Prior 9/11, 100s of Israeli agents targeted FBI, Secret Service, Air Force, DEA, ATF

[Atlanta Skins Fan]

Between January 2000 and June 2001, hundreds of Israeli intelligence agents engaged in a massive, 40+ city U.S. operation to penetrate the DEA, FBI, Secret Service, Air Force, ATF and U.S. Marshals Service.

A number of these agents resided in Hollywood, Florida, at 4220 Sheridan Street, only a few hundred feet from Mohamed Atta's residence at 3389 Sheridan.

Five Israeli agents were caught videoing the burning WTC towers and were reported to be posing in front of them (on top of their van) and celebrating. They worked for a front operation called "Urban Moving Systems", whose name was on their van.

Three Israelis were caught, in a van labeled "Moving Systems Incorporated", with a video showing extensive zoom shots of the Sears Tower. The Sears Tower was thought to be a target of the 5th or 6th 9/11 plane targeted for hijacking on 9/11 (one plane never left the ground; the other was diverted to Canada).

A Washington Times story on 9/10/01, the day before 9/11, leaked a 68-page paper by the Army School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS), on the dangers of Middle East peacekeeping:

Of the MOSSAD, the Israeli intelligence service, the SAMS officers say: "Wildcard. Ruthless and cunning. Has capability to target U.S. forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act."

Why was a massive Israeli intelligence operation being run against almost all top federal law enforcement agencies in the year and a half prior to 9/11? Why was the operation so close to Atta? Why so close to the WTC and the Sears Tower?

The following article from Salon.com asks questions the mainstream media is unwilling to ask:

http://archive.salon.com/news/feature/2002/05/07/students/print.html

The Israeli "art student" mystery

For almost two years, hundreds of young Israelis falsely claiming to be art students haunted federal offices -- in particular, the DEA. No one knows why -- and no one seems to want to find out.

By Christopher Ketcham

May 7, 2002 | In January 2001, the security branch of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency began to receive a number of peculiar reports from DEA field offices across the country. According to the reports, young Israelis claiming to be art students and offering artwork for sale had been attempting to penetrate DEA offices for over a year. The Israelis had also attempted to penetrate the offices of other law enforcement and Department of Defense agencies. Strangest of all, the "students" had visited the homes of numerous DEA officers and other senior federal officials.

As a pattern slowly emerged, the DEA appeared to have been targeted in what it called an "organized intelligence gathering activity." But to what end, and for whom, no one knew.

Reports of the mysterious Israelis with an inexplicable interest in peddling art to G-men came in from more than 40 U.S. cities and continued throughout the first six months of 2001. Agents of the DEA, ATF, Air Force, Secret Service, FBI, and U.S. Marshals Service documented some 130 separate incidents of "art student" encounters. Some of the Israelis were observed diagramming the inside of federal buildings. Some were found carrying photographs they had taken of federal agents. One was discovered with a computer printout in his luggage that referred to "DEA groups."

In some cases, the Israelis visited locations not known to the public -- areas without street addresses, for example, or DEA offices not identified as such -- leading authorities to suspect that information had been gathered from prior surveillance or perhaps electronically, from credit cards and other sources. One Israeli was discovered holding banking receipts for substantial sums of money, close to $180,000 in withdrawals and deposits over a two-month period. A number of the Israelis resided for a period of time in Hollywood, Fla. -- the small city where Mohammed Atta and three terrorist comrades lived for a time before Sept. 11.

In March 2001, the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive (NCIX), a branch of the CIA, issued a heads-up to federal employees about "suspicious visitors to federal facilities." The warning noted that "employees have observed both males and females attempting to bypass facility security and enter federal buildings." Federal agents, the warning stated, had "arrested two of these individuals for trespassing and discovered that the suspects possessed counterfeit work visas and green cards."

In the wake of the NCIX bulletin, federal officials raised several other red flags, including an Air Force alert, a Federal Protective Services alert, an Office of National Drug Control Policy security alert and a request that the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) investigate a specific case. Officials began dealing more aggressively with the "art students." According to one account, some 140 Israeli nationals were detained or arrested between March 2001 and Sept. 11, 2001. Many of them were deported. According to the INS, the deportations resulted from violations of student visas that forbade the Israelis from working in the United States. (In fact, Salon has established that none of the Israelis were enrolled in the art school most of them claimed to be attending; the other college they claimed to be enrolled in does not exist.) After the Sept. 11 attacks, many more young Israelis -- 60, according to one AP dispatch and other reports -- were detained and deported.

The "art students" followed a predictable modus operandi. They generally worked in teams, typically consisting of a driver, who was the team leader, and three or four subordinates. The driver would drop the "salespeople" off at a given location and return to pick them up some hours later. The "salespeople" entered offices or approached agents in their offices or homes. Sometimes they pitched their artwork -- landscapes, abstract works, homemade pins and other items they carried about in portfolios. At other times, they simply attempted to engage agents in conversation. If asked about their studies, they generally said they were from the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem or the University of Jerusalem (which does not exist). They were described as "aggressive" in their sales pitch and "evasive" when questioned by wary agents. The females among them were invariably described as "very attractive" -- "blondes in tight shorts or jeans, real lookers," as one DEA agent put it to Salon. "They were flirty, flipping the hair, looking at you, smiling. 'Hey, how are you? Let me show you this.' Everything a woman would do if she wanted to get something out of you." Some agents noted that the "students" made repeated attempts to avoid facility security personnel by trying to enter federal buildings through back doors and side entrances. On several occasions, suspicious agents who had been visited at home observed the Israelis after the "students" departed and noted that they did not approach any of the neighbors.

The document detailing most of this information was an internal DEA memo: a 60-page report drawn up in June 2001 by the DEA's Office of Security Programs. The document was meant only for the eyes of senior officials at the Justice Department (of which the DEA is adjunct), but it was leaked to the press as early as December 2001 and by mid-March had been made widely available to the public.

On the face of it, this was a blockbuster tale, albeit a bizarre and cryptic one, full of indeterminate leads and fascinating implications and ambiguous answers: "Like a good Clancy novel," as one observer put it. Was it espionage? Drug dealing? An intelligence game? The world’s wackiest door-to-door hustle? Yet the mainstream media has almost entirely ignored the allegations or accepted official "explanations" that explain nothing. Even before the DEA memo was leaked, however, some reporters had begun sniffing around the remarkable story.

On Oct. 1 of last year, Texas newswoman Anna Werner, of KHOU-TV in Houston, told viewers about a "curious pattern of behavior" by people with "Middle Eastern looks" claiming to be Israeli art students. "Government guards have found those so-called students," reported Werner, "trying to get into [secure federal facilities in Houston] in ways they're not supposed to -- through back doors and parking garages." Federal agents, she said, were extremely "concerned." The "students" had showed up at the DEA's Houston headquarters, at the Leland Federal Building in Houston, and even the federal prosecutor's office; they had also appeared to be monitoring the buildings. Guards at the Earle Cabell Federal Building in Dallas found one "student" wandering the halls with a floor plan of the site. Sources told Werner that similar incidents had occurred at sites in New York, Florida, and six other states, "and even more worrisome, at 36 sensitive Department of Defense sites."

"One defense site you can explain," a former Defense Department analyst told Werner. "Thirty-six? That's a pattern." Ominously, the analyst concluded that such activity suggested a terrorist organization "scouting out potential targets and ... looking for targets that would be vulnerable."

Post-9/11, this should have been the opening thrust in an orgy of coverage, and the scoop of a lifetime for Werner: Here she’d gotten a glimpse into a possible espionage ring of massive proportions, possibly of terrorists scouting new targets for jihad -- and those terrorists were possibly posing as Israelis. KHOU’s conclusions were wrong -- these weren’t Arab terrorists -- but at the time no one knew better. And yet the story died on the vine. No one followed up.

Just about the same time that KHOU was stabbing in the dark, reporter Carl Cameron of the Fox News Channel was beginning an investigation into the mystery of the art students that would ultimately light the way into altogether different terrain. In a four-part series on Fox’s "Special Report With Brit Hume" that aired in mid-December, Cameron reported that federal agents were investigating the "art student" phenomenon as a possible arm of Israeli espionage operations tracking al-Qaida operatives in the United States. Yes, you read that right: a spy ring that may have been trailing al-Qaida members in the weeks and months before Sept. 11 -- a spy ring that according to Cameron’s sources may have known about the preparations for the Sept. 11 attacks but failed to share this knowledge with U.S. intelligence. One investigator told Cameron that "evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It's classified information."

According to Cameron, some 60 Israeli nationals had been detained in the anti-terrorism/immigrant sweeps in the weeks after Sept. 11, and at least 140 Israelis identified as "art students" had been detained or arrested in the prior months. Most of the 60 detained after Sept. 11 had been deported, Cameron said. "Some of the detainees," reported Cameron, "failed polygraph questions when asked about alleged surveillance activities against and in the United States." Some of them were on active military duty. (Military service is compulsory for all young Israelis.) Cameron was careful to note that there was "no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9/11 attacks" and that while his reporting had dug up "explosive information," none of it was necessarily conclusive. Cameron was simply airing the wide-ranging speculations in an ongoing investigation.

Incendiary as it was, that story died on the vine, too, and the scuttlebutt in major newsrooms was that Cameron’s sources -- all anonymous -- were promulgating a fantasy. Reporters at the New York Times and the Washington Post hit up their go-to people inside Justice and FBI and CIA, but no one could seem to confirm the story, and indeed numerous officials laughed it off. Fox got it wrong, the newspapers of record concluded. And nothing more was heard on the topic in mainstream quarters.

But inside the DEA, the Fox piece reverberated. An internal DEA communiqué obtained by Salon indicates that the DEA made careful note of Cameron’s reports; the communiqué even mentions Fox News by name. Dated Dec. 18, four days after the final installment in the Fox series, the document warns of security breaches in DEA telecommunications by unauthorized "foreign nationals" -- and cites an Israeli-owned firm with which the DEA contracted for wiretap equipment -- breaches that could have accounted for the access that the "art students" apparently had to the home addresses of agents.

It wasn’t until nearly three months after the Fox reports that the "art student" enigma resurfaced in newsrooms, this time in Europe. On Feb. 28, the respected Paris-based espionage newsletter Intelligence Online reported in detail on what turned out to have been one of Cameron's key source documents: the 60-page DEA memo. The memo itself, which Salon obtained in mid-March, went no further than to speculate in the most general terms that the "nature of the individuals’ conduct" suggested some sort of "organized intelligence gathering activity." The memo also pointed out that there was some evidence connecting the art students to a drug ring. "DEA Orlando has developed the first drug nexus to this group," the memo read. "Telephone numbers obtained from an Israeli Art Student encountered at the Orlando D.O. [District Office] have been linked to several ongoing DEA MDMA (Ecstasy) investigations in Florida, California, Texas and New York."

However, Intelligence Online and then France's newspaper of record, Le Monde, came to a much more definite -- and explosive -- conclusion. This was the jackpot, they concluded, a proven spy ring run by the Mossad or the Israeli government. Thus you had Intelligence Online leading its Feb. 28 piece with the statement that "a huge Israeli spy ring operating in the United States was rolled up," and you had Le Monde trumpeting on March 5 that a "vast Israeli spy network" had been dismantled in the "largest case of Israeli spying" since 1985, when mole Jonathan Pollard was busted selling Pentagon secrets to the Mossad. Reuters that same day went with the headline "U.S. Busts Big Israeli Spy Ring," sourcing Le Monde’s story.

The two French journals came to conclusions that the memo itself clearly did not. And yet they had unearthed some intriguing material. Six of the "students" were apparently carrying cell phones purchased by a former Israeli vice consul to the United States. According to Le Monde, two of the "students" had traveled from Hamburg to Miami to visit an FBI agent in his home, then boarded a flight to Chicago and visited the home of a Justice Dept. agent, then hopped a direct flight to Toronto -- all in one day. According to Intelligence Online, more than one-third of the students, who were spread out in 42 cities, lived in Florida, several in Hollywood and Fort Lauderdale, Fla. -- one-time home to at least 10 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers. In at least one case, the students lived just a stone's throw from homes and apartments where the Sept. 11 terrorists resided: In Hollywood, several students lived at 4220 Sheridan St., just down the block from the 3389 Sheridan St. apartment where terrorist mastermind Mohammed Atta holed up with three other Sept. 11 plotters. Many of the students, the DEA report noted, had backgrounds in Israeli military intelligence and/or electronics surveillance; one was the son of a two-star Israeli general, and another had served as a bodyguard to the head of the Israeli army.

The DEA report on which the French journals based their investigations contained a wealth of remarkable tales. To take just a few samples:

• On March 1, 2001, a DEA special agent in the Tampa division offices "responded to a knock at one of the fifth floor offices. At the door was a young female who immediately identified herself as an Israeli art student who had beautiful art to sell. She was carrying a crudely made portfolio of unframed pictures." Aware of the "art student" alert, the agent invited the girl to an interview room, where he was joined by a colleague to listen to the girl's presentation. "She had approximately 15 paintings of different styles, some copies of famous works, and others similar in style to famous artists. When asked her name, she identified herself as Bella Pollcson, and pointed out one of the paintings was signed by that name." Then things got interesting: In the middle of her presentation, she changed her story and claimed that the paintings were not for sale, but "that she was there to promote an art show in Sarasota, Fla., and asked for the agents' business cards so that information regarding the show could be mailed to them." Well, where's the show? asked the agents. When's it going up? Pollcson couldn't say: didn't know when or where -- or even who was running it. Later it was determined that she had lied about her name as well.
  
• On Oct. 20, 2000, in the Houston offices of the DEA, a "male Israeli art student was observed by the Security Officers [entering] an elevator from a secure area. [The officers] were able to apprehend the art student before he could enter a secure area on the second floor." Three months later, in January 2001, a "male Israeli" was apprehended attempting to enter the same building from a back door in a "secured parking lot area." He claimed "he wanted to gain access to the building to sell artwork."
  
• On April 30, 2001, an Air Force alert was issued from Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City concerning "possible intelligence collection being conducted by Israeli Art Students." Tinker AFB houses AWACS surveillance craft and Stealth bombers. The report does not elaborate on what kind of intelligence was being sought.
  
• On May 19, 2001, two Israeli nationals "requested permission to visit a museum" at Volk Field Air National Guard Base in Camp Douglas, Wis. "Approximately ten minutes after being allowed on the base, the two were seen on an active runway, taking photographs." The men, charged with misdemeanor trespass, were identified as 26-year-old Gal Kantor and 22-year-old Tsvi Watermann, and were released after paying a $210 fine. According to the Air Force security officer on duty, "Both were asked if they were involved in the selling of art while in the U.S. Kantor became very upset over this, and questioned why they were being asked about that ... Kantor's whole demeanor changed, and he then became uncooperative."

So it went week after week, month after month, for more than a year and a half. In addition to the locations mentioned above, there were "art student" encounters in Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, El Paso, Los Angeles, Miami, Orlando, New Orleans, Phoenix, San Diego, Little Rock, Seattle, Washington, D.C., Arlington, Texas, Albuquerque, and dozens of other small cities and towns.

"Their stories," the DEA report states, "were remarkable only in their consistency. At first, they will state that they are art students, either from the University of Jerusalem or the Bezalel Academy of Arts in Jerusalem. Other times they will purport to be promoting a new art studio in the area. When pressed for details as to the location of the art studio or why they are selling the paintings, they become evasive."

Indeed, they had reason to be nervous, because they were lying. Salon contacted Bezalel Academy's Varda Harel, head of the Academic Students' Administration, with a list of every "student" named in the DEA report, including their dates of birth, passport numbers, and in some cases military registration numbers. Not a single name was identified in the Bezalel database, either as a current student or as a graduate of the past 10 years (nor had any of the "students" tried to apply to Bezalel in the last ten years). As for the University of Jerusalem, there is no such entity. There is the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, but Heidi Gleit, the school's foreign press liaison, told me that Israelis commonly refer to the school as Hebrew University, not the University of Jerusalem. (Hebrew University, she said, does not release student records to the public.)

Still, the U.S. press was uninterested. Just one day after the Le Monde report, the Washington Post ran a story on March 6 that seemed to put the whole thing to rest. Headlined "Reports of Israeli Spy Ring Dismissed," the piece, by John Mintz and Dan Eggen, opened with official denials from a "wide array of U.S. officials" and quoted Justice Department spokeswoman Susan Dryden as saying, "This seems to be an urban myth that has been circulating for months. The department has no information at this time to substantiate these widespread reports about Israeli art students involved in espionage."

The Post quoted anonymous officials who said they thought the allegations had been "circulated by a single employee of the Drug Enforcement Administration who is angry that his theories have not gained currency ... [T]wo law enforcement officials said the disgruntled DEA agent, who disagreed with the conclusion of FBI and CIA intelligence experts that no spying was taking place, appears to be leaking a memo that he himself wrote."

An INS spokesman acknowledged to the Post that several dozen Israelis had been deported, but said it was the result of "routine visa violations." At the same time, DEA spokesman Thomas Hinojosa told the Post that "multiple reports of suspicious activity on the part of young Israelis had come into the agency's Washington headquarters from agents in the field. The reports were summarized in a draft memo last year, but Hinojosa said he did not have a copy and could not vouch for the accuracy of media reports describing its contents."

The Post's apparent debunking was far from convincing, even to the casual reader. Of course there was no proof that the art students were part of a spy ring: Intelligence Online and Le Monde had jumped the gun. However, the real possibility that they were part of a spy ring could not be dismissed -- any more than could any other theory one might advance to explain their unusual behavior. With that in mind, Justice spokeswoman Dryden's assertion that reports of an Israeli spy ring were an "urban myth" was an oddly overplayed denial. A response that fit the facts would have been something like "There have been numerous reports of suspicious behavior by Israelis claiming to be art students. We are looking into the allegations." Instead, Dryden appeared to be trying to forestall any discussion of just what the facts of the case were. Given the political sensitivities and the potentially embarrassing nature of the case, that was not surprising,

If the whole thing was an "urban myth," like the sewer reptiles of Manhattan, and if it all led back to one deskbound nut job in the DEA, then what were those "reports of suspicious activity" that had come in from agents in the field? Hinojosa's statement about the DEA memo was suspiciously evasive: If the "media reports describing its content" (that is, the articles in Le Monde and Intelligence Online) were in fact based on the DEA memo whose existence Hinojosa acknowledged, then the "lone nut" explanation offered by anonymous U.S. officials was at best irrelevant and at worst a rather obvious piece of disinformation, an attempt to shove the story under the rug. (In fact, the French articles were based on the actual DEA memo -- a fact any news organization could have quickly verified, since the leaked DEA document had been floating around on various Web venues, such as Cryptome.org, as early as March 21).

To someone not familiar with the 60-page DEA memo, or to reporters who didn't bother to obtain it, the fact that a disgruntled employee leaked a memo he wrote himself might seem like decisive proof that the whole "art student" tale was a canard. In reality, the nature of the memo makes its authorship irrelevant. The memo is a compilation of field reports by dozens of named agents and officials from DEA offices across America. It contains the names, passport numbers, addresses, and in some cases the military ID numbers of the Israelis who were questioned by federal authorities. Pointing a finger at the author is like blaming a bank robbery on the desk sergeant who took down the names of the robbers.

Of course, the agent (or agents) who wrote the memo could also have fabricated or embellished the field reports. That does not seem to have been the case. Salon contacted more than a half-dozen agents identified in the memo. One agent said she had been visited six times at her home by "art students." None of the agents wished to be named, and very few were willing to speak at length, but all confirmed the veracity of the information.

Despite such obvious holes in the official story, neither the Post nor any other mainstream media organization ran follow-up articles. The New York Times has not yet deemed it worth covering -- in fact, the paper of record has not written about the art student mystery even once, not even to pooh-pooh it. One or two minor media players did some braying -- Israel had been caught spying, etc. – and the bonko conspiracy fringe had a field day, but the rest of the media, taking a cue from the big boys, decided it was a nonstarter: the Post's "debunking" and the Times' silence had effectively killed the story.

So complete was the silence that by mid-March, Jane's Information Group, the respected British intelligence and military analysis service, noted: "It is rather strange that the U.S. media seems to be ignoring what may well be the most explosive story since the 11 September attacks -- the alleged break-up of a major Israeli espionage operation in the USA."

The only major American media outlet aside from Fox to seriously present the "art student" allegations was Insight on the News, the investigative magazine published weekly by the conservative Washington Times. In a March 11 article, Insight quoted a senior Justice Department official as saying, "We think there is something quite sinister here but are unable at this time to put our finger on it" -- essentially echoing what the DEA report concluded.

Managing editor Paul M. Rodriguez, who wrote the Insight story and had quietly tracked the art student phenomenon for weeks before Intelligence Online scooped him, took an agnostic stance toward the mystery. "There is zero information at this time to suggest that these students were being run by the Mossad," he told me. "Nothing we've come across would suggest this. We have seen nothing that says this is a spy ring run by the Israeli government directly or with a wink and a nod or some other form of sub rosa control. Based on what we've been told, seen and obtained I just don't see the so-called spy ring as a certain fact. Does that make it not so? I don't know."

Rodriguez added, "I think the investigators' take is this: What were these 'students' doing going around accessing buildings without authorization, tracking undercover cops to their homes -- if not for some sort of intel mission? It's sort of a mind-**** scenario, if one were to believe this was a conspiracy by a foreign intel source and/or a bunch of nutty 'kids' ****ing around just to see how far they could push the envelope -- which they seem to have pushed pretty damn far, given the page after page after page of intrusions and snooping alleged."

The Israeli embassy denies the charges of a spy ring. "We are saying what we've been saying for months," spokesman Mark Reguev told Salon, referring to the Fox series in December. "No American official or intelligence agency has complained to us about this. The story is nonsense. Israel does not spy on the United States."

Whether or not the "art students" are Israeli spies, Reguev's blanket disavowal is untrue: Israel does spy on the United States. This should come as no surprise: Allies frequently spy on each other, and Israeli intelligence is renowned as among the best and most aggressive in the world. Israel has been at war off and on since its birth as a nation in 1948 and is hungry for information it deems essential to its survival. And America's relationship to Israel and support for it is essential to the survival of the Jewish state. Add these things up, and espionage against the United States becomes understandable, if not justifiable.

The U.S. government officially denies this, of course, but it knows that such spying goes on. In 1996, the U.S. General Accounting Office issued a report indicating that "Country A," later identified as Israel, "conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the United States of any U.S. ally." A year earlier, the Defense Investigative Service circulated a memo warning U.S. military contractors that "Israel aggressively collects [u.S.] military and industrial technology" and "possesses the resources and technical capability to successfully achieve its collection objectives." The memo explained that "the Israelis are motivated by strong survival instincts which dictate every facet of their political and economic policies."

In the history of Israeli espionage in and against the United States, the case of Jonathan Pollard was certainly the most heinous. Pollard, a civilian U.S. naval intelligence analyst, provided Israeli intelligence with an estimated 800,000 pages of classified U.S. intelligence information. The information eventually ended up in Soviet hands, compromising American agents in the field -- several of whom were allegedly captured and killed as a result. Israel at first denied, and then admitted, Pollard's connections to the Mossad after he was arrested in 1985 and imprisoned for life. The case severely strained American-Israeli relations, and continues to rankle many American Jews, who believe that since Pollard was spying for Israel, his sentence was unduly harsh. (Other American Jews feel equally strongly that Pollard and the Israelis betrayed them.)

Any attempt to understand the official U.S. response to the Israeli art student mystery -- and to some degree, the media response -- must take into account both the smoke screen that states blow over incidents that could jeopardize their strategic alliances, and America's unique and complex relationship with Israel. The Jewish state is a close if problematic ally with whom the United States enjoys a "special relationship" unlike that maintained with any other nation in the world. But U.S. and Israeli interests do not always coincide, and spying has always been deemed to cross a line, to represent a fundamental violation of trust. According to intelligence sources, the United States might perhaps secretly tolerate some Israeli spying on U.S. soil if the government decided that it was in our interest (although it could never be acknowledged), but certain types of spying will simply not be accepted by the United States, whether the spying is carried out by Israel or anyone else.

If England or France spied on the United States, American officials would likely conceal it. In the case of Israel, there are far stronger reasons to hide any unseemly cracks in the special relationship. The powerful pro-Israel political constituencies in Congress; pro-Israel lobbies; the Bush administration's strong support for Israel, and its strategic and political interest in maintaining close ties with the Jewish state as a partner in the "war against terror"; the devastating consequences for U.S.-Israeli relations if it was suspected that Israeli agents might have known about the Sept. 11 attack -- all these factors explain why the U.S. government might publicly downplay the art student story and conceal any investigation that produces unpalatable results.

The pro-Israel lobby is a vast and powerful force in American politics; the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, is the No. 1 foreign-policy lobby and the fourth most powerful lobby in Washington, according to Fortune Magazine. Michael Lind, a senior fellow of the New America Foundation and a former executive editor of the National Interest, calls the Israel lobby "an ethnic donor machine" that "distorts U.S. foreign policy" in the Middle East. Among foreign service officers, law enforcement and the military, there is an impression, says Lind, that you can't mess with Israel without suffering direct and indirect smears, such as being labeled an Arabist. Lind, who himself has been virulently attacked as an anti-Semite for his forthrightness on the subject, acknowledges that the Israel lobby is no different from any other -- just more effective. "This is what all lobbies do," Lind observes. "If you criticize the AARP, you hate old people and you want them to starve to death. The Israel lobby is just one part of the lobby problem."

Considering the volatility of the issue, it is not surprising that almost no one in officialdom wants to go on the record for a story like the art students. "In government circles," as Insight's Rodriguez put it, "anything that has to do with Israel is always a hot topic, a third rail -- deadly. No one wants to touch it." Fox News' Cameron quoted intelligence officers saying that to publicly air suspicions of Israeli wrongdoing was tantamount to "career suicide." And the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in one of its bloodiest and most polarizing phases, has only exacerbated sensitivities.

Some of the same pressures that keep government officials from criticizing Israel may also explain why the media has failed to pursue the art student enigma. Media outlets that run stories even mildly critical of Israel often find themselves targeted by organized campaigns, including form-letter e-mails, the cancellation of subscriptions, and denunciations of the organization and its reporters and editors as anti-Semites. Cameron, for example, was excoriated by various pro-Israel lobbying groups for his exposé. Representatives of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) argued that the Fox report cited only unnamed sources, provided no direct evidence, and moreover had been publicly denied by spokesmen for the FBI and others (the last, of course, is not really an argument).

In a December interview with Salon, CAMERA's associate director, Alex Safian, said that several "Jewish/Israeli groups" were having "conversations" with representatives of Fox News regarding Cameron's piece. Safian said he questioned Cameron's motives in running the story. "I think Fox has always been fair to Israel in its reporting," said Safian. "I think it's just Cameron who has something, personally, about Israel. He was brought up in the Middle East. Maybe that has something to do with it. Maybe he's very sympathetic to the Arab side. One could ask." The implicit suggestion was that Cameron is a bigot; in conversation, Safian would later make the same allegation about the entire editorial helm at Le Monde, which he called an anti-Semitic newspaper.

Told of Safian's comments, Cameron said, "I'm speechless. I spent several years in Iran growing up because my father was an archaeologist there. That makes me anti-Israel?" The chief Washington correspondent for Fox News, Cameron had never before been attacked for biased coverage of Israel or Israeli-related affairs -- or for biased coverage of Arabs, for that matter. Cameron defends his December reporting, saying he had never received any heat whatsoever from his superiors, nor had he ever been contacted by any dissenting voices in government.

Oddly, four days after the Cameron investigation ran, all traces of his report -- transcripts, Web links, headlines -- disappeared from the Foxnews.com archives. (Normally, Fox leaves a story up for two to three weeks before consigning it to the pay archive.) When Le Monde contacted Fox in March for a copy of the original tapes, Fox News spokesmen said the request posed a problem but would not elaborate. (Fox News now says Le Monde never called.) Asked why the Cameron piece disappeared, spokesman Robert Zimmerman said it was "up there on our Web site for about two or three weeks and then it was taken down because we had to replace it with more breaking news. As you know, in a Web site you've got x amount of bandwidth -- you know, x amount of stuff you can put stuff up on [sic]. So it was replaced. Normal course of business, my friend." (In fact, a text-based story on a Web site takes up a negligible amount of bandwidth.)

When informed that Cameron's story was gone from the archives, not simply from the headline pages (when you entered the old URL, a Fox screen appeared with the message "This story no longer exists"), Zimmerman replied, "I don't know where it is."

The extreme sensitivity of the Israeli art student story in government circles was made clear to this reporter when, in the midst of my inquiries at DEA and elsewhere, I was told by a source that some unknown party had checked my records and background. He proved it by mentioning a job I had briefly held many years ago that virtually no one outside my family knew about. Shortly after this, I received a call from an individual who identified himself only by the code name Stability. Stability said he was referred to me from "someone in Washington." That someone turned out to be a veteran D.C. correspondent who has close sources in the CIA and the FBI and who verified that Stability was a high-level intelligence agent who had been following the art student matter from the inside.

Stability was guarded in his initial conversation with me. He said that people in the intelligence committee were suspicious about my bona fides and raised the possibility that someone was "using" me. "Your name is known and has been known for quite a while," Stability said. "The problem is that you're going into a hornet's nest with this. It's a very difficult time in this particular area. This is a scenario where a lot of people are living a bunker mentality." He added, "There are a lot of people under a lot of pressure right now because there's a great effort to discredit the story, discredit the connections, prevent people from going any further [in investigating the matter]. There are some very, very smart people who have taken a lot of heat on this -- have gone to what I would consider extraordinary risks to reach out. Quite frankly, there are a lot of patriots out there who'd like to remain alive. Typically, patriots are dead."

In a subsequent conversation, Stability said that the DEA's Office of Professional Responsibility is currently undertaking an aggressive investigation targeting agents suspected of leaking the June 2001 memo. The OPR inquiry was initiated as a result of Intelligence Online's exposé of the DEA document in late February. According to Stability, at least 14 agents -- including some in agencies other than DEA -- are now under intense scrutiny and interrogation. Half a dozen agents have been polygraphed several times over, computers have been seized, desks have been searched.

A DEA spokesman would neither confirm nor deny the allegation. "Anything that has to do with internal security, which would include OPR, is not anything we're able to discuss," the spokesman said.

As for the DEA document itself, Stability said that all information gathering for it ceased around June 2001. He also noted that "there are multiple variations of that document" floating around DEA and elsewhere.

"It was a living, breathing document," Stability said, "that grew on a week-by-week basis, that was being added to as people forwarded information. To say this was a coordinated effort would be a stretch; it was ad hoc. But that document [the DEA memo] didn't just happen. That document was the result of literally dozens of people providing input, working together. These events were going on, people were looking at them, but could not understand them.

"It wasn't until the end of 2000 and the beginning of 2001 that field agents ran across a series of visits that occurred within a very close period of time," Stability said. Agents from across the country began talking to each other, comparing notes. "There was an embryonic understanding that there was something here, something was happening. People kept running across it. And agents being who they are, gut feelings being what they are, they would catch a thread. They'd start to pull a thread, and next thing, they'd end up with the arm of the jacket and the back was coming off, and then you'd end up with reports like you saw. The information, in its scattered form, is one thing. The information compiled, documented, timelined, indexed, is a horrific event for some of these people. Because it is indisputable."

"Agents started to realize that people were coming to their homes," he continued. "If you are part of an organization like this, you tend to be careful about your security. When something disturbs that sense of security, it's unnerving. One thing that was understood fairly early on was that the students would go to some areas that didn't have street signs, and in fact they would already have directions to these areas. That indicated that someone had been there prior to them or had electronically figured where the agents were located -- using credit card records, things of that nature. This sat in the back of people's minds as to the resources necessary to do that."

"I will tell you that there is still great debate over what [the art students’] specific purposes were and are," Stability went on. "When you take an individual who picks up a group of individuals from an airport, individuals who supposedly have no idea what they're doing in-country, who fly on over from a foreign land, whose airline tickets could in some instances total a value greater than $15,000 -- and who get picked up at the airport and drive specifically to one individual's home, which they know the exact directions to: Yeah, you could say there's a problem here. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to understand that. The overarching item is that a lot of work went into going to people's houses to sell them junk from China in plastic frames."

But to what end? What was the value? What was to be gained? "Unknown, unknown," Stability said. "You could be anywhere from D.C. to daylight on that one. Even on our side, you have to take all the stuff and draw it all out and clean out all the chaff. I will tell you that from those who are working ground zero [of this case], it is a difficult puzzle to put together, and it is not complete by any means." Even the spooks are baffled; they have no answers.

So let’s draw out the chaff ourselves and see if we can at least speculate. In intel circles, there are a number of working theories, according to Stability. "Profiling of federal agents is one," said Stability. "Keeping tabs on other people, other foreign nationals, is another. A third is that they were working for organized crime -- that's an easy one, and it almost sounds more like a cover than a reality. The predominant thought is that it was a profiling endeavour, and from a profiling aspect, also one of intimidation."

You mean this whole vast scheme was a mind ****, to use Paul Rodriguez’s elegant phrasing? A psy-ops endeavor to spook the spooks? Perhaps. As Stability put it, "Almost nothing is wrong in this particular instance, Mr. Ketcham. In this particular situation, right is wrong, left is right, up is down, day is night."

Yet for the most part the targeted agents weren’t spooks in the strictest sense: They were DEA -- cops who bust drug dealers. And that leads us into Theory No. 1, also known as the Art Student/Drug Dealer Conspiracy. This theory has a piece of evidence to support it: the link, mentioned in the leaked DEA memo, between an Ecstasy investigation and the telephone numbers provided by an Israeli detained in Orlando. There are "problems" with Israeli nationals involved in the Ecstasy business, according to Israeli Embassy spokesman Reguev. "Israeli authorities and the DEA are working together on that issue," he said. In a statement before Congress in 2000, officials with the U.S. Customs Service, which intercepted some 7 million Ecstasy tablets last year, noted that "Israeli organized-crime elements appear to be in control" of the multibillion-dollar U.S. Ecstasy trade, "from production through the international smuggling phase. Couriers associated with Israeli organized crime have been arrested around the world, including ... locations in the U.S. such as Florida, New Jersey, New York and California."

Miami was cited as one of the main entry points of Ecstasy into the United States and was specified as one of the central "headquarters for the criminal organizations that smuggle Ecstasy"; Houston was also cited for large Ecstasy seizures -- an interesting nexus, given the large number of "art students" who congregated both in the Miami and Ft. Lauderdale area and in Houston. "Israeli nationals in the Ecstasy trade have been very sophisticated in their operations," says a U.S. Customs officer who has investigated the groups. "Some of these individuals have been skilled at counterintelligence and in concealing their communications and movements from law enforcement."

It would thus seem that Israeli organized crime has at least the capacity to pull off a widespread surveillance and intelligence operation. The drug connection would also explain the sizable reserves of cash one Tampa student was handling.

One DEA agent named in the "art student" report told Salon that the best possible explanation for the affair –- and he admitted to being utterly baffled by it -- was that drug dealers were involved.

"Why us if not because of the DEA's mission?" the agent asked. "I mean, what would Israeli intel want with us? Here's another avenue of inquiry to take: Israeli organized crime is the now the biggest dealer of Ecstasy in the United States. These students? It was Israeli organized crime judging our strength, getting a survey of our operations. What if I wanted to burglarize your building and go through your files? I'd do a reconnoiter. Get a sense of the floor plan and security, where the guards are stationed, how many doors, what kind of locks, alarm systems, backup alarm systems."

The trouble with this theory is the obvious one: In the annals of crime chutzpah, for drug dealers to brazenly approach drug agents in their homes and offices may represent the all-time world record. And what conceivable useful intelligence could they gather that would be worth the risk? Were the tee-heeing tight-sweatered Israeli babes pulling some kind of Mata Hari stunt, seducing paunchy middle-aged DEA boys and beguiling them into loose-lipped info sharing?

Theory No. 2 is that they were all engaged in espionage. This scenario has the virtue of simplicity -- if it smells like a spy, walks like a spy, and talks like a spy, it probably is a spy -- but doesn't make much sense, either. Why would the Mossad -- or any spy outfit with a lick of good sense -- use kids without papers as spies? And, just as our incredulous DEA agent noted, what intelligence useful to Israel could be gathered from DEA offices, anyway?

I suggested to Stability that the operation, if it was that, was purposely conspicuous -- almost oafish. "Yes, it was," he replied. "It was a noisy operation. Did you ever see 'Victor/Victoria'? It was about a woman playing a man playing a woman. Perhaps you should think about this from that aspect and ask yourself if you wanted to have something that was in your face, that didn't make sense, that couldn't possibly be them." He added, "Think of it this way: How could the experts think this could actually be something of any value? Wouldn't they dismiss what they were seeing?"

That’s where you enter truly dark territory: Theory No. 3, the Art Student as Agent as Art Student Smoke Screen. It has major problems, but let’s roll with it for a moment. This theory contends that the art student ring was a smoke screen intended to create confusion and allow actual spies -- who were also posing as art students -- to be lumped together with the rest and escape detection. In other words, the operation is an elaborate double fake-out, a hiding-in-plain-sight scam. Whoever dreamed it up thought ahead to the endgame and knew that the DEA-stakeout aspect was so bizarre that it would throw off American intelligence. According to this theory -- Stability's "Victor/Victoria" scenario -- Israeli agents wanted, let's say, to monitor al-Qaida members in Florida and other states. But they feared detection. So to provide cover, and also to create a dizzyingly Byzantine story that would confuse the situation, Israeli intel flooded areas of real operations with these bumbling "art students" -- who were told to deliberately stake out DEA agents.

Perhaps. Why not? Up is down, left is right. I nudged Stability on the obvious implication of the "Victor/Victoria" scenario: If this was a ruse, a decoy to conceal another operation, what was that other operation? "Unknown," Stability said.

Then of course there’s Theory No. 4: that they really were art students. Either they were recruited in Israel as part of an art-selling racket or they simply hit upon the idea themselves. This theory is basically the de facto position held by the U.S. and Israeli governments, which insist that the only wrong committed by the "students" was to sell art without the proper papers. There are almost too many problems with this to list, but it's worth mentioning a few: Why in the world would people try to sell cheap art market to DEA officials? Why would they almost all use the same bogus Bezalel Academy of Arts cover story? Why would anyone running such a racket to make money use foreign nationals without green cards, knowing that they would quickly be snagged for visa violations? And why did so many of these itinerant peddlers, wandering the United States on their strange mission of hawking cheap Chinese knockoff paintings, have "black information" about federal facilities?

There are other theories. One is that these were spies in training, newly minted Mossad graduates on test runs to see how they would operate in field conditions. I asked Stability how hotly the matter was now being pursued in intel and law enforcement. "Depends on who you speak to," he told me. "Some people say that it's a dead issue, a fantasy. Most of the investigations are happening at an ad hoc level. There are people out there that you couldn't sway off some of the cases, because that's how dedicated they are."

Apparently, at least some agents in FBI remain quite concerned about the art student problem. According to several intelligence sources, including Stability, on Dec. 3, 2001, six separate FBI field offices simultaneously forwarded communiqués to FBI headquarters inquiring into the status of the investigation. The FBI agents wanted to have a "clarification" as to what was going on.

The subject may not be officially dead yet. The art student matter may be taken up by the congressional committees investigating intelligence failures leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks, according to another source.

What about the crucial Washington Post article, in which anonymous federal agents alleged the DEA memo was the work of a disgruntled employee?

"The Washington Post article was a plant -- that's obvious. The story was killed," Stability told me. Who planted the story? Stability claimed the FBI was behind it. "Every organization is running scared," Stability added, "because they're afraid of the next shoe to drop. There are many smoking guns out there, many. So consequently every one is at a level of heightened anxiety, and when they're anxious they make mistakes."

Yes, but what are they afraid of? What will the smoking guns prove? Questions, questions, labyrinthine questions, and the more you ask in this matter, the fewer get answered. When I called the CIA to inquire about the agency's March 2001 alert -- an alert that evinced deep disquiet over the affair -- an official who was aware of the inquiry told me, "I'll make a recommendation to you: Don't write a story. This whole thing has been blown way out of proportion. As far as we're concerned, we reported it, yes, but subsequently it's nothing of interest to us. And we've just closed the book on it. And I really recommend you do the same. Let it go. There's nothing here."

Not everyone else in law enforcement is so sure. "There's a lot of concern among the agents," said the DEA source. "We're investigators. We're not satisfied when we don't have answers. This is a mystery that has an answer and it has to be resolved."

[jbooma]

where do you get this information from????

stupidinsanecrazyidiots.com

unless you have a credible news source and another news source to post it as well, so that makes 2 credible new sources I don't think you should post anymore crazy idealistic articles. Unless you are of Jewish decent and know something then don't go starting some conspiracy factor just to please your crazy ideas.

Sorry, but since I do know some people who are Jewish something like this would make them a little madder than me. If you hate our country and government so much then I suggest you go to Iraq or Afganistan on a little vacation and check out the quality of life over there.

[Kilmer17]

He get's it from IHatetheJews.com and HeilHitler.com.

[Glenn X]

[Atlanta Skins Fan]

Originally posted by jbooma

where do you get this information from????

Gee, here I thought providing the publication (Salon.com) and the URL might provide a clue.

[jbooma]

I can't believe you are basing your entire argument from an article from Salon. They write what you want to hear, the don't have any actual proof of any of this. Once again and I think the moderaters would agree if you can post an article from a "credible" source then you can post it. If your article is not to credible, then you need another source to justify it.

Taking an article from salon is like going to aljezera and saying that is a credible source for the love of the jews. Find me another "credible" source before I bore my time with your crazy allegations. What you post sometimes offends other people, and I believe on this site that is not allowed. This is a site about FOOTBALL not a site to justify your needs to hear your propaganda.

[Romo]

ASF,

what kind of magazine is Salon.com?? Is it published only on the web? What bias/slant if any does this site have??

[Tarhog]

Originally posted by jbooma

I can't believe you are basing your entire argument from an article from Salon. They write what you want to hear, the don't have any actual proof of any of this. Once again and I think the moderaters would agree if you can post an article from a "credible" source then you can post it. If your article is not to credible, then you need another source to justify it.

Taking an article from salon is like going to aljezera and saying that is a credible source for the love of the jews. Find me another "credible" source before I bore my time with your crazy allegations. What you post sometimes offends other people, and I believe on this site that is not allowed. This is a site about FOOTBALL not a site to justify your needs to hear your propaganda.

jbooma...

I don't agree with ASF (obviously), but I think this ought to be a site where you can say whatever you want. Is there a line that shouldn't be crossed? Probably, mostly in terms of posting something that truly offends a large # of extremeskins members. From my relatively brief time here, I've seen that the founding fathers generously allow heated debate and ONLY draw the line when it truly gets out of hand, or lines of respect (such as those involving race, religion, sexuality, and other areas of sensitivity and controversy) are clearly crossed. I'd be the last one to agree with ASF on this one, but you'd be surprised how boring this place would be without dissent. One man's NY Times is another's Salon.....so I'm not sure what constitutes a valid source in all instances. Of course I'm only one extremeskins loving peon, and I don't pretend to speak for the mods. But my view is that ASF should be allowed to post whatever he wants, and you should feel free to wail away on him to your hearts content. Its what makes this place so interesting.

[Atlanta Skins Fan]

Originally posted by jbooma

Taking an article from salon is like going to aljezera and saying that is a credible source for the love of the jews. Find me another "credible" source before I bore my time with your crazy allegations.

I can't help that you don't like Salon, but it's certainly credible. Salon is probably the largest and most enduring Web-only magazine in existence. It has a full staff like any magazine and runs a wide range of articles, much like, say, The New Yorker.

You may not like its politics, but it's politics are nothing radical. It's standard liberal fare, mostly, though it normally includes some conservative columnists. It is certainly not a fringe publication (such as a white supremacy source) or a mouthpiece for racist views.

[jbooma]

Originally posted by Atlanta Skins Fan

I can't help that you don't like Salon, but it's certainly credible. Salon is probably the largest and most enduring Web-only magazine in existence. It has a full staff like any magazine and runs a wide range of articles, much like, say, The New Yorker.

You may not like its politics, but it's politics are nothing radical. It's standard liberal fare, mostly, though it normally includes some conservative columnists. It is certainly not a fringe publication (such as a white supremacy source) or a mouthpiece for racist views.

Ok ASF, if salon is a very credible source like you say. Then that means every other news agency would be running this same article. In that case, find me another source offering the same story. Then I will shut up and read on. If you tell me you can't find another story like this then how can you call Salon credible if no other news agency believes in this story. If this story has any crediblity to it then it would be on many news sites. However, like you said if there is not another source then what is the difference between this and a fringe publication? Please tell me.

[Tarhog]

Originally posted by jbooma

Ok ASF, if salon is a very credible source like you say. Then that means every other news agency would be running this same article. In that case, find me another source offering the same story. Then I will shut up and read on. If you tell me you can't find another story like this then how can you call Salon credible if no other news agency believes in this story. If this story has any crediblity to it then it would be on many news sites. However, like you said if there is not another source then what is the difference between this and a fringe publication? Please tell me.

The other point of jbooma's I'll echo is that 'credible source' doesn't mean nearly what it used to. News organizations used to require confirmation from multiple sources before they'd even touch a story. Thats no longer true as we've seen multiple examples, even in mainstream news organizations and networks, of outright falsehoods being put out there as 'truth'. Codes written a lot about this rabid need to get 'the scoop' and what its done to the reliability of news sources. So whether its the Washington Post or Salon.com, I view all news stories as highly suspect until I see incontrovertible evidence. I'm not a big believer that finding similiar information in 3 or 4 different articles constitutes 'proof' or even solid evidence.

[Atlanta Skins Fan]

Originally posted by jbooma

Ok ASF, if salon is a very credible source like you say. Then that means every other news agency would be running this same article. In that case, find me another source offering the same story. Then I will shut up and read on.

With all due respect, this is a stupid debate. There are plenty of exclusives in news, and there are plenty of obvious reasons the mainstream media (largely owned by seven companies) wouldn't touch this story.

Salon has been around since the beginning of the Web. If Salon were producing libel, they'd have been put out of business a long time ago. This article was dated May 7, 2002. If it had significant factual problems, the article would be taken down or corrected.

I don't bear any further burden of proof as to the relative quality of this source. You may not like the story and may not believe the story. That's your privilege. However, it's not my problem.

[Tarhog]

It may be annoying, but I don't think its stupid ASF. You just made a fairly incredible statement...that whats reported in mainstream media (however loosely you define that) is accurate because otherwise such outlets would be put out of business or sued for libel. Do you really believe that? We have a parallel thread (see NY Times thread) demonstrating this is clearly not the case. Looking for the real truth by surfing the web, or even by reading every major newspaper is only going to get you halfway there.

I also find it ironic that someone so skeptical of the US government and the party line put out for public consumption doesn't apply that same skepticism to information put forth elsewhere, particularly when promulgated by media sources (who typically have agendas that rival political forces).

[jbooma]

"Five Israeli agents were caught videoing the burning WTC towers and were reported to be posing in front of them (on top of their van) and celebrating. They worked for a front operation called "Urban Moving Systems", whose name was on their van.

Three Israelis were caught, in a van labeled "Moving Systems Incorporated", with a video showing extensive zoom shots of the Sears Tower. The Sears Tower was thought to be a target of the 5th or 6th 9/11 plane targeted for hijacking on 9/11 (one plane never left the ground; the other was diverted to Canada)"

ASF, where did you get this from? This was not in your "credible" salon article. Did you write this yourself or do you have something to back this up with.

If you actually read the article all they have are theories of what happened, not proof of anything you mention here. The article also had other news sources quotes such as Fox News, The Washington Times, etc..... If this were the case then there would be some type of information from these news agencies as well.

The article itself does have validity, but the opening paragraphs do not, and am curious where you got that from.

All of this makes me think, what position do you really have since at first you blame the US for 9/11 and now it seems you are blaming Israel for it. You jump from side to side it seems but don't seem to support one theory 100%. I am curious why you do this or is it that you just like to ruffle some feathers here and there.

Don't get me wrong some of your threads are interesting to say the least. The beginning statements in this one are a little offensive to some and that is why I just wanted to get more information from you on where it come from. Everyone is entitled to thier opinions, but don't create stories to present your aticle unless you can back it up.

[Atlanta Skins Fan]

Tarhog, I should add that there *are* other sources for this story. It's just that Salon offers the most comprehensive story from a credible source.

If FoxNews is more your cup of tea, they did a similar four-part series reported by Carl Cameron, begining 12/13/01. Pressure from Jewish groups caused FoxNews to take down the story from their Web site, but I know of no retraction or apology for the story from FoxNews.

I have a copy of that FoxNews story that I can post here:

Part 1 of 4

BRIT HUME, HOST: It has been more than 16 years since a civilian working for the Navy was charged with passing secrets to Israel. Jonathan Pollard pled guilty to conspiracy to commit espionage and is serving a life sentence. At first, Israeli leaders claimed Pollard was part of a rogue operation, but later took responsibility for his work.

Now Fox News has learned some U.S. investigators believe that there are Israelis again very much engaged in spying in and on the U.S., who may have known things they didn't tell us before September 11. Fox News correspondent Carl Cameron has details in the first of a four-part series.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CARL CAMERON, FOX NEWS CORRESPONDENT: Since September 11, more than 60 Israelis have been arrested or detained, either under the new patriot anti-terrorism law, or for immigration violations. A handful of active Israeli military were among those detained, according to investigators, who say some of the detainees also failed polygraph questions when asked about alleged surveillance activities against and in the United States.

There is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9-11 attacks, but investigators suspect that they Israelis may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not shared it. A highly placed investigator said there are "tie-ins." But when asked for details, he flatly refused to describe them, saying, "evidence linking these Israelis to 9-11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It's classified information."

Fox News has learned that one group of Israelis, spotted in North Carolina recently, is suspected of keeping an apartment in California to spy on a group of Arabs who the United States is also investigating for links to terrorism. Numerous classified documents obtained by Fox News indicate that even prior to September 11, as many as 140 other Israelis had been detained or arrested in a secretive and sprawling investigation into suspected espionage by Israelis in the United States.

Investigators from numerous government agencies are part of a working group that's been compiling evidence since the mid '90s. These documents detail hundreds of incidents in cities and towns across the country that investigators say, "may well be an organized intelligence gathering activity."

The first part of the investigation focuses on Israelis who say they are art students from the University of Jerusalem and Bazala Academy. They repeatedly made contact with U.S. government personnel, the report says, by saying they wanted to sell cheap art or handiwork.

Documents say they, "targeted and penetrated military bases." The DEA, FBI and dozens of government facilities, and even secret offices and unlisted private homes of law enforcement and intelligence personnel. The majority of those questioned, "stated they served in military intelligence, electronic surveillance intercept and or explosive ordinance units."

Another part of the investigation has resulted in the detention and arrests of dozens of Israelis at American mall kiosks, where they've been selling toys called Puzzle Car and Zoom Copter. Investigators suspect a front.

Shortly after The New York Times and Washington Post reported the Israeli detentions last months, the carts began vanishing. Zoom Copter's Web page says, "We are aware of the situation caused by thousands of mall carts being closed at the last minute. This in no way reflects the quality of the toy or its salability. The problem lies in the operators' business policies."

Why would Israelis spy in and on the U.S.? A general accounting office investigation referred to Israel as country A and said, "According to a U.S. intelligence agency, the government of country A conducts the most aggressive espionage operations against the U.S. of any U.S. ally."

A defense intelligence report said Israel has a voracious appetite for information and said, "the Israelis are motivated by strong survival instincts which dictate every possible facet of their political and economical policies. It aggressively collects military and industrial technology and the U.S. is a high priority target."

The document concludes: "Israel possesses the resources and technical capability to achieve its collection objectives."

(END VIDEO CLIP)

A spokesman for the Israeli embassy here in Washington issued a denial saying that any suggestion that Israelis are spying in or on the U.S. is "simply not true." There are other things to consider. And in the days ahead, we'll take a look at the U.S. phone system and law enforcement's methods for wiretaps. And an investigation that both have been compromised by our friends overseas.

HUME: Carl, what about this question of advanced knowledge of what was going to happen on 9-11? How clear are investigators that some Israeli agents may have known something?

CAMERON: It's very explosive information, obviously, and there's a great deal of evidence that they say they have collected — none of it necessarily conclusive. It's more when they put it all together. A bigger question, they say, is how could they not have know? Almost a direct quote.

HUME: Going into the fact that they were spying on some Arabs, right?

CAMERON: Correct.

HUME: All right, Carl, thanks very much

60 Israelis who had been detained in connection with the Sept. 11 terrorism investigation.

Carl Cameron Investigates Part 2

Part 2 of 4

BRIT HUME, HOST: Last time we reported on the approximately 60 Israelis who had been detained in connection with the Sept. 11 terrorism investigation. Carl Cameron reported that U.S. investigators suspect that some of these Israelis were spying on Arabs in this country, and may have turned up information on the planned terrorist attacks back in September that was not passed on.

Tonight, in the second of four reports on spying by Israelis in the U.S., we learn about an Israeli-based private communications company, for whom a half-dozen of those 60 detained suspects worked. American investigators fear information generated by this firm may have fallen into the wrong hands and had the effect of impeded the Sept. 11 terror inquiry. Here's Carl Cameron's second report.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CARL CAMERON, FOX NEWS CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Fox News has learned that some American terrorist investigators fear certain suspects in the Sept. 11 attacks may have managed to stay ahead of them, by knowing who and when investigators are calling on the telephone. How?

By obtaining and analyzing data that's generated every time someone in the U.S. makes a call.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What city and state, please?

CAMERON: Here's how the system works. Most directory assistance calls, and virtually all call records and billing in the U.S. are done for the phone companies by Amdocs Ltd., an Israeli-based private elecommunications company.

Amdocs has contracts with the 25 biggest phone companies in America, and more worldwide. The White House and other secure government phone lines are protected, but it is virtually impossible to make a call on normal phones without generating an Amdocs record of it.

In recent years, the FBI and other government agencies have investigated Amdocs more than once. The firm has repeatedly and adamantly denied any security breaches or wrongdoing. But sources tell Fox News that in 1999, the super secret national security agency, headquartered in northern Maryland, issued what's called a Top Secret sensitive compartmentalized information report, TS/SCI, warning that records of calls in the United States were getting into foreign hands – in Israel, in particular.

Investigators don't believe calls are being listened to, but the data about who is calling whom and when is plenty valuable in itself. An internal Amdocs memo to senior company executives suggests just how Amdocs generated call records could be used. “Widespread data mining techniques and algorithms.... combining both the properties of the customer (e.g., credit rating) and properties of the specific ‘behavior….’” Specific behavior, such as who the customers are calling.

The Amdocs memo says the system should be used to prevent phone fraud. But U.S. counterintelligence analysts say it could also be used to spy through the phone system. Fox News has learned that the N.S.A has held numerous classified conferences to warn the F.B.I. and C.I.A. how Amdocs records could be used. At one NSA briefing, a diagram by the Argon national lab was used to show that if the phone records are not secure, major security breaches are possible.

Another briefing document said, "It has become increasingly apparent that systems and networks are vulnerable.…Such crimes always involve unauthorized persons, or persons who exceed their authorization...citing on exploitable vulnerabilities."

Those vulnerabilities are growing, because according to another briefing, the U.S. relies too much on foreign companies like Amdocs for high-tech equipment and software. "Many factors have led to increased dependence on code developed overseas.... We buy rather than train or develop solutions."

U.S. intelligence does not believe the Israeli government is involved in a misuse of information, and Amdocs insists that its data is secure. What U.S. government officials are worried about, however, is the possibility that Amdocs data could get into the wrong hands, particularly organized crime. And that would not be the first thing that such a thing has happened. Fox News has documents of a 1997 drug trafficking case in Los Angeles, in which telephone information, the type that Amdocs collects, was used to "completely compromise the communications of the FBI, the Secret Service, the DEO and the LAPD."

We'll have that and a lot more in the days ahead – Brit.

HUME: Carl, I want to take you back to your report last night on those 60 Israelis who were detained in the anti-terror investigation, and the suspicion that some investigators have that they may have picked up information on the 9/11 attacks ahead of time and not passed it on.

There was a report, you'll recall, that the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, did indeed send representatives to the U.S. to warn, just before 9/11, that a major terrorist attack was imminent. How does that leave room for the lack of a warning?

CAMERON: I remember the report, Brit. We did it first internationally right here on your show on the 14th. What investigators are saying is that that warning from the Mossad was nonspecific and general, and they believe that it may have had something to do with the desire to protect what are called sources and methods in the intelligence community. The suspicion being, perhaps those sources and methods were taking place right here in the United States.

The question came up in select intelligence committee on Capitol Hill today. They intend to look into what we reported last night, and specifically that possibility – Brit.

HUME: So in other words, the problem wasn't lack of a warning, the problem was lack of useful details?

CAMERON: Quantity of information.

HUME: All right, Carl, thank you very much.

Part 3 of 4

BRIT HUME, HOST: Last time we reported on an Israeli-based company called Amdocs Ltd. that generates the computerized records and billing data for nearly every phone call made in America. As Carl Cameron reported, U.S. investigators digging into the 9/11 terrorist attacks fear that suspects may have been tipped off to what they were doing by information leaking out of Amdocs.

In tonight's report, we learn that the concern about phone security extends to another company, founded in Israel, that provides the technology that the U.S. government uses for electronic eavesdropping. Here is Carl Cameron's third report.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CARL CAMERON, FOX NEWS CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The company is Comverse Infosys, a subsidiary of an Israeli-run private telecommunications firm, with offices throughout the U.S. It provides wiretapping equipment for law enforcement. Here's how wiretapping works in the U.S.

Every time you make a call, it passes through the nation's elaborate network of switchers and routers run by the phone companies. Custom computers and software, made by companies like Comverse, are tied into that network to intercept, record and store the wiretapped calls, and at the same time transmit them to investigators.

The manufacturers have continuing access to the computers so they can service them and keep them free of glitches. This process was authorized by the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA. Senior government officials have now told Fox News that while CALEA made wiretapping easier, it has led to a system that is seriously vulnerable to compromise, and may have undermined the whole wiretapping system.

Indeed, Fox News has learned that Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller were both warned Oct. 18 in a hand-delivered letter from 15 local, state and federal law enforcement officials, who complained that "law enforcement's current electronic surveillance capabilities are less effective today than they were at the time CALEA was enacted."

Congress insists the equipment it installs is secure. But the complaint about this system is that the wiretap computer programs made by Comverse have, in effect, a back door through which wiretaps themselves can be intercepted by unauthorized parties.

Adding to the suspicions is the fact that in Israel, Comverse works closely with the Israeli government, and under special programs, gets reimbursed for up to 50 percent of its research and development costs by the Israeli Ministry of Industry and Trade. But investigators within the DEA, INS and FBI have all told Fox News that to pursue or even suggest Israeli spying through Comverse is considered career suicide.

And sources say that while various F.B.I. inquiries into Comverse have been conducted over the years, they've been halted before the actual equipment has ever been thoroughly tested for leaks. A 1999 F.C.C. document indicates several government agencies expressed deep concerns that too many unauthorized non-law enforcement personnel can access the wiretap system. And the FBI's own nondescript office in Chantilly, Virginia that actually oversees the CALEA wiretapping program, is among the most agitated about the threat.

But there is a bitter turf war internally at F.B.I. It is the FBI's office in Quantico, Virginia, that has jurisdiction over awarding contracts and buying intercept equipment. And for years, they've thrown much of the business to Comverse. A handful of former U.S. law enforcement officials involved in awarding Comverse government contracts over the years now work for the company.

Numerous sources say some of those individuals were asked to leave government service under what knowledgeable sources call "troublesome circumstances" that remain under administrative review within the Justice Department.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

And what troubles investigators most, particularly in New York, in the counter terrorism investigation of the World Trade Center attack, is that on a number of cases, suspects that they had sought to wiretap and survey immediately changed their telecommunications processes. They started acting much differently as soon as those supposedly secret wiretaps went into place – Brit.

HUME: Carl, is there any reason to suspect in this instance that the Israeli government is involved?

CAMERON: No, there's not. But there are growing instincts in an awful lot of law enforcement officials in a variety of agencies who suspect that it had begun compiling evidence, and a highly classified investigation into that possibility – Brit.

HUME: All right, Carl. Thanks very much.

Part 4 of 4

TONY SNOW, HOST: This week, senior correspondent Carl Cameron has reported on a longstanding government espionage investigation. Federal officials this year have arrested or detained nearly 200 Israeli citizens suspected of belonging to an "organized intelligence-gathering operation." The Bush administration has deported most of those arrested after Sept. 11, although some are in custody under the new anti-terrorism law.

Cameron also investigates the possibility that an Israeli firm generated billing data that could be used for intelligence purpose, and describes concerns that the federal government's own wiretapping system may be vulnerable. Tonight, in part four of the series, we'll learn about the probable roots of the probe: a drug case that went bad four years ago in L.A.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CARL CAMERON, FOX NEWS CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Los Angeles, 1997, a major local, state and federal drug investigating sours. The suspects: Israeli organized crime with operations in New York, Miami, Las Vegas, Canada, Israel and Egypt. The allegations: cocaine and ecstasy trafficking, and sophisticated white-collar credit card and computer fraud.

The problem: according to classified law enforcement documents obtained by Fox News, the bad guys had the cops’ beepers, cell phones, even home phones under surveillance. Some who did get caught admitted to having hundreds of numbers and using them to avoid arrest.

"This compromised law enforcement communications between LAPD detectives and other assigned law enforcement officers working various aspects of the case. The organization discovered communications between organized crime intelligence division detectives, the FBI and the Secret Service."

Shock spread from the DEA to the FBI in Washington, and then the CIA. An investigation of the problem, according to law enforcement documents, concluded, "The organization has apparent extensive access to database systems to identify pertinent personal and biographical information."

When investigators tried to find out where the information might have come from, they looked at Amdocs, a publicly traded firm based in Israel. Amdocs generates billing data for virtually every call in America, and they do credit checks. The company denies any leaks, but investigators still fear that the firm's data is getting into the wrong hands.

When investigators checked their own wiretapping system for leaks, they grew concerned about potential vulnerabilities in the computers that intercept, record and store the wiretapped calls. A main contractor is Comverse Infosys, which works closely with the Israeli government, and under a special grant program, is reimbursed for up to 50 percent of its research and development costs by Israel's Ministry of Industry and Trade.

Asked this week about another sprawling investigation and the detention of 60 Israeli since Sept. 11, the Bush administration treated the questions like hot potatoes.

ARI FLEISCHER, WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY: I would just refer you to the Department of Justice with that. I'm not familiar with the report.

COLIN POWELL, SECRETARY OF STATE: I'm aware that some Israeli citizens have been detained. With respect to why they're being detained and the other aspects of your question – whether it's because they're in intelligence services, or what they were doing – I will defer to the Department of Justice and the FBI to answer that.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

CAMERON: Beyond the 60 apprehended or detained, and many deported since Sept. 11, another group of 140 Israeli individuals have been arrested and detained in this year in what government documents describe as "an organized intelligence gathering operation," designed to "penetrate government facilities." Most of those individuals said they had served in the Israeli military, which is compulsory there.

But they also had, most of them, intelligence expertise, and either worked for Amdocs or other companies in Israel that specialize in wiretapping. Earlier this week, the Israeli embassy in Washington denied any spying against or in the United States – Tony.

SNOW: Carl, we've heard the comments from Ari Fleischer and Colin Powell. What are officials saying behind the scenes?

CAMERON: Well, there's real pandemonium described at the FBI, the DEA and the INS. A lot of these problems have been well known to some investigators, many of who have contributed to the reporting on this story. And what they say is happening is supervisors and management are now going back and collecting much of the information, because there's tremendous pressure from the top levels of all of those agencies to find out exactly what's going on.

At the DEA and the FBI already a variety of administration reviews are under way, in addition to the investigation of the phenomenon. They want to find out how it is all this has come out, as well as be very careful because of the explosive nature and very political ramifications of the story itself – Tony.

SNOW: All right, Carl, thanks.

[Skins24]

Oh goody, now that we know this we can bring the 3000+ who died back!!!

....oh wait....we can't.....:doh:

[Atlanta Skins Fan]

Originally posted by jbooma

"Five Israeli agents were caught videoing the burning WTC towers and were reported to be posing in front of them (on top of their van) and celebrating. They worked for a front operation called "Urban Moving Systems", whose name was on their van.

Three Israelis were caught, in a van labeled "Moving Systems Incorporated", with a video showing extensive zoom shots of the Sears Tower. The Sears Tower was thought to be a target of the 5th or 6th 9/11 plane targeted for hijacking on 9/11 (one plane never left the ground; the other was diverted to Canada)"

ASF, where did you get this from? This was not in your "credible" salon article. Did you write this yourself or do you have something to back this up with.

All of this makes me think, what position do you really have since at first you blame the US for 9/11 and now it seems you are blaming Israel for it. You jump from side to side it seems but don't seem to support one theory 100%.

My theory has been consistent since I began posting on this recently. The official story is that the 9/11 attacks were wholly conspired and produced by Islamic militants. Some fringe groups think 9/11 was a U.S. operation. Other fringe groups think it was an Israeli operation.

My theory is, "all of the above". I've stated the theory in more depth elsewhere. But the quick version is that 9/11 was a joint U.S.-Israeli operation, probably directed by some members of PNAC (Paul Wolfowitz being the most likely mastermind), with logistical operations directed by Mossad, and the actual attacks performed by duped anti-American Islamic militants.

As to sources for the statements above, yes I have multiple sources. I'll post them later, probably this evening. Those stories were actually more broadly reported than the Salon.com story about a massive spy operation being directed against federal law enforcement.

[jbooma]

You still didn't quote the source for the images of the soldiers jumping up and down, or at least admit it was your own writing.

If that is your theory then wouldn't the US and Israel try to make one of the palestinian terrorist groups look guilty, not Al Qaeda?? Al Qaeda doesn't do the damage that Hezbollah or the other groups do to Israel.

[@DCGoldPants]

I don't buy it.

I personally don't see enough of a "reason" for Israel to be behind it. Plus. as well prepared as the 9/11 attacks were. I think if Israel were behind it, that 3rd plane would of made it a lot closer to D.C.. Plus, they could of trained the pilots in secret outside of the U.S..

[Atlanta Skins Fan]

Originally posted by jbooma

You still didn't quote the source for the images of the soldiers jumping up and down, or at least admit it was your own writing.

jbooma, one thing you'll learn is not to challenge my sources. I post well sourced stuff.

Here are some sources for you:

Five Men Detained As Suspected Conspirators

by Paulo Lima

The Bergen Record [New Jersey newspaper]

September 12, 2001

Eight hours after terrorists struck Manhattan's tallest skyscrapers, police in Bergen County detained five men who they said were found carrying maps linking them to the blasts. The five men, who were in a van stopped on Route 3 in East Rutherford around 4:30 p.m., were being questioned by police but had not been charged with any crime late Tuesday.

However, sources close to the investigation said they found other evidence linking the men to the bombing plot. "There are maps of the city in the car with certain places highlighted," the source said. "It looked like they're hooked in with this. It looked like they knew what was going to happen when they were at Liberty State Park."

Sources also said that bomb-sniffing dogs reacted as if they had detected explosives. The FBI seized the van for further testing, authorities said. Sources said the van was stopped as it headed east on Route 3, between the Hackensack River bridge and the Sheraton hotel. As a precaution, police shut down Route 3 traffic in both directions after the stop and evacuated a small roadside motel near the Sheraton.

Sources close to the investigation said the men said they were Israeli tourists, but police had not been able to confirm their identities. Authorities would not release their names. East Rutherford officers stopped the van after the FBI's Newark Office broadcast an alert asking surrounding police departments to look for a white Chevrolet van, police said.

"We got an alert to be on the lookout for a white Chevrolet van with New Jersey registration and writing on the side," said Bergen County Police Chief John Schmidig. "Three individuals were seen celebrating in Liberty State Park after the impact. They said three people were jumping up and down."

East Rutherford officers summoned the county bomb squad, New Jersey state troopers, and FBI agents, who waited alongside the van as prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney's Office tried to obtain a warrant to search the van late Tuesday, Schmidig said. The FBI alert, known as a BOLO or "Be On Lookout," was sent out at 3:31 p.m. It read:

"Vehicle possibly related to New York terrorist attack. White, 2000 Chevrolet van with New Jersey registration with 'Urban Moving Systems' sign on back seen at Liberty State Park, Jersey City, NJ, at the time of first impact of jetliner into World Trade Center. "Three individuals with van were seen celebrating after initial impact and subsequent explosion. FBI Newark Field Office requests that, if the van is located, hold for prints and detain individuals."

State police Col. Barry W. Roberson confirmed the traffic stop at a late night news briefing at state police headquarters in Trenton. He would not elaborate, however. A business traveler staying at the Homestead Studio Hotel said she watched state troopers drive the suspects away in a procession of state police cars about 5 p.m. "First, they told us we could hang out in the lobby, but then they told us to leave," the traveler said.

At 10 p.m., the hotel guest said she could see at least two police officers searching through the van while a crowd of other officers kept their distance.

http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=75266&sw=mockery%20

5 Israelis detained for `puzzling behavior' after WTC tragedy

By Yossi Melman

Five Israelis who had worked for a moving company based in New Jersey are being held in U.S. prisons for what the Federal Bureau of Investigation has described as "puzzling behavior" following the terror attack on the World Trade Center in New York last Tuesday. The five are expected to be deported sometime soon.

The families of the five, who asked that their names not be released, said that their sons had been questioned by the FBI for hours on end, had been kept in solitary confinement for three days, and had been humiliated, stripped of their clothes and blindfolded.

...

The Foreign Ministry said in response that it had been informed by the consulate in New York that the FBI had arrested the five for "puzzling behavior." They are said to have had been caught videotaping the disaster and shouting in what was interpreted as cries of joy and mockery.

The following article in a Jewish-audience publication concedes the men were Israeli spies, but asserts that they were really on the U.S. side:

http://www.forward.com/issues/2002/02.03.15/news2.html

MARCH 15, 2002

Spy Rumors Fly on Gusts of Truth

Americans Probing Reports of Israeli Espionage

By MARC PERELMAN

FORWARD STAFF

Despite angry denials by Israel and its American supporters, reports that Israel was conducting spying activities in the United States may have a grain of truth, the Forward has learned.

However, far from pointing to Israeli spying against U.S. government and military facilities, as reported in Europe last week, the incidents in question appear to represent a case of Israelis in the United States spying on a common enemy, radical Islamic networks suspected of links to Middle East terrorism.

[jbooma]

See was that so hard now

However, do you think this group was maybe terrorists under the disguise of Israeli's?

What do you make of the video of Bin Laden telling all of his comrades about the plans, and discussing the plot of the attack on that day?

If the US and Israel were involved, wouldn't they have let this group go? There are such things as maybe they were Israeli's but working with a terrorist group, not thier government. That makes more since then saying the governments were behind this.

I have always believed our government knew of an attack, but they didn't have concrete evidence and didn't know where, when, and how it would happen.

What also do you make of the phone call one of the passengers made on the plane to his wife saying that there are some armed muslims on the plan, do you think the were working with our government too??

Your theory has a lot of holes yet to be answered. I give you credit that you do have some sources to back some of it.

Remember when the sniper case was happening in DC? All along they believed it was a white van, but guess what they were wrong. This is simillar to what your story is based on. People saw this van by the scenes so they believed that was the vehicle used. Turns out they were never in that van.

Here in DC I remember people saying that buildings were blowing up in Arlington on 9-11, it is very hard to say that what these people saw was the actual proof. There were so many fake stories reported that day, everyone was just in shock and believed anything the imagined. That is all I have to say. When you can start answering some of those questions I pointed out I would listen.

To say that the US and Israel worked with one way or another with a terrorist group is insane. According to your theory then that must be the case since there is hard evidence of the individuals in the planes, and they were not US or Israeli.

[Riggo-toni]

The last paragraph finally gets it right. Israelis were in the US spying on Islamic radicals. The truth is, our gov't was far too complacent vis a vis terrorists prior to 9/11. Israel couldn't afford that luxury.

Does Israel spy on us? Undoubtedly, as I'm sure we spy on them. France has been conducting full scale industrial espionage on the US since the 80s, trying to steal as many high-tech plans as well as gain foreknowledge of US corporation strategies. Russia was sending copies of messages from Tony Blair to Saddam. Yet you and the other devout UN/Internationalists seem to believe we should subordinate our foreign policy to these countries while simultaneously condemning Israel for spying on a common enemy.

The idea that Mossad officers would be jumping up and down in celebration of 9/11 is fvcking ridiculous. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that somehow they were involved (which I don't believe). These guys aren't that friggin stupid. No way would they be openly celebrating. The Mossad are brilliant and disciplined professionals. More likely this would be Palestinians or other Arabs) posing as Israelis, if there is any truth to their existence at all. This sort of tactic is very common among suicide bombers in Israel.

By the way, isn't Haaretz another one of those Arab "news" sources like Al Jazeera?

[Atlanta Skins Fan]

Here's more, with a highlight first:

On the evening of Sept. 11, local police in Bergen County, New Jersey, arrested five Israeli nationals as they were driving a van, owned by their employer, a Weehawken, N.J. moving company called Urban Moving Systems.

The five Israelis, Sivan and Paul Kurzberg, Oded Ellner, Moer Marmari, and Yaron Shmuel, had been spotted on the roof of the moving company warehouse, shortly after planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers, taking photos of one another and obviously clowning around, while pointing at the burning towers in the background.

Perleman reported, "In addition to their strange behavior and their Middle Eastern looks, the suspicions were compounded when a box cutter and $4,000 in cash were found in the van. Moreover, one man carried two passports, and another had fresh pictures of the men standing with the smoldering wreckage of the World Trade Center in the background."

The five men were turned over to the FBI by the Bergen County police, and, after two of the men's names appeared on an FBI-CIA list of known Mossad operatives, the U.S. opened a foreign counterintelligence investigation of the incident. The Israelis were held for several months, interrogated and put through lie detector tests, and were eventually deported back to Israel.

After one brief interview with the FBI, the owner of the moving company, Dominik Otto Suter, fled to Israel. Authorities confirmed that the company was a Mossad front, whose "main office" was a letter drop address in midtown Manhattan.

A Pattern?

Putting the New Jersey arrests together with a similar incident that took place a month later in Pennsylvania, poses further questions about another possible modus operandi of Israeli Mossad spy operations in America.

According to The Mercury, a Pottstown, Pennsylvania newspaper, on Oct. 17, 2001, another group of Israelis, working for a moving company, were detained by police in Plymouth, Pennsylvania, a Philadelphia suburb, in response to complaints that they were illegally dumping the contents of a tractor-trailer behind a local restaurant. The three Israelis, Ron Katar, Moshe Elmakias, and Ayelet Reisler, were detained by the FBI, after a search of the tractor-trailer unearthed detailed surveillance videos of the Sears Towers in Chicago, and other suspicious items. The tractor-trailer had the logo "Moving Systems Incorporated" on the side, and was mostly filled with office furniture and household items. The FBI probe revealed that the operator's log of the truck's movements had been falsified.

Here's the full story:

http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2002/2912isrspies_updt.html

This article appears in the March 29, 2002 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

Administration Makes First Moves

Against Israeli Spies

by Jeffrey Steinberg

At the same time that Attorney General John Ashcroft has ordered the surpression of news coverage of massive Israeli espionage operations inside the United States, the Bush Administration has taken several significant initiatives, aimed at closing some of the most egregious loopholes, that have facilitated Israeli penetration of American national security institutions at the highest levels.

In the beginning of March 2002, both the Defense Department and the Justice Department issued new regulations, prohibiting foreign nationals from involvement in the development and maintenance of information technology systems at the two giant federal bureaucracies. While internal memos and public statements by the Pentagon and the Justice Department did not mention Israeli telecommunications firms as the targets of the new orders, the timing of the actions—just days after major international media exposes of the Israeli spy operations in America—left little doubt about the motive for the crackdown.

And one interoffice communiqué from the Drug Enforcement Administration, according to well-informed sources, does single out several Israeli companies, with sensitive DEA information technology contracts. The companies, Comverse and JSI, received a $25 million contract from DEA in Sept. 1997 to provide interception equipment, used in some of the agency's most sensitive international and domestic drug investigations.

Pete Nelson, the Pentagon deputy director for personnel security, told World Tribune.com, on March 13, 2002 that "some foreign nationals—those in the most sensitive positions—may not be permitted to remain in those positions ... [W]e need to ensure all people with access to sensitive IT systems are cleared and properly vetted for the material to which they have access."

The new DOD regulations, to be implemented within the next 60-90 days, would extend restrictions that already exist on classified projects, to non-classified DOD projects as well.

According to the newsletter Middle East Newsline, Israeli firms currently have DOD contracts for encryption technology and software, that is vital for the security of the Pentagon's most sensitive data bases.

The Israeli firms have made deep inroads into the Defense Department's IT operations, as the result of recent years' pressures on Pentagon budget planners to save money by outsourcing, even to foreign firms. The Department's Pete Nelson admitted, "The IT business has become largely contractual, with programming and data work being farmed out to areas where there is cheap labor. If this trend does not simultaneously take into consideration security requirements, there would be reason for concern."

The Justice Department, on March 4, issued a memorandum from Robert F. Diegelman, Acting Assistant Attorney General for Administration, which placed similar bans on foreign nationals involvement in information technology development and maintenance. The memorandum ordered DOJ information officers and procurement directors to fully implement a July 12, 2001 Justice Department Order, No. 2460.2D, which banned foreign nationals from any access to the Department's IT systems, unless a waiver was first issued by the Department's Chief Information Officer. The March 4, 2002 memorandum emphasized that no waivers would be granted, under any circumstances, for IT projects which involved access to classified systems.

Comverse and Telrad

Readers of EIR who have followed the Israeli espionage scandal since Executive Alert Service broke the story on Dec. 4, 2001, will recall that a string of Israeli companies—all founded by veterans of the Israeli Defense Force signal intelligence division—have won sensitive U.S. national security contracts, giving them extraordinary access to Justice Department and White House secured communications systems. Comverse Infosys, Inc., a company founded in Israel in 1984, is the leading provider and operator of wiretap systems, used by the Department of Justice, the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). Telrad Telecommunications and Electronics Industries Ltd. is Israel's largest telecommunications conglomerate. During the Clinton Administration, Telrad was contracted to revamp the White House secured communications systems.

A third Israeli telecommunications giant, Amdocs International Ltd., has the exclusive customer-billing and call-tracking contracts with the 25 largest phone companies in the United States, giving Amdocs access to the routing information on practically every telephone call placed in America.

The most comprehensive dossier on these Israeli firms to appear in the U.S. media, was published in EIR on Feb. 1, 2002, and has since been republished, along with exhaustive additional documentation of the Israeli spy apparatus, in a LaRouche in 2004 campaign special report, Zbigniew Brzezinski and September 11th.

The 'Art Students'

What's more, both Comverse and Amdocs personnel have been linked to the scores of Israeli spy teams, that have been operating in every part of the United States, since no later than January 2000 (see "EIR Blows Israeli Spies' Cover in Sept. 11 Case," EIR Dec. 28, 2001, and "Israeli Spies Scandal Is Too Big To Bury," EIR Jan. 11, 2002). These 6- to 8-person espionage squads, posing as "Israeli art students," have been infiltrating and surveilling government officies, military bases, safe-houses and private homes of government executives. Some of the teams have been linked to "Islamic" radical circles, with possible ties to terrorist groups.

According to government sources, and a 60-page Drug Enforcement Administration working document, now widely circulating among reporters in the U.S. and Europe, 125 Israeli "art students" were detained and deported between January 2000 and July 2001; another 80-100 Israelis have been similarly detained, interrogated, and deported, since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.

In one case, set forth in the DEA document, an Israeli "art student" was bailed out of jail by another Israeli, named Ophir Baer, who was an employee of Amdocs.

The proximity of the Israeli "art student" spy teams to some of the suspected al-Qaeda "sleeper" networks in the United States has prompted some American national security officials to suspect that Israel had infiltrated the Sept. 11 terror plot, at some level, and failed to pass on the information to U.S. authorities.

In Texas, California, Arkansas, and Florida, U.S. investigators found that the Israeli "art student" teams were living within a stone's throw from houses and apartments occupied by suspected "Islamic" terrorists, whose names appeared on an Oct. 2001 list of individuals whose assets were frozen, at the request of the U.S. government.

In the most egregious instance, a dozen Israeli spies were operating out of a Hollywood, Florida address, 4220 Sheridan Street, just a block away from 3389 Sheridan Street, the apartment where Mohammed Atta was living with three other men accused of the Sept. 11 hijackings.

Movers and Shakers

On March 15, the first evidence of direct Israeli Mossad ties to the U.S.-based spy teams surfaced, in an unlikely location. The weekly Jewish newspaper Forward published a pair of lengthy stories on the Israeli "art student" spy flap, which attempted to discredit the charges that the Israelis were targetting the U.S. government for espionage operations.

(The idea of Israel spying on the United States is still a point of maximum tension between Washington and Tel Aviv, nearly 17 years after the arrest of Naval intelligence analyst Jonathan Jay Pollard, who was caught stealing thousands of top-secret U.S. military documents, and passing them to officials of the Israeli embassy in Washington.)

Forward's Marc Perleman reported that "far from pointing to Israeli spying against U.S. government and military facilities, as reported in Europe last week, the incidents in question appear to represent a case of Israelis in the United States spying on a common enemy, radical Islamic networks suspected of links to Middle East terrorism." Perleman claimed that American officials were furious when they learned of the Israeli "art student" spy operations—because they had not been alerted in advance. "The resulting tensions between Washington and Jerusalem," he wrote, "arose not because of the operations' targets but because Israel reportedly violated a secret gentlemen's agreement between the two countries under which espionage on each other's soil is to be coordinated in advance."

On the face of it, Perleman's explanation for the Israeli "art student" fiasco is pure fabrication. The DEA documents, butressed by on-the-record statements by several U.S. government spokesmen, confirms that dozens of DEA, FBI, and other federal law enforcement facilities were targetted for aggressive surveillance by the Israeli teams; and at least 36 military bases on U.S. soil were similarly targetted, including an Oklahoma air base that houses America's AWACS surveillance aircraft, and a secret U.S. Special Forces facility near Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

What was revealing about the Perleman story, was the confirmation that one of the most controversial of the Israeli spy teams was a Mossad squad, working undercover.

On the evening of Sept. 11, local police in Bergen County, New Jersey, arrested five Israeli nationals as they were driving a van, owned by their employer, a Weehawken, N.J. moving company called Urban Moving Systems.

The five Israelis, Sivan and Paul Kurzberg, Oded Ellner, Moer Marmari, and Yaron Shmuel, had been spotted on the roof of the moving company warehouse, shortly after planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers, taking photos of one another and obviously clowning around, while pointing at the burning towers in the background.

Perleman reported, "In addition to their strange behavior and their Middle Eastern looks, the suspicions were compounded when a box cutter and $4,000 in cash were found in the van. Moreover, one man carried two passports, and another had fresh pictures of the men standing with the smoldering wreckage of the World Trade Center in the background."

The five men were turned over to the FBI by the Bergen County police, and, after two of the men's names appeared on an FBI-CIA list of known Mossad operatives, the U.S. opened a foreign counterintelligence investigation of the incident. The Israelis were held for several months, interrogated and put through lie detector tests, and were eventually deported back to Israel.

After one brief interview with the FBI, the owner of the moving company, Dominik Otto Suter, fled to Israel. Authorities confirmed that the company was a Mossad front, whose "main office" was a letter drop address in midtown Manhattan.

A Pattern?

Putting the New Jersey arrests together with a similar incident that took place a month later in Pennsylvania, poses further questions about another possible modus operandi of Israeli Mossad spy operations in America.

According to The Mercury, a Pottstown, Pennsylvania newspaper, on Oct. 17, 2001, another group of Israelis, working for a moving company, were detained by police in Plymouth, Pennsylvania, a Philadelphia suburb, in response to complaints that they were illegally dumping the contents of a tractor-trailer behind a local restaurant. The three Israelis, Ron Katar, Moshe Elmakias, and Ayelet Reisler, were detained by the FBI, after a search of the tractor-trailer unearthed detailed surveillance videos of the Sears Towers in Chicago, and other suspicious items. The tractor-trailer had the logo "Moving Systems Incorporated" on the side, and was mostly filled with office furniture and household items. The FBI probe revealed that the operator's log of the truck's movements had been falsified.

It is not yet clear whether the "moving companies" are part of the same spy apparatus that has been the subject of the DEA-initiated interagency counterintelligence probe, a probe that is an included part of the Sept. 11 terror investigation.

Government officials are not talking about how the multiple tracks of Israeli spy leads are being viewed, although a DEA internal memorandum from Dec. 2001, clearly links the "art students" probe to the review of the status of the Comverse and JSI contracts.

EIR has also learned that, in several Western European countries, including the Netherlands and possibly Germany, the Israeli Mossad is officially handling all visa background checks, for applicants from Arab and Muslim countries. According to a well-placed diplomatic source, the Israelis offered these "services," free of charge, to the European immigration agencies, in return for access to the unusually detailed information contained in the visa applications. The rationale for the deal is that the Israeli secret services maintain the most comprehensive watch-lists of suspected Arab and Islamic terrorists and criminals.

The source of this startling information, however, noted that, under this arrangement, the Israelis have access to the past travel itineraries of all the visa applicants, and would, therefore, have a profile of individuals—such as Mohammad Atta—who travelled back and forth to Pakistan and Afghanistan, and other al-Qaeda, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad hotbeds of activity. The source asked the obvious question: How much did the Israeli Mossad know about the activities of the so-called "Hamburg cell" of al-Qaeda terror plotters? And why, if the Israelis did, indeed, have the authority to turn down visa applications, did Atta and the others have such free access between Europe and the United States?

These are disturbing questions that need answering, if the full story of the events of Sept. 11, 2001 is ever to be known, and a serious crackdown on the actual authors of the horrific attacks achieved.

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Originally posted by riggo-toni

The idea that Mossad officers would be jumping up and down in celebration of 9/11 is fvcking ridiculous. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that somehow they were involved (which I don't believe). These guys aren't that friggin stupid. No way would they be openly celebrating. The Mossad are brilliant and disciplined professionals. More likely this would be Palestinians or other Arabs) posing as Israelis, if there is any truth to their existence at all. This sort of tactic is very common among suicide bombers in Israel.

riggo-toni, come on. Put on your reading glasses and thinking cap. These guys were confirmed to be Israelis and confirmed to be spies, which is why they were deported. The only reason they weren't held even longer or charged is because the U.S. government couldn't prove they were part of the 9/11 plot, and the U.S. government was under intense Israeli pressure to release the men.

Your most interesting point is the question as to whether Mossad conspirators would be caught so stupidly celebrating. My take on this is that these guys were low-level guys in Israeli spy circles, who were either involved only tangentially or were simply aware of the plot, and showed their stupidity by celebrating. Obviously high-level Mossad operatives are not morons.

By the way, isn't Haaretz another one of those Arab "news" sources like Al Jazeera?

You jest. Haaretz is one of Israel's top dailies. It was founded in 1919 by Zionists.