Old Familiar Names

By Lucille Barnes

(Familiar names, like familiar songs, spin in and out of the media dialogue almost too rapidly for recognition. You've heard the name before, but you can't remember why. Below are some things the mainstream media may neglect to mention about names currently in the news.)

The Washington Post reported that Philip B. Heymann, who headed the criminal division of the Justice Department during the administration of President Jimmy Carter, would be named deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration. A professor at Harvard in the intervening years, he was the official who ignored an FBI recommendation that Stephen Bryen, then a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer, be indicted on suspicion of offering classified U.S. government information to an Israeli official.

Then-National Association of Arab Americans official Michael Saba, now representing U.S. exporters in Saudi Arabia, told the FBI he heard Bryen making the offer in a Washington, DC coffee shop. When the FBI investigated Saba's complaint, it found Bryen's fingerprints on the document Saba heard being discussed. Saba went on to write a book, The Armageddon Network*, on alleged Israeli spying activities in the U.S. (long before Navy counterintelligence agent Jonathan Jay Pollard was caught spying for Israel) which alleged the FBI, through electronic monitoring, also had overheard Bryen discussing classified information with Israeli Embassy officials.

Stephen Bryen went on to become a deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan-era Pentagon, serving under then Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle, another long-time advocate of close U.S. ties with Israel.

Bryen is back in the news. Between his Senate and Pentagon days, he was president of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), which lobbies for the Israeli arms industry. At the Pentagon he was responsible for controlling the export of sensitive U.S. technology.

Since leaving the Pentagon, he has been president of Secured Communications Technologies Inc. of Silver Spring, MD, which makes security equipment to protect electronic data transmissions. He recently protested a U.S. government plan to preserve privacy in electronic communications while also ensuring the U.S. government's ability to eavesdrop when law enforcement or national security are involved.

"I think the government is creating a monster," Bryen told The New York Times. "People won't be able to trust these devices because there is a high risk that the government is going to have complete access to anything they are going to do.”

Take it from a guy who knows.

Superhawk Files Again

Israeli superhawk Ariel Sharon, who as Menachem Begin's defense minister engineered the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and as Yitzhak Shamir's housing minister accelerated the building of Jewish settlements on the Israeli-occupied West Bank, called upon his fellow Knesset members in late March to establish an emergency government in Israel, which he volunteered to head, "with the declared aim of smashing terror."

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's reaction to the same emergency was to seal off the occupied territories from Israel. It caught Sharon off guard, In addition to the home he owns in the Muslim quarter of East Jerusalem's Old City, Sharon also owns a farm in Israel where West Bank Arabs do virtually all of the work. Since they no longer can get to the farm, Sharon had to turn his attention from an emergency government for Israel to emergency measures for the farm.

Meanwhile, Back In the Nest ...

While Sharon was trying to hire Jewish labor to plow under the unharvested cabbages and cut and ship to European florists at least part of the fast-fading spring flower crop, his successful rival for leadership of the Likud party, 43-year-old Benjamin Netanyahu, was waiting eagerly for collapse of the Middle East peace talks in Washington. He reasons that such a collapse would be followed by collapse of the Rabin government, followed by new Israeli elections.

Seeking to capitalize on the stated refusal by many West Bank Jewish settlers to obey the Palestinian police called for in the Rabin government's autonomy plan, and the warning by some Jewish settlers on the Golan Heights that they will take up weapons against the Israeli army if it tries to force them to leave as part of any peace treaty with Syria, Netanyahu hopes his Likud bloc will replace Rabin's Labor coalition long before it can reach any land-for-peace agreement, or even complete its first year in office.

Substituting Iraqgate for Irangate

The Israel lobby's traditional answer to any mention of "Irangate" is to switch the subject to "Iraqgate, " the charges endlessly reiterated in the Los Angeles Times and by Texas Democratic Rep. Henry Gonzales that the Bush administration coddled Iraqi President Saddam Hussain for so long after the end of the Iraq-Iran war that he decided he could get away with starting another war, this time against Kuwait. Bush administration officials have explained, time after time, that the policy was to treat the Iraqi strongman like a responsible leader in hopes of turning him into one. They admit, "It didn't work."

Instead of letting it go at that, pro-Israel senators are using "Iraqgate" as a club to beat anyone associated with Mideast policy during the administration of George Bush, the first U.S. president to stand up to Israel since Dwight Eisenhower threatened to lift the U.S. tax exemption on funds collected for Israel if Israel didn't withdraw from Egyptian territory it had seized in 1956.

To avoid such problems, the State Department is said to be steering career foreign service officers who were serving in high-level Bush administration Near East positions in Washington as far away as possible from jobs requiring Senate confirmation hearings. Former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie was dealing with environmental issues at the U.S. mission to the United Nations in New York, according to The Washington Post, when Madeleine K. Albright showed up in January to take over as Clinton administration ambassador to the U.N. Albright, said the Post, gave Glaspie five hours to empty her desk and return to the State Department in Washington.

James P. "Jock" Covey, a deputy assistant secretary of state in the State Department's Near East bureau during the interval between the Iran-Iraq war and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, was under consideration for assistant secretary of state for South Asia. When the State Department realized what might lie ahead, however, the idea was scratched and Covey was next considered for deputy assistant secretary for political-military affairs, a position that does not require Senate confirmation.

Lucille Barnes covers Washington and the Middle East for U.S. and overseas newspapers.

*The Armageddon Network by Michael Saba is available from the AET Book Club Catalog .