Accused Israel spy hints at FBI anti-Semitism in AIPAC probe

He was arrested, subjected to humiliating interrogations, accused of spying for Israel, lived under the specter of a 13-year prison term and sold everything he owned to pay for his legal defense.

But Lawrence Franklin, 63, a former senior officer in the U.S. Air Force, an intelligence expert, university professor and senior official in the U.S. administration, did not crack. A devout Catholic, he accepted his bitter fate submissively and saw it as a test from heaven, as a means of achieving salvation. This is not just rhetoric. In order to support his family - his disabled wife and their five children - Franklin took a job cleaning restrooms at a West Virginia church, washed the floors in the local Roy Rogers restaurant and even dug cesspools. While making his way through that vale of tears, he arrived at an insight: that some of the agencies of the U.S. administration, and in particular the Federal Bureau of Investigation, are tainted by anti-Semitism. "I learned a lot from crawling on the floor," he says in a special interview with Haaretz.

Franklin is not yet entirely free to talk about his ordeal: The details of the case remain classified, and the trial was held behind closed doors. He has not yet begun carrying out the community service to which he was ultimately sentenced. Any incautious remark on his part is liable to stir the wrath of the FBI and stoke what he sees as its desire for revenge. Every word he uttered in the interview was examined under the magnifying glass of his lawyer, Plato Cacheris, a former Marine officer, who is defending Franklin pro bono. More