Larry Franklin lost a storied defense career after sounding the warning on Iran

Photos: John Sherwood

Larry Franklin, who had a storied career as a US defense intelligence analyst, including a stint as head of the Iran desk in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, had every reason to be optimistic he would be pardoned as the last days of President Donald Trump’s term wound down.

The highest echelons of the White House had assured sponsors of Franklin’s petition for a pardon that it was on the president’s desk, and “good to go.” Trump had already issued many pardons. But in the end, Franklin’s compelling plea — which stood on firm humanitarian and legal grounds — went unanswered.

Although in the end he never served jail time, without the pardon, Larry has not been able to recoup the staggering losses he suffered as a consequence of his 2006 government-pressured plea agreement to two counts of conspiring to pass national defense information: his military pension as a full colonel in the US Air Force with 35 years of service, half his pension as a high-level civil servant, and his VA pension as well. He estimates the total loss to date at approximately $750,000.

Without those funds, he and his wheelchair-bound wife have descended to abject poverty. They were both recently hospitalized for food poisoning, after eating food foraged from the dumpster behind the local pizza parlor. Larry has spent the last 15 years cleaning out cesspools, mopping the local Roy Rogers restaurant after closing time, washing down stables, and parking cars. For a long time, the Franklins were living without any indoor running water due to rusted-out pipes. At present, Larry has only three functioning teeth, and is in desperate need of extensive dental work.

Who is Larry Franklin? And why should his case be of interest to Mishpacha readers more than 15 years after he was first accused of passing information to AIPAC lobbyists Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman and to an Israeli consular official? How did a gung-ho American patriot find himself identified by major media outlets as “an Israeli mole in the Defense Department”?

Finally, how did a devout Irish Catholic kid from “the projects overlooking the Hudson River and a Bronx tenement” come to count Moshe Weiss, a chassidic Jew, as his closest friend? And why has the Torah community undertaken to lift this defense analyst, whose work saved the lives of American servicemen, out of penury?

Over the past two weeks, I’ve spent many hours discussing those questions over the phone with Larry and exchanged endless rounds of emails. At 74, there still remains a certain innocence and naivete about him — a naïveté that did not always serve him well.