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intelligence contacts that the United ~tates had broken'their commun!cations codes -- a breach
that prompted a break in U.S. support for Ch.alabi last spring -- and the FBI wanted to know who
had shared that highly classified information with Chalabi. What's more, an independent expert
on Israeli espionage said he had been interviewed by the FBI in June and in several follow-up
calls, and that the scope ofthe senior FBI investigators' questioning was broad and extremely
detailed.
In the wake ofthe first news reports, AlPAC strongly denied that any ofits employees had ever
knowingly received classified U.S. information. Israel also categorically denied that it had
conducted intelligence operations against the United States since the case ofJonathan Pollard, a
U.S. Navy intelligence analyst who was convicted ofspyi~g for Israel in 1987.
At the time the CBS report aired in late August-- incidentally, on the Friday evening before the
opening ofthe Republican national convention -- custody ofthe Franklin investigation was being
transferred from the head ofthe FBI counterintelligence unit, David Szady, to U.S. Attorney Paul
McNulty, a Bush appointee, in Alexandria, Virginia, as the case moved to the grand-jury phase..
And then, in mid-September, news ofthe Franklin investigation went dark.
***
The classified document that Franklin allegedly passed to AlPAC concerned a controversial
proposal by Pentagon hard-liners to destabilize Iran. The latest iteration ofthe national-security )
presidential directive was drafted by a Pentagon ci~ilian and avid neocon, Michael Rubin, who .--1
hoped it would be adopted as official policy by the Bush administration. But in mid-June, Bush's
national-security advisers canceled consideration ofthe draft, partly hi response to resistance from
some at the State Department and the National Security Council, according to a recent memo
written by Rubin and obtained by The American Prospect. No doubt also contributing to the
administration's decision was the swelling insurgency and chaos ofpostwar Iraq.
Rubin, in his early 30s, is a relative newcomer to the neoconservative circles in which he is
playing an increasingly prominent role. Once the Iraq and Iran desk officer in the Pentagon's
Office ofSpecial Plans and later a Coalition Provisional Authority adviser in Iraq, these days the
Yale-educated Ph.D~ hangs his hat at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and serves as editor
for controversial Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes' magazine, The Middle East Quarterly.
In an article published in the Republican-oriented quarterly Ripon Forum in June, Rubin suggests
that the administration resolve its Iran warning by turning against the current regime. "In 1953
and 1979," he wrote, "Washington supported an unpopular Iranian government against the will of
the people. The United States should not make the same mistake three times." In other words,
President Bush should step up his public condemnation ofthe Iranian regime and break offall
contact with it in hopes ofspurring a swelling ofthe Iranian pro-democracy movement. In short,
Rubin, like his fellow Iran hawks, urges the administration to make regime c~ange in Iran its
official policy.
This invocation of"moral clarity" has a long intellectual pedigree among neoconservatives. It's
the same argument they made to Ronald Reagan about the Soviet Union more than 20 years ago.
"Ifwe could bring down the Soviet empire by inspiring and supporting a small percentage ofthe
people," Michael Ledeen, a chiefneoconservative advocate ofregime change in Iran and freedom
scholar at AEI, recently wrote in the National Review, "surely the chances ofsuccessful
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