill. He said it was a matter of life or death, and that Israeli lives were in immediate danger. The two made three phone calls: to an administration official, to Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post, and to Gilon, at the embassy. Rosen told Gilon about the information and the Israeli official promised he would look into it. All of those calls were wiretapped by the FBI and are part of the case against Rosen and Weissman.
At the same time, the grand jury is expected to hand down its indictment against Franklin this week. That indictment is expected to be similar to the criminal complaint already filed by the FBI.
Plato Cacheris, Franklin's lawyer, confirmed to The New York Sun this weekend that his client indeed took part in the sting operation and said that the investigators appealed to Franklin's sense of patriotism to win him over.
In the meantime, if such an indictment is filed against the two former top-level AIPAC staff members then Gilon, who heads the political department at the embassy, may be questioned. According to Israeli officials, he has never been question about the affair.
AIPAC will presumably be discussed in the actual trials. But right now at least, it does not appear the organization itself will be charged.
AIPAC leaders have taken a series of steps to cut themselves off from the two former officials suspected in the case. Sources close to the case say the prosecution posed four conditions to AIPAC, which would guarantee that it would not be involved in the indictments: a change of working methods to ensure that such incidents don't happen again; the firing of the two officials and public disassociation from them; no offers of high severance or anything else to make it appear the two quit of their own volition; and no financing of their legal defense.
AIPAC has abided by the first three conditions. But it is said to be helping with their legal fees, indirectly, through its own law firm.
AIPAC's decision to cooperate with the investigators' demands and to fire the two officials was made after it became evident that the FBI had tape-recordings showing that Franklin explicitly said that the material was secret. AIPAC's assessment was that it would be difficult for the organization to continue working on Capitol Hill, and with the administration, while two of its senior officials are facing such charges.
The AP contributed to this report.
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