Steven J. Rosen, a hawkish supporter of Israel who strengthened the clout of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a Washington lobbying group, but whose career was derailed when he was charged with leaking government secrets, a case that was later dropped, died on Oct. 28 near his home in Silver Spring, Md. He was 82.
His partner, Barbara Schubert, said his death, in a memory-care center, was from complications of Alzheimer’s disease.
Mr. Rosen was a prominent behind-the-scenes figure in Washington as the director of foreign policy issues for AIPAC, as the pro-Israel group is known, from the 1980s to the early 2000s. He forged ties with officials in the State Department and the White House to promote American support for Israel.
He was known as a brainy, aggressive advocate, and his private life was as changeable as his moods: He was married and divorced six times.
“He’s a mercurial character, very intense, very smart, in many ways brilliant, but somewhat misanthropic,” Martin S. Indyk, a former ambassador to Israel, whom Mr. Rosen advised on a doctoral dissertation, told The Washington Post in 2006. (Mr. Indyk died in July.) “His personality is so intense that he can be off-putting to people, especially among the gray suits of a bureaucracy.”
Mr. Rosen had worked for AIPAC for 23 years when, in 2005, under the World War I-era Espionage Act, he was charged with sharing secret national security information that he had received from government officials with journalists and the Israeli Embassy.
That highly unusual prosecution raised alarms about whether the government was moving to turn the trading of inside information, practiced daily among Washington power players and journalists, into a criminal activity. It also deeply embarrassed AIPAC, raising the sensitive issue of the role of Jewish American supporters of Israel who cultivate close, behind-the-scenes ties with government officials.
By 2009, the case had collapsed and all charges were dropped. But Mr. Rosen had already been fired by AIPAC, despite more than two decades as one of the most influential figures in an influential organization.
Over dinner at a restaurant, Mr. Rosen once showed a writer for The New Yorker a napkin and bragged: “You see this napkin? In 24 hours we could have the signatures of 70 senators on this napkin.”
From the time he joined AIPAC as a researcher in 1982, after a decade of working in academia, Mr. Rosen helped broaden the group’s influence. He promoted the view that Israel was more than an American protectorate. The two countries were partners in a strategic alliance, he argued, an opinion affirmed by the Reagan administration, which designated Israel a “non-NATO ally.”
Mr. Rosen lobbied for high-level cooperation, including joint American-Israeli naval maneuvers, over the initial opposition of the Defense Department. And in 1996, he and AIPAC colleagues helped draft a law placing American sanctions on Iran, which he considered Israel’s greatest threat because of Iran’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons.
One of Mr. Rosen’s innovations was to expand the reach of AIPAC’s influence by lobbying not just Congress but also members of the executive branch. He developed close ties with officials in policy positions at the State Department, the National Security Council and the Pentagon.
One of those contacts, Lawrence A. Franklin, an Iran analyst at the Pentagon, came under suspicion by the F.B.I. for leaking secrets to the press. In 2004, he turned cooperating witness and wore a wire while the F.B.I. recorded a conversation he had with an AIPAC analyst, Keith Weissman. Federal prosecutors said Mr. Franklin passed classified information to Mr. Weissman, who repeated it to Mr. Rosen.
According to an August 2005 indictment, both AIPAC officials then shared details with an Israeli diplomat and a Washington Post reporter, later identified as Glenn Kessler. Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman were charged with illegally disclosing classified national security information about terrorism and U.S. policy in the Middle East.
During the investigation of the case, prosecutors played a recording of Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman’s conversation with Mr. Kessler for an AIPAC lawyer, who immediately “advised the group to fire the men,” The New York Times reported.
Neither one was charged with spying. But their indictment under the Espionage Act raised concerns that the George W. Bush administration, which was trying to crack down on leaks, was making a felony of the kind of high-level information-swapping that routinely takes place in Washington.
Mr. Rosen’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, threatened to call as trial witnesses more than a dozen senior Bush officials, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, to demonstrate that such activity was a routine part of policy-making rather than something nefarious.
In 2009, with new Justice Department leadership under the presidency of Barack Obama, the charges against Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman were dropped.
Mr. Rosen said then that the case had been pushed by government officials who had “an obsession with Israel and the theory that it spies on America.”
“Thank God we live in a country where you can defend yourself against an injustice like this,” he told The Washington Post.
Steven Jack Rosen was born on July 22, 1942, in Brooklyn, one of four sons of Leon Rosen and Pauline (Dinnerstein) Rosen. His father worked in a factory.
When Steven entered Hofstra College, his parents also enrolled there to continue their educations. His mother went on to earn a degree in fine art.
Mr. Rosen received a Ph.D. from Syracuse University in political science and spent a decade teaching, at Brandeis University, the University of Pittsburgh and the Australian National University.
In the late 1970s, he left academia to join the RAND Corporation, the research institute with close ties to the Pentagon. In the 1980s, he was wooed by to join AIPAC as it was hiring a cadre of weapons experts and strategic analysts.
He and Ms. Schubert married in 1962, but she left him after a year, she said, before divorcing him. They reunited many years later and were partners for the last 23 years of Mr. Rosen’s life, although they didn’t remarry.
Besides Ms. Schubert, Mr. Rosen’s survivors include his sons, Jesse and Jonah; his daughter, Jamie Rosen; and three grandchildren.
Ms. Schubert said that Mr. Rosen had never hid the fact that he had been married and divorced so many times. “He wasn’t embarrassed about anything he did,” she said.
After he was dismissed by AIPAC, Mr. Rosen continued to seek influence over policy by writing for think tanks, including the neoconservative Middle East Forum and the European Leadership Network.
In 2009, a series of blog posts he wrote kicked off a campaign that derailed the appointment of Chas W. Freeman Jr., a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, as chair of the National Intelligence Council under President Obama. Mr. Freeman blamed “the Israel lobby” for his defeat.
Mr. Rosen’s son Jesse posted an Instagram reminiscence of his father this month, calling him “a real tough guy” who would never admit to losing a fight.
“He was like a stubborn wise owl,” he wrote, “who somehow always knew more than you.”
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