WASHINGTON – The federal government yesterday charged two former lobbyists for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee with conspiring with one of the Pentagon’s Iran analysts to disclose classified information to people unauthorized to receive it.

All told, Steven Rosen is charged with three counts of conspiring and communicating classified material and Keith Weissman is charged with one count of conspiracy. The Pentagon analyst, Lawrence Franklin, is charged with five new counts.

The charges fall short of espionage, which would imply the individuals were working on behalf of a foreign government. The case is novel in that the former AIPAC lobbyists are being prosecuted under anti-leaking laws even though they were not employees of the federal government.

“The facts alleged today tell a story of individuals who put their own interests and their own views of foreign policy ahead of American national security,” U.S. Attorney Paul McNulty said from the federal courthouse yesterday in Alexandria, Va.

Mr. McNulty took control of the case last September after it was leaked that the FBI was planning to make imminent arrests.

Mr. Rosen’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, yesterday called the charges “entirely unjustified.” In a statement for the press, he said, “We expect the trial will show that this prosecution represents a misguided attempt to criminalize the public’s right to participate in the political process.”

The lawyer for Mr. Weissman, John Nassikas, said his client denied the charge against him.

A spokesman for AIPAC, Patrick Dorton, yesterday reiterated the contention that the former employees were acting outside the organization’s internal rules. “AIPAC dismissed Rosen and Weissman because they engaged in conduct that was not part of their jobs, and be cause this conduct did not comport in any way with the standards that AIPAC expects of its employees,” Mr. Dorton said yesterday. “AIPAC could not condone or tolerate the conduct of the two employees under any circumstances. The organization does not seek, use, or request anything but legally obtained, appropriate information as part of its work.”

As director of foreign policy for the organization, Mr. Rosen in particular is credited with inventing the practice of lobbying the executive branch of government on behalf of Israel, a practice that generally involved trading on information not readily available to the public.

The timeline of the indictment shows that the two former officials are recorded on what appear to be wire taps of an unnamed person referred to as foreign official 1. On page 8 of the 26-page document, Mr. Rosen is said to be involved in an April 13, 1999, conversation with a foreign official regarding terrorist activities in Central Asia and “an extremely sensitive piece of intelligence,” which Mr. Rosen said was “codeword protected.” On June 11 of that year, the indictment says, Mr. Weissman discussed a secret FBI report on the 1996 bombing of the American barracks in Saudi Arabia, known as Khobar Towers, information he said he obtained from three sources including American government officials. He was an Iran specialist for AIPAC at the time.

On December 12, 2000, the indictment alleges the two men met a government official who disclosed details of a strategy against a Middle Eastern country and the state of the Clinton administration’s deliberations regarding the country. It says the two former lobbyists then told a reporter about the matter.

The bulk of the material in the indictment dates from 2002, when the two lobbyists first met with Mr. Franklin. Very little new information is in the document that was not first disclosed in the indictment against Mr. Franklin released in June. The indictment also sheds no new light on the nature of the information Mr. Franklin is alleged to have shared with former AIPAC lobbyists.

Mr. Franklin in 2003 is said to have faxed Mr. Rosen a document detailing Iran’s role in international terrorism that was itself not classified but attached as an annex to a classified document. Mr. Franklin in 2004 is alleged to have discussed intelligence suggesting Iranian teams in northern Iraq were targeting American and Israeli special forces. At the time, he was cooperating with the FBI in what he believed was a probe of AIPAC. Five weeks after his participation in the sting, he was assigned a government attorney and urged to plead guilty to charges of espionage. He has pleaded not guilty to lesser charges leveled against him in June.

Mr. Franklin, first described in the press as an “Israeli Mole,” was allowed earlier this year to return to his job at the Pentagon, albeit without a security clearance.