American Patriot

If Larry were asked to describe himself, “super-patriot” would likely figure high on his list. That was already the case in 1969, when he left a PhD program at Yale University and enlisted in the US Army so he could join the fight in Vietnam.

In basic training, Larry’s personal physical workouts were so intense that he developed an arterial blockage in his arm, which led to a seizure. Instead of Vietnam, he found himself awakening in Walter Reed Military Hospital. But at least one good thing came of that near-death experience. He met his future wife, Patricia, who was volunteering at a convalescent hospital nearby.

With his dreams of becoming a combat soldier over, Larry did not return to Yale, but entered military intelligence, first with the Army and subsequently with the Air Force. For the next 35 years, he served in both military and civilian intelligence, acquiring a PhD along the way.

Larry began as a Soviet analyst, in which he distinguished himself. In a 2013 letter in support of a pardon, former CIA director James Woolsey cited Franklin’s prescient predictions that the Soviets would attempt to assassinate Pope John Paul II and invade Afghanistan.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Larry asked himself, “What is the next comparable global threat to the United States?” He concluded it was Iran. He learned Farsi and became an Iran analyst.

Larry was in the Pentagon on 9/11, when it was struck by a commandeered commercial airliner that claimed 184 lives. The next day, when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld convened a department meeting and requested a volunteer to deliver a message in the name of President Bush to the American forces in Afghanistan, Larry’s hand was the first up.

General John Mulholland, the commander of US special operations task forces in Operation Enduring Freedom, appreciated the grace and respect with which Franklin delivered President Bush’s sharp message to strike quickly. Franklin also delivered a rousing speech to the Green Berets and CIA special forces under Mulholland’s command. Later, after Larry had been indicted, Mulholland would write to Judge Thomas S. Ellis how, from the first, “It was clear that I had met a fellow American who was deeply devoted to our country, the cause we were all fighting for, and the men who were carrying the fight to our enemies.”

Two years after the 9/11 attacks, Larry traveled to Rome to meet Michael Ledeen, a former official in the Reagan Defense Department, and to meet with Iranian sources close to Ledeen. One of those sources alerted him to a forthcoming Iranian arms shipment to Afghani groups hostile to America. Larry relayed the information to General Mulholland, whose troops were able to interdict the shipment and eliminate many of those involved.

In the FBI’s Crosshairs

Larry Franklin is not sure when he first came to the attention of the FBI. But he does know that in the late 1990s, colleagues in the Defense Intelligence Agency where he served in a dual capacity as the US Air Force attaché to the American embassy in Israel and as an intelligence analyst on Iran in the DIA, were suspicious of him. A fellow analyst mentioned to him around then that she had heard rumblings that “you’re getting too close to the Izzies.”

Whether those colleagues took their suspicions then to the FBI or whether they waited until the FBI came knocking to interview them when Larry was later caught up in the AIPAC investigation, he does not know.

His enemies in the DIA certainly did not have to look far for evidence of his closeness to Israeli counterparts. After the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000, Larry was assigned by the American embassy the task of confirming Israel’s retreat to the agreed-upon Green Line. In the course of doing so, he detected a number of weaknesses in the Israeli defensive positions, and informed his Israeli contacts of his findings.

In late 2000, Larry received a CIA report of an Iranian hit squad on its way to kill undercover Israelis operating in the Kurdish areas of Iraq. After confirming much of the information with his own sources among the Kurds, he alerted the Israelis to the threat, relying on an intelligence-sharing compact between Israel and the United States to share intelligence information on Iraq, Iran, and Libya.

Israel had not known of the danger, and Larry’s action only increased the flow of information he received from Israeli sources and his access to upper echelon Israeli officials. That very success in tapping into Israeli intelligence sources later became a cause of suspicion.

On a trip to Israel — one of 12 Franklin has made — together with three colleagues in the DIA, those colleagues expressed displeasure that after official meetings with Israeli counterparts were over for the day, he continued socializing with the Israelis or soaking up the atmosphere of Jerusalem until the early hours of the morning. From his point of view, building trust with the Israelis was crucial to his job, as it was apparent to him that the Israelis’ human intelligence resources, particularly in Iran, were better than American ones.

Though Larry was part of a group of “Iran hawks” in the Defense Department, almost all of them Jewish, Arabists still predominated throughout the intelligence services. The Arabist view, which dominated State Department thinking even before the birth of Israel, holds that American policy in the region should prioritize close ties with the oil-rich Arab states. Arabists have always assumed that American support for Israel inflames the Arab states against the United States.

The Arabist position is not inherently anti-Semitic, even if it is hostile to the idea of close American ties with Israel. But it is easy for Arabists to convince themselves that American Jews — and by extension, anyone who sees American and Israeli interests as generally aligned — suffer from “dual loyalty” and favor Israel’s interests over those of America.

Larry encountered that suspicion multiple times during his career. His civilian supervisor in the DIA department of attaché affairs kept a Hezbollah flag on his desk and denied that Hezbollah, which killed 243 US Marines in a 1983 suicide bombing of their barracks in Beirut, was a terrorist organization. On one occasion, he asked Larry, “What’s with you and all those Jews in the Office of Secretary of Defense?” On another occasion, he mocked him, asking, “Have you converted yet?”

Larry is convinced that his attaché supervisor suppressed intelligence information notes he wrote up after meetings with foreign nationals, and expunged from his record that he had registered an Israeli embassy official as an intelligence source. That absence made his many contacts with that official in the Pentagon gym appear to be surreptitious.

The senior DIA Middle East analyst once dismissed a citation of historian Bernard Lewis that Larry had made, saying, “Don’t you know, Larry, Bernard Lewis is a Jew.”

Another DIA colleague with whom Larry frequently found himself in disagreement was the director of security in his department. Larry had in his possession a work of Nazi propaganda from 1934, which his uncle Albert had appropriated when he liberated the Mauthausen concentration camp as an American soldier. After Larry brought the book to work one day, Larry’s overall boss opened it up to page 64 and put his finger on a photo of Franz Ritter von Epp, the top Nazi general in Bavaria at the time. Larry asked his colleague, who bore the same last name, whether he was a relation, and the latter replied, “Yes, he’s my uncle, and I’m very proud of him.”

Larry tells me that one of the lessons he has learned from his ordeal is “the extent to which colleagues will use policy differences to criminalize someone with whom they disagree.” The lesson was a personal and painful one that affected himself, his family, and his distinguished record of service.

The AIPAC Investigation

Certainly as of his first meeting in early 2003 with Steven Rosen, AIPAC’s senior lobbyist, Larry was on the FBI’s radar. A pioneer in executive branch lobbying, Rosen was a consensus choice as one of the most influential lobbyists in D.C. And as such, he was the bête noire of the Arabists. What Franklin did not know was that Rosen had been under FBI surveillance for years prior to their first meeting. And now Larry was too.

That first meeting must be understood in the context of disputes in the first term of President George W. Bush over US policy toward Iran. There were those in the State Department and the CIA who argued that the revolutionary regime in Iran would, with time and understanding from the US, evolve into a more moderate state. On the other side were those who viewed Iran as a major global threat and likely to continue as such for a long time.

Franklin was firmly in the latter camp. He harbored no illusions that a theological regime would evolve into a more Western-style country or moderate its behavior. He viewed Iran as a malevolent force, and likely to remain one for some time to come.

Of most immediate concern to Larry was the fact that the United States was preparing for an invasion of Iraq, without any policy vis-à-vis Iran. Iran, in his view, would be happy to have the US remove its archenemy, Saddam Hussein. But after that, it would be only too eager to turn Iraq into the same quagmire that Afghanistan had proven to be for the Soviet Union. Indeed, he saw mounting evidence that Iran had already set up networks in Iraq that could be turned on the Great Satan, the United States.

To all who would listen, Larry kept proclaiming that without a policy for first addressing Iran, large numbers of Americans would return from Iraq “in body bags.” He advocated that the US send Iran a strong signal prior to the invasion of Iraq not to target American troops.

Journalist Jeffrey Goldberg documented Larry’s concern in a 2006 New Yorker piece on the AIPAC prosecution, quoting Franklin’s claim that “Iran, not Iraq, would turn out to be the most difficult challenge in the war on terror.” Former CIA director Woolsey would later acknowledge that Larry had been right about the Iranian threat, and that up to one-third of American casualties in Iraq could be attributed to Iran.

But when Larry first met with Rosen prior to the invasion of Iraq, Iran was not widely considered a consequential threat to US soldiers. Larry, with his knowledge of the region, was desperately seeking someone who could alert the National Security Council to this threat. He hoped that Rosen, with his extensive connections throughout the executive branch and in the National Security Council, would be the courier for that view.

But he could not foresee how that conversation would be perceived, and what price he would pay for it. James Bamford, an outspoken critic of the Israel lobby and the author of well-received books on the National Security Agency (NSA), told journalist Jeffrey Goldberg that Franklin’s efforts to enlist Rosen’s help were not espionage, but something very different — “the selling of ideology, trying to sell a viewpoint. Larry Franklin is not going to knock on George Bush’s door, but he can get AIPAC, which is a pressure group, and the Israeli government, which is an enormous pressure group, to try to get the government to change its policy [vis-à-vis Iran] to a more aggressive policy.”

Franklin’s sole intent was to save American lives. But his own life was to be overturned as a result.

The FBI Moves In

Two FBI agents came to Larry’s office at the Pentagon on June 23, 2003. He was not overly concerned, as it never occurred to him that he had done anything wrong. “My late father-in-law was a career FBI officer, and I had grown up watching the TV show The FBI. To me the FBI were the good guys, and I was sure they would soon see that I was one of the ‘good guys’ too.”

In his innocence, Larry did not call an attorney then, or in any other subsequent interviews with the FBI.

The FBI agents began by showing Larry a document about an Iranian hit team on the way to kill Israeli agents in Kurdistan, the contents of which he had shared with Israeli officials. Next they asked whether it was Douglas Feith, undersecretary of Defense for Policy, who had urged him to meet with Steven Rosen. Then the agents asked him about a wide range of fellow analysts in the DoD, as well as senior policy makers.

“I noticed that every person they asked me about, including Feith, was Jewish,” Larry tells me. “That raised my antennae.”

At the very end of the conversation, the FBI agents asked him whether he had any classified documents in his possession, and he told them forthrightly that he did. Months earlier he had said the same thing on one of the polygraph tests to which DoD employees are periodically subjected.

He was not too worried about the admission, as he had known others who had taken home classified documents and gotten off with a slap on the wrist. Indeed, former CIA director John Deutch had been caught with classified documents on his personal computer, and he was not prosecuted.

“I took the documents home because I was my wife’s nighttime caretaker, and I also wanted to have a chance to speak to the kids about their day before they went to sleep,” Larry explains. “Late at night, I would study them in preparation for an upcoming interview for assignment to Iraq, with an anti-terrorism unit.”

But the agents apparently took a very different view. Larry was asked by the two agents to accompany them from his office to his home in West Virginia. When they arrived, they were met by nearly 20 additional agents, who proceeded to isolate his wife in one room and his teenage son in another. That son was left permanently traumatized by the experience.

“Fionan was a carefree, outgoing teenager,” Larry laments. “And I had always been his hero. After the FBI closed him in his room and told him that his father had done bad things, he became socially dysfunctional, resentful, and quiet — too quiet.”

The extra FBI agents were, in any event, unneeded, as Larry immediately furnished the FBI agents who had accompanied him with 83 documents, mostly copies, with his notes and double-wrapped for security. Those documents gave the FBI the club they needed to secure his continued cooperation in the AIPAC investigation.

In September 2003, the FBI broke the news to Franklin that he was a prime suspect in an espionage investigation of certain AIPAC operatives (identified as Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, who would later be aquitted of all charges), and would be well-advised to hire an attorney. He told his interrogators that he had no money for an attorney, and they provided him with a public defender.

“I thought I was receiving a government-appointed attorney, not a government attorney [i.e., one on the government’s side],” Larry commented to me dryly. His attorney never asked him a single question about any of the facts cited by the US attorneys in their indictment, with an eye to presenting a defense. Instead, he immediately began working on a plea agreement with the government that would have sent Larry to jail for many years.

He’d always been a fighter, but when faced with such a staggering jail sentence, Larry took a fatalistic stance: “I felt my duty was no longer to help myself. Instead, I thought it best to cooperate, so I could go back to my responsibilities as a husband to an ailing wife, son to an aged father, and son-in-law to an impoverished mother-in-law, all of whom lived nearby and depended upon me.”

Fortunately, the signing of that draconian plea agreement was delayed for a day because of some technical issues. The night before the originally scheduled signing, Larry went to his Catholic church at 2 a.m. to pray for some way out.

The next day, he received a call from Michael Ledeen, together with Larry’s friend, Moshe Weiss, a well-connected chassidic activist, asking him what was going on.

“If Natan Sharansky could endure more than eight years in the KGB’s most infamous prison, I can survive as long as I keep my soul and mind free,” Larry replied.

Sharansky had long been a hero to Larry. When he worked on the DIA Soviet desk, Larry kept a photo of Sharansky on his desk. He had read Fear No Evil, and revered Sharansky “because he proved what a man of G-d could accomplish with prayer for strength to resist absolute evil.” Larry had previously met Sharansky — “We instantly had a meeting of hearts” — at the Jerusalem home of Moshe Weiss.

Ledeen disregarded Larry’s resignation to serving a long prison term and secured the services of leading D.C. defense lawyer Plato Cacheris to represent Larry pro bono. Eventually, Cacheris succeeded in showing Judge Thomas Ellis who Larry really was.

He brought to Judge Ellis’s attention two things Larry had done since losing his Pentagon job. First, he helped break up an interstate drug ring. A woman in his karate class told him that “something very wrong is taking place in the house across the street from me — people are coming and going all the time.” In the middle of the night, Larry reconnoitered the house, unarmed, looked through the window, and took down license plate numbers of motorcycle couriers and cars coming in and out. That information proved sufficient to break the drug-ring.

On another occasion, a young black coworker named Darius complained to Larry that his mother and younger sister were being held hostage by his mother’s Iranian husband. Darius had seen guns being sold from his step-father’s car. Larry relayed the information to the FBI through Cacheris, and it turned out that the husband was not only a central player in a gun-selling ring in D.C., but also part of a terrorist group. The FBI found videos of executions of “infidels” in his trunk.

Judge Ellis reviewed this new information along with Larry’s long record of service and acknowledged that Larry had at all times acted with the interests of the United States uppermost in his mind. He sentenced Larry to ten months in a halfway house, which allowed him to work during the day at whatever job he could find to support his family.

The lighter sentence was a marked relief, but the loss of his pension, reputation, and any respectable employment options meant that Larry’s life had been transformed from the pursuit of dignified and lucrative public service to a struggle with punishing poverty.

Without Bitterness

Perhaps the most striking thing about talking to Larry is his lack of bitterness or self-pity. He tells me proudly about a son who just completed a tour of duty with special forces in Afghanistan and a daughter who served in the Peace Corps. When I express surprise that his children were eager to serve a government that had treated their father so badly, Larry is quick to share what he has always told his children.

“Yes, good men and patriots are often victims of their fellow countrymen, because all of us are capable of evil,” Larry says. “But America remains the providentially inspired and unique country in human history. So embrace her, serve her, and be like George Washington, in the statue I once showed you, seated, with his hand on the hilt of his sword ready to defend liberty from whatever source the threat might emanate.”

While Larry laments the impact on his family and the loss of a great job serving his country, he has not lost his sense of humor or allowed himself to disengage from the world.

Without question Larry’s strong Catholic faith has been a major factor in his ability to endure. His conversation is punctuated with frequent references to trips to church to pray in the middle of the night and to conversations with priests.

But religious Jews have also played a role in his endurance. Larry was introduced to Moshe Weiss, a Karlin-Stoliner chassid living in Jerusalem, by his DoD colleague Harold Rhode, and became a frequent Shabbos visitor from the time that he was appointed USAF attaché to the embassy in Israel. Weiss has been a mashgiach in the Karlin-Stolin yeshivah; built LeTzion B’Rina, a high school in Israel for Jews from the FSU; served as an aide to Natan Sharansky in the Absorption Ministry; was charged with finding halachic solutions to the various issues raised by the mass aliyah from the FSU; and is today the chairman of the board of Internet Rimon.

Larry describes his first visit to the Weiss home as a “love feast — the air permeated with joy, the innocence of the children singing alone and together without any self-consciousness, the respect shown the parents out of love, not fear, and the peace, completely shutting out the external cacophony of the world.” The presence of Moshe’s mother, an Auschwitz survivor, reinforced for Larry the urgency in fighting anti-Semitic evil in the world.

Today, Moshe and Larry speak almost daily, and Moshe and his wife have been to Larry’s West Virginia home, where a photo of the Weiss family hangs near the door. Larry describes Moshe Weiss as one of his two closest friends in the world.

From the beginning of Larry’s travails, it has been Jews, most of them Orthodox, who have taken his case closest to heart. Not long ago, an Orthodox Jew whom Larry met at an Aleph Institute event donated $100,000 to refurbishing the Franklins’ home, which had become uninhabitable, and another has provided a wheelchair-accessible vehicle for his wife. And it was Torah Jews who spearheaded his recent effort to secure a pardon. A drive is currently under way to raise funds to provide the family with an annuity to replace the pensions lost.

Though Larry Franklin certainly shared with most top Israeli policymakers a deep concern about Iran’s nuclear programs and hegemonic ambitions in the Middle East, his motivation was always the security of the United States and its fighting forces. Similarly, his frequent discussions with Israeli officials, in his view, netted twice as much intelligence for the United States as what he shared with the Israelis.

But it is clear that he took a bullet because he got “too close to the Izzies” and to a cadre of Jewish anti-Iran hawks in and out of government. Those currently involved in lifting him from poverty and back to employing his analytic skills to the maximum will not abandon him in the field.

The AIPAC Prosecution

The FBI’s August 2005 announcement of criminal indictments against senior AIPAC officials Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman under the 1917 Espionage Act, following the indictment of Larry Franklin a few weeks earlier, sent shock waves through official Washington, D.C.

Rosen and Weissman were the first nongovernmental officials ever charged under the Espionage Act. And the indictment made clear that they had neither received nor been shown any classified documents from Franklin. All they had done was talk about Iran and the different factions in the American government with respect to Iran policy.

As a New York Times news story at the time put it, such conversations are business as usual: “[I]n the circular, echo chamber world of official Washington, where government policy makers, members of Congress, analysts, lobbyists, and journalists are forever seeking to cull information for one another to gain an edge, such conversations are a routine part of doing business and influencing public policy.” Information is the currency of the realm.

In 2009, the Justice Department dropped all charges against Rosen and Weissman. Their attorney, Abbe Lowell, one of D.C.’s leading white-collar defense attorneys, had mounted an aggressive defense, winning from the judge the right to use at trial the classified documents relied upon by the prosecution in charging his clients and subpoenaing leading government officials, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The Department of Justice eventually recognized that it had no hope of meeting the standard set by Judge Thomas Ellis of proving the two lobbyists had a “bad faith purpose to either harm the United States or to aid a foreign country,” albeit only after four years and the expenditure of millions of dollars on attorneys’ fees.

In truth, the US government might not have cared about convicting Rosen and Weissman. James Bamford, for instance, speculated that their indictment was a “kind of brushback pitch” intended to limit the reach and power of AIPAC. And as such, it worked. AIPAC felt forced to part ways with Rosen and Weissman, thereby losing their senior and most effective lobbyist in Rosen, and becoming much more circumspect in the executive branch lobbying he pioneered.

The Search for a Second Pollard

For David Szady, the FBI agent in charge of the case against Franklin, Rosen, and Weissman, the AIPAC investigation had another aspect. Szady had long believed that Jonathan Pollard did not act alone, and that whoever helped him might still work in the intelligence community.

David Szady’s deep suspicion of Jews first came to light in the case of Adam Ciralsky, a young lawyer in the CIA. In 1997, Richard Clarke, then President Clinton’s counterterrorism czar, offered Ciralsky a rotation with the National Security Council. But the CIA’s Counterespionage Group (CEG), then headed by Szady, put a stop on the rotation, citing Ciralsky’s “Jewish roots.” Ciralsky fought back, bringing a lawsuit, which unearthed many documents showing that he had been treated with hyper-suspicion from the start of his CIA career.

Within weeks of his joining the CIA in late 1996, the agency had compiled a four-page “Jewish résumé,” including a teenage trip to Israel with the Milwaukee Federation, a summer job at the local JCC camp, and his college minor in Jewish studies. After six months, Szady’s CEG had already prepared a memo on how to force him out of the agency, despite the absence of any incriminating evidence. That effort culminated in a rigged polygraph test. A memo circulated to the effect that “[CIA Director] Tenet says that this guy is out of here because of his lack of candor.” Only one problem: The polygraph had not yet taken place, as the memo noted.

CIA director George Tenet, who was deposed by Ciralsky, later admitted in a speech to the ADL that parts of his agency were infected with anti-Semitism.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 852)