Information-passing inquiry could expand

By Toni Locy and Barbara Slavin, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — An investigation into whether a midlevel Pentagon analyst passed information about U.S. policy on Iran to pro-Israel lobbyists could expand into a broader inquiry into whether more U.S. secrets were shared with Israel, two federal law enforcement officials said Sunday.

Pentagon analyst Lawrence Franklin is suspected of having given either an internal administration document or an oral summary of its contents to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), said the officials, who have knowledge of the case but asked not to be named because the investigation is ongoing. One official said charges as serious as espionage could be filed soon. The other official said the FBI hopes Franklin will cooperate. If he does, he may face a lesser charge such as mishandling classified documents.

Spokesmen for AIPAC and the Israeli government have denied the notion, first reported Friday by CBS News, that Franklin shared the contents of a draft U.S. policy document on Iran with AIPAC members who then passed the information to Israel.

"Any allegation of criminal conduct by AIPAC or our employees is false and baseless," the organization said in a statement on its Web site. "Neither AIPAC nor any of its employees has violated any laws or rules, nor has AIPAC or its employees ever received information they believed was secret or classified."

Much about the case is puzzling. The document Franklin is suspected of having shared, an internal statement on U.S. policy on Iran, was never published because of differences within the Bush administration about how to deal with that country.

Israel, which fears Iran is close to developing nuclear weapons, has myriad ways of finding out and influencing U.S. policy, as does AIPAC, a half-century old organization considered the most influential foreign affairs lobby in the United States.

"AIPAC doesn't need to deal with midlevel people like this guy," says Dennis Ross of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a think tank whose trustees include AIPAC members. "Why create a risk by dealing with someone who is not at the policy level? It doesn't add up to me at all."

The investigation is taking place in an atmosphere of political recriminations in Washington focused on so-called neoconservatives — strong supporters of Israel who lobbied for the U.S. invasion of Iraq and downplayed the difficulties U.S. forces would face there.

The Franklin investigation comes as a separate inquiry looks into who leaked information about U.S. methods of spying on Iran to Ahmad Chalabi, an Iraqi politician who was once favored by the neoconservatives as a likely leader of the new Iraq. One of the law enforcement officials said "there may be some crossover" between the two investigations, but only because the information in both deals with Iran.

Franklin is an Air Force reservist who served in Israel and also worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon's in-house intelligence organization. An Iran analyst, Franklin works for Douglas Feith, undersecretary of Defense for policy.

Before becoming the Pentagon's No. 3 official, Feith was a private attorney in Washington who represented Israeli companies. In 1996, Feith co-authored a study for an Israel-based institute that advocated overthrowing Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein as a means of weakening another Israeli enemy, Syria.

Franklin, who lives in West Virginia, could not be reached for comment.

Contributing: Donna Leinwand, Mark Memmott