Steven Rosen

Steven Rosen is a former RAND analyst and an AIPAC lobbyist who is credited with expanding the lobby group's influence from the congress to the executive branch.

On Lobbying and Influence

In an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of the New Yorker, Rosen responded to question about AIPAC's influence thus:

A half smile appeared on his face, and he pushed a napkin across the table. “You see this napkin?” he said. “In twenty-four hours, we could have the signatures of seventy senators on this napkin.”

Influencing the Executive Branch

According to Jeffrey Goldberg Rosen arrived at AIPAC with the new idea

that the organization could influence the outcome of policy disputes within the executive branch—in particular, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the National Security Council.

Rosen began to court officials. He traded in gossip and speculation, and his reports to aipac’s leaders helped them track currents in Middle East policymaking before those currents coalesced into executive orders. Rosen also used his contacts to carry aipac’s agenda to the White House. An early success came in 1983, when he helped lobby for a strategic coöperation agreement between Israel and the United States, which was signed over the objections of Caspar Weinberger, the Secretary of Defense, and which led to a new level of intelligence sharing and military sales.

FBI Espionage probe

AIPAC lobbyist charged with receiving classified US Government documents from Larry Franklin.

Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman were charged in an indictment in August 2005 with conspiring to gather and disclose classified national security information to journalists and an unnamed foreign power that government officials identified as Israel. Aipac dismissed the two men in April 2005.

The indictment said the two men had disclosed classified information about a number of subjects, including American policy in Iran, terrorism in central Asia, Al Qaeda and the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers apartment in Saudi Arabia, which killed 23 Americans, mainly members of the military. Lawyers for the two men have sought to have the indictment against them dismissed.

As Aipac's director of foreign policy issues, Mr. Rosen was a well-known figure in Washington who helped the organization define its lobbying agenda on the Middle East and forged important relationships with powerful conservatives in the Bush administration.

Affiliations

• AIPAC - 1982-
• RAND Corporation

Connections

• Keith Weissman
• Larry Franklin

Related Articles

• James Bamford, Iran: The Next War, Rolling Stone, August 10, 2006.