AIPAC
Still Our Biggest Foreign Agent
Senate Hearing on Foreign Agents Registration
Act
By Grant Smith
July
18, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- Alleged
Russian meddling in the US electoral process
will be the subject of a
Senate Judiciary Hearing on Wednesday.
The hearing is titled "Oversight of the Justice
Department’s (Non) Enforcement of the Foreign
Agents Registration Act: Lessons from the Obama
Administration and Current Compliance
Practices." In 1938 the U.S. Congress passed the
Foreign Agents Registration Act to mandate
disclosure of the activities of non-diplomatic
foreign agents in the United States
propagandizing for war, swinging public opinion,
and obtaining foreign aid and other economic
benefits through congressional lobbying without
disclosing that their activities were conducted
on behalf of foreign principals.
The
first panel of witnesses for Wednesday’s Senate
hearing will include Deputy Assistant Attorney
General of the National Security Division of the
Justice Department Adam Hickey, Assistant
Director of the Counterintelligence Division of
the FBI Bill Priestap and Inspector General of
the Justice Department Michael Horowitz.
Second panel witnesses include Glenn Simpson of
Fusion GPS, an outfit which circulated the now
infamous dossier
of allegations made against Donald Trump by a
British spy. William Browder, a Russian market
investment expert from Hermitage Capital
Management, who has now deemed Russia "absolutely
uninvestable"
will also testify. According to reports, Browder
knows Natalia Veslnitskaya, the Russian lawyer
who met with Donald Trump Jr. to peddle
opposition research on Hillary Clinton.
Panel
Chairman Chuck Grassley may ultimately conclude
that the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA)
has failed and that unregistered Russian foreign
agents are taking over America. If so, he will
be half right, but not the first such senator to
express concern. Grassley should consider what
happened after a more extensive Senate FARA
inquiry was launched 55 years ago.
Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman JW
Fulbright became convinced that unregistered
Israeli foreign agents were a serious matter in
1961. A
classified staff report
worried that:
"In
recent years there has been an increasing number
of incidents involving attempts by foreign
governments, or their agents, to influence the
conduct of American foreign policy by techniques
outside normal diplomatic channels….there have
been occasions when representatives of other
governments have been privately accused of
engaging in covert activities within the United
States and elsewhere, for the purpose of
influencing United States Policy (the Lavon
Affair)."
The
Lavon Affair referred to Israeli false-flag
terror attacks on US facilities in Egypt, in the
interest of preventing the handover of the Suez
Canal to Egyptian control. The Israeli spies
were caught and prosecuted by Egypt, while the
disclosure of the attacks created a diplomatic
crisis.
During the course of the
1960s Senate
and Justice Department investigations, it was
revealed that Israel was funneling millions of
dollars to unregistered foreign agents in
America to lobby for foreign aid to Israel, set
up think tanks, engage in Madison Avenue public
relations, fund lobbying newsletters, and
establish an umbrella organization called the
American Zionist Council (AZC).
Within
the AZC was an unincorporated unit that lobbied
congress called the "American Israel Public
Affairs Committee."
On
November 21, 1962,
the Department of Justice ordered the AZC to
begin registering as an Israeli foreign agent.
This touched off an intense battle between the
Justice Department and the AZC which outlasted
both JFK and RFK. The bloodied and bruised
Justice Department hid away its files on the
affair until they were finally
declassified and released in 2008.
The
effort to register Israel’s foreign agents
clearly failed. Just 42 days after the Justice
Department order, the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee incorporated itself in
Washington and took over the AZC’s functions.
Since the year it was ordered to register—as
part of the AZC—AIPAC has extracted an
inflation-adjusted $250 billion from US
taxpayers for its foreign principals.
Influencing the conduct of US policy "by
techniques outside normal diplomatic channels"
has never stopped.
If AIPAC had complied with the 1962 FARA order,
by now it would have filed 109 required biennial
reports (1963-2017) of its activities. It would
have had to detail joint efforts with Israeli
operatives. These include a 1975 incident in
which AIPAC Director Morris Amitay
circulated classified information
about a proposed US Hawk missile sale to Jordan.
AIPAC’s FARA file would have had to detail AIPAC
staffers Steven Rosen, Douglas Bloomfield and
Ester Kurz 1984 receipt of
stolen classified information
taken from US industry groups opposed to
allowing duty free imports from Israel into the
United States. Of course, the FARA disclosure
would include details on two AIPAC executives,
Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, who from
2002-2004
solicited and received stolen classified
national defense information from Colonel
Lawrence Franklin about Iran and other matters
which they passed to the Israeli embassy. The
pair attempted to contextualize and place the
stolen classified national defense information
in the Washington Post to
precipitate a US attack on Iran.
AIPAC is not complying with the 1962 DOJ order.
The Grassley panel might want to invite the FARA
Section Head Heather Hunt, who knows all about
the AZC-AIPAC incident, to testify why. In 2009
Hunt, along with other members of the FARA
division, received a two-hour briefing with the
unsubtle title of "The
American Israel Public Affairs Committee is an
Unregistered Foreign Agent of the Israeli
Government."
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If Grassley does not believe Israeli foreign
agent activity to be important, he might want to
invite as a star witness Stephanie Schriock.
Schriock has publicly claimed that as a
high-powered campaign fundraiser for major
candidates across the US, the first step in
obtaining seed funding for a political campaign
was always to circulate a position paper on
Israel to
AIPAC regional officials.
Only then could candidates obtain funds from
willing pro-Israel donors sufficient to launch a
serious campaign. The Israel lobby’s oversized
role in US campaign finance on Israel’s behalf
has now made regional peace and productive
innovation in US policy impossible, and war all
but inevitable.
Grassley might also engage in the following
thought experiment as he ponders his upcoming
hearing. "What happens to a candidate or
incumbent if they loudly criticize Russia or US
policy toward Russia?" He should then swap out
"Russia" for "Israel."
Today, AIPAC may obtain most of its lobbying
budget from a
relatively small,
but wealthy, group of US donors. But that does
not mean it is not an Israeli foreign agent for
three reasons. The first observable sign,
listed on the Department of Justice FARA webpage,
is that AIPAC is so obviously devoted to the
sole purpose of channeling US taxpayer funds to
a foreign country. Such breaks, though DOJ lists
sugar quotas as an example, is the major red
flag. Despite changes in its PR framing, AIPAC’s
primary business is the same as when founder Si
Kenen first conceived it. “The lobby for Israel,
known as the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC) since 1959, came into
existence in 1951. It was established at that
time because Israel needed American economic
assistance…”
The second is that AIPAC was incontrovertibly
established with
foreign seed funding,
including to Kenen, nestled inside the AZC. The
third is that, as an unincorporated unit within
the AZC, AIPAC was clearly covered by the order
to register as an Israeli foreign agent.
AIPAC’s top priorities include maneuvering the
US to attack Iran, keeping US forces in the
region as a buffer, protecting Israeli nuclear
hegemony and making criticism and boycotts of
Israel in the US impossible. Americans
overwhelmingly
oppose all that,
as well as unconditional US aid to Israel.
Senator Grassley should therefore ignore for a
moment the flap over Russia, and his own
top-25 position
as a recipient of pro-Israel PAC money. He
should then look seriously at the
longest-running unresolved foreign agent problem
and ask what action would be best for America.
Grant F. Smith is
the director of the Institute
for Research: Middle Eastern Policyin
Washington and the author of the 2016 book,
Big Israel: How Israel’s Lobby moves America
and
America’s Defense Line: The Justice Department’s
Battle to Register the Israel Lobby as Agents of
a Foreign Government.
This article was first published by
AntiWar
-
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.
