Steve Rosen, ex-AIPAC official whose innovative lobbying led to a failed espionage prosecution, dies at 82

The man at the center of a case that tested the First Amendment

Steve died at the end of October. I have not had the chance to post this until now.

WASHINGTON -- Steve Rosen, the AIPAC lobbyist whose bold innovations changed how lobbies engage with the executive branch and led to a historic and failed espionage prosecution, has died.

Rosen died in hospice care in Maryland on Oct. 29, said Jonathan Kessler, a friend and his longtime associate in the professional leadership of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. He was 82.

“We mourn the passing of our former colleague Steven Rosen who was deeply committed to strengthening the US-Israel relationship,” Marshall Wittmann, the AIPAC spokesman said in an email.

Rosen was born in Brooklyn and received a bachelor’s degree at Hofstra College and a Ph.D. from Syracuse University in political science. Before AIPAC, he taught political science and had a stint at the Rand Institute, a Pentagon-aligned think tank,

Rosen arrived at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in 1982 when the lobby, seen as among the most powerful in Washington, had recently suffered a blow: President Ronald Reagan neutralized its bid to get Congress to kill his planned sale of advanced war planes, AWACS, to Saudi Arabia.

Congress had been AIPAC’s natural battleground, and the lobby had used its influence to kill similar deals proposed by Reagan’s predecessors. But Reagan, famous for his skills in suasion, proved to be a more adept lobbyist.

Rosen arrived at the lobby in a senior research role not long after the AWACS fiasco. In 1985, in an internal memo entitled “A Perspective on Lobbying the Executive Branch” he proposed an aggressive new gambit: Take the lobbying into the president’s territory, to the bureaucrats who helped formulate policy.

"Most foreign policy is determined primarily by the agencies of the executive branch, with little or no congressional involvement," he wrote. "We lack entirely any key contacts to the president, his chief of staff, his deputy chief of staff, the secretary of defense, the deputy secretary of defense, the director of central intelligence, the deputy national security adviser to the president and many other top officials."

Soon, Rosen, who would become AIPAC’s foreign policy chief, led a small cadre of staffers who sought meetings with not just the top executive branch officials but with the anonymous mid-level staffers with whom initiatives often originated.

The lobby would score impressive victories by seeding ideas among these bureaucrats, among others, including making Israel the first nation to have “non-NATO ally” status.

“Steve had a magnificent mind and a keen understanding of all things strategic,” said Kessler, who headed AIPAC’s student outreach at the time. “He had an uncanny ability to focus on what mattered, to separate signal from noise, and to maintain a unique constellation of contacts, associates, proteges, and friends who mourn his passing and will miss him dearly.”

Under the leadership of Rosen and top officials he mentored, AIPAC seemed unbeatable, and it took on not just the U.S. government when it felt it necessary, but the government of Israel, the country whose interests it was ostensibly defending. In 1995, the lobby was behind the passage of a law in Congress that recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, angering President Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who were engaged in sensitive negotiations with the Palestinians.

Other lobbies would emulate AIPAC, and seek information from within the executive branch, a practice that unsettled security agencies on the lookout for leaks. By the end of the 1990s, unbeknownst to Rosen, he was on the radar of spy agencies tracking the doings of Israeli diplomats and the folks they met and spoke with.

Rosen had a cloak and dagger sensibility. Not long after he joined AIPAC in 1982 he wrote a memo in haiku that occasioned, depending on who in the lobby was reading it, awe or mockery: “A lobby is a nightflower/ It thrives in the dark/ And dies in sunlight.”

He signed the memo: “Remember: The Walls Have Ears.”

It was odd advice from a man who in other ways was not the model of discretion: He threw wild parties for colleagues. He preferred interns who were young, female and attractive, a former staffer said.

He bigfooted colleagues, pushing out of the lobby anyone who might cross him, and engineering the demotion of staffers at the Washington Jewish Week who angered him with an AIPAC expose.

He was married at least five times, the last 23 years living with Barbara Schubert, to whom he was briefly married when she was a teenager.

He had a voracious intellectual curiosity and would not tolerate ideological conformity, at least when it was aimed at him. He interviewed the Palestinian pollster, Khalil Shikaki, at an AIPAC policy conference in 2004, and furiously shushed an audience stunned that a top AIPAC official would air Palestinian grievances.

He could within a single lunch turn from charming to menacing. The combination of arrogance, almost superhuman skills at assessing which bureaucrat held which information, performative secrecy and high living didn’t help when federal agents raided AIPAC’s offices in the summer of 2004 and soon after arrested Rosen and one of his closest deputies, Keith Weissman. They alleged that the AIPAC officials had shared a classified tip with a Washington Post reporter about an Iranian plot to kill Americans and Israelis in Iraq. The tip turned out to be false, manufactured to spur Weissman and Rosen to urgent action.

Although the sharing of such tips among lobbyists and reporters is standard operating procedure in Washington, the media, in part because of Rosen’s reputation, at first bought, hook, line and sinker the government’s claim it had uncovered a spy operation to rival that of Jonathan Pollard, the Navy analyst charged with spying for Israel in the late 1980s.

It turned out the government’s case was weak: A conservative, government-friendly federal judge treated it with increasing skepticism, at times entertaining the arguments of lawyers for Rosen and Weissman who said the case was based on entrapment.

First Amendment experts derided the government’s case, which, based on the 1917 Espionage Act, alleged that those who receive leaks are as vulnerable to prosecution as those who leak. Criminalizing such interactions, said civil libertarians, would inhibit reporting on government.

Rosen was forever shaken by the breadth of government surveillance, listening stunned to recordings of conversations he had with Ms. Schubert while they hiked the capital's Billy Goat Trail.

“You know how they say a conservative is a liberal who was mugged?” he once told this reporter. “A liberal is a conservative who was mugged by the government.”

Eric Holder, President Barack Obama’s first attorney general, killed the prosecution almost as soon as he assumed office in 2009.

The case had its effect, nonetheless. AIPAC effectively ended executive branch lobbying. Within months of the arrests, it fired Rosen and Weissman, an act Rosen found hard to forgive, even as he continued working for other pro-Israel organizations, with a focus on Europe.

“AIPAC was my family, closer to me than my own family that I grew up with," Rosen told the authors of an unauthorized AIPAC biography in 2006, his eyes glistening. "The only people in the world that are treating me in a shitty manner are AIPAC. How come AIPAC is harming me and not fighting the prosecutors?”

Rosen is survived by Schubert, two sons and a daughter.