Suspicious spies

The CIA's religious profiling comes under scrutiny. Plus, Bush's and Gore's bogus military debate and Gore's weak NH operation.

by Seth Gitell

The nomination of Senator Joseph Lieberman as the Democratic vice presidential candidate could strike another blow for progress. Not for religious diversity, but for putting an end to alleged racial and religious profiling within the Central Intelligence Agency.

A federal lawsuit filed July 19 in Washington DC charges that the CIA's internal screening process to weed out agency spies automatically casts suspicion on Orthodox Jews. Adam Ciralsky, a former lawyer for the agency, is seeking millions of dollars in damages from the agency and CIA director George Tenet for alleged religious discrimination. Ciralsky -- who was the subject of a CBS 60 Minutes story in February -- alleges that his career was blocked in 1997 because he was unfairly targeted as a security risk: by his lawyer's reckoning, Ciralsky fits a CIA profile that flags Orthodox Jews with close ties to Israel -- a modern version of the old canard that Jews are more loyal to Israel than America.

David H. Shapiro, the attorney of record on Ciralsky's lawsuit, on Tuesday called on Lieberman to put an end to the practice. "I would hope that any responsible government official, whatever his or her religious background, would not tolerate this," Shapiro says.

While Lieberman hasn't addressed the case directly, he has had to deal with suspicions about his own loyalty. "If I'm honored and fortunate enough to become the vice president of the United States, my first and primary loyalty is of course to the United States of America," Lieberman said on CNN's Larry King Show.

Shapiro, meanwhile, maintains that the "CIA engages in religious, racial profiling" and that that's what the agency did to Ciralsky.

CIA documents previously made public seem to back up the charge. In a redacted memo on Ciralsky, an agency official wrote: "From my experience with rich Jewish friends from college, I would fully expect . . . his wealthy daddy to support Israeli political/social causes in some form or other be it Israeli Bonds [sic] purchased through the United Jewish Appeal, or outright financial support to the Likud Party... I believe one of . . . his big problems . . . is that his mind and heart are so biased in favor of Israel that he has great difficulty separating his great pride in being such a staunch supporter of Israel in word and deed." Officials also raised concerns at the time of the security review about Ciralsky's distant family relationship to Israel's then-president, Ezer Weizman, according to his lawyers.

Shapiro maintains that even a high government official such as Lieberman would not be immune from unwarranted scrutiny based on such a profile. "It would raise presumably the same concerns for somebody like Joe Lieberman -- or even more so because his connections are so much greater," he says.

As it happens, some agency thick-neck could see such a profile in Lieberman. During his time in the senate, Lieberman has championed various pro-Israel causes. In 1998, when the Clinton administration was tussling with Israel's then-prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the Middle East peace process, Lieberman authored a senate letter warning that "public pressure against Israel [would be] a serious mistake." Lieberman also has Israeli relatives. According to an August 11 article in The Jerusalem Post, Lieberman is a "distant relative" of Efraim Imbar, the director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University in Israel and a member of the international advisory board of the institution. Its US equivalent would be the Rand Corporation, a California-based research organization that focuses on security and other issues.

Not everyone agrees with Shapiro's speculation about how the security profiling could harm a politician like Lieberman, however. Abraham Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League notes that as a senator, Lieberman has already received the requisite security clearances. He calls the notion that Lieberman could be targeted by the CIA for security profiling "poppycock."

For the record, Foxman also dismisses the charge that the CIA engages in wholesale racial and religious profiling. "I think there have been some problems in this case. To say there is religious profiling is something the lawyer is entitled to, but we found no evidence that profiling exists," says Foxman who has examined records in the case and who, with the ADL, has created a diversity and sensitivity training program.

But Shapiro says Ciralsky is being treated unfairly -- in part because he, unlike Lieberman, is a low-profile government bureaucrat. "Ciralsky is merely an observant Jew whose family gave money on occasion to things like the UJA. This is benign activity. This is like a Catholic giving to Catholic charities," says Shapiro. "The main thing is this racial, ethnic religious profiling could happen again and for all I know is happening right now, because nothing was done to remedy or change it."

Neal Sher, the former head of the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations, who has advised Ciralsky with his case and says he also experienced a degree of suspicion during his time in the government. "When I was in the US Justice Department I felt the sting of the charge of dual loyalty," Sher recalls. "I have no doubt in my mind that there are some in the intelligence community -- including the CIA -- that are suspicious of any Jew that's supportive of Israel."

But Sher sees a big difference between Lieberman and Ciralsky -- one is a vice presidential candidate being vetted before the public eye, the other a lowly faceless bureaucrat. "They're going to tread more carefully if you're in a position to affect them," says Sher, who hopes that the Lieberman nomination will put an end to the CIA's profiling." This could be one way of demonstrating that the days of anybody harboring a notion that a Jew is a second-class citizen would be long-gone."

Officially, the CIA didn't have much to say about the Ciralsky case or any "profile" the Democratic vice presidential candidate might fit into. "We don't comment on matters that are before the court or in litigation," says CIA spokesperson Anya Guilsher. In a statement released prior to the lawsuit, Bill Harlow, the CIA's director of public affairs, said, "The Agency is confident . . . that its actions were appropriate and nondiscriminatory, and that it would prevail in any lawsuit." He added: "The Central Intelligence Agency greatly values diversity and has succeeded on the contributions of men and women from a wide variety of ethnic, cultural and religious backgrounds."

The CIA has not filed legal papers responding to the complaint in the Ciralsky case.

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The political buzzword of the week is "military readiness." Earlier in August, GOP presidential candidate George W. Bush made the readiness issue a key plank in his critique of the Clinton-Gore years during his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia. "If called on by the commander in chief today, two entire divisions of the Army would have to report `Not ready for duty, sir.' " Last week, Gore pounced on the chance to prove Bush wrong. He donned his VFW garrison cap and said "to say that two divisions can't even respond to a call to deploy or to imply that our fighting forces are not the most capable in the world by far, that's mistaken."

Military experts say on this one Bush is mistaken, but that both candidates are arguing about the wrong thing in the first place. Andrew Bacevich, a professor of international relations at Boston University, explains that after returning from a peace-keeping deployment in the Balkans, the commanders of two Army divisions felt their troops needed more training to be ready for combat again. "Does this mean they came back and they were all messed up?" Bacevich asks. "The soldiers probably learned a lot in the Balkans and had some valuable experiences."

More interesting than the skirmish over "military readiness," however, is the fact that Bush opened himself up to criticism on such an easily disprovable allegation. This is the same problem Bush had during the New Hampshire primary: an eagerness to just slide along without addressing issues on point. If he keeps it up, he'll have even bigger problems as the presidential race moves into the fall. Gore will fully exploit such mistakes.

Bush advisers, meanwhile, still want to make the case that their argument on defense is better than Gore's. "The argument needs to be one of structure -- one of making the military a more relevant instrument for the post Cold War era," says Bacevich. "That's where the Republicans can and should fault the administration." He adds that the problem with such an argument is that the Republicans and Democrats don't really disagree on it because they don't really disagree on foreign policy.

Tom Neumann, a Washington-based national security expert, says differences do exist between the Democrats and Republicans -- but they're on the margins of the debate. Bush, Neumann says, could have questioned "the quality of the military, the pay, the commitment to ballistic missile defense, the amount of deployments during the Clinton administration, the question of support for our allies, Clinton's permitting things to have been sold to China that shouldn't have been, the whole idea of making the military a social experiment."

That Bush could have raised any of these issues but chose not to suggests a certain intellectual laziness on his part. The Texas governor clearly likes to avoid truly controversial, and difficult, issues. It's something that will certainly weaken his run for the presidency.

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Last winter, before the New Hampshire primary, you couldn't step into a diner or onto a campus without tripping over an operative for Al Gore's campaign -- or even sometimes Gore himself. That's not the case now, just three months before the general election.

The Gore campaign doesn't even have a state director in New Hampshire and the campaign is debating whether to try and even compete there. One of the reasons for this is the Gore campaign strategy itself. Campaign advisors have targeted between 12-17 states -- Pennsylvania, Illinois, etc. -- in the heartland of the country that the Democrats need to win to be victorious. New Hampshire isn't crucial.

"Al Gore's got a tremendous number of supporters up here. People have been doing everything on their own, letting the campaign spend dollars in other states that are a little bit larger," says Ray Buckley, Gore's New Hampshire political coordinator. The vice chair of the state Democratic Party and the Democratic whip in New Hampshire's state house, Buckley says he's too busy to take the job as state director of the campaign.

Some Democrats argue that the Gore team doesn't need to worry about getting a team in place given that Jeanne Shaheen, a key Gore ally and high profile Democratic governor, is running for office this year. "Who needs a New Hampshire coordinator when you have Jeanne Shaheen, and she's got a race," says Democratic strategist Mary Anne Marsh. "The fact that people will be coming out voting for her will be good for Gore. The fact that she's such a Gore supporter and has a race will ensure that there will be many efforts up there that will be good for Gore."

Still, the fact that the Gore people haven't been able to find a young Democratic operative to take the job on for next to nothing is significant. New Hampshire, after all, is a breeding ground for some of the most influential political talent in the country. Former Democratic operatives who cut their teeth in New Hampshire include Charles Baker, who ran New Hampshire for Michael Dukakis in 1999, and Michael Whouley, a top adviser to Gore right now, both of whom are with the Dewey Square Group, a politically connected consulting firm based in Washington DC and Boston.

"New Hampshire is a primo place," says Buckley. "Once you've got New Hampshire experience, you're quite the commodity every four years."

The question is whether it's the hot economy or something else that is prompting political wannabes to stay away.

Seth Gitell can be reached at sgitell@phx.com.