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Israel Denies Spying Allegations

(Washington Post) Israeli officials on Saturday denied allegations the country spied on the U.S. American law enforcement officials on Friday said the FBI is investigating whether a Pentagon analyst fed Israel secret material about White House deliberations on Iran. Israeli security officials said the U.S. and Israel cooperate closely on Iranian issues, making it unlikely they would need to resort to spying. (AP/Washington Post) No arrest in the case is believed to be imminent, in part because prosecutors have not yet clearly established whether Lawrence Franklin, a lower-level Pentagon policy analyst, broke the law. Moreover, Franklin appears to be an unlikely candidate for intelligence work. A defense official said Sunday that he had no impact on U.S. policy and few dealings with senior Pentagon officials, including the deputy defense secretary, Paul Wolfowitz. Franklin, one of two Iran desk officers in the Pentagon's Near Eastern and South Asian Bureau, is one of about 1,500 people who work for the Pentagon's policy office, headed by Douglas Feith. (New York Times) Colleagues said they were stunned to hear Franklin was suspected of giving secret information to a foreign government. And foreign policy specialists said they were skeptical that the pro-Israel group under FBI scrutiny, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, would jeopardize its work with classified documents from a midlevel bureaucrat when it could find out almost anything it wanted to by calling top officials in the Bush administration. "The whole thing makes no sense to me," said Dennis Ross, special envoy on the Arab-Israeli peace process in the first Bush and Clinton administrations.
2004-08-30 00:00:00
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