This communication from the Council for the National Interest Foundation provided a book review by Terry Walz of the CNI Staff of Grant F. Smith’s new publication,
Foreign Agents
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee from the 1963 Fulbright Hearings to the 2005 Espionage Scandal
Although the review is entitled, AIPAC’s Long Criminal History, it is probably best appreciated for the manner in which AIPAC is currently influencing American politics and foreign policy, which extends to our misinformed and misguided invasion of Iraq and its present exhortation for America to attack Iran. These efforts, of course, find their rationale in Clean Break, a plan to remake the Middle East concocted by Neocons like Perle and Feith for the Likud government under Netanyahu in 1996 and finally executed by the Cheney-Rumsfeld twins with a slight push from Wolfowicz. This use of American military forces to carry out strategic Israeli foreign policy, given that other factors like oil may be involved, is ultimately what books like this one question, along with AIPAC’s interference in American domestic politics over the past several decades.
Here is Walz’s review:
Many citizens concerned by the undue influence of the Israel lobby are dismayed by the action of the US Congress that adopts resolution after resolution favoring Israel with nary of word about its failure to make peace with the Palestinians, whose land it inhabits, or with its neighbors, whose borders it abutts. Last year Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, two professors from prestigious American universities, began a public debate on the power of the lobby – a cause long advocated by the Council for the National Interest – giving hope that a public airing of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), its work, financing, and political connections would help Americans understand the gross misdirection of Middle East foreign policy over the last forty years. Grant F. Smith’s new book, Foreign Agents, decisively pushes this debate forward and shows just how brazen and criminal the lobby has acted since its beginnings.
Smith traces the development of AIPAC from its early days under founder Si Kenen, who in 1947 registered with the US Department of Justice under the Foreign Agents Registration Act as an employee of the American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs. He was representing himself then as an agent working for Israel. He continued to register as a foreign agent during the late forties and fifties, working for various organizations funded by the Israel government, but in 1959, the name of the American Zionist Committee was changed to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to better reflect, as Kenen said, that it “raised its funds from both Zionists and non-Zionists.” Its focus of work never changed, which was to promote the cause of Israel in both the executive and legislation branches of government, yet the organization no longer filed as a foreign agent. AIPAC eventually developed an extensive grassroots national network of organizations that engaged in all manner of illegal activities, from transgressing federal elections laws, to economic and industrial espionage, to flouting congressional laws regarding the use of arms exported to foreign countries, and passing classified and secret information to the Israeli government via the Israeli embassy in Washington. In 2005, after a nine-year investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, two of AIPAC’s top officials were arrested for espionage, and the role that AIPAC played over the years as a covert agent for Israel was given unusual light.
The book uses as a primary source the historic and remarkable hearings that Senator William Fulbright held in 1963 to investigate the “activities of agents of foreign principals in the United States.” The Committee’s aim was to look at the work of all organizations working on behalf of foreign countries, but in the process it discovered that the American Zionist Committee (AZC) was funded by the Jewish Agency, an arm of the Israeli government, and by the Israeli embassy, although its principals were not registered as foreign agents. The hearings disclosed the secret world of the AZC and the Jewish Agency, finding a pattern of money laundering that became a hallmark of AIPAC in the years to come. Both the Agency and the embassy typically hid the support that they provided by using private foundations and individuals as fronts so that it would appear the AZC was funded by American, not foreign, sources. Thus they bypassed the terms of the Foreign Agent Registration Act and sought to obscure their aim, which was to represent the interests of the Israeli government.
To measure the influence of the emerging lobby, Smith covers a wide spectrum of illegal and criminal activity. He begins by examining AIPAC’s efforts to promote Israeli economic interests to the disadvantage of American workers. During the 1984 negotiations that preceded the creation of a “US-Israel Free Trade Agreement,” AIPAC obtained a copy of the classified document spelling out the American negotiating strategy. Thus Israeli negotiators were aware of American positions well in advance of the meeting. AIPAC then managed to persuade the House Ways and Means Committee to provide special protections for Israeli imports of certain products should a free-trade zone be established. Even Congressional members, with long experience in Israeli lobby tactics, couldn’t help but notice AIPAC’s heavy hand in this instance.
The pressure exerted by AIPAC during congressional and presidential elections is well known, though consistently denied by the organization. Smith here focuses on the California Senate race of 1986 and the role played by Michael Goland, a real estate developer, who contributed $1 million via various conduits to derail a potential dangerous opponent of Sen. Alan Cranston, who was seeking reelection that year and was an AIPAC favorite. Goland was convicted and sentenced to imprisonment for election fraud. Goland had been a member of the board of AIPAC and had been highly visible in AIPAC’s successful effort to unseat Sen. Charles Percy of Illinois in 1984.
AIPAC also had a hand in the defeat of Sen. Fulbright in 1968, and of Congressman Paul Findley in 1986. Findley’s series of books about the lobby, especially his Dare to Speak Out, have been noted for the light they have thrown on the power of the lobby and its illegal activities.
AIPAC set up a series of political action committees (PACs), all with innocuous names, with the aim of influencing the election of congressional representatives all over the country. It made sure that internal firewalls, as Smith describes them, were set up so that no one could detect AIPAC’s hand. But the line between them and the actions of the committees was hardly invisible. One “activist,” a Chicago businessman, attempted to explain in a New York Times interview in 1987 how he and AIPAC operated independently, in the course of which it became apparent that the opposite was true, that there was tight coordination between AIPAC and dozens on pro-Israel committees. In 1988 the Washington Post published an internal AIPAC memo, reproduced in Foreign Agents, revealing now active AIPAC was in illegally coordinating PAC distributions to favored candidates.
The many instances of election fraud prompted a group of former US government officials to sue the Federal Election Commission for failure to require AIPAC to publish details of its income and expenditures, which political action committees are required to do. Among this group were George Ball, former secretary of state, Paul Findley, former congressman and founder of the Council for the National Interest, Andrew Kilgore, publisher of the Washington Report for Middle East Affairs and former ambassador to Qatar, and James Akin, former ambassador to Saudi Arabia. The FEC delivered a report on the complaint that cleared the PACs but professed a desire to further study the actions of AIPAC, but in fact the chief complaints were ignored. Appeals to the Supreme Court were turned aside on various points and the case remains in legal limbo to this day.
In the last twenty years, AIPAC has continued to develop its political networks. Steve Rosen, AIPAC Director of Policy, notoriously likened the lobby to “a night flower. It thrives in the dark and dies in the sun.” It funds dozens of congressional “educational” trips to Israel every year through its affiliate the American Israel Education Foundation; it continues to publish Si Kenen’s Near East Report, which serves as a propaganda arm of the Israel government; it established a “think tank,” the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which maintains a roster of “experts” providing cover for Israeli government positions (many of whose Board members have served as Board members of AIPAC); it maintains a large public relations office in Manhattan; and works in tandem with the new Saban Center for Middle East Policy, whose president, Martin Indyk, was deputy director of AIPAC and a former US ambassador to Israel. Thus Middle East policy at Brookings Institution, once a formidable independent think tank, has been usurped by pro-Israeli interests.
The growing arrogance of AIPAC, which in recent years acted with brazen impunity, was not unnoticed by the FBI counterintelligience which began probing the organization’s activities as far back as 1999. In 2005, Col. Lawrence Franklin, who was working in the office of Douglas Feith, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, was arrested and charged with giving classified documents to two top officials at AIPAC who passed them on to the Israeli embassy. The information concerned US positions toward Iran. The AIPAC officials were also arrested and charged with espionage. Lawrence was found guilty and sentenced to 12 years and seven months in prison and fined $10,000 for passing classified information to AIPAC and an Israeli diplomat. The trial against Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman has been delayed on several occasions and is now scheduled to begin in January 2008. The espionage charges have been dropped. A full analysis of the trial and its various permutations can be found in Smith’s Chapter Five.
The case appropriately summarizes the extent of the illegalities that AIPAC has engaged in since its beginnings some fifty years ago. Senator Fulbright was on to something much bigger than even he could have imagined. Spawned by the Jewish Agency, it has abetted efforts that have encouraged “charitable” organizations in the US to contribute more than US $50 billion to illegal settlements in Gaza and the West Bank while appropriating and developing lands that belong to Palestinians. The money laundering activities of the Agency and the US donors have been brought to the attention of the US Department of Justice, thanks to work by the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy and the Council for the National Interest but as yet no action has taken place to stop the illegal operations. As Smith states, “This follows an established pattern of law enforcement failures since the Fulbright foreign agent hearings.”
Foreign Agents shines light on the murky world of AIPAC and its efforts to divert policy and push Israel’s rightwing interventionist agenda in Washington. It garnered support for a war and occupation of Iraq in Congress. Contrary to the assertions of many now claiming how AIPAC was not promoting war, Smith documents how it helped prompt the American invasion of Iraq and now threatens to coordinate an intervention by the US in Iran. The consequences for the American public have been huge, as the response to Hurricane Katrina made clear, and has rendered the US the least popular country in the world. The book also discusses in detail how tenuous are AIPAC’s claims to even be a legally constituted nonprofit corporation. Most of all, it serves to remind us that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee does not serve US interests, but works as a foreign agent for the government of Israel and should be required to register as a foreign agent. Only then will be operations and financing be made transparent and public. In fact, this book makes a convincing case that America – and the world – would be better off without AIPAC.
Members may order a copy from CNIF by sending a check for $14.95, which includes the cost of postage and handling, TO:
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Reprinted here with permission.
I’m not sure about that. Readers of your diaries and similar articles elsewhere are already well aware of how AIPAC plays a very significant role in getting Congress to go along with Bush’s neocoloniast adventures in the Middle East. But I was unaware of most of what Mr. Waltz mentions in his review, which does indeed appear to be literally criminal.
I found this especially revealing:
I had long suspected that AIPAC is a de facto foreign agent. This book seems to document that that’s indeed what it is, and that it’s representing itself as not being a foreign agent is nothing but a fraud perpetrated with the assistance of the US government.
Your point is well taken.
But for me, the impact of AIPAC on American foreign policy is its most dangerous role as a foreign agent. I’m not trying to diminish the actual criminality, but only to emphasize this larger function of AIPAC, which may not actually be illegal, and its current relevancy.
If AIPAC is for all intents and purposes a foreign agent, and yet it is not legally required to register itself as such, then I think there is something wrong with the law.
I wonder if Grant Smith looks at whether there are loopholes in the Foreign Agents Registration Act which allow AIPAC to avoid registering itself under it, or at whether the relevant law is simply ignored by the Justice Department. My guess is that AIPAC functions as a shell corporation in the for-profit sector. Looking up “shell corporation” at Wikipedia took me to the entry “Front organization“:
Of course, when you have American citizens advocating to the Likud members of the Israeli government the program outlined in the Clean Break white paper, employees of AIPAC do not actually have to take orders from the Israeli government, since their thinking and goals are exactly the same. That is the beauty of this particular fraud.
Obviously, any government that was not hopelessly corrupt would find a way of shutting a front organization like AIPAC down. The Russians have managed it with various “Western” NGOs.
AIPAC, as I understand it, is associated with organizations like the Zionist Organization of America and the American Jewish Committee, supporters of Likud and the Likud agenda for Palestine: the no state solution. But as a front organization, AIPAC flexes its muscles through as many as 120 PACs which are capable of spreading money around at election time. The book discusses the elections of some vocal antiAIPAC politicians, which AIPAC succeeded in replacing. Few politicians care to mix it up with AIPAC. I was even surprised when Ted Kennedy put a stop to HR 3077, which was spear-headed by Daniel Pipes with AIPAC support in 2005, by calling Pipes an antiIslamic/antiArab bigot during hearings. The details of this House bill is now vague to me, but it would somehow have helped to curtail criticism of Israel on college campuses. Pipes as you may know runs the McCarthyite site, Campus Watch.
Is it anti-semitic to utter such things.
No. Most people have gotten over that. Criticism of AIPAC from Israel is so much more harsh than seen in the US that no one should be confused that AIPAC is somehow representative of Israel. It is distinctly extreme right wing Likud and out of step with most of the Israeli public, which by a majority supports a two state solution in polls. And by a Palestinian state, I don’t think most Israelis mean bantustans.
So I know that AIPAC lobbies congress on a militant and pro-Israeli basis. I know that I would never support AIPAC.
You are forwarding an accusation of criminality, but I can’t follow your argument. This diary is mostly a large quote about AIPACs lobbying history, much of which I believe is common knowledge. There are some mentions of espionage, but we conduct such activities in most foreign nations.
What type and level of criminality do you have reason to believe AIPAC conducts?
Sorry but I can’t go beyond the review as I haven’t read the book. And it is a historical review.
The concern of many on the left is with AIPAC’s untoward influence with respect to American foreign policy in the Middle East, and that is also common knowledge. Although that influence goes back a long time, under Bush-Cheney it has been disasterous in regard to America’s stature in the world as well as the Middle East.
Fulbright was defeated in a Democratic primary by Dale Bumpers in 1974.
This is the first I have ever heard that AIPAC played any role in that.
You really should get that sort of fact correct.
Read the book. I only presented the review. If you have information contradicting it, please inform.
The year of Fulbright’s defeat is not in dispute. A simple Google search will reveal that Bumpers defeated Fulbright in a Democratic primary in 1974. Your review puts it at 1968. That is an easy thing to check.
Fulbright voted against the 1963 civil rights act and the 1965 voting rights act. By 1974 the black vote was a major force in Arkansas politics and that is how Dale Bumpers beat Fulbright.
No, there is no way I am going to read a book that gets something like dates wrong. That is just plain sad.
From what is presented here, it’s not clear if the reviewer made the mistake or the book’s author.
Fulbright was likely a Dixiecrat and voted in concert with the southern block of Democratic Senators and congressmen, who were against racial and other forms of equality. As such he deserved his defeat. However, if there was AIPAC involvement in his defeat for another reason, it would not contradict the thesis of the book.
Yah know this would make a better diary if you had read the book, written your own review and could explain it to us.
I can assure that Walz’s review would exceed my own by a long shot. What is there to explain? The book is an historical review of AIPAC’s influence on American politics and foreign policy.
What is there to explain?
Whether it was the book or reviewer that got the date of Fulbright’s defeat wrong. Also, whether anyone has any evidence to back up the assertion that AIPAC played any role in Fulbright’s defeat.
Another reference, can’t vouch for the source…
I stand corrected. Clearly AIPAC had a role in Fulbright’s defeat. But he was also done in by his historic opposition to civil rights.
I don’t really know. I hadn’t ever thought about how Fulbright left office. I guess I assumed he retired.
Thanks for the fill, Booman.