Is being as a story possible espionage for Israel by a midlevel Pentagon analyst. But it is starting to look more and more like another example of criminalizing Washington’s policy disputes. The tip-off is that the weirdness started with federal officials leaking information about the investigation before any arrests had been made or charges filed. In a serious espionage case, things tend to work the other way around.

And it may be that in the end this is not about espionage but, if anything, about the mishandling of classified information by a midlevel official. That is also a serious matter, but a less grave one, especially at the end of a week in which Congress held a hearing where a Pentagon official described excessive classification as an “extensive” problem. It prompted the Washington Post to run an editorial headlined “Too Much Secrecy.”

The draft “national security presidential directive” that the official, Larry Franklin, is accused in anonymous leaks of having given to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee was described to us as little more than a wordier version of a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece. If it was secret, it was because of American political sensitivity, not any genuine security concerns. The document may not have been labeled classified at all until some time after it was written, as bureaucrats mulled over what level of secrecy was appropriate.

The existence of the draft directive was, in any case, no secret. A June 15, 2003, Washington Post dispatch by Michael Dobbs reported that “the national security presidential directive on Iran has gone through several competing drafts and has yet to be approved by Bush’s senior advisers, according to well placed sources.” If some of Mr. Dobbs’s well-placed sources were in the State Department and arguing for a softer line against Iran, we’d like to see them subjected to the same FBI scrutiny as Mr. Franklin.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which denies any wrongdoing, is an American group broadly allied with the Bush administration in the war on terrorism. The leaks about the Franklin investigation – which prominently mention Mr. Franklin as aligned with the deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz, and the undersecretary of defense for policy, Douglas Feith – seem designed to damage the faction in Washington that has argued for a tougher stance in the war against Islamic terrorism.

The leaks also have the effect of turning our Iraqi friends with ties to Mr. Franklin – such as Minister of State Kassim Daoud – into marked men. The leaks about Mr. Franklin come in the context of an administration that is bitterly divided internally. The person in charge of Iraq policy at the National Security Council, Meghan O’Sullivan, wrote a 2003 book issued by the Brookings Institution in which she criticized Aipac-backed sanctions on Iran as “extreme” and called for “lifting the remaining restrictions on civilian trade between the United States and Iran.”

In any event, these leaks have an ugly dimension, coming as they do at a time when protesters are mobbing the Republican National Convention to support, among other things, the Palestinian Arab regime launching terror attacks against Israelis and other Jews. Back in 1997, there were press leaks about another possible Israeli spy in America, code named “mega.” They turned out to be false. Haaretz reported that George Tenet, who was then director of central intelligence, wrote a letter of apology to Israel’s security chief. The Israelis may want to watch their mail.