Somebody wanted Larry Franklin out of the way. 

In court documents filed last week, a sketchy tale surfaced suggesting that someone wanted Franklin, the former Pentagon analyst who had agreed to testify against two pro-Israel activists on charges of espionage, dead.

In a Tuesday, June 30 interview, Franklin and his attorney Plato Cacheris, the famed criminal defense lawyer, elaborated on the shadowy incident.

"Somebody approached Larry and suggested it would be good if Larry could disappear and fake a suicide," Cacheris said, "and this person would assist him in doing that."

 

Franklin didn't take it that way: It was more like a page out of The Sopranos, which would end with him disappearing -- forever.

He insists he did it for his country, to head off a disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq. 

But instead, Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin found himself charged with giving classified information to suspected agents of Israel. In 2006 he was sentenced to almost 13 years in prison and a $10,000 fine, later reduced to probation and 10 months house arrest for cooperating with the feds. 

Today, the former Iran specialist is mopping floors at a Roy Rogers near his home in West Virginia and serving a 100 hour community service sentence at a halfway house for abused children

Now, breaking silence for the first time since he became entangled in the Israel-spy-ring-that wasn't, Franklin says he gave sensitive information to a pro-Israel lobbyist in hopes that it would be passed on to the White House.

California Democrat Jane Harman, battling a controversy over her interactions with a suspected Israeli spy, was overheard on a 2005  wiretap discussing a failed fundraising ploy designed to get her named chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, according to a former national security official who has read the transcript.

Harman was heard lamenting to the suspected Israeli agent how the tactics of a major Jewish fundraiser to use the threat of withholding political donations to California Democrat Nancy Pelosi to win Harman the gavel of the House Select Committee on Intelligence had badly backfired, the former official said.

The tremendous interest in my story yesterday about a 2005 NSA wiretap picking up California Democratic Rep. Jane Harman conversing with a suspected Israeli agent took me by surprise, frankly.

It's always gratifying to find so many people paying attention to things like this when Carrie Prejean is only a click away. 

The first thing I want to dispel, though, is the apparently widespread notion that the timing of my story Monday was somehow related to: (1) the upcoming trial of former AIPAC lobbyists Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman; (2) the raging debate over the NSA's warrantless wiretaps, (3) the Justice Department/CIA's torture memos; (4) anything else.