The scoops that followed `Scoop'

By Amir Oren


Four people, all of them formerly of the political affairs department at the Israeli embassy in Washington during the past decade and currently in the top echelons of the Foreign Ministry, sat in Jerusalem on Sunday combing through the Foreign Ministry's computers and paging through its documents in search of evidence that might inculpate Israel. They are Jeremy Issacharoff, the head of the ministry's strategic division; Ron Prosor, currently the acting deputy director general and Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom's chief political adviser; Naor Gilon, who happened to be in Israel on personal business and discovered that he is being spoken of as the interlocutor of Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin and Steve Rosen of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC); and Prosor's associate in Shalom's bureau, Yaki Dayan.

This was one of those searches "with a fine-tooth comb," as one of the four put it, in which you hope you won't find anything, and the hope was realized until finally it was decided that there was no danger in Gilon's return to Washington, although in any case he enjoys diplomatic immunity.

The story of the investigation of Franklin was broken in an exclusive report by CBS-TV, a real scoop, and there was implied praise in it for the head of the FBI's counter-intelligence unit, Dave Szady. Exactly one year earlier Szady had appeared on another CBS broadcast to defend the failures of his colleagues in a previous investigation of leaks - or rather, floods - of security secrets. Now a way was found to make both sides happy - the ambitious investigator and the voracious media.

Generation follows generation and in a regular cycle, ever since 1970, the American media - mostly CBS or The Washington Post - have been publishing exclusive reports: A suspicion is being investigated that a knowledgeable Jewish/non-Jewish supporter of Israel in the administration/in Congress has handed security information to Israeli representatives. This has been the case for 34 years, from Richard Perle through Stephen Bryen to Paul Wolfowitz to Douglas Feith - all of them young and still before their rise to relative greatness in the Pentagon.

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