- JERUSALEM (Reuters) -- Israel
denied Saturday spying on its main ally, the United States, responding
to suspicions a Pentagon analyst passed secret papers to the Jewish state
about one of its most bitter enemies, Iran.
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- U.S. government sources said Friday the FBI was investigating
an analyst connected to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's office on suspicion
he gave classified documents to Israel via the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC), the powerful pro-Israel lobby in Washington.
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- The sources declined to identify the suspect and said
no one had been arrested and no charges brought. An official in Israeli
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office denied the allegations.
-
- "Israel has no connection with the matter,"
the source said. "The United States is Israel's greatest ally and
Israel is not engaged in intelligence activity in the United States and
denies all the reports."
-
- Israeli officials insisted Israel had not spied on the
United States since being caught red-handed two decades ago in an espionage
scandal involving U.S. Navy analyst Jonathan Pollard, arrested in 1985
outside the Israeli embassy.
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- "We deny carrying out any intelligence activity.
It is a strange story," said a senior Israeli government official,
who declined to be identified. "Israel, for many years, has not carried
out intelligence activity in the United States."
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- In a brief statement, the U.S. Department of Defense
said it had been cooperating on the matter with the Justice Department
for some time and understood the investigation was limited in scope.
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- "SERIOUS MATTER"
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- White House spokesman Scott McClellan said he could not
discuss any investigation.
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- "Obviously any time there is an allegation of this
nature, it's a serious matter," he told reporters in Ohio.
-
- A former AIPAC staff member said that as a "matter
of policy" the organization hired former Pentagon insiders with security
clearance to keep Israelis informed on projected U.S. plans.
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- "It's a standard feature of the lobbying scene,"
the staffer told Reuters. "How do you draw the line between a lobbyist
briefing and spying? It is not as clear-cut as it should be."
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- Sharon has frequently highlighted his warm relations
with President Bush and has visited the White House nine times since taking
office. A senior Sharon aide meets often with U.S. national security adviser
Condoleezza Rice.
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- But the case of Pollard, an American Jew granted Israeli
citizenship in 1995, eight years after he began serving a life sentence
in a U.S. prison for spying for Israel, is still an irritant in relations
between the two countries.
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- CBS, which first reported the FBI investigation, said
one of the documents passed to Israel was a draft presidential directive
on U.S. policy toward Iran -- placed by Bush in an "axis of evil"
along with pre-war Iraq and North Korea.
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- U.S. and Israeli officials accuse Iran of developing
nuclear weapons, a charge Tehran denies. Since its 1979 Islamic revolution
Iran has refused to recognize Israel's right to exist.
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- - Additional reporting by Dan Williams in Jerusalem and
Mohammad Zargham in Washington
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- http://news.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml
?type=domesticNews&storyID=6094927
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