Spy Probe Scans Neocons
by
Jim Lobe
The
burgeoning scandal over claims that a Pentagon official passed highly
classified secrets to a Zionist lobby group appears to be part of a much
broader set of FBI and Pentagon investigations of close collaboration
between prominent U.S. neo-conservatives and Israel dating back some 30
years.
According
to knowledgeable sources, who asked to not be identified, the FBI (Federal
Bureau of Investigation) 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, to the great frustration
of counter-intelligence officers, in some cases.
Some of
these past investigations involve top current officials, including Deputy
Secretary of Defence Paul Wolfowitz; Undersecretary of Defence for Policy
Douglas Feith, whose office appears to be the focus of the most recently
disclosed inquiry; and Richard Perle, who resigned as Defence Policy Board
(DPB) chairman last year.
All three
were the subject of a lengthy investigative story by Stephen Green
published by Counterpunch in February. 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.
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 by
Israel obtained from the United States, in some cases with the help of
prominent neo-conservatives who were then serving in the government.
Some of
that equipment has been sold by Israel � which in the last 20 years has
become a top exporter of the world's most sophisticated hi-tech
information and weapons technology � or by Israeli middlemen, to Russia,
China and other potential U.S. strategic rivals. Some of it has also found
its way onto the black market, where terrorist groups � possibly including
al-Qaeda � obtained bootlegged copies, according to these sources.
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.
But these
versions were modified with a "trap door" that permitted the seller to spy
on the buyers' own intelligence files, according to a number of published
reports.
A modified
version of the software, which is used to monitor and track files on a
multitude of databases, is believed to have been acquired by al-Qaeda on
the black market in the late 1990s, possibly facilitating the group's
global banking and money-laundering schemes, according to a Washington
Times story of June 2001.
According
to one source, Pentagon investigators believe it possible that al-Qaeda
used the software to spy on various U.S. agencies that could have detected
or foiled the Sep. 11, 2001 attack.
The FBI is
reportedly also involved in the Pentagon's investigation, which is
overseen by Deputy Undersecretary of Defence for International Technology
Security John A. "Jack" Shaw with the explicit support of Defence
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
The latest
incident is based on allegations that a Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA)
career officer, Larry Franklin � who was assigned in 2001 to work in a
special office dealing with Iraq and Iran under 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.
Franklin
has not commented on the allegation, and Israel and AIPAC have strongly
denied any involvement and say they are co-operating fully with FBI
investigators.
The office
in which Franklin has worked since 2001 is dominated by staunch
neo-conservatives, including Feith himself. 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.
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.
Feith's
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).
Since the
Iraq war, Feith's office has also lobbied hard within the U.S. government
for a confrontational posture vis-�-vis Iran and Syria, including actions
aimed at destabilising both governments � policies which, in addition to
the ousting of 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.
Despite
his status as a career officer, 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 Ledeen and Harold Rhode, who once
described himself as Deputy Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz's chief
adviser on Islam.
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 deal involving the Reagan
administration, Israel and Iran in the mid-1980s that became known as the
"Iran-Contra Affair."
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 Chalabi's INC, which has long been championed by the
neo-conservatives, has been passing sensitive intelligence to Iran.
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.
He, Perle
and several other like-minded hardliners participated in a task force that
called for then-Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin 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 favour,
permitting it to abandon the Oslo peace process, which Feith had publicly
opposed.
Previously, 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 a FBI inquiry into whether he had
provided classified material to an official of the Israeli embassy in
Washington, according to Green's account.
But Perle,
who was then serving as assistant secretary of defence 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.
Also
serving under 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 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.
Although
political appointees decided against prosecution, 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.
In his
position as Perle's deputy, Bryen created the Defence Technology Security
Administration (DTSA) which enforced regulations regarding technology
transfer to foreign countries.
During his
tenure, according to one source with personal knowledge of Bryen's 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 Perle left
office and the current deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, took
over in 1987.
Soon,
Armitage was raising serious questions about Bryen's approval of sensitive
exports to Israel without appropriate vetting by other agencies.
"It is in
the interest of U.S. and Israel to remove needless impediments to
technological cooperation between them," 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."
Perle,
Ledeen, and Wolfowitz have also been the subject of FBI inquiries,
according to Green's account. In 1970, one year after he was hired by
Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, an FBI wiretap authorised for the Israeli
Embassy picked up Perle discussing classified information with an embassy
official, while 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.
In 1992,
when he was serving as undersecretary of defence for policy, Pentagon
officials looking into the unauthorised export of classified technology to
China, found that 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.
The FBI
and the Pentagon are reportedly taking a new look at all of these
incidents and others to, in the words of a New York Times story
Sunday, "get a better understanding of the relationships among
conservative officials with strong ties to Israel."
It
would be a mistake to see Franklin as the chief target of the current
investigation, according to sources, but rather he should be viewed as one
piece of a much broader puzzle.
September 1, 2004
Jim
Lobe is Inter Press Service's correspondent in Washington,
DC.
Copyright
� 2004 Inter Press Service
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