Full Release - IRmep

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David Szady, who also·supervised the alleged campaign against
Ciralsky, confronted Franklin, according to sources familiar with the
case.
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Threatened with charges of espionage and decades of imprisonment,
Franklin was deployed to set up a sting against AIPAC, the sources say.
According ~o sources, he was also involved in initiating contact with
some neoconservative defense experts, several of them Jewish, who
supported Ahmad Chalabi. Chalabi, the president of the Iraqi National
Congress, ha~ deep tie~ to Bush administration officials.
Chalabi's political adviser;, a non-Jewish American, was also targeted"
according to sources.
Chalabi is at the vortex of a Pentagon-intelligence community squabble
ov~r pre- and post-war policy in Iraq.
AIPAC had been under intense scrutiny by the FBI throughout early
2003, but the law enforcement officials had seen nothing to justify
prosecutorial action, sources said.
At the Tivoli restaurant lunch with AIPAC, Franklin allegedly verbally
mentioned information from a classified Pentagon policy paper
purportedly written by defense expert Michael Rubin while Rubin was
still at the Pentagon. But Franklin did not actually pass along the
document, according to multiple sources familiar with the document and
the pro~ecution's case. .
Rubin is now at the American Enterprise Institute,. a conservative thil1k
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The Pentagon policy paper reportedly proposed an American strategy to
destabilize Iran in the face of its growing nuclear potential, according to
the sources.
The Tivoli lunch didn't trigger an immediate prosecution: No document
was passed, sources say, and while the verbal information allegedly was
drawn from a Pentagon document that did enjoy ~ low-security
classification - as do many such planning debate documents in
Washington - much of its content already had been aired in the media.
AIPAC steadfastly has denied that it violated any laws, and insists it is
the victim of a witch-hunt.
Franklin refused to speak about the matter.
Franklin had been under increased scrutiny since disclosure of a secret
meeting in Decen:'ber 2001 with former Iranian spy and arms merchant
Manucher Ghorbanifar that some in the Washington establishment
claimed was unauthorized. Ghorbanifar was on a CIA "burn list- of
individuals who could n~t be contacted, according to informed