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FBI probe raises questions about Israel's US spying

It began like most national security investigations, with a squad of FBI agents surreptitiously tailing two men, noting where they went and whom they met.

What was different about this case was that the surveillance subjects were lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and one of their contacts turned out to be a Pentagon policy analyst.

The ensuing criminal investigation into whether AIPAC officials passed classified information from the Pentagon official to Israel has become one of the most byzantine counterintelligence stories in recent memory.

So far, the Justice Department has not accused anyone of wrongdoing, and no one has been arrested.

AIPAC has dismissed the accusations as baseless, and Israel has denied conducting US espionage operations.

Behind the scenes, however, the case has reignited a furious and long-running debate about the close relationship between the pro-Israel lobbying organization and a conservative group of Republican civilian officials at the defense department.

This group is in charge of the office that employs Law-rence Franklin, the Pentagon analyst implicated in the FBI investigation. The group's aggressive policy views on Iraq, Iran and the rest of the Middle East have been controversial but influential within the Bush administration.

"They have no case," said Michael Ledeen, a conservative scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a friend of Franklin. "If they have a case, why hasn't anybody been arrested or indicted?"

Nearly a dozen officials who have been briefed on the investigation said in interviews last week that the FBI began the inquiry as a national security matter based on specific accusations that AIPAC employees had been a conduit for secrets between Israel and the Pentagon.

These officials said that the FBI, in consultation with the Justice Department, had established the necessary legal foundation required under the law before beginning the investigation.

But friends and associates of the civilian group at the Pentagon say they are targeted by adversaries from within the intelligence community who have opposed them since before the war in Iraq.

The Pentagon civilians, led by Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, and Douglas Feith, the undersecretary for policy, were among the first in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks to urge military action to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, an approach favored by AIPAC and Israel.

Wolfowitz and Feith were part of a larger network of policy experts inside and out of the Bush administration who made the controversial case that a war with Iraq was part of a larger war on terrorism.

This Pentagon group circulated their own intelligence assessments, which have since been discredited by the CIA and by the independent Sept. 11 commission, claiming that there was a terrorist alliance between Saddam's government and al-Qaeda.

This Pentagon group has also advocated that the Bush administration adopt a more aggressive policy toward Iran, and some of its members have quietly begun to argue for similarly forcible "regime change" in Tehran.

Israel says Iran represents a grave threat to its national security.

Pushing the US to attack Tehran is one of its major foreign policy objectives, and AIPAC has lobbied the Bush administration to support Israel's policies in this regard.

Franklin was an expert on Iran in Feith's office, and among the material he is suspected of turning over to AIPAC is a draft presidential policy directive on Iran that detailed the Bush administration's early plans.
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