WMR has learned from informed sources that the FBI investigation of the espionage case surrounding the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is continuing even though espionage charges were recently dropped against two former AIPAC officials, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman.
WMR has learned that Representative Jane Harman (D-CA) was interviewed by Department of Justice prosecutors after the dropping of the charges against Rosen and Weissman. Harman's phone conversations had, according to a CQ Politicsreport last month, been wiretapped by the National Security Agency (NSA) as part of an authorized foreign counterintelligence investigation. Harman was intercepted telling an Israeli "agent" that she would "waddle into" the Department of Justice investigation of Rosen and Weissman. In 2006, Timereported that Harman would pressure Justice to drop its investigation of Rosen and Weissman, accused iof violating the Espionage Act by passing highly-classified U.S. documents to an Israeli intelligence agent based out of the Israeli embassy in Washington.
AIPAC was to then agree to pressure House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to appoint Harman as the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) as a quid pro quo for Harman's help in scuttling the investigation of AIPAC. CIA director Porter Goss was pressured by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to drop the CIA's investigation of Harman because Gonzales needed Harman's support for the Bush administration's illegal warrantless wrietap program known as the Terrorist Surveillance Program or "The Program." The program's classified code word, known to only a handful of administration officials, was "Stellar Wind."
WMR has also learned that based on multi-agency reports of Israeli espionage activity in the United States prior to and after 9/11, CIA director George Tenet, who was succeeded by Goss in 2004 after serving as the second longest-serving director of the agency since its inception, ordered his senior staff to pull out all the files concerning the history of Israeli espionage activities in the United States. What Tenet discovered was shocking.
Although the CIA files were rife with information on the damage done to U.S. national security by Israel's U.S. Navy spy, Jonathan Pollard, there were files on another little-known espionage case. Before the Pollard case broke, Israel claimed they arrested a Soviet spy, who also happened to be the deputy director of Israel's top secret Ness-Ziona biological and chemical warfare facility, some 16 miles from Tel Aviv. Klingberg was also a Professor of Epidemiology at Tel Aviv University.
Israel only admitted in 1993 that it had arrested Avraham Marcus Klingberg, a former Soviet Red Army Colonel, on charges of spying for the USSR. Israel's cover story was that Klingberg suffered from mental illness and simply disappeared from a scientific conference in Switzerland in 1983. In fact, Israel had arrested Klingberg and tried and sentenced him in a secret tribunal in 1983.
In 1988, a Hebrew-language newspaper in New York reported that Klingberg had been arrested for spying for the USSR in 1983 but was part of negotiations that would see him sent to the Soviet Union in a three-country swap that would also see Pollard sent to Israel from the United States and the Soviet releasing a few U.S. agents. However, the deal fell through. Any newspaper stories about Klingberg being arrested by Israel were blocked by Israeli military censors up until 1993.
Klingberg was released to house arrest in 1998 due to his reported "failing health." Klingberg signed an agreement stating that he would never speak about his work. Klingberg also agreed to have his telephones tapped by the Israeli Defense Ministry while under house arrest. On January 22, 1999, The Jerusalem Postreported that Israel's General Security Service, Shin Bet, wanted an Israeli judge to bar the Polish-born Klingberg from speaking Yiddish while under house arrest. The reasoning was that Shin Bet could not find any guards/housekeepers for Klingberg who could understand Yiddish. A Beersheba district judge concurred with Shin Bet and ordered hiom not to speak Yiddish.
In 2003, Klingberg was allowed to leave house arrest and he moved to Paris where he lives with his daughter and grandson. In 2007, Klingberg co-authored his memoirs in Hebrew, Hameragel Ha'akharon ("The Last Spy").
Although the Israelis reported that Klingberg confessed to spying for the Soviets in 1983, they withheld from the United States something much more important. Klingberg had, according to the report presented to Tenet, been a double-agent for the Soviets and Israelis. The CIA report stated that Klingberg, while in the United States, received 20,000 pages of documents on the U.S. biological warfare and defense program fro two scientists working at the U.S. Army's biological warfare laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
The classified information passed from Fort Detrick to Israel advanced the Israelis' work on a number of biological agents, including aerosolized weaponized anthrax. WMR previously reported that the Israeli Urban Moving Systems employees who were seen celebrating the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11 were also discovered by U.S. law enforcement of stockpiling anthrax samples at the moving company's Weehawken, New Jersey warehouse. The anthrax letters mailed to the U.S. Senate were later found to have been sent from New Jersey.
In Patrick Tyler's book, A World of Trouble, a scene in 2004 is described where Tenet, having ingested a good amount of Scotch while staying at Prince Bandar's palace in Saudi Arabia, decries the influence of the neoconservatives in the Bush administration. Tyler writes: "According to one witness, he [Tenet] mocked the neoconservatives in the Bush administration and their alignment with the right wing of Israel's political establishment, referring to them with exasperation as, "the Jews."
What Tenet had read about Israeli espionage against the United States since Israel's independence in 1948 could have driven any CIA director to drink. Not only did Tenet read about the Klingberg deception but also Israeli intelligence's penetration of America's nuclear weapons research and strategic network; access to NSA sources and methods for conducting electronic surveillance; involvement with the U.S. telecommunications and computer software industry, upon which U.S. national security and law enforcement is reliant; and human intelligence (HUMINT) blackmailing of top U.S. politicians.
