The AIPAC/Franklin Affair

Lawrence Franklin was a Pentagon analyst working on Iran, one of two mid-level officials handling Iran policy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, under Undersecretary Douglas Feith. He was, by his own account, frustrated. He believed the United States was not taking the Iranian threat seriously enough, and he believed that two men at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee had the access to change that.

So he talked to them. Over roughly two years he passed Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman classified material, including information from a classified presidential directive on Iran policy and intelligence about threats to American troops in Iraq. The government alleged the two men passed it on to Israeli officials.

Franklin also met, at least eight times by his own admission, with Naor Gilon, the political officer at the Israeli embassy in Washington.

What happened to each of them

Franklin pleaded guilty in October 2005 and was sentenced in January 2006 to twelve years and seven months.

Rosen and Weissman were indicted under the Espionage Act. In May 2009, before any trial, the government dropped every charge. There was no plea bargain and no conviction. Neither man has ever been found guilty of anything, and this article does not suggest otherwise.

Naor Gilon was never charged. He was recalled to Israel during the investigation and no Israeli official faced any proceeding in connection with the case.

Why the case collapsed

The reason the prosecution folded is more interesting than the prosecution.

The section of the Espionage Act being used had rarely if ever been applied to private citizens who received national defense information verbally and passed it along. Judge T.S. Ellis III issued a series of pretrial rulings that prosecutors said made conviction effectively impossible. Acting U.S. Attorney Dana Boente, moving to dismiss, said the rulings had made the case too hard to prove and that classified information would inevitably come out at trial.

But the decisive problem was the witness list. Rosen and Weissman had won the right to subpoena former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other senior Bush administration officials, and the government had tried and failed to quash those subpoenas. The defense intended to use that testimony to establish something specific: that the United States government routinely used AIPAC as a back channel to communicate with Israel, and that what Franklin did was a version of what officials did as a matter of course.

The government chose to drop the case rather than let that argument be made under oath.

Franklin’s sentence

There is a coda that says something about how seriously the underlying conduct was finally treated.

At the original sentencing, Judge Ellis said the facts led him to believe Franklin had been motivated by a desire to help the United States rather than harm it, and gave him the bottom of the guideline range. Then, after the case against Rosen and Weissman collapsed, Ellis cited that collapse as a significant factor and resentenced him. The twelve years and seven months became probation, with a special condition of ten months in a halfway house and a hundred hours of community service.

He served the ten months. He lost his military pension and benefits as a consequence of the felony conviction. AIPAC had fired Rosen and Weissman back in April 2005, while they were under investigation and before any charge existed, and declined to say whether it believed they had done anything improper.

Why it matters

This is the only time in American history that officials of a major domestic lobbying organization were indicted under the Espionage Act for receiving national defense information and passing it to a foreign government.

It produced exactly one conviction, of the government employee, and that sentence was cut by more than nine tenths after the case against the recipients fell apart. The two men accused of moving the material to Israel walked out with no trial, no plea and no conviction. The Israeli diplomat who received it went home.

What makes the case matter beyond its own facts is the reason the government retreated. Prosecutors were not defeated on the evidence. They abandoned the case rather than put Condoleezza Rice on a witness stand to be asked, under oath, how information ordinarily travels between the United States government, AIPAC and Israel. The subpoenas that forced that decision are on the docket. Whatever the answer would have been, the government preferred that it not be given in public.

Sources

• United States v. Lawrence A. Franklin, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Criminal No. 1:05cr225; plea October 5, 2005; sentencing January 20, 2006; resentencing June 11, 2009
• United States v. Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia; indictment unsealed August 4, 2005; all charges dismissed May 1, 2009
• Department of Justice and U.S. Attorney’s Office releases, Eastern District of Virginia, 2005–2009
• Washington Post, “Defense Analyst Guilty in Israeli Espionage Case,” October 6, 2005
• CBS News, “Feds Drop Charges in AIPAC Spy Case,” May 1, 2009
• ABC News, “DOJ May Dismiss Spy Case Against AIPAC Lobbyists,” April 23, 2009