August 29, 2004

F.B.I. Said to Reach Official Suspected of Passing SecretsBy JAMES RISEN

ASHINGTON, Aug. 28 - The F.B.I. is in communication with a Pentagon official suspected of passing secrets to Israel and is seeking to gain his cooperation in their espionage investigation, government officials said.
The Pentagon official, Larry Franklin, a midlevel analyst who works in the policy office of the Defense Department, has been in contact with investigators with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, officials said. It could not be learned whether he was talking with the bureau directly or through a lawyer.
Government officials say they suspect that Mr. Franklin provided classified documents to officials at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a major pro-Israel lobbying group in Washington, and that the group in turn handed the materials over to Israeli intelligence. Both the lobbying group and the Israeli government have denied any misconduct. [Page 23.]
Mr. Franklin could not be located for comment.
Government officials who have been briefed on the investigation said investigators had unspecified evidence that Mr. Franklin provided the Israelis with a sensitive report about American policy toward Iran, along with other materials. Mr. Franklin focused on Iranian issues in his work.
No arrests have been made in the case, however, and the F.B.I. apparently is seeking more information from Mr. Franklin. The investigation has been going on for more than a year, government officials said.
Michael Ledeen, a conservative scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who is a friend of Mr. Franklin, said Saturday that he believed the accusations were baseless.
"I don't believe a word of it," Mr. Ledeen said. "This story is incoherent, it makes no sense. Anyone who wanted to know about U.S. policy on Iran could just read The New York Times."
The work done in the Pentagon's policy offices often involves regional strategic planning like deliberations on what stance the government should take in dealing with other countries. A little more than a year ago, one policy pushed from within the Pentagon would have relied on covert support for Iranian resistance groups to destabilize Iran's powerful clergy. In internal deliberations, some even raised the possibility of a military strike against an Iranian nuclear facility at Natanz. The ideas, reported in the news media at the time, came up in the context of developing a draft directive outlining the administration's overall policy toward the regime in Tehran.
American policy toward Iran is now of critical importance to Israel, which is increasingly concerned by evidence that Tehran has accelerated its program to develop a nuclear weapon. The Bush administration has become concerned that Israel might move militarily against Iran's nuclear complex.
The investigation is the latest embarrassing incident involving Pentagon employees. In June, federal investigators began administering polygraph examinations to civilian Pentagon employees to determine who may have disclosed classified information to Ahmad Chalabi, the former Iraqi exile leader who was once a close ally of the Pentagon.
Pentagon officials have said that they are cooperating in the investigation regarding Israel. But some senior officials in the policy branch were not informed about it until Friday night, after it was reported on evening television news programs.
A government official who has been briefed on the investigation said that F.B.I. officials had earlier expressed an interest in interviewing two of Mr. Franklin's superiors, Douglas Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy, and Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, although there is no sign that they are a focus of the investigation.
It could not be learned whether the F.B.I. had decided to go ahead with those interviews.
Former government officials have also been contacted by the F.B.I. in recent days, apparently in an effort to gain a better understanding of the relationships among conservative officials with strong ties to Israel.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee said that it was "cooperating fully with the governmental authorities" and had "provided documents and information to the government and has made staff available for interviews."
One of the group's priorities is stopping Iran from obtaining nuclear arms and other unconventional weapons.
The 65,000-member group has long been regarded as one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington, cultivating close ties in Republican and Democratic administrations alike.
As recently as May, President Bush singled out the group for calling attention to "the great security challenges of our time," which include the "threat posed by Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons."
The F.B.I. inquiry is considered sensitive because of the case's potential political implications.
Mr. Feith and the work done under him have been the focus of intense criticism over the past year as questions have mounted about the justification for the war in Iraq. Before the war, Mr. Feith created a small intelligence unit that sought to build a case for Iraq's ties to Al Qaeda, an effort that has since been disputed by the Central Intelligence Agency.
Questions have also repeatedly been raised about work done by members of Mr. Feith's staff that skirted the normal bureaucracy. For example, Mr. Franklin participated in secret meetings with Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian who had acted as an arms deal middleman in the Iran-contra affair during the Reagan administration.
The secret meetings were first held in Rome in December 2001 and were brokered by Mr. Ledeen. He said he arranged the meetings to put the Bush administration in closer contact with Iranian dissidents who could provide information in the war on terrorism. But Mr. Ledeen said Saturday that Mr. Franklin was always skeptical that the back-channel meetings were useful.
Current and former defense officials said on Saturday that Mr. Franklin worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency until about three years ago, when he moved to the Pentagon's policy office, headed by Mr. Feith, to work on Iran and other Middle East issues.
Former colleagues said that Mr. Franklin was a Soviet analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency who transferred to the Middle East division in the early 1990's. He learned Farsi and became an Iran analyst, developing extensive contacts among Iranians who opposed the Tehran government.
"He was a good analyst of the Iranian political scene, but he was also someone who would go off on his own," said one former defense colleague.
Although Mr. Franklin worked as a Middle East policy officer, a defense official said he had no effect on United States policy and few dealings with senior Pentagon officials like Mr. Wolfowitz. At one point in the run-up to the Iraq war in early 2003, Mr. Franklin was brought in to help arrange meetings between Mr. Wolfowitz and Shiite and Sunni clerics across the United States, a defense official said.