Bryen (an American and a U.S. government employee) was heard continually referring to the U.S.government as “they”

Michael Saba and the veteran journalist, Andrew St. George worked closely together for years seeking to publicize the Israeli espionage scandal involving Richard Perle’s longtime associate Stephen J. Bryen. Saba wrote a book about the Bryen affair, The Road to Armageddon, while his friend St. George wrote extensively about the scandal in the pages of The Spotlight, one of the few publications to dare to delve into the matter.

Although Perle and Bryen achieved immense power as high-level political appointees in the Reagan administration, their rise was nearly derailed by a scandal that erupted just two years prior to Reagan’s election to the presidency. A complete understanding of this scandal is critical to understanding precisely how closely wed to the government of Israel that the Perle network truly is.

Let us begin by noting that in the era of the Team B intrigue (the mid-1970s)— Perle left Senator Jackson’s staff and began engaging in the private arms business, setting up many lucrative deals between the Pentagon and Soltam, one of Israel’s premier weapons firms.

Meanwhile, Perle’s Capitol Hill associate, Stephen J. Bryen, was under observation by the FBI beginning as early as 1977 when he was suspected of using his post as a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer to obtain classified Pentagon information, particularly related to Arab military matters, that the Defense Intelligence Agency suspected Bryen was turning over to the Israelis.

Then, on March 9, 1978, Bryen was overheard in a private conversation over breakfast with four Israeli intelligence officials at the coffee shop of the Madison Hotel in Washington. It was clear, based on the content of his conversation, that he was providing the Israeli officials with high-level military information.

What was so amazing, however, was that Bryen (an American and a U.S. government employee) was heard continually referring to the U.S.government as “they” and to use the pronoun “we” when referring to his—and the Israeli government’s—position. Little did Bryen know that an American of Arabic descent, who had been active in Arab-American affairs and lobbying on the Middle East issue, would recognize him (Bryen) and actually understand the sensitive nature of the conversation that Bryen was conducting with the Israeli officials.

The Arab-American businessman, one Michael Saba, reported the matter to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In due course, a full-scale FBI inquiry into Bryen evolved to the point that the Justice Department (which oversees the FBI) assembled a 632-page file on Bryen’s activities. The U.S. Attorney handling the investigation, Joel Lisker (an American of the Jewish faith) recommended that Bryen be indicted on felony charges of having not only been an unregistered foreign agent for Israel but also of having committed espionage on behalf of Israel.

The scandal finally broke (to a limited degree) in the American media, with the liberal journal, The Nation, making the allegation that Bryen had routinely taken orders from Zvi Rafiah, a counselor at the Israeli Embassy. In fact, it was ultimately learned, Rafiah was not just an embassy counselor. He was the U.S. station chief for the clandestine services division of Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad.

Despite all this, Bryen was not indicted. Instead, Bryen was told to “quietly” depart from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff, which he did. Appropriately, Bryen promptly set up shop in Washington, D.C. as a publicist and lobbyist for Israel as the director of a group known as the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA).Ultimately, as we have seen, when Republican Ronald Reagan was elected president with firm support from the neo-conservative Jewish network, Perle and Bryen moved back into the upper ranks of the U.S. government policy making establishment—despite the scandal.

from the book The High Priests of War
By Michael Collins Piper