[6] On March 9, 1978, Michael Saba was waiting to meet someone in the coffee shop of the Madison Hotel in Washington D.C.. As he sat reading a newspaper, the three Hebrew-speaking men, later identified as Israeli officials,[6]: 261 sitting at an adjacent table were joined by a fourth who was introduced as "Stephen Bryen of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee".
What he overheard soon led to an FBI investigation, and took Saba "down a path of inquiry which would reveal to me the activities of a small group of influential U.S. policy-makers who used their positions to shape American policy - regardless of the economic and strategic costs - so as to favor the military interests of the Israeli Government.
Five days later the Washington Post mentioned the affair and noted that Bryen was leaving his position at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in order to "prepare for his upcoming wedding."
This coalition was home to many public figures who came to be known as neoconservatives who were basically social liberals who favored a high military budgets and interventionist foreign policies in order to benefit Israel.
As Joel Lisker, Chief of the Registration Unit at the Justice Department, turned his attention to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he encountered some more difficulties.
A Defense Week article quoted an unnamed source in the Justice Department as saying the presence of the committee lawyer had a chilling effect on the interviewees.
Apparently Bryen's deposition or a description of it was not included in the many government documents the Saba acquired via FOIA requests, upon which much of The Armageddon Report is based.
The Justice Department closed the case in October 1979 before Lisker received any Senate documents or finished deposing Stephen Bryen.
Saba cites a source who says when Heymann returned to Washington to work again at the Justice Department in 1978, he stayed as a house guest of Nathan Lewin.
The suspicion of disloyalty cast upon him by the exposure of the meeting in the coffee shop of the Madison Hotel did not seem to do any harm to Bryen's career in government as, after a short stint as Executive Director of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), Bryen took a position as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense under Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy Richard Perle during the Reagan administration.
Like Bryen, Perle fell under suspicion of spying for Israel when he was caught on an FBI phone tap discussing classified material, evidently supplied to him by Kissinger aide Helmut Sonnenfeldt, with someone in the Israeli embassy.
[6]: 123–124 The National Association of Arab-Americans, for whom Saba once worked, sent letters warning numerous members of Congress and government officials of the security threat Bryen posed.