ISRAEL today "unequivocally" denied allegations it was engaged in any kind of intelligence gathering in the United States following the indictment of a Pentagon analyst on charges of passing classified information to a pro-Israel lobby group.
"The question is: is Israel carrying out intelligence-gathering in the United States? The answer is: absolutely not," Labour MP Efraim Sneh, who heads the parliamentary subcommittee for security affairs, said. "Israel meticulously abstains from all intelligence-gathering in the United States. I am saying this unequivocally," he said in an interview with army radio.
"This started as policy in the wake of the Pollard affair and everyone has rigorously stuck to this," he added, referring to Jonathan Pollard, a Jewish American who was jailed for life in 1987 in the United States on charges of spying for Israel. Yesterday, a US court indicted Lawrence Franklin, who worked on the Pentagon's Iran desk, on four counts of communicating national defence information to persons not entitled or authorised to receive it, and two counts of conspiracy.
According to the indictment, Franklin allegedly divulged classified information about an unnamed Middle Eastern country to two employees of a Washington lobbying firm, a foreign diplomat and another person associated with that country's intelligence service. The indictment gives no names other than Franklin's, but officials had previously identified the lobbying firm as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The indictment did not say what country the diplomat was from. Israel denied any involvement in the case after Franklin's arrest in May.
No comments:
Post a Comment