Wednesday, May 11, 2005
A spy story worth watching
It will be fascinating to see just how tangled a can of
worms is opened up with the arrest of Larry Franklin, a
Pentagon analyst specializing in Iran. Mr. Franklin, who spent
much of his government career at the Defense Intelligence
Agency, is accused of passing along classified documents to
two employees of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee
(AIPAC).
It is unclear whether the U.S. government believes that
these AIPAC employees subsequently passed the documents along
to the government of Israel. The affidavit in support of his
arrest warrant only claims "the information could be used to
the injury of the United States or to the advantage of a
foreign nation."
What is significant about the case is that Mr. Franklin
worked in the Office of Special Plans, run by
then-Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, who
reported to then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. The
OSP is said to have functioned as a "shadow" intelligence
service on Iraq, and to have provided much of the information
to the White House that seemed to justify the American
invasion of Iraq. Some wags have called it "Feith-based
intelligence."
Will the Franklin case unravel a larger pattern of sloppy
handling of intelligence, perhaps related to the ongoing case
of Valerie Plame, the CIA officer who was "outed" in some news
stories during the controversy about Saddam possibly seeking
uranium in Niger?
Stay
tuned. |