- SEATTLE (IPS/GIN) -- The
burgeoning probe over claims that a Pentagon official passed highly classified
secrets to a Zionist lobby group is part of a much broader network of FBI
and Pentagon investigations of prominent U.S. neo-conservatives and their
ties to Israel dating back some 30 years, according to knowledgeable sources.
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- The sources, who asked to not be identified, said the
FBI has been intensively reviewing a series of past counter-intelligence
probes that were started against several high-profile neo-cons but never
followed up with prosecutions, due to political pressure, to the great
frustration of counter-intelligence officers.
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- Some of these past investigations involve top current
officials, including Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz; Undersecretary
of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, whose office appears to be the focus
of the most recently disclosed inquiry; and Richard Perle, who resigned
as Defense Policy Board (DPB) chairman last year.
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- All three were the subject of a lengthy investigative
story by Stephen Green published by the progressive newsletter Counterpunch
in February. Mr. Green is the author of two books on U.S.-Israeli relations,
including "Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations with a Militant
Israel," which relies heavily on interviews with former Pentagon and
counter-intelligence officials.
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- At the same time, another Pentagon office concerned with
the transfer of sensitive military and dual-use technologies has been examining
the acquisition, modification and sales of key hi-tech military equipment
to third parties by Israel obtained from the United States, in some cases
with the help of prominent neo-conservatives who were then serving in the
government.
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- Some of that equipment has been sold by Israel - which
in the last 20 years has become a top exporter of the worldís most
sophisticated hi-tech information and weapons technology - or by Israeli
middlemen, to Russia, China and other U.S. strategic rivals. Some of it
has also found its way onto the black market, where terrorist groups obtained
bootlegged copies, according to these sources.
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- Of particular interest in that connection are derivatives
of a powerful case-management software called PROMIS that was produced
by INSLAW, Inc. in the early 1980s and acquired by Israel's Mossad intelligence
agency, which then sold its own versions to other foreign intelligence
agencies in the Middle East, Asia and Eastern Europe.
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- But these versions were modified with a "trap door"
that permitted the seller to spy on the buyers' own intelligence files
and possibly the U.S., according to a number of published reports.
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- The FBI is reportedly also involved in the Pentagon's
investigation, which is overseen by Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for
International Technology Security John A. "Jack" Shaw with the
explicit support of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
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- The latest incident is based on allegations that a Defense
Intelligence Agency (DIA) career officer, Larry Franklin - who was assigned
in 2001 to work in a special office dealing with Iraq and Iran under Mr.
Feith - provided highly classified information, including a draft on U.S.
policy towards Iran, to two staff members of the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC), one of Washington's most powerful lobby groups.
One or both of the recipients allegedly passed the material to the Israeli
embassy.
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- It would be a mistake to see Mr. Franklin as the chief
target of the current investigation, according to sources, but rather he
should be viewed as one piece of a much older and broader network.
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- Mr. Franklin has not commented on the allegation, and
Israel and AIPAC have strongly denied any involvement and say they are
cooperating fully with FBI investigators.
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- The office in which Mr. Franklin has worked since 2001
is dominated by staunch neo-conservatives, including Mr. Feith himself.
Close to Israel's right-wing Likud party and headed by William Luti, a
retired Navy officer who worked for DPB member Newt Gingrich when he was
speaker of the House of Representatives, it played a central role in building
the case for war in Iraq.
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- Part of the office's strategy included working closely
with the Iraqi National Congress (INC), led by now-disgraced exile Ahmad
Chalabi, and the DPB members in developing and selectively leaking intelligence
analyses that supported the now-discredited thesis that former Iraqi President
Saddam Hussein had close ties to al-Qaeda.
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- Mr. Feithís office enjoyed especially close links
with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, to whom
it "stovepiped" its analyses without having them vetted by professional
intelligence analysts in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the DIA,
or the State Department Bureau for Intelligence of Research (INR).
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- Since the Iraq war, Mr. Feith's office has also lobbied
hard within the U.S. government for a confrontational posture vis-a-vis
Iran and Syria, including actions aimed at destabilizing both governments
- policies which, in addition to the ousting of Saddam Hussein, have been
strongly and publicly urged by prominent, hard-line neo-conservatives,
such as Perle, Feith and Perle's associate at the American Enterprise Institute
(AEI), Michael Ledeen, among others.
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- Despite his status as a career officer, Mr. Franklin,
who is an Iran specialist, is considered both personally and ideologically
close to several other prominent neo-conservatives, who have also acted
in various consultancy roles at the Pentagon, including Mr. Ledeen and
Harold Rhode, who once described himself as Deputy Secretary of State Paul
Wolfowitz's chief adviser on Islam.
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- In December 2001, Rhode and Franklin met in Europe with
a shadowy Iranian arms dealer, Manichur Ghorbanifar, who, along with Ledeen,
played a central role in the arms-for-hostages scandal involving the Reagan
administration, Israel and Iran in the mid-1980s that became known as the
"Iran-Contra Affair."
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- Mr. Ledeen set up the more recent meetings that apparently
triggered the FBI to launch its investigation, which has intensified in
recent months amid reports that Mr. Chalabi's INC, which has long been
championed by the neo-conservatives, has been passing sensitive intelligence
to Iran.
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- Mr. Feith has long been an outspoken supporter of Israel's
Likud Party, and his former law partner Marc Zell has served as a spokesman
in Israel for the Jewish settler movement on the occupied West Bank. Most
of the neo-cons are Jewish.
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- He, Perle and several other like-minded hardliners participated
in a taskforce that called for then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
to work for the installation of a friendly government in Baghdad as a means
of permanently altering the balance of power in the Middle East in Israel's
favor, permitting it to abandon the Oslo peace process, which Mr. Feith
had publicly opposed.
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- Previously, Mr. Feith served as a Middle East analyst
in the National Security Council in the administration of former President
Ronald Reagan (1981-89), but was summarily removed from that position in
March 1982 because he had been the object of an FBI inquiry into whether
he had provided classified material to an official of the Israeli embassy
in Washington, according to Mr. Greenís account.
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- But Mr. Perle, who was then serving as assistant secretary
of defense for international security policy (ISP) which, among other responsibilities,
had an important say in approving or denying licenses to export sensitive
military or dual-use technology abroad, hired him as his "special
counsel" and later as his deputy, where he served until 1986, when
he left for his law practice with Zell, who had by then moved to Israel.
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- Also serving under Mr. Perle during these years was Stephen
Bryen, a former staff member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
and the subject of a major FBI investigation in the late 1970s for offering
classified documents to an Israeli intelligence officer in the presence
of AIPAC's director, according to Mr. Green's account, which is backed
up by some 500 pages of investigation documents released under a Freedom
of Information request some 15 years ago.
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- Although political appointees decided against prosecution,
Mr. Bryen was reportedly asked to leave the committee and, until his appointment
by Perle in 1981, served as head of the Jewish Institute for National Security
Affairs (JINSA), a group dedicated to promoting strategic ties between
the United States and Israel and one in which Perle, Feith and Ledeen have
long been active.
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- In his position as Mr. Perle's deputy, Mr. Bryen created
the Defense Technology Security Administration (DTSA) which enforced regulations
regarding technology transfer to foreign countries.
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- During his tenure, according to one source with personal
knowledge of his work, "the U.S. shut down transfers to western Europe
and Japan (which were depicted as too ready to sell them to Moscow) and
opened up a back door to Israel" - a pattern that became embarrassingly
evident after Mr. Perle left office and the current deputy secretary of
state, Richard Armitage, took over in 1987.
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- Soon, Mr. Armitage was raising serious questions about
Mr. Bryenís approval of sensitive exports to Israel without appropriate
vetting by other agencies.
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- "It is in the interest of U.S. and Israel to remove
needless impediments to technological cooperation between them," Mr.
Feith wrote in Commentary in 1992. "Technologies in the hands of responsible,
friendly countries facing military threats, countries like Israel, serve
to deter aggression, enhance regional stability and promote peace thereby."
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- Messrs. Perle, Ledeen, and Wolfowitz have also been the
subject of FBI inquiries, according to Mr. Green's account. In 1970, one
year after he was hired by Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, an
FBI wiretap authorized for the Israeli Embassy picked up Mr. Perle discussing
classified information with an embassy official, while Mr. Wolfowitz was
investigated in 1978 for providing a classified document on the proposed
sale of a U.S. weapons system to an Arab government to an Israeli official
via an AIPAC staffer.
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- In 1992, when he was serving as undersecretary of defense
for policy, Pentagon officials looking into the unauthorized export of
classified technology to China found that Mr. Wolfowitz's office was promoting
Israel's export of advanced air-to-air missiles to Beijing in violation
of a written agreement with Washington on arms re-sales.
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- The FBI and the Pentagon are reportedly taking a new
look at all of these incidents, and others to, in the words of an Aug.
29 New York Times story, "get a better understanding of the relationships
among conservative officials with strong ties to Israel."
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- © Copyright 2004 FCN Publishing, FinalCall.com http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/article_1576.shtml
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