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Private Organization | Esquire is an American magazine whose October 1991 article by Craig Unger repeated Ari Ben-Menashe's allegations that Robert McFarlane was recruited by Rafi Eitan and identified McFarlane as 'Mr. X' in the Jonathan Pollard case. |
Esquire is an United States magazine. In October 1991, it published an article by Craig Unger that repeated Ari Ben-Menashe allegations that Robert McFarlane had been recruited by Rafael Eitan and named McFarlane as "Mr. X" in the Jonathan Pollard case.1 The article was the subject of a libel suit by McFarlane. The United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed the judgment for the magazine on January 30, 1996.2 The opinion records that the magazine's editor, William Blythe, approved the phrase "Yet it's almost impossible to dismiss him" directly after the passage listing Ben-Menashe's vulnerabilities. Explaining the decision, Blythe testified: "We wouldn't have used him as a source unless we thought he had some knowledgeability."2
Footnotes
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Ben-Menashe, Ari. Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network. Sheridan Square Press, 1992 (TrineDay reprint, 2015). ↩︎
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McFarlane v. Esquire Magazine, 74 F.3d 1296 (D.C. Cir. 1996), No. 94-7137, decided January 30, 1996. https://static.case.law/f3d/74/cases/1296-01.json ↩︎