By Jeff Stein, CQ Staff
May 3, 2009 – 8:55 p.m.
Even the shouting’s over.
“Rep. Jane Harman received cheers at the AIPAC policy conference this morning for attacking the wiretapping of her conversations with allies of Israel,” Politico’s Ben Smith reported Sunday.
And why not?
AIPAC — the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — had just won a grand victory of sorts with the Justice Department dropping its far-fetched, ill-conceived espionage case against two of its former officials, Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman.
Never mind that AIPAC fired the two in April 2005, many months after the FBI’s investigation surfaced, citing their alleged failure to “comport with standards that AIPAC expects of all its employees.”
And what standards did they violate? Getting a Pentagon official to leak information about U.S. policy in the Middle East? Does anyone seriously think AIPAC prohibits its operatives from eliciting sensitive information from defense and intelligence officials?
Of course not. Does The Washington Post? And that was the problem with the AIPAC case from the get-go, as many before me have remarked: The Justice Department was criminalizing behavior that reporters and lobbyists carry on every day.
The Justice Department’s big mistake was in not making clear its real intent: To show that AIPAC’s officials should be required to register as foreign agents, that is to say, that their activities in Washington are no different than lobbyists for, say, Turkey or any other foreign government. Their job is to find out about and influence U.S. policy.
And how do they do that? By getting access to top American policymakers and members of Congress — like Jane Harman , who in 2005 — when U.S. intelligence intercepted her conversation with a target of a wiretap on suspected Israeli operatives — was the top Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
Now, have no doubt about it: Israeli agents are busy stealing American industrial, technical and military secrets — witness the spy Jonathan Pollard — and tapping into its telecommunications lines through myriad avenues.
But the Justice Department’s AIPAC case should never have muddied classic espionage with foreign lobbying.
To be sure, a number of former senior counterintelligence officials remain convinced that Rosen and Weissman were engaged in far more nefarious activities than they were charged with. One called the charges against them “an Al Capone case,” i.e., the equivalent of prosecuting the legendary Chicago gangster with tax evasion.
But with Rosen and Weissman taking a walk now, they’re just going to have to shut up. The way the law works, they are innocent of any wrongdoing.
“I am now convinced that an investigation of Israel’s [covert lobbying] operations here can never succeed,” said a veteran national security lawyer over the weekend. “It’s all political.”
Actually, the outcome was forecast in a similar case 30 years ago.
Stephen D. Bryen, a pro-Israel activist who was instrumental in forging close ties between Jerusalem and the Pentagon, was an aide to New Jersey Democratic Sen. Clifford P. Case in 1978 when someone reported seeing him pass documents to Israeli officials in a Washington restaurant.
The witness, however, was Michael Saba, head of an Arab-American organization, which probably doomed the case from the beginning. And the Justice Department’s top criminal prosecutor was a friend of Bryen’s lawyer, or so Saba detailed in a subsequent book, “The Armageddon Network.”
“After I reported this incident to the Justice Department, FBI and Justice Department investigators gathered sufficient evidence on Dr. Bryen’s activities to recommend he be brought before an investigative grand jury for espionage,” Saba wrote. “The case was quietly closed, however, by Philip Heymann, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, a close personal friend and associate of Dr. Bryen’s attorney. Bryen was never formally charged or made to account for his actions under oath.”
Justice Department officials denied any such thing had taken place.
So with a history like that, no wonder AIPAC officials were in a celebratory mood on Sunday, and cheered Harman when she repeated her vow not to rest until the government released classified wiretaps reportedly incriminating her in a quid-pro-quo with an Israeli agent.
“I will not quit on this until I am absolutely sure that this never can happen to anyone else,” she said.
Whatever the meaning of “this” is, she needn’t worry.
Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.
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