How AIPAC Learned from Genêt’s Mistakes: Foreign Influence, Now with Better Lawyers. Part II

Nobody gets accused of privateering. Nobody gets expelled. The tools changed; the underlying function, mobilizing domestic resources on behalf of a foreign government’s preferred policy outcome, did not.

The Investigation Nobody Remembers

In 1962, Senator J. William Fulbright, a man with an evidently low tolerance for foreign money sloshing around Capitol Hill, opened a Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigation into covert influence operations inside the United States.

What he found was that the American Zionist Council (AZC) was receiving substantial funding from the Jewish Agency for Israel, a quasi-governmental Jerusalem body, to run public relations campaigns and lobby American politicians. In 1963, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s Justice Department did what the law technically required: it ordered the AZC to register as a foreign agent under FARA.

Registration would have been a death sentence. Every pamphlet, every press release, every friendly lunch with a congressman would have had to be stamped, essentially, “paid foreign propaganda,” an unforgivable branding problem for any advocacy operation that needs Americans to believe it speaks with an authentically American voice.

So, the AZC’s leadership did something rather elegant: they shut the lobbying arm down and reconstituted it as a new, smaller, entirely domestic-facing organization, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. AIPAC took American donations from American citizens, which meant that, on paper, no foreign government was funding a single thing it did. That its explicit mission was to advance the policy preferences of a foreign government was, apparently, beside the legal point. The Justice Department dropped its case. A blueprint was born, and it has been photocopied by half of Washington’s advocacy industry ever since.

It is worth pausing to admire the craftsmanship here because Genêt never had access to this kind of legal choreography. He tried to arm privateers directly. AIPAC’s founders realized you don’t need privateers if you can simply fund a Political Action Committee.

Whereas the Democratic-Republican Societies of the 1790s organised rallies and pamphleteering campaigns to win popular sympathy for France, today’s pro-Israel PACs and Super PACs (including AIPAC’s own United Democracy........

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