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Official heading AIPAC probe linked to anti-Semitism case

Thread ID: 15088 | Posts: 6 | Started: 2004-09-22

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Sertorius [OP]

2004-09-22 11:27 | User Profile

Oy!

INVESTIGATIVE REPORT Official heading AIPAC probe linked to anti-Semitism case

By Edwin Black WASHINGTON, Sept. 20 (JTA) — David Szady, the senior FBI counterintelligence official currently heading the controversial investigation of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, is well-known to senior Jewish communal officials, who assert he has targeted Jews in the past. Now, an investigation reveals that Szady was involved in a well-publicized case involving a Jewish former CIA staff attorney who sued the FBI, the CIA and its top officials for religious discrimination.

Although not named in the suit, Szady headed the elite department that former CIA Director George Tenet admitted in 1999 was involved with “insensitive, unprofessional and highly inappropriate” language regarding the case of the attorney, Adam Ciralsky.

The AIPAC investigation, which CBS broke last month on the eve of the Republican convention, is believed to focus on a Pentagon official suspected of passing a classified draft policy statement on Iran to AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, which allegedly then passed it on to Israel.

AIPAC denies any wrongdoing and has called the alleged charges “baseless.” But the case cast a spotlight on the venerable lobbying organization and has sent shock waves through the Jewish community.

Jewish communal officials and members of Congress have protested the investigation and the media frenzy around it, calling for an investigation into who leaked the investigation and for what purpose.

Many questions remain unresolved, including who initiated the investigation, believed to have begun two years ago, and why.

Szady, who was appointed by President Bush in 2000 to head a little-known intelligence interagency unit known as the National Counter Intelligence Policy Board, returned to the FBI about two years ago, becoming assistant director for counterintelligence.

Jewish communal officials familiar with Szady assert he has targeted Jews, blocked or slowed their clearances and squeezed minor security violators.

“He’s bad, very bad,” declared one senior Jewish organizational executive, who like all those familiar with Szady declined to speak for the record.

According to exclusively obtained documents, Szady was directly involved in the Ciralsky case. He is identified in the documents as the chief of the CIA’s Counterespionage Group, known as CEG, which was later accused of targeting Ciralsky for being Jewish and a supporter of Israel.

Szady would not respond directly to a request for an interview, but FBI spokeswoman Cassandra Chandler said, “David Szady has informed me that he has no anti-Semitic views, has never handled a case or investigation based upon an individual’s ethnicity or religious views, and would never do so.”

Of the AIPAC investigation in particular, Chandler said: “Investigations are predicated upon information of possible illegal or intelligence activity. The suggestion that the FBI or any FBI official has influenced this investigation based on moral, ethnic or religious bias is simply unfounded, untrue, and contrary to the very values the FBI holds highest.”

Ciralsky’s problems began as soon as he joined the CIA’s legal staff as a junior member in early December 1996. Within days, CIA security personnel began creating a special file on Ciralsky and his Jewish background, according to the documents.

One Dec. 19, 1996, internal CIA memo on Ciralsky indicated that a CIA supervisor “would like to keep current on developments for damage control purposes.”

By Jan. 15, 1997, the agency had created a four-page annotated “Jewish resume” of Ciralsky, which was classified “secret.” The resume listed Ciralsky’s teenage trips to Israel in 1987 with the Milwaukee federation and for Passover in 1988, his camp counselor stint at the Milwaukee JCC’s day camp, and his minor in Judaic studies at George Washington University. His major in international affairs was not mentioned.

Shortly thereafter, CIA security personnel were asking whether Ciralsky’s nephew might be working with the Israeli government, according to documents; the nephew was only about five months old at the time.

By May 1997, Szady, a 32-year veteran of the FBI, had joined the CIA as chief of the Counterespionage Group, within the CIA’s Counterintelligence Center. A presidential directive mandates that an independent FBI official serve as chief of the CIA’s Counterespionage Group.

Although Szady was not in his post when Ciralsky was hired, shortly after Szady assumed his new position, the counterespionage group appeared determined to terminate Ciralsky.

On June 12, 1997, a memo entitled, “Spot Report-Next Steps in the Adam Ciralsky Case” was circulated by Szady’s department, outlining what would be done to force Ciralsky from the agency.

The report and the routing slips were tagged with classifications such as “sensitive,” “restricted handling” and “eyes only, no registries” thus ensuring that the documents would not end up in any formal and traceable file.

Although Szady’s name is blocked out, his bureaucratic initials, C/CEG/CIC, on two routing pages plus the hand-written acknowledgment next to his initials, show he received the “Spot Report” the day it was written, according to sources with personal knowledge of the case.

By September 1997, unable to find any incriminating information on Ciralsky, Szady’s CEG assigned teams of investigators to ramp up the pressure with multiple interrogations, according to documents.

One CEG investigator’s memo on Sept. 12, 1997, suggests questions for interrogators to ask Ciralsky, such as, “What is your family’s relation with Israeli President Ezer Wizman (sic)?”

This question was based on the fact that Ciralsky is a distant relative of Ezer Weizman, who was Israel’s president at the time.

The Sept. 12, 1997 memo added, “Maybe his family has donated money to Israeli government causes.”

The memo also quotes one of Szady’s investigators, saying “From my experience with rich Jewish friends from college, I would fully expect Adam’s wealthy daddy to support Israeli political/social causes in some form… [such as] Israeli Bonds purchased through the United Jewish Appeal.”

A week later, Sept. 19, 1997, before a security polygraph had even been administered, Szady’s CEG circulated a secret memo, saying that former CIA director “Tenet says this guy is outta here because of lack of candor… Once that’s over, it looks like we’ll be waving goodbye to our friend.”

Szady was third on the distribution list to receive that Sept. 19 memo, according to the routing slip and sources.

A handwritten note on the routing slips comments, “Great job — we should have Ciralsky’s report in the security file… This will definitely…result in termination by cancellation of contract! Thx.”

Ciralsky complained to the CIA’s inspector general, the Office of Equal Employment Opportunity, to senior administration officials and to Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

After the outlines of the Ciralsky story broke in 1998, the CIA launched an internal and external review of Szady’s department, the CEG, to determine whether it had engaged in anti-Semitism.

As a result of that review, Tenet conceded in a letter to Abraham Foxman, the Anti-Defamation League’s national director, that “some of the language used by some of the investigators in this case was insensitive, unprofessional and highly inappropriate.”

After the review, the CIA hired the ADL to conduct “sensitivity training” within the ranks of Szady’s CEG.

Foxman said, “The sensitivity training in the CIA was not directed at one individual. It was directed at a situation. There was a concern in the agency at that time, that the world was changing and the agency itself needed its staff to be sensitive to diversity.”

After he left the CIA in 1998, when his contract was not renewed, Ciralsky filed a lawsuit against the CIA, the FBI and others, alleging that he was “unjustly singled out for investigation and subsequently interrogated, harassed, surveilled and terminated from employment with the CIA solely because he is a Jew and he practices the Jewish religion,” according to the complaint.

Ciralsky’s case was not isolated within the intelligence community, according to senior officials at Jewish organizations who declined to speak for the record. One Jewish official stated that he knew of as many as 10 other CIA employees who had been harassed or pressured because of their Jewish background, but they were afraid to come forward.

Postings on the CIA’s internal Jewish-only bulletin board — the agency allows various ethnic groups within its ranks to share company tidbits — reflect that numerous employees feel anti-Semitism is rampant. One such posting in 2000, obtained from sources, asks, “Does anyone know how one would go about informing the D/CI [director of central intelligence] “directly that some incidents of anti-Semitism…are tolerated?”

Despite Szady’s direct involvement in the Ciralsky case, Szady was decorated twice by the CIA for distinguished service, once with its Seal Medallion and once with the Donovan Award.

One Jewish communal official said of Szady, “He has never stopped looking for Mr. X,” the elusive individual some FBI officials hypothesized worked with Jonathan Pollard, who was sentenced in 1987 for spying for Israel.

At least one senior Jewish official cautioned against concluding too much. “Szady might just be over-zealous. I know Jews who have been to his house and they assure they saw no evidence of prejudice.”

On Szady’s link to the Ciralsky case, American Jewish Congress chairman Jack Rosen said, “The FBI, in recent years, has been criticized for many things, and if the story is true, I would urge that an outside and independent individual or group come in to investigate.”

Ciralsky, now a TV network newsman, declined to comment on his case. His lawsuit has been caught up in pre-trial legal limbo, hampered by a series of preliminary motions, according to attorneys familiar with the case.

(Award-winning investigative author and reporter Edwin Black has covered allegations of Israeli spying in the United States since the Pollard case. He is the author of the forthcoming book, “Banking on Baghdad” (Wiley), being released October 12, which chronicles 7,000 years of Iraqi history.)

[url=http://www.jta.org/page_view_story.asp?strwebhead=A%20pattern%20of%20cases%20against%20Jews?&intcategoryid=5]http://www.jta.org/page_view_story.asp?strwebhead=A%20pattern%20of%20cases%20against%20Jews?&intcategoryid=5[/url]

Sojourner

2004-09-28 15:27 | User Profile

[url]http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/spies_in_pentagon.html[/url]

[B]Spies in Pentagon Ignored[/B]

[COLOR=DarkRed][B]CIA Told Top Brass Of Israeli Spooks Over Six Years Ago[/B][/COLOR]

By Richard Walker

Recent revelations of a year-long FBI probe into Pentagon insider Larry Franklin, a Defense Intelligence Agency official, have startled the United States, revealing evidence that a mid-level official passed classified documents about Iran to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), a powerful lobbying group in Washington.

However, warnings about an Israeli spy in the Pentagon are not new. They were voiced in 1998 by then CIA Director George Tenet, but quickly ignored.

Tenet at the time was concerned that the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, had a mole deep in the Pentagon and a concerted effort was needed to root out the traitor.

The CIA chief’s recommendation fell on deaf ears despite the fact there was information showing that Israel had stolen America’s nuclear secrets and in the mid 1980s had acquired U.S. naval nuclear codes.

Both the Israeli government and the committee have dismissed espionage charges, arguing that the information was not classified and it is regularly shared informally.

AIPAC, which boasts a membership of 65,000, is one of the most powerful lobbying groups in D.C. with allies in both the Democratic and Republican parties.

Earlier this year, President George W. Bush praised AIPAC for highlighting the most dangerous and “greatest challenges of our times” and praised its role in exposing Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons.

Nonetheless, the FBI probe raises important issues of how much U.S. policy is shaped publicly and perhaps secretly by Israel and its neo-conservative supporters in Washington.

Franklin is a former Air Force colonel who spent two periods of duty as a Defense Department staffer at the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv. Before the latest Iraq war, he acted as a liaison officer during meetings between Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and leading Iraqi clerical figures.

Franklin’s supporters say that he is a mid-level Pentagon officer working on policy deliberations that are often widely reported in the media and therefore not secret. Some of those deliberations center around arguments about whether the United States should finance Iranian dissidents in order to weaken the rule of the clerical leadership in Teheran. In that capacity he works under Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy.

As AFP has consistently reported, Feith, Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, former chairman of the Defense Policy Board, calculatingly shaped a pro-Israel agenda in national security circles in Washington.

These neo-conservatives, among other things, promoted Ahmed Chalabi, the now disgraced former head of the Iraqi National Congress.

In December 2001, Franklin, the man at the center of the latest espionage claims, had a secret meeting in Rome in December 2001 with Manucher Ghorbanifer, an Iranian with a complex history.

Ghorbanifer is a former agent of the late Shah of Iran’s notorious SAVAK secret police, which was infamous for its use of torture.

[B]In 1985, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Iran was losing its war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Ghorbanifer became a tool of the Israelis. At that time, Israeli policy advocated by David Kimche, a former head of Mossad, was to secretly supply Iran with weapons. Despite Israel’s distaste for Khomeini and his clerical leadership, Israel wanted to keep Iran in the war with Iraq in order to weaken both its Islamic neighbors. As for the United States, the Reagan administration was fixated with getting hostages released from the clutches of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorist organization in Beirut, Lebanon.

Kimche saw an opportunity to get the United States secretly involved in an arms-for-hostages deal with the Iranian government, even though the United States was providing support to Saddam.

HIDE REAGAN’S ROLE

It was not difficult for Israel to seduce the Reagan administration into a deal with Khomeini’s regime, but a cut-out mechanism was needed to protect the U.S. weapons supply line and to hide the role of the Reagan administration.

The cutout mechanism was provided by Kimche and Mossad in the form of a colorful cast of characters. Among them was Ghorbanifer, as well as Saudi arms dealer, Adnan Khashoggi, a petro-billionaire, and Ya’atov Nimrodi, who had run agents for AMAN, the Israeli military intelligence agency, during his time as a military attaché in Teheran while the shah was in power.

Robert McFarlane, Reagan’s national security advisor, did not approve of Ghorbanifer and the other cutout characters and threatened to tell Reagan to pull the plug on the operation. As history has shown, it went ahead and became a political disaster when it was revealed how the United States had been suckered by Israel into negotiating with Iran.

It later emerged that Ghorbanifer had been used by the Israelis to convince the United States that his impeccable knowledge of Iran and his contacts within the leadership had shown a deal could be done for the release of the Beirut hostages. As it turned out, Iran took the weapons, and the hostages remained in Beirut.

Khashoggi later asserted that he had lost millions when the arms-for-hostages project collapsed. He had, he revealed, borrowed heavily from BCCI, the international bank that went bankrupt after it was discovered that it had been a vehicle for money launderers, drug dealers, intelligence services, terrorists, arms dealers and even Khomeini’s Revolutionary Guard in Iran, as well as both the CIA and Israel’s Mossad—an unusual conglomeration to say the least.

The question remains as to why Franklin, the mid-level Pentagon official at the center of an FBI probe, secretly met Ghorbanifer. Was it a meeting organized by Israeli intelligence?[/B]

Khashoggi’s name also surfaced before the latest gulf war after it was revealed that he had lunch with Perle in France. With them was Harb Saleh al-Zuhair, a billionaire Saudi industrialist. Perle later explained that the meeting was in his capacity as an executive of a company that provided defense and security services.

It has therefore come as no surprise to intelligence experts that Israel has been keen to track and secretly influence U.S. policy on Iran.

For Israel, Iran poses the greatest threat to its survival because of its determination to become a nuclear nation with nuclear weapons to rival Israel’s arsenal.

Israel needs the United States to take a harder line with Iran and to encourage European allies to do likewise. If that requires an Israeli mole within the Pentagon to track and influence U.S. policy on Iran, every effort will have been made, and probably is being made, to recruit one.

Sertorius

2004-12-01 23:02 | User Profile

FBI subpoenas four AIPAC staffers

The FBI subpoenaed four senior staffers at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to appear before a grand jury. The FBI searched the Washington office of the pro-Israel lobby on Wednesday, seeking additional files related to two staffers who were interviewed by the agency in August — Research Director Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, deputy director for foreign policy issues. The FBI also delivered the grand jury subpoenas, AIPAC said in a statement that did not name the four “senior staff members.” An FBI spokeswoman confirmed the search, but had no further comment.

Federal investigators reportedly have been investigating AIPAC for two years, and the case is said to focus around a former Pentagon official suspected of passing a classified draft policy statement on Iran to AIPAC, which allegedly then passed it on to Israel.

In a statement Wednesday, AIPAC continued to deny any wrongdoing. “Neither AIPAC nor any member of our staff has broken any law,” the statement said. “We are fully cooperating with the governmental authorities. We believe any court of law or grand jury will conclude that AIPAC employees have always acted legally, properly and appropriately.”

[url]http://www.jta.org/brknews.asp?id=128778[/url]

This will go down the memory hole.

Texas Dissident

2004-12-02 14:57 | User Profile

[QUOTE=Sertorius]Although not named in the suit, Szady headed the elite department that former CIA Director George Tenet admitted in 1999 was involved with “insensitive, unprofessional and highly inappropriate” language regarding the case of the attorney, Adam Ciralsky.[/QUOTE]

Very interesting, Sert. It appears that Szady is guilty of doing his job thoroughly and maybe even without compromise. I'm sure the AIPAC Israel-firsters are very threatened by that.

Thanks for the post and please keep us updated on this one.

Sather_Gate

2004-12-11 18:24 | User Profile

Mounting Scandal at Aipac Prompts Talk of Lobbying Powerhouse's Demise [url]http://www.forward.com/main/article.php?ref=nir200412081101[/url]

Does anybody know how Richard Cheney and his wife Lynn Vincent got so entangled (and instrumental) in this subversion? Money? Christian Zionism? Such a disgraceful and shameful fate for kids like we all used to be from good ole Casper, Wyoming. They're making history alright.

Hugh Lincoln

2004-12-13 01:06 | User Profile

Is the writer of Sert's story the same Edwin Black who wrote about eugenics as a white plot to destroy non-whites?