What is D.C.'s Mysterious “N Street”

[Guest guest]

What is the Mysterious "N Street" in Washington

 

Three times in the last three years, certain high-placed Americans

unofficially "advised" their Israeli contacts to mute the Israeli

profile and presence in Washington forthwith and to stop badgering

President Clinton to arrange for the release of Jonathan Pollard, who

is serving a life sentence for spying for Israel. Pollard, they said

flatly, would never be freed under any circumstances. The "advice"

came in increasingly stringent forms, yet Israel chose to ignore it –

both when Likud's Binyamin Netanyahu was prime minister and under his

successor Ehud Barak. A senior Aamerican sources told

DEBKAfile: "Make no bones about it, Martin Indyk is now paying the

price for Israel's disregard. Someone in Washington is taking

advantage of the President's impending exit from the White House to

aim a single shot at three targets – Clinton himself, the First Lady

and Israel. The emblematic link between the three is the US

Ambassador Martin Indyk. Shooting him down eliminates the link."

That source declined to name the high-placed Americans who conveyed

the whispered warning, much less the parties who orchestrated he

diplomat's comedown, but reliable sources confirm that the wire-

puller behind the scenes is the semi-clandestine, unofficial power

behind the highest of Washington's thrones known to the initiated

as "N Street".

 

*

"N Street", a street cutting through the heart of Georgetown,

actually applies to a wedge of cityscape delimited in the South by

the Potomac, in the West by Key Bridge and 35th Street, in the North

by Dupont Circle and Connecticut Avenue, and in the East by

Washington Circle and Foggy Bottom. It is the home of a certain kind

of power-broker: the old intelligence and state horses, who once

lived in its very comfortable town houses, but have since moved out

to the suburbs. However they still haunt the clubs, restaurants and

bars of "N Street, from which they keep their artful fingers in every

pie in the US capital. Though invisible on the surface, their reach

is everywhere. Here are the behind-the-scenes king makers and

breakers, the equivalent of England's Old Boys' Network and Europe's

Old Guard. Most are officially retired officers of foreign and

military intelligence agencies, such as the National Security Agency,

the Defense Intelligence Agency and Naval Intelligence, as well as

the CIA and FBI, who spin their arcane schemes in those Georgetown

mansions, bars, restaurants and on privately-kept squash courts.

In these discreet haunts, the "wise men" of "N Street" consult

quietly with their successors in the senior ranks of the CIA and the

FBI, some of whom have gone on to top positions in other fields to

become international lawyers, senior corporate directors, global

bankers, or in the policy-making level of government, secretaries of

state, defense or energy. The men of "N Street" sit in separate

groups in the quiet corners of their watering holes, none interfering

in the business of their fellows. Each "represents" the interests of

some important business sector, such as aeronautics, automobiles,

chemicals, arms, computers, oil, banking, finance and Wall Street.

Their influence is manifested in informal ways quite separate from

the lobbies operating on Capital Hill.

Their combined influence outstrips that of individual government

departments and is certainly more lasting than that of the White

House, although the men of "N Street" fight shy of putting this

strength to the ultimate test unless convinced that the White House

incumbent is falling down in his main duty: preserving the United

States standing as superpower number 1.

Failing a national crisis, the various factions of "N Street" also

tend to avoid concerted action as a single group. Therefore, when

they decided in early 1997 to join forces against Israel, the impact

was extremely painful for their target. Among the numerous motives

for their antagonism, but DEBKAfile will refer only to the most

pressing.

At that time, "N Street" was dead set against Binyamin Netanyahu

becoming prime minister of Israel – not out of personal antipathy as

his Likud fans often complained; "N Street" is not as a rule moved by

emotions – but because during the time he served as Israel's UN

Ambassador he went around arguing to every American he met that

Israel must for its own good downgrade its strong political, security

and economic affinity to the United states. Another reason for their

disapproval was his arrogant, almost condescending, manner towards

President Clinton.

But Netanyahu's most egregious mistake, as far as "N Street" was

concerned, was his appointment of the Canadian-American Jewish

millionaire Edgar Bronfman as the single representative of the Jewish

world and the State of Israel in the Holocaust compensation

negotiations with banks and industries in Europe, especially in

Germany and Switzerland. Little of this chapter is known to the

Israeli public to this day. In this case, "N Street"'s wise men were

moved mostly by domestic political considerations. Bronfman is one of

Hillary Clinton's closest cronies and through him Netanyahu hoped to

gain a privileged foothold in the White House. He was oblivious to

the enmity between "N Street" and Hillary Clinton. Those powerful

veterans, determined at all costs to cut her close circle down to

size, regarded Netanyahu's favoritism of Bronfman as inimical to

their interests.

What saved the Likud prime minister for a time was the Levinsky

affair, which distracted "N Street"'s attention to a more pressing

matter, the campaign in the Senate to have the President impeached.

Then, in 1998, Netanyahu was defeated at the polls and replaced as

prime minister by Ehud Barak. However, for "N Street", the Israel

nuisance became if anything more acute, because the new prime

minister relied heavily on his relationship with Edgar Bronfman and

Hillary Clinton as his power base in the US capital. One of his

earliest actions was to ask President Clinton, on the advice of his

two American friends, to appoint Martin Indyk ambassador to Israel,

as a means of cementing his ties with the White House. The President

hastened to grant the new prime minister's request and "N Street"

took careful note. What they saw now was Netanyahu's arrogance and

cheek being replaced with the brash airs of self-importance evinced

by the Israeli members of the Barak and Indyk packs.

Indyk himself was never close to "N Street". On his arrival in

Washington in the early eighties, he put many backs up among the

local elite. He had come from a senior position in Australian

intelligence as deputy head of its Middle East Department and was

regarded in Canberra as a rising star. All of a sudden, in the middle

of a meteoric career, he got up and moved to Washington. His wife was

promptly put in charge of cultural affairs at the Australian embassy

there.

"N Street" was deeply suspicious of the newly-arrived Australian

couple and could not understand why so senior a man in Australian

intelligence would abandon a brilliant career and be willing to start

afresh in the United States. This mistrust was accompanied by certain

remarks about his Jewish descent and country of birth, Britain. Many

members of the "N Street" community – especially the intelligence

veterans – are not exactly friends of Jews or in love with British

intelligence. Strangely enough, some have never come out of the

traumas they suffered in the fifties and sixties from the betrayals

of the British defectors, Phlby, Burgess, MacLean and Blake.

When Israel failed to heed the veiled threats about the conduct of

its representatives in Washington, N Street went into action in its

customary surreptitious manner. Defense Secretary William Cohen,

after much persuasion, finally agreed to impose an unofficial embargo

on the Pentagon's relations with Israel and its defense industries

(See DEBKAfile Archive: An Israeli Diplomat in Washington: Bill

Cohen Orders a Pentagon Embargo AgainstIsrael – August 15, 2000).

When that move had no effect, N Street turned its attention to

Ambassador Indyk and his close relations with the Clintons and the

Barak coterie. Here they dug out a suggestive parallel from the past.

Was not the traitor George Blake a Dutch Jew named George Bechar? And

how did an newly-arrived foreigner, whom no one had heard of outside

parts of US intelligence, come to be the bosom friend of the Clintons

at a time when they themselves were local politicos who had yet to

make their name. His attaining an important position in the couple's

innermost circle could not be fortuitous. This was the point at which

the men of "N Street" addressed the Israel factor.

As deputy head of Australian Intelligence's Middle East Department,

and later head of a Middle East think tank in Washington, Indyk came

to cultivate close ties with Israel's political, intelligence,

financial and social elites. Many of its members regard themselves

as "special friends of Indyk" and since they spend long periods in

the US, they take the liberty of making themselves very much at home

in America's power centers, embracing Indyk's connections in the

Clinton camp as their own.

"N Street" finds this phenomenon extremely disturbing. Washington's

ruling caste is closed, exclusive and scrupulously stratified. Its

members are less than delighted to see Israelis making free of

Pennsylvania Avenue and the streets of Georgetown in their capacity

as "friends of… " The more conspicuous their presence, the more

pressing was the determination in "N Street" to wind that presence

down. They acted again, this time sending out to those "friends" a

hint too broad to ignore, namely Ambassador Indyk's suspension

pending a security investigation against him by the FBI.

DEBKAfile 's American source put the situation in a nutshell: "Martin

Indyk is a sort of hostage. The more his Israeli friends parade their

White House connections and keep up the pressure on Clinton to get

Pollard freed before he leaves office, the worse it will be for

Indyk."

Earlier, DEBKAfilesources in Washington reported the United States

government is preparing a list of Israelis for the FBI for

questioning in connection with its security investigation against the

suspended US Ambassador. That list runs to dozens whom FBI agents

hope to interview in Israel as soon as possible. According to two

precedents – Irangate and the Jonathan Pollard inquiry - those

Israelis have the right to refuse to be questioned by the FBI and

decline to answer certain questions. In any case, an Israeli judge

will preside over the procedure.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and the US State Department are

doing their best to play down the invstigation, presenting it as

just another breach of the security regulations prohibiting the

transfer of classified material to unclassified computers of the kind

plaguing the State Department of late. At the same time, Mrs

Albright, during a briefing at the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee

Tuesday, disclosed that the case was under examination with the

Senate Intelligence Committee. This places it in a far graver light.

It is also learned that the Committee Chairman, Richard C. Shelby, is

giving the investigation his personal attention and has asked the

Secretary of State to hand all the relevant data directly to him.