Israel Candidate’s Campaign a Victim of U.S. Break-In

As if Israel’s election campaign wasn’t already nasty enough, a break-in at the offices of an American consultant to a leading opposition candidate added grist Wednesday to the mudslinging mill.

“Israeli Watergate!” was the label that local commentators, predictably, gave the burglary of the Washington offices of prominent Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg. Among the items reportedly stolen or tampered with sometime between Monday and Tuesday were records connected to the campaign of Israeli Labor Party leader Ehud Barak, who leads the pack of candidates hoping to unseat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Barak, who is well known in Israel but lacks the charisma of some of his rivals, hired Greenberg, along with former Clinton political strategist James Carville, to advise him in the run-up to May 17 elections.

As the Washington police and FBI investigated, several Labor politicians immediately saw political shenanigans behind the break-in and turned accusing fingers toward Barak’s rivals, including Netanyahu.

“Who has an interest?” Binyamin Ben Eliezer, a Labor member of the Knesset, or parliament, said on Army Radio. “Do the Americans? The French? The Arabs? What are we dealing with? We are dealing with an election campaign and information that any political adversary has an interest in.”

There was no comment from Netanyahu, but a senior aide branded as obscene any suggestion that the prime minister or his supporters might be involved in the burglary.

Netanyahu’s conservative Likud Party issued a statement calling on the Washington police to capture and punish those responsible. But the party added, “We are very sorry that Barak won’t be able to chant like a parrot the slogans that [his American advisors] prepare for him.”

The accusations were bandied about Wednesday morning, shortly after the news broke and captured headlines in major newspapers. Cooler heads prevailed later, however, with senior Labor officials cautioning that it was still not clear what the thieves’ motives were.

“I can’t say right now that I suspect a party or anyone else,” Barak spokeswoman Aliza Goren said from Tel Aviv. “We must wait for the results of the investigation and then start to accuse.

“This is unpleasant. It disturbs us,” she added. “But the damage is not that big, and we can recover and we will recover.”

The break-in comes in the early stages of what is already an unusually bitter and volatile campaign.

Netanyahu was forced to call elections a year ahead of schedule after much of his ruling coalition bolted over his handling of the peace process with the Palestinians. Candidates have been lining up ever since to challenge him for the premiership and even for leadership of his own party. Attacks traded by the candidates have been highly personal, with scant discussion of issues.

For Barak, news of the burglary momentarily overshadowed his efforts to tamp down a revolt within his left-of-center party as its two-day convention begins. Rank-and-file members have become disillusioned with what they describe as Barak’s authoritarian management of the party.

Asked Wednesday night about the intrusion into Greenberg’s office, Barak said he hoped that it had nothing to do with the campaign but noted that Greenberg has conducted extensive polling that shows Labor winning the largest bloc in parliament in May’s vote.

Barak’s Israeli campaign director, Tal Zilberstein, told reporters that the purloined material included computer files containing the financial records of the Barak camp.

Sgt. Joe Gentile of the District of Columbia police declined to go into detail about what was stolen, photocopied or otherwise tampered with. He was quoted in reports from Washington as saying that “certain confidential records, materials, various other items, including petty cash,” were taken.

He said the thieves removed a vent on the roof of the building that houses Greenberg’s firm, Greenberg Quinlan Research Inc., broke through the ceiling and entered the offices.

Greenberg, who did key polling work for President Clinton during the 1992 presidential campaign, also has several other international clients, including South African President Nelson Mandela and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Jeremy Rosner, a spokesman for Greenberg’s firm, declined to discuss the case except to say that “it looks as if our international political work may have been targeted.”

In the Watergate scandal, President Nixon was accused of trying to block the FBI from pursuing its investigation of the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, which a White House official termed just “a third-rate burglary.”

Carville, whose coaching of Barak has already produced a feistier candidate, said the break-in did not appear to be the work of amateurs. “It wasn’t some kids, but how could they be so dumb?” Carville told Associated Press from Argentina.