Newly-released classified documents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have revealed that the founder of the biggest Zionist lobby in America, AIPAC, was also a member of the US Communist Party.
AIPAC was founded in 1951 by Isaiah Leo Kenen. The FBI documents, available to download in full here, revealed that he was a member of the Cleveland unit of the Communist Party (CPUSA) in 1939.
Kenen, who died in 1988, relied upon a long association with Jewish political organizations to found the committee in 1954. The committee has been instrumental in assuring that Israel receives more military and economic aid from the United States than any other country.
Kenan began his efforts on behalf of eretz Israel in earnest when he moved to New York in 1943 and became the director of the American Emergency Committee on Zionist Affairs and later was a member of the first Israeli delegation to the United Nations.
In 1951 he moved to Washington and established the American Zionist Committee to lobby Congress for aid to Israel. The American Zionist Committee became the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.
He became active in the Zionist movement and in 1941 became president of the Cleveland Zionist District. In the 1940s, he served as the information director of the Jewish Agency and following the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, he served on the Israeli delegation to the United Nations.
Former Senator William Fulbright, in the 1970s, and former senior CIA official Victor Marchetti, in the 1980s, said in public that AIPAC should have registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) which requires those who receive funds or act on behalf of a foreign government to register as a foreign agent.
In 1992, AIPAC president David Steiner was forced to resign after he was recorded boasting about his political influence in obtaining aid for Israel. Steiner also claimed that he had “met with (then Bush U.S. Secretary of State) Jim Baker and I cut a deal with him. I got, besides the $3 billion, you know they’re looking for the Jewish votes, and I’ll tell him whatever he wants to hear … Besides the $10 billion in loan guarantees which was a fabulous thing, $3 billion in foreign, in military aid, and I got almost a billion dollars in other goodies that people don’t even know about.”
Steiner also claimed to be “negotiating” with the incoming Clinton administration over who Clinton would appoint as Secretary of State and Secretary of the National Security Agency. Steiner stated that AIPAC had “a dozen people in [the Clinton] campaign, in the headquarters… in Little Rock, and they’re all going to get big jobs.”
In April 2005, AIPAC policy director Steven Rosen and AIPAC senior Iran analyst Keith Weissman were fired by AIPAC amid an FBI investigation into whether they passed classified U.S. information received from Franklin on to the government of Israel.
They were later indicted for illegally conspiring to gather and disclose classified national security information to Israel. AIPAC agreed to pay the legal fees for Weissman’s defense through appeal.
In May 2005, the Justice Department announced that Lawrence Anthony Franklin, a U.S. Air Force Reserves colonel working as a Department of Defense analyst at the Pentagon in the office of Douglas Feith, had been arrested and charged by the FBI with providing classified national defense information to Israel.
The six-count criminal complaint identified AIPAC by name and described a luncheon meeting in which, allegedly, Franklin disclosed top-secret information to two AIPAC officials.
Franklin pleaded guilty to passing government secrets to Rosen and Weissman and revealed for the first time that he also gave classified information directly to an Israeli government official in Washington.
On January 20, 2006, he was sentenced to 151 months (almost 13 years) in prison and fined $10,000. As part of the plea agreement, Franklin agreed to cooperate in the larger federal investigation. All charges against the former AIPAC employees were dropped in 2009(!).
This then, is the record of AIPAC: Founded by a Communist, and an active spy organization for Israel. And yet people still believe Israel is America’s “ally” and “friend.”
