Israel's U.S. "Man For All Seasons" Unable to Play Same Role for Libya

By Richard H. Curtiss

"According to his own testimony to congressional investigators, Sofaer simultaneously played the roles of 'department lawyer, president's lawyer, and the secretary of state's lawyer, 'and saw 'no conflict of interest.”

—Investigative reporter Claudia Wright, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, September 1987

Even some members of Washington's pro-Israel establishment were scandalized at the July 13 revelation by Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland that attorney Abraham Sofaer, State Department general counsel from 1985 to 1990, had accepted a half-million-dollar retainer to represent Libyan interests in the United States.

It was Sofaer who had produced the legal justification for the 1986 air strike on Muammar Qaddafi's residence, in which the Libyan leader's adopted baby daughter was killed, based on allegations that Libya was behind a December 1985 bombing in a Berlin nightclub in which two American soldiers and a Turkish woman died. It was after that U.S. raid on Libya that Pan Am Flight 103 was blown up over Scotland in 1988, with the loss of 270 lives. U.S. investigators, including Sofaer, blamed Libya for the Pan Am bombing, and Sofaer helped draft the U.S. response which led to the 1991 U.N. embargo on Libya.

Sofaer's new assignment, the Hoagland column revealed, would be to help Libya find ways to end the embargo, whose rationale Sofaer had helped devise. For some time there have been reports that Libya was seeking to influence the U.S. government through Israel and its powerful lobbying apparatus in Washington, DC.

A Washington Jewish Week report indicated that Sofaer might offer families of victims of the crash cash settlements from Libya, then seek a compromise with the U.S. government whereby the two Libyan government employees charged with complicity in the bombing would not have to stand trial in either the U.S. or UK. American authorities hope to try the accused in the U.S. because they believe by offering one or both immunity, they can be induced to testify that top levels in the Libyan government ordered the aircraft destroyed.

Families of Pan Am 103 victims immediately announced plans to picket Sofaer's Washington, DC office. "I think this is treason," said Susan Cohen, mother of one of the Pan Am 103 victims. "Sofaer is going to work for a terrorist country that has American blood on its hands."

After Hoagland's column appeared, Sofaer, who had not consulted the State Department, asked its opinion. Hughes, Hubbard & Reed, Sofaer's Washington, DC law firm, however, didn't wait for a response before announcing on July 16 that, "Regrettably, the public perception of this undertaking and the reaction of government authorities has been so negative as to lead us to conclude that we could not effectively carry out this representation."

In fact, the Libyan government previously had approached at least three other prominent lawyers in the national capital, according to the Washington Post. All turned down the commission and retainers as high as $1.5 million.

"Trying to Buy Influence"

"We are outraged that Sofaer ... would attempt to get a payoff for the families so that the two Libyan agents could be tried outside the U.S. or Britain," said Rosemary Wolfe, president of a family support group. "It certainly appears that they're trying to buy influence," said Stephanie Bernstein, whose husband, Michael, deputy director of the Office of Special Investigations at the Department of Justice, was killed in the Pan Am bombing.

"I deeply regret not having gone to the families and discussed with them the representation," responded Sofaer, who seemed genuinely bewildered at the indignant public reaction. It is, in fact, the first time the U.S. mainstream has focused, even briefly, on his almost unbelievable career, encompassing repeated instances of seeming to protect the interests of the Israeli government, or individual Israeli officials, while being assigned by the U.S. government to investigate them.

Sofaer was born in Bombay in 1938 to a Jewish family from Baghdad. His parents brought him to the U.S. in 1948 and he became a U.S. citizen in 1959. In 1977, he married Marian Scheuer, a niece of Rep. James Scheuer (D-NY). His wife's family owns a home in Jerusalem, which Sofaer frequently visits.

He was a registered Democrat when he was appointed to a federal judgeship in New York in 1979. In that capacity his talent for spin control emerged into public view when he presided over a libel suit brought by former Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon against Time magazine. The newsweekly had reported that Sharon encouraged or incited Lebanese Maronite militiamen to massacre between 800 and 2,000 Palestinian men, women and children after Israeli forces surrounded the Sabra-Shatila refugee camps in West Beirut in 1982.

Sofaer seemed genuinely bewildered at the Indignant public reaction.

Sharon, who already had been charged by an Israeli government commission with "indirect responsibility" for the massacre, had no chance of winning the suit, but Sofaer told the jury to render separate verdicts on each of three questions: whether Time's account was accurate; whether Sharon had suffered damages as a result; and whether the Time account was "malicious"—meaning that the magazine had rushed to print with charges it knew to be erroneous or distorted.

Jury findings that Time's account contained inaccuracies and that Sharon's reputation had suffered as a result of the account made headlines for the first two days, obscuring the final, key finding that there had been no malice, and therefore no libel. Sharon then returned to his political career in Israel claiming that even though he had lost the lawsuit, the New York jury had "vindicated" him.

Meanwhile, after Ronald Reagan was elected president, Sofaer changed his voter registration from Democrat to Republican. On June 9, 1985, he was sworn in as legal adviser to the State Department. Within four months he had drafted a legal justification of the Oct. 1, 1985 Israeli bombing of PLO headquarters in Tunisia, calling it a "defensive" action in retaliation for the killing of three alleged Israeli Mossad agents in Cyprus six days earlier on Sept. 25. This bypassed the requirement in U.S. law mandating a cutoff of military assistance to countries which use U.S. -supplied weapons for other than defensive purposes.

The same raid figured prominently in another Sofaer damage-control operation after the FBI arrested U.S. naval counter-intelligence specialist Jonathan Jay Pollard for spying for Israel. In a pre-sentencing memorandum to the court, Pollard revealed that prior to the Israeli attack on Tunis, "I spent two hectic weeks collecting information pertaining to Libya's defense reporting system and the PLO's disposition of anti-aircraft weapons."

Since the Israeli attack supposedly was retaliation for the Cyprus incident only six days earlier, Pollard's memorandum made it clear that Israel was planning the strike before the Cyprus killings occurred. Sofaer simply ignored the Pollard revelation that should have reversed his opinion.

Sofaer had demonstrated even more awesome damage-control skills earlier, after Pollard's arrest. After the original "factual proffer," dated June 3, 1986, detailing the charges to which Pollard was pleading guilty, reached Sofaer's office, a dozen charges were simply crossed out by hand and the document was retyped and redated June 4.

Facts deleted in Sofaer's office included information that Pollard had passed "satellite photographs" to the Israelis and confirmation that Pollard had passed to Israel detailed U.S. data on "scientific and technical developments in Soviet/Warsaw Pact weapons and weapons systems. " Such material would have been invaluable to Soviet counter-intelligence specialists in devising ways to protect their secrets from U.S. detection.

Sofaer's office also requested that references in the document to "representatives of the government of Israel" be changed to less damaging references to Pollard's "handlers." This helped lend public credence to Israel's claims that Pollard's espionage had not been sanctioned at top government levels.

It also was Sofaer who led a U.S. team to Israel to determine why, after Israel promised to make the officials involved in Pollard's espionage available for questioning in the U.S., it smuggled them back to Israel. The Sofaer team also was charged with determining what documents Pollard had stolen.

Although the Israeli officials were offered for interview in Israel only, and his team returned with only 163 documents of the thousands of pages stolen, Sofaer did not object publicly. Later, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Joseph diGenova, who accompanied Sofaer on the December 1985 trip to Israel, said Sofaer pressured him not to search for Pollard's Israeli and American collaborators.

Sofaer's damage-control efforts in the investigation of the Iran-contra scandal were equally successful for Israel, but not for his Reagan administration employers. For his efforts, he was hailed by the Washington Post as a "whistleblower" within the Reagan administration. His whistle was blown, however, when his Reagan administration colleagues wanted to deny that they had authorized two of the initial Israeli shipments of U.S. arms to Iran.

Sofaer was able to protect Israeli interests because he had persuaded Reagan's secretary of state, George Shultz, to channel all State Department investigations of the Iran affair through a group working in his office, and to control press inquiries through this same group. Its members were Nicholas Rostow, son of Eugene Rostow, who ended up writing much of the Tower Commission report, Jeffrey Kovar and Joy Yanagida. Astonishingly, according to an article by investigative reporter Claudia Wright in the September 1987 Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, while protecting Israeli interests at several key points in the 1985-1986 investigation, Sofaer also recommended that the U. S. government continue its secret negotiations with Iran through Israel.

Shielding Israel from Criticism

Sofaer's best-known service to Israel U.S. relations was his role in Egyptian Israeli negotiations for Israeli withdrawal from Taba, a tiny enclave containing a beach hotel and tourist camp on the Gulf of Aqaba which Israel refused to leave even after it had withdrawn from the rest of Sinai in accordance with the Egyptian Israeli peace agreement. By steadfastly refusing to assign blame during the two-year period before the Israeli government finally yielded, Sofaer shielded Israel from much of the press criticism its intransigence would otherwise have earned.

In a curious postscript perhaps related more to Israeli domestic politics than any other factor, Sofaer subsequently was accused in the Israeli press of smuggling valuable antiquities out of Israel during the period he was mediating the Taba dispute.

Since leaving U.S. government service, Sofaer has remained a major player in the pro-Israel establishment in the U.S. national capital. Last May 19, he and two other Hughes, Hubbard & Reed attorneys registered with the U.S. Justice Department as foreign agents in order to represent former Italian Foreign Minister Giulio Andreotti, who is under Italian government investigation for allegedly serving as the Sicilian Mafia's long-time protector within the Italian government.

The Washington Jewish Week reported that an unnamed Washington source "with close ties to both the Italian and Libyan governments" said Andreotti, who served as Italian prime minister seven times starting in the 1970s, was "Qaddafi's godfather for 25 years" and "protected him from Italian response" to such Libyan provocations as attacks on Libyan political dissidents living in Italy. Sofaer has denied speaking to Andreotti about Libya.

There is little question, however, that employment of U.S. public relations or legal representatives closely associated with Israel increasingly is seen by foreign individuals or nations as a way to buy influence or immunity in Washington.

How well it works was demonstrated by the speed with which two prominent members of Washington's pro-Israel community came to Sofaer's defense. "It's important not to ascribe the problems of a client to the lawyer that represents them," former Carter administration domestic political adviser Stuart Eizenstat told the Washington Jewish Week. Eizenstat, who has been appointed by President Bill Clinton as U.S. ambassador to the European Community in Brussels, said there is "nothing in [Sofaer's] prior position that would create ethical problems."

In another statement to the Washington Jewish Week, Nathan Lewin, president of the American section of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists, seemed to be seeking to defuse criticism of Sofaer from within the American Jewish community. Lewin cited "a popular misconception about what it means to represent someone."

With such soothing statements, the affair may drop out of the U. S. mainstream media almost as rapidly as Sofaer dropped the assignment. Nevertheless, the public reaction to Hoagland's revelations obviously caught Sofaer by surprise.

After such a breathtakingly successful record of serving two masters without arousing media criticism, it is little wonder that Sofaer expected no opposition to his agreement with Libya. In his previous adventures, however, Sofaer's motive for playing fast and loose with his U.S. government employers was to protect Israel or its leaders.

In his latest commission to outsmart the U.S. government on behalf of Libya, his mistake may have been to move too rapidly, especially for the families of the Pan Am Flight 103 victims. With Israel seemingly not involved, he learned, the media's double standard is inoperative, even when applied by Israel's American man for all seasons, Abraham D. Sofaer.