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FBI Waited More Than a Year to Make Move against AIPAC

(JTA)Edwin Black - The FBI's investigation of AIPAC did not go into high gear until more than a year after the Pentagon's top Iran analyst allegedly passed foreign policy strategy information to two AIPAC officials on June 26, 2003. The investigation only intensified in July 2004, when the FBI allegedly directed the same analyst, Larry Franklin, to conduct a sting operation against AIPAC officials, providing them with purportedly classified information to pass on to Israel, according to sources close to the investigation. The chronology is important because it suggests that that first meeting produced insufficient grounds for the FBI to pursue a case against AIPAC. The probe appears to have intensified only after the FBI monitored a call between Franklin and reporters at CBS News in May 2004, in which he allegedly disclosed information about aggressive Iranian policy in Iraq. Someone who knows him explained, "Franklin spoke to CBS reporters in an effort to ring an alarm" about White House indifference to a looming threat. After the call, the FBI's counterintelligence division, headed by David Szady, confronted Franklin, who, threatened with charges of espionage and decades of imprisonment, was deployed to set up a sting against AIPAC. Franklin had been under increased scrutiny since disclosure of a secret meeting in December 2001 with former Iranian spy and arms merchant Manucher Ghorbanifar, who was on a CIA "burn list" of individuals who could not be contacted, according to informed intelligence community sources. During June, July, and August, Franklin, apparently being directed by the FBI, made a series of calls to prominent personalities.
2004-12-22 00:00:00
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