The Power Player Who Faces Charges for Talking

As a result of such successes, Rosen became synonymous with AIPAC; his energetic promotion of American-Israeli relations contributed to the group's rapid growth. "He was very important" to AIPAC, said Malcolm Hoenlein, chief executive of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. "He was a respected voice."

Gerald Charnoff, a member of AIPAC's executive committee, added: "I thought he was one of the brightest guys in a staff position in any organization I've been involved in. I do think his loss was a blow."

At the same time, Rosen could be ornery, hard to work with and secretive, almost spy-like. "He's a mercurial character, very intense, very smart, in many ways brilliant, but somewhat misanthropic," said Martin S. Indyk, a former ambassador to Israel. "His personality is so intense that he can be off-putting to people, especially among the gray suits of a bureaucracy."

Rosen could also be ruthless with his colleagues. He was among those behind the ouster of Douglas M. Bloomfield as AIPAC's chief congressional lobbyist in 1988 and helped remove other employees. "He was spooky, strange and not driven by love for Israel," said M.J. Rosenberg, a former AIPAC employee who tangled with Rosen. "I saw him as a power player, interested solely in power."

Rosen has also been "a little roguish," said Abbe D. Lowell, Rosen's attorney. An expansive and sometimes bawdy raconteur, Rosen's frequent marriages were a source of wonderment among people who knew him. He is currently living with his first wife in the Silver Spring house he extensively renovated with his own hands. He has three children, ages 23, 20 and 7.

His personal quirks aside, former associates remain perplexed and concerned about why Rosen is being prosecuted. "He and other members of AIPAC dealt with the administration just the way other lobbyists do. He was doing what he's always done," Ross said. Indyk agreed: "His job was to trade in information. That was his great skill. He's essentially on trial for doing his job well."

Defense lawyers make similar points and have enlisted a surprising ally: Viet D. Dinh, former head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy and an author of the Bush administration's USA Patriot Act. Dinh helped write a memorandum that called for the dismissal of the Espionage Act charges against the lobbyists. The memo said that in the 90 years since the act was drafted, "there have been no reported prosecutions of persons outside government for repeating information that they obtained verbally."

The memo also said that in receiving leaked classified information and relaying it to others, the lobbyists were doing what journalists, think-tank scholars and congressional staff members "do perhaps hundreds of times every day."

AIPAC and prosecutors dispute those assertions. "Rosen and Weissman were dismissed because they engaged in conduct that was not part of their jobs, and because this conduct did not comport with the standards that AIPAC expects and requires of its employees," AIPAC spokesman Patrick Dorton said.

U.S. Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty said last year when he announced the charges against them that the lobbyists had simply gone too far. "Washington is a town in which the flow of information is virtually nonstop," but the law "separates classified information from everything else." The charges, he added, "are about crossing that line."

Rosen's case is undergoing preliminary motions and could go to trial as early as next month.

The FBI monitored Rosen and Weissman during a series of meetings between them and Lawrence A. Franklin, an Iran specialist at the Pentagon who in January was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison for passing government secrets. Both lobbyists deny they did anything wrong.

The FBI raided AIPAC's Washington offices twice in 2004, obtaining computer files and serving grand jury subpoenas on four senior executives. It also listened in on several encounters between Franklin and the lobbyists -- at restaurants and a Pentagon City shopping mall -- dating to 2003, as well as on a phone call from Rosen to Washington Post reporter Glenn Kessler.

For at least a short while, the Rosen controversy boosted AIPAC's coffers as donors rallied to its side. But in an open letter to AIPAC directors, former executive director Neal M. Sher added, "a very serious toll already has been taken on AIPAC's ability . . . to be the aggressive advocate we have a right to expect it to be."

As Rosen liked to say, "A lobby is like a night flower: It thrives in the dark and dies in the sun."