Stanley M. Moskowitz, 68; Twice CIA Liaison to Congress (original) (raw)

Stanley Martin Moskowitz, 68, a Central Intelligence Agency official who twice served as the agency's liaison to Congress and who tried to forge peace between Israelis and Palestinians, died June 29 of a heart attack after playing tennis in McLean. He died after driving himself to the McLean Immediate Care clinic.

Mr. Moskowitz spent more than 40 years in the CIA, working in Vietnam, Russia, Eastern Europe, Tel Aviv, New York and Capitol Hill. He received six of the agency's top awards during his career. Yesterday, the current CIA director, Michael V. Hayden, and former CIA director George Tenet issued statements praising him as "truly exceptional" and "indispensable."

Because of his position as director of congressional affairs, Mr. Moskowitz was one of the few CIA officials whose names regularly appeared in print. But he was not supposed to be in the public eye when he was the CIA's station chief in Tel Aviv in the mid-1990s. An Israeli newspaper outed him when it exposed a program to train Palestinian security personnel at CIA headquarters at Langley.

Mr. Moskowitz, who was more of a diplomatic than a clandestine officer at the time, returned to Washington and worked a second stint as the agency's congressional liaison. In recent years, claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and leaks about national security matters made the position especially demanding.

He retired in 2005, but as a consultant, he was the CIA's representative to the Interagency Working Group on Nazi War Crimes. The team's job was to declassify information in the agency's files. He reported June 6 that the team has released 27,000 pages from 174 files, much of it new material. "We will have withheld nothing of substance. . . . We have done our part. We look forward to the work of the historians to put this material into sound historical context," he said.

Mr. Moskowitz was born in the Bronx, N.Y. He graduated from Alfred University in Upstate New York. He attended a graduate program in government at Duke University but left to join the CIA in 1962. One of his first jobs was in Southeast Asia, where he arrived just as the U.S. military began to pour into Vietnam. He later became the CIA's director of training and education.

In the 1980s, he was a national intelligence officer for Russia and Eastern Europe and spent his first tour as congressional liaison, serving under two CIA directors. During a 1991 brouhaha over the CIA's employment of a college president, Mr. Moskowitz declared, "We need to quit treating the CIA as a pariah organization, as they do on some campuses."

Mr. Moskowitz was the station chief in Israel from 1995 to 1999, said a son, James Moskowitz of Oakton, and he tried to enforce promises made by the Israelis and Palestinians. After his name became public in the Middle East, the Jerusalem Post on Christmas Day 1997 described his method during a meeting of Israeli and Palestinian security officials:

"The Israelis made suggestions. The Palestinians made suggestions. The local CIA representative, Stan Moskowitz, wrote up a draft. No one signed anything. No one committed to anything. . . . Perhaps the answer lies with Stan Moskowitz, who did well from this whole encounter. He understood the nuances, took all the ideas that he knew would pass with the Palestinians, and prepared the draft agreement that isn't really an agreement, but that is now being argued over so publicly. Who knows what will happen at the next stage; perhaps the Moskowitz method will find favor with the administration . . . "

He briefly was the CIA's senior representative to the Council of Foreign Relations in New York and also was its deputy comptroller for a time. He received two Presidential Distinguished Officer Awards, the Director's Medal, the Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal, the Distinguished Intelligence Medal and the Intelligence Community Medal of Merit.

He enjoyed golf, tennis and hiking. He also enjoyed opera and classical music.

In addition to his son James Moskowitz, survivors include his wife, Evadna Moskowitz of Great Falls; three other children, Marianne Henle of Herndon, Paul Moskowitz of Los Angeles and Sarah Moskowitz of Chicago; a sister, Lenore Moskowitz of Silver Spring; two brothers, Ronald Moskowitz of Miami and Allen Moskowitz of Davenport, Iowa; and three grandchildren.