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How Mole Hunting Has Changed in the
Good Ole USA: The Vest-Rozen Report
September 12, 2004
Comments #523-524
Discussion Threads: Comment #458 - The War Scare of 2002 (Section III)
Attached References:
[Ref.1] Bob Drogin and Greg Miller, "Israel Has Long Spied on U.S., Say Officials," Los Angeles Times,
September 3, 2004.
DNI Editor's note: For editorial reasons, we have combined Chuck's comments #523 and 524 into this single comment, but have used the unusual number (523-524) to preserve the correct numbering of future comments.
One of the most enduring features the Cold War was the Great Mole Hunt. It reflected the widespread the fear and paranoia that Soviet moles and agents of influence were working deep in the recesses of the US government. Congressman Richard Nixon became a national figure by outing the alleged Soviet mole Alger Hiss in the late 1940s, Senator Joseph McCarthy lent his name to an era of fear in 1950s by falsely accusing hundreds of innocent American citizens of being Soviet secret agents. But the greatest mole hunter of them all was James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's Chief of Counterintelligence. Angleton became so obsessed by the fear of a Soviet mole in the upper reaches of the CIA that he literally tore the CIA apart for over twenty years in a futile effort to hunt him down. Indeed, according to David Martin, author of The Wilderness of Mirrors, one of Angleton's successors became convinced that Angleton must have been the mole because who else but a Soviet agent would have the motive to inflict so much damage to the CIA. Such was the mind-boggling logic of mole hunting in the good ole days. [DNI Editor's note: For readers interested in learning more about the murky world of counterintelligence and about Angleton in particular, DNI recommends The Company by Robert Littell.]
If mole hunting was a pathological obsession of the cold warriors in the Cold War, the recent spate of news reports about Israeli moles in the Pentagon shows that post-cold war mole hunting has transmogrified itself into a flabby embarrassment to the not-so-cold neo-con warriors in the hot wars of the 21st Century.
That Israel spies on the United States and has so-called agents of influence all over Washington, including the US Congress, is a well known fact to just about anyone who has been involved involved in national security affairs for even a short time. [see Reference 1] Yet mole hunting has gone out of style when it comes to Israel … there are no Richard Nixons, Joseph McCarthys, or James Jesus Angletons among today's national security fanatics. Maybe that is a good thing, but … what about real national security?
To be sure, Israel insists it stopped spying on the United States in 1986, after Jonathan Jay Pollard, a former Navy analyst, was convicted in U.S. federal court and sent permanently to the slammer for selling secret military documents to Israel. But the recent FBI investigations suggest otherwise. Indeed, if news reports are accurate: it is beginning to look like our nation's mole hunters are now in a target rich environment. Yet the thunderous guns of the past are now strangely silent. Could it be that some moles are nicer than other moles? Or perhaps we live in a less fearful, more tolerant age that evokes a greater respect for civil liberties? Or maybe it is something else silencing the mole hunters of today?
This blaster can not answer these questions; it is better thought of as a mole hunting SITREP. A recent article in CounterPunch expands the discussion by examining the target rich environment and, by extension, the state of Mole-ology in 2004.
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Mole Hunt
An expert on U.S.-Israeli relations reveals details from his recent visit with the FBI.
By Jason Vest and Laura Rozen
The American Prospect
Web Exclusive: 09.03.04
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=8467
Re-printed with permission of authors.
In May, Stephen Green was hard at work campaigning for a seat in Vermont's House of Representatives when he got a phone call. The last person the 64-year-old former United Nations official, then preoccupied with health-care policy issues, expected to hear from was an FBI agent, who asked if he could come to Washington to chat with him about the history of Israeli espionage efforts against the United States.
As the author of two books on U.S.-Israeli relations, Green knew something about the subject. Still, the phone call seemed to come out of the blue. Green quickly discovered, however, that the FBI had a keen interest in the subject. Federal agents were involved in an investigation into an alleged Israeli "mole" in the office of Douglas Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy.
Early reports suggested that the FBI had wiretap evidence that a veteran Iran analyst working in Feith's office at the Defense Intelligence Agency, Larry Franklin, may have passed a classified draft of a National Security Presidential Directive on Iran to an official working for the pro-Israel lobbying organization, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Members of the organization, in turn, were said to have passed the document on to Israel. (AIPAC officials strongly deny the accusations.)
But as Green spoke with investigators, he realized the agents were investigating far more than Franklin.
"Larry Franklin's name never came up, but several others did," he said.
Green, as the FBI agents knew, had a special expertise in the field of Israeli espionage in the United States. In the 1980s, he had taken time off from his job at the UN to look into the U.S.-Israeli "special relationship." He spent years combing through public records, filing and litigating Freedom of Information Act requests, and tracking down current and retired government officials. He eventually wrote two books, Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations With Israel and Living By The Sword: America and Israel in the Middle East. The Times of London and Foreign Affairs commended his work, describing it as "praised by those who believe the United States has damaged its own security, and Israel's too, by uncritical and often secret support of Israel's actions, no matter how extreme." Yet, as Foreign Affairs reported, Green's work also caused "sputter[ing] with indignation" among "those who believe that American and Israeli interests are identical."
Green returned to the UN in 1990 and followed the subject from there. Earlier this year, he published a piece in the newsletter CounterPunch, recapping previously reported—though long-forgotten—government investigations of prominent neoconservatives for their suspected espionage or improper information-sharing with Israel. And that's where the FBI comes in.
According to the FBI agents who contacted Green, as he recounts, the article had come to their attention when one of Green's sources—a retired national security official they were interviewing— shared it with them.
And so on June 22, Green found himself sitting across an oval-shaped conference table from two FBI agents at an undisclosed northern Virginia venue. The meeting lasted nearly four hours.
"They were extraordinarily well-informed; it was apparent they've been at this for awhile," Green says. "I asked them if there was a current reason for them asking questions about things that go back over 30 years, and they sort of looked at each other and said, 'Yes, it's a present issue,' but wouldn't say specifically what. Though they did ask very specific questions about one individual in particular."
Green said the agents asked about several current or former Pentagon officials such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Michael Ledeen, and Stephen Bryen.
"The tenor of their questions was such that it defined where these people were in terms of the nature of their focus," Green says. "They also asked about a couple other Office of Special Plans people, including Harold Rhode. Ironically, about the only name that didn't come up was Larry Franklin."
Regardless of the status of the investigation, something seemed a bit fishy. After all, Israel—one of the United States' closest allies, with deep support in the Bush Administration and especially at the Defense Department—hardly needs a Pentagon-embedded spy to get access to interagency debates about U.S. policy to Iran, as observers have pointed out. And compared with the information on arms shipments that former US Navy analyst Jonathan Pollard passed on to Israel in the 1980s, a draft of a document about U.S. policy toward Iran would hardly seem like the crown jewels.
Yet, as Newsweek has reported, Franklin had come to the FBI's attention a year and a half ago, when he walked in on a lunch with an Israeli diplomat and an AIPAC lobbyist, both of whom were under FBI surveillance for a year. In addition, Newsweek reported that when news of the investigation surfaced, Franklin had already been cooperating with the FBI for several weeks and had reportedly led FBI agents to those who may have received information from him.
The previous FBI investigation came into focus only on September 1, when The Washington Post reported that for two years, the FBI has conducted a counterintelligence investigation into whether AIPAC has forwarded "highly classified materials from the National Security Agency … to Israel." The Post piece describes Franklin's alleged role as merely "coincidental" to the larger FBI probe of alleged intelligence-passing through AIPAC to Israel.
Both AIPAC and Tel Aviv vehemently deny any wrongdoing. And indeed, the Israeli diplomat who acknowledges meeting with Franklin and AIPAC—Naor Gilon, the Israeli embassy's No. 3 official and a specialist on Iran's nuclear program—returned to Washington on August 29 from a summer vacation in Israel. He admits that he met with Franklin, but insists he's done nothing wrong.
A source familiar with the investigation told The American Prospect that when news of the investigation broke, the Justice Department had been preparing a request to the State Department to have an Israeli diplomat—by implication Gilon—declared persona non grata for allegedly having received classified U.S. intelligence from AIPAC sources.
Furthermore, a September 1 report by NBC speculated that the reason the Israelis may have broken their declared post-Pollard policy of not spying on the United States is because of Israel's preeminent concern about Iran's nuclear program, and its view that the United States may not be prepared to act assertively enough to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.
The Post piece seems to imply that Franklin is more of an anti-Tehran zealot than anything else and wasn't engaging in espionage per se. But as the Post article and the June meeting between Green and the FBI seem to indicate, the FBI is looking into the possibility there's been communication between Israeli elements and U.S. officials, including several who work for Feith and have access to sensitive intelligence on Iran and its nuclear program.
Jason Vest is Prospect senior correspondent. Laura Rozen reports on national security issues from Washington, D.C. and for her weblog, War and Piece.
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Chuck Spinney
"A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives." - James Madison, from a letter to W.T. Barry, August 4, 1822
Disclaimer: In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.
Reference 1
Israel Has Long Spied on U.S., Say Officials
By Bob Drogin and Greg Miller Times Staff Writers
Los Angeles Times
September 3, 2004
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=2026&ncid=2026&e=8&u=/latimests/20040903/ts_latimes/israelhaslongspiedonussayofficials
WASHINGTON - Despite its fervent denials, Israel secretly maintains a large and active intelligence-gathering operation in the United States that has long attempted to recruit U.S. officials as spies and to procure classified documents, U.S. government officials said.
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Officials said FBI surveillance of a senior Israeli diplomat, who was the subject of an FBI inquiry in 1997-98, played a role in the latest probe into possible Israeli spying. The bureau now is investigating whether a Pentagon analyst or pro-Israel lobbyists provided Israel with a highly classified draft policy document.
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"There is a huge, aggressive, ongoing set of Israeli activities directed against the United States," said a former intelligence official who was familiar with the latest FBI probe and who recently left government. "Anybody who worked in counterintelligence in a professional capacity will tell you the Israelis are among the most aggressive and active countries targeting the United States."
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In his first public comments on the case, Israel's ambassador, Daniel Ayalon, repeated his government's denials this week. "I can tell you here, very authoritatively, very categorically, Israel does not spy on the United States," Ayalon told CNN. "We do not gather information on our best friend and ally."
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But U.S. diplomats, military officers and other officials are routinely warned before going to Israel that local agents are known to slip into homes and hotel rooms of visiting delegations to go through briefcases and to copy computer files.
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Although never previously implicated in a potential espionage case, AIPAC has frequently been a subject of controversy. Its close ties to Israel and its aggressive advocacy of Israeli government positions has drawn criticism that it should be registered as an agent of a foreign country. Others, noting its ability to organize significant backing for or against candidates running for national office, have demanded that it be classified as a political action committee.
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Times staff writers Mark Mazzetti and Tyler Marshall in Washington contributed to this report.
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