ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
In a federal courtroom in Alexandria, Virginia, today, Larry Franklin pleaded guilty. He is the Pentagon analyst who's charged with six counts of mishandling or passing on classified information. Today, he pleaded guilty to three of those charges which stopped just short of espionage. Franklin's case has drawn attention because of the nature of the intelligence he is alleged to have leaked and the alleged involvement of two high-level officials of AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobbying group. NPR's Mary Louise Kelly was in the courtroom this afternoon, and she joins us now.
And, Mary Louise, first, do we learn today why Franklin is switching to a guilty plea? For months, his lawyers have been saying that he's not guilty.
MARY LOUISE KELLY reporting:
Right. Well, he said today that he is, in fact, guilty as charged, that he did leak classified information, that he shared it with two senior officials at AIPAC--which is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee--and that he also shared it with an agent of a foreign government. The key, of course, as to why he's now saying he's guilty is that he's got to deal with government prosecutors. He is agreeing to testify, he says he'll tell everything he knows to prosecutors and try to help the prosecutors win convictions against the two remaining defendants in this case, who are the two AIPAC officials. In exchange, the deal says that the remaining charges, the other three out of the six counts against him, will be dropped, and he's likely to get significantly reduced jail time. He could have faced up to 45 years had he been found guilty on all counts. Under this plea bargain, the max he could get would be 25 years, and he'll probably get a lot less than that.
SIEGEL: And you say that he is now expected to testify against the two other defendants in the case.
KELLY: That's correct. These two other defendants are Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, both of whom were at AIPAC until this spring when they were fired as details in this case thickened. They are both charged with seeking classified intelligence from Franklin and from others and passing it on to reporters and to foreign embassy officials. So today's developments are not great news for them on one level in that the government now has, in Larry Franklin, a star witness who is poised to testify against them.
However, I'm told that they are both planning to stick with their original pleas, which is that they are not guilty.
SIEGEL: Mm-hmm.
KELLY: Later this month, one of their lawyers told me, they will be asking the judge to throw the case out, basically file a motion to dismiss the entire case against them. So they're going in that direction. If that doesn't happen and they don't get what they want, then these two, Rosen and Weissman, will still go to trial in January with Larry Franklin as the key witness against them.
SIEGEL: Well, did you learn any more in court today about the substance of this case, what material is actually at the center of the charges and how damaging it may or may not be to national security?
KELLY: We learned a bit, yes. I mean, the central allegation here all along has been that Franklin leaked intelligence about Iran and about Iraq, and that the people he was leaking this intelligence to were people either who were sympathetic to Israel or actual Israeli officials. And today for the first time, we got confirmation of that. Larry Franklin told the court that he met with the political officer of the Israeli Embassy in Washington; that's a man named Naor Gilon. Franklin says he and Gilon met eight or nine times, perhaps up to a dozen times, over the time span of a couple of years.
And we also got some insight into Franklin's motives in all of this. He said he was frustrated with a particular policy and he wanted his concerns communicated to the National Security Council. We didn't get details on that policy, but he is known to favor a more hard-line stance against Iran than the US currently takes, and I'm told by former colleagues of Franklin's that that's probably the issue that was at stake here.
SIEGEL: OK. Thank you, Mary Louise.
KELLY: You're welcome.
SIEGEL: That's NPR's Mary Louise Kelly, speaking to us from outside the courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia.
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