Obama Intelligence Nominee Withdraws

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Hand-picked to lead the NIC by Obama’s director of national intelligence, Admiral Dennis Blair, Freeman brings a wide-ranging resume to the job. He has spearheaded key U.S. initiatives from Africa to Europe to East Asia while gathering experience in the Middle East as U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War. Having cut his teeth as President Richard Nixon’s translator during his historic trip to China, Freeman is fluent in Mandarin and Cantonese. Pat Lang, a retired senior officer of U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces colonel, described Freeman as “a man awesomely educated, of striking intellect, of vast experience and demonstrated integrity.” A letter signed by 17 current and former ambassadors published in the Wall Street Journal underscored the career diplomat’s credibility. “We know Chas [Freeman] to be a man of integrity and high intelligence who would never let his personal views shade or distort intelligence assessments,” the ambassadors wrote.

But Freeman’s professional qualifications are irrelevant to Steven Rosen. “This is a profoundly disturbing appointment,” he wrote in a February 19 entry on his Obama Mideast Monitor, a blog he writes for Daniel Pipes’ Middle East Forum. Of particular issue to the former AIPAC director was a 2005 Freeman speech in which he partially blamed the failure of the peace process on U.S. support for the Israeli occupation on the West Bank. The next day, Rosen pronounced his alarm at a 2006 address by Freeman that called for “a break from the past” in U.S. policy toward Israel and Palestine, calling for a new peace process suggested by the framework offered by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia in 2002—a proposal praised by President Obama in his interview with al Arabiya. The Atlantic’s Goldberg echoed Rosen three days later, claiming Freeman was “well-known for his hostility toward Israel.” Goldberg’s sole piece of evidence was the 2006 speech Rosen had highlighted. From there, criticism of Freeman spread to the Weekly Standard, the National Review, and the New Republic.

Rosen’s campaign against Freeman follows the tactics he honed during a series of internecine battles within AIPAC against the Middle East peace process and to gain control of the organization. In 1988, Rosen overthrew his chief rival, legislative director and chief lobbyist Douglas Bloomfield, after the Reagan administration recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization. “Bloomfield was fired in a blast of unwelcome publicity airing AIPAC’s inner turmoil,” The Washington Post’s Lloyd Grove reported in 1991. “Rosen had won.” His method, according to the Post, “indulged an appetite for the ad hominem, warning of conspiracies among various Jewish organizations to undermine AIPAC's mission.”

According to M.J. Rosenberg, the former AIPAC staffer, Rosen then trained his sights on the man who hired him, AIPAC director Tom Dine. “Rosen didn’t like the fact that Dine was a Democrat,” Rosenberg told me, “and even more than that, he didn’t like having a boss.” When Rosen learned of alleged remarks by Dine that seemed to disparage Orthodox Jews as “smelly” and “low-class,” he rushed to AIPAC’s board of directors to complain. In short order, Dine was drummed out. But Rosen’s real agenda was to undermine the Oslo peace process initiated by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. In 1993, the second-ranking AIPAC lobbyist, Harvey Friedman, a Rosen ally, called Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin "a little slime-ball" for advocating Rabin’s land-for-peace policy. Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., Itamar Rabinovich, demanded an apology, which was publicly offered by Dine. That prompted Rosen’s counterattack, Dine’s ouster, and his control of the group. According to Douglas Bloomfield, in an article published last week in the New Jersey Jewish Week, Rosen “coordinated with Benjamin Netanyahu in the 1990s, when he led the Israeli Likud opposition and later when he was prime minister, to impede the Oslo peace process being pressed by President Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres.”

Rosen’s machinations eventually precipitated his undoing. In 2005, federal prosecutors indicted him and two other AIPAC staffers for allegedly violating the Espionage Act by furnishing top-secret U.S. documents to reporters and foreign officials. The one-time power broker suddenly became persona non grata on Capitol Hill. In 2007, Rosen announced a new mission to The Forward’s Nathan Guttman: avenging “the strong anti-Israel sentiment among individuals in America’s intelligence community, which he believes is what led to the investigation against him in the first place.” In November 2008, Rosen started blogging for the Middle East Forum, a neoconservative think tank founded by Pipes, who once called for “razing villages” in Palestine.

Rosen’s former employer denies any role in fueling the Freeman controversy. “We’re not really interested in Freeman,” AIPAC director of communications Josh Block told me. “It’s not something we’re working on.” But when I asked Block whether anyone at the group had circulated information about Freeman to reporters, he declined to comment.

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