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On August 27, 2004, CBS News broke a story about an FBI investigation into a possible spy in the US Department of Defense working for Israel. The story reported that the FBI had uncovered a spy working as a policy analyst under Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith and then Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. He was later identified as Lawrence Franklin, who had previously served as an attaché at the US embassy in Israel and was one of two mid-level Pentagon officials in the Office of the Secretary of Defense responsible for Iran policy in the office's Northern Gulf directorate. He has since been demoted within the Defense Department and no longer has his previous security privileges. [1] [2] [3] Furthermore, he was sentenced on January 20, 2006 to 12 years and 7 months in prison sentence and a $10,000 fine for passing classified information to a pro-Israel lobby group and an Israeli diplomat [4]
Lawrence Franklin has pled guilty to passing on a classified Presidential Directive, and other sensitive documents pertaining to US deliberations on foreign policy regarding Iran, to a powerful pro-Israel lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), who in turn provided the information to Israel. FBI sources have indicated that the year-long investigation was actively underway when the CBS News story broke.
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