HAARETZ
September 5, 2004
WASHINGTON - The FBI
investigation into the Pentagon mole affair has expanded beyond data
analyst Larry Franklin's immediate circle to encompass the entire issue of
Jewish influence on the neoconservative part of the administration.
The FBI queries have recently been focusing on a number of
officials, all from the neoconservative wing, who had access to the
debates on Iranian affairs, the Washington Post reported
yesterday.
The officials include Deputy Defense Secretary Paul
Wolfowitz; Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith; Pentagon adviser
Richard Perle; adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, David Wormser; and
Iran specialist Harold Rhode, all of them Jews.
The Washington Post
reported that FBI people recently spoke to administration officials and
Middle East experts to sound them out on the suspicion that senior
officials funneled secret material to Israel. They asked each official
whether he believes that a certain group of people could spy for Israel
and transfer secret information.
The investigation now appears to
center on the claim made by the opponents of the neoconservatives in the
administration - that the latter are responsible for the U.S. Middle East
policy and that they are suspected of bias in favor of Israel's
interests.
The issues being queried have also increased. It
transpires that the FBI is investigating, in addition to funneling
classified information to Israel, the possibility that secret information
had been given to Ahmed Chalabi, of the Iraqi opposition. Chalabi was
close to many of the people mentioned in the affair and was a central
source of information to the Americans on the goings-on in Iraq before the
war.
The Washington Post said the FBI asked the administration
officials about Israeli embassy officials in Washington who allegedly held
contacts with administration officials to procure secret information. So
far, only the name of Naor Gilon, the political adviser in the embassy,
was mentioned as involved in the affair.
The L.A. Times reported on
Friday that the American administration does not believe Israel's
contention that it does not spy on America and that U.S. government
officials say Israel secretly maintains a large and active
intelligence-gathering operation in the U.S.
The officials said the
FBI and other bodies spy on Israeli diplomats in Washington and New York
as a matter of routine. The report said that Israel has long attempted to
recruit U.S. officials as spies and to procure classified documents,
according to the Times.
Israel said it set a policy of not spying
on the United States after Jonathan Pollard's arrest in November 1985 and
the damage it did to bilateral relations in general and to intelligence
and security ties in particular. For 20 years, Israel said, that policy
has translated into unequivocal directives to the intelligence and defense
communities: They are not allowed to locate candidates for recruiting as
agents, cannot recruit and operate agents, nor pay for information.