September 12, 2001, The Boston Herald, Hijackers tied to Boston - Search begins for local bin Ladin group. by Jules Wells, Jonathan Crittenden and Stephanie Schorow,
September 13, 2001, The Independent (London) Terror in America: The Investigation - Police raid hotel used by suspects in Boston, by Andrew Gumbel and Chris Blackhurst,
September 13, 2001, The Independent (London), Terror In America: The Investigation - FBI starts 'biggest manhunt in history', by Chris Blackhurst,
September 22, 2001, World Net Daily, Did Israelis Evacuate Towers?
October 8, 2001, New York Times, 5 Young Israelis, Caught in Net of Suspicion, by Alison Leigh Cowan,
October 19, 2001, The Forward, Prison is No Joke for 5 Israeli Detainees, by Nacha Cattan,
November 9, 2001, Salon.com, "Islamism is fascism," Daniel Pipes says leading American Muslim groups want Islamic law to rule the U.S. -- even if they won't admit it -- and must be carefully watched, by Eric Boehlert,
November 21, 2001, New York Times, Dozens of Israeli Jews Are Being Kept in Federal Detention, by Tamar Lewin and Alison Leigh Cowan,
November 23, 2001, The Washington Post, 60 Israelis on Tourist Visas Detained Since Sept. 11; Government Calls Several Cases 'of Special Interest,' Meaning Related to Post- Attacks Investigation, by John Mintz,
December 21, 2001, The Forward, Israel Calls Fox's Spy Reports 'Baseless', by Marc Perelman,
March 5, 2002, Le Monde, An Enigma: Vast Israeli Spy Network Dismantled in the US, by Sylvain Cypel, Translated by Malcolm Garris,
March 6, 2002, International Herald Tribune, U.S. cool to report of Israeli spy ring, by Brian Knowlton,
March 9, 2002, AP Worldstream, Tourists or spies? Federal agencies track 'suspicious' Israeli art students, by Connie Cass,
March 9, 2002, AP Online, Gov't Tracks Israeli Art Students, by Connie Cass,
March 10, 2002, Telegraph - Herald (Dubuque) / Associated Press, Israeli 'art students' draw authorities' attention; Immigration violations: Dozens are deported after originally being suspected of spying,
March 11, 2002, Jewish World Review, An Israeli spy network in the United States?, by Daniel Pipes,
March 15, 2002, The Forward, FBI: Deported Students Weren't Agents, by Marc Perelman,
March 15, 2002, The Forward, "Spy Rumors Fly on Gusts of Truth: Americans Probing Reports of Israeli Espionage," by Marc Perelman,
March 21, 2002, The Jewish Advocate (Boston, MA), An Israeli Spy Network in the U.S.?, by Daniel Pipes,
April 1, 2002, Insight on the News, Intelligence agents or art students? The DEA and Justice Department believe there was something sinister behind unusual visits Israeli `art students' paid to employees of law-enforcement agencies, by Paul Rodriguez,
April 16, 2002, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Florida-Based Movers' Ring Uses Shady Tactics, Illegal Workers, Watchdogs Say, by Dan Benson,
April 21, 2002, Sunday Gazette-Mail, Movers and shakedowns: Ring uses shady tactics, illegal Israeli workers, watchdogs say, by Dan Benson,
April 30, 2002, Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Movers' ring uses shady tactics, illegal Israelis, watchdogs say, by Dan Benson,
June 1, 2002, The Middle East, With friends like these ...: Ed Blanche reports on allegations of Israeli espionage on its closest ally, the United States, by Ed Blanche,
June 24, 2002, ABC News 20/20, The White Van. Were Israelis Detained on Sept. 11 Spies?,
August 29, 2004, The Record (Bergen County, NJ) / Knight Ridder Newspapers, Spy probe may reach beyond Israel case, by Warren P. Strobel,
August 30, 2004, Israel Faxx, Israel Denies Spying on United States, by VOA News & Ha'aretz,
September 3, 2004, Los Angeles Times, Israel Has Long Spied on US, Say Officials, by Bob Drogin and Greg Miller,
October 1, 2004, The Middle East, With friends like these ... The Israeli government has strenuously denied involvement in the current spy scandal in the United States but the episode has undoubtedly opened up old wounds, by Ed Blanche,
September 12, 2001, The Record (Bergen County, NJ) Five Men Detained as Suspected Conspirators, Maps Connect Them to Attack, by Paulo Lima, Staff Writer,
Similar Van Was in Liberty Park,
Edition: Late, Notes: ATTACK ON AMERICA. 2 of 2 versions.
About 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. The Bergen County Police bomb squad X-rayed packages found inside the van but did not find any explosives, authorities said.
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, although officers were unable to find anything. 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 Field 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."
The East Rutherford officers summoned the county police 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.
By 10 p.m., members of the bomb squad were picking through the van and X-raying packages found inside, Schmidig said.
Sources 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."
FBI spokeswoman Sandra Carroll declined to comment on the incident late Tuesday.
State police Lt. 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.
Business records show an Urban Moving Systems with offices on West 50th Street in Manhattan and on West 18th Street in Weehawken. Telephone messages left at the businesses Tuesday evening were not immediately returned.
Business records show the owner as Dominik Suter of Fair Lawn. A woman answering the telephone at Suter's home acknowledged he owned the company but refused to comment further. She also declined to identify herself.
It was not clear Tuesday whether the van stopped by police is related to Suter's company.
A business traveler staying at the Homestead Studio Suites Hotel said she watched state troopers drive the suspects away in a procession of state police cars about 5 p.m.
The woman, who asked not to be identified, said the people detained appeared to be white men, but she could not give more details. About 5:30 p.m., police evacuated the hotel without offering guests an explanation.
"First, they told us we could hang out in the lobby, but then they told us we had 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. Except for police vehicles and a tow truck, the service road beside Route 3 was empty, she said.
Staff Writer Wendy Ruderman contributed to this report. Staff Writer Paulo Lima's e-mail address is lima(at)northjersey.com
Illustrations/Photos: PHOTO - JAMES W. ANNESS / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER - TRAGIC
VIEW: Looking like a large smokestack billowing in the distance, the World Trade Center burns out of control as four men watch the tragedy from Jersey City just before the collapse of the north tower.
September 12, 2001, The Boston Herald, Hijackers tied to Boston - Search begins for local bin Ladin group, by Jules Wells, Jonathan Crittenden and Stephanie Schorow,
With suspicions zeroing on archterrorist Osama bin Laden, his group's past links to Boston and the fact that two of yesterday's four suicide hijacking flights originated here raise the specter that a Hub-based cell may have carried out the murderous attacks.
Yesterday, as the FBI issued a nationwide alert for three men in a white Chevy van with a New Jersey plate, "Urban Moving Systems" on its side, Massachusetts State Police were looking for a blue-green Toyota with two Middle Eastern-looking men asking directions from Hanscom Air Force Base to Pease International Tradeport.
Robert Fitzpatrick, a former second-in-command in the FBI's Boston office, pointed out that Boston appears to have been the staging area for the attack on New York City, and that the hijackers most likely had help from others who still may be in Boston.
"There's a terrorist cell operating out of Boston," he said. "They had to have support, they had to have people on the ground, in Boston, supporting them."
Fitzpatrick said members of the "law enforcement and intelligence community" he spoke with yesterday were discussing possible links between the New York City and Pentagon attacks and past reports of terrorists residing in Boston who had ties to Osama bin Laden.
Raed Hijazi, a former Boston cab driver who lived in Everett in the mid-1990s, was sentenced to death in Jordan last year for plotting terrorist attacks on tourists visiting that country for millennium celebrations.
Another Boston cabbie, Bassam A. Kanj, lived in the Boston area for nearly 15 years and shared an apartment with Hijazi, according to a news report. Kanj and Hijazi both left in the late 1990s and Kanj was killed last year leading a militant attack in Lebanon. Both men worked at Boston Cab Co., but aroused no suspicions.
In addition, a Montreal-based bin Laden cell reportedly included two Boston residents among its North American members. Authorities headed off that group before it could set off a millennium bomb in the United States.
Fitzpatrick said the initial information about yesterday's attack points to bin Laden's organization.
"The pattern is there: well-financed, well-trained, well-disciplined," he said. "The planning was military-type planning. Obviously, (bin Laden) had a motive. It looks to be revenge for the conviction of the people behind the original bombing of the World Trade tower."
Officially, no suspects had been named by U.S. authorities. But some voiced strong suspicions.
"There are indications that people with links to bin Laden and the al Qaeda organization may have been responsible, but it is still too premature and that has not been determined," one U.S. official told Reuters on condition of anonymity.
An Arab journalist said bin Laden warned three weeks ago that he and his followers would carry out an unprecedented attack on U.S. interests.
"Personally we received information that he planned very, very big attacks against American interests. We received several warnings like this," Abdel Bari Atwan, editor of the London-based al-Quds al-Arabi news magazine, told Reuters.
Holed up in Afghanistan, bin Laden commands Islamic fundamentalists willing to die attacking the United States, which they see as the ultimate enemy in a holy war. Few other people are perceived to have the cash or expertise to mount such attacks.
Washington has previously accused him of masterminding the coordinated bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998 that killed more than 200 people and has put a $5 million reward on his head. He was also named as a suspect within hours of a suicide attack on the USS Cole in the port of Aden that killed 17 Americans last October.
The Taliban prime minister of Afghanistan, Abdul Wakil Muttawakil, denied bin Laden was involved, and Iran's president denied his government was involved.
The United States launched cruise missiles at what it termed bin Laden training camps inside Afghanistan after the 1998 embassy attacks, killing some militants but failing to touch the Saudi exile
While bin Laden is high on the list of likely suspects behind yesterday's sophisticated and complex attacks on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, experts say a rogue nation's spy service or a secret American conspiracy are just as likely.
"It was not possible without a deep intelligence infrastructure," said Uri Ra'Anan, an international relations professor at Boston University. "I don't know of a terrorist organization with such a (intelligence) network. Therefore it has to be state-supported, to carry out not one but several hijackings. I am skeptical of the Saudi gentleman. I don't think he has that level of capability."
Ra'Anan suggested the culprit will be found among pariah nations such as Iraq, Iran, Syria, Sudan or Libya that may act without regard for the consequences.
Former Justice Department terrorism expert Julliette Kayyem said she doubts a nation is involved, but cautioned that some unknown and highly secret homegrown group of anti-government and anti-establishment terrorists in the mold of Timothy McVeigh could also be responsible.
Experts also warn that the assault on America may not be over - given the intensity of yesterday's attacks, Americans have to be alert for an ongoing barrage of explosive or even biological attacks in coming days and weeks.
Yonah Alexander of Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, said, "Americans have to understand the entire country is a front line. it's a very vicious kind of war.
"We were very lucky for a long time. Our luck ran out. Terrorists only have to be lucky once. We have to be lucky all the time," Alexander said. "We have seen the writing on the wall for a very long time; I don't think it's over; that's what really concerns me."
September 13, 2001, The Independent (London) Terror in America: The Investigation - Police raid hotel used by suspects in Boston, by Andrew Gumbel and Chris Blackhurst,
HEAVILY ARMED federal agents and local police investigators fanned out across the eastern seaboard of the United States yesterday, mounting a raid at a Boston hotel, emptying a train in Rhode Island and searching homes and businesses in southern Florida in a massive hunt for leads establishing who was responsible for Tuesday's attacks on New York and Washington.
In the first dramatic incident of what is expected to become the country's largest criminal investigation, a rapid-response police team descended on the Westin Hotel in Boston's Copley Square early yesterday afternoon hoping to search two rooms rented in the name of a hijacking suspect.
According to some news reports, they ran into three people in a corridor who were taken into custody. One person was apparently injured, and a stretcher was seen being taken into the hotel.
A search of the rooms yielded evidence of a link to someone whose name appeared in the passenger lists of the hijacked planes, police sources said. The search also turned up hair dye and other materials useful for creating disguises. It appeared many people had come and gone from the rooms in the past few days.
No arrests were made, at least not in connection with Tuesday's hijackings and explosions, but Bob Mueller, the director of the FBI, told a news briefing in Washington that some people picked up by his agents were being held on the grounds that they were in the United States illegally.
Eyewitnesses saw at least one person being led away to a police van outside the hotel.
At Boston's Logan airport, where two of the four hijacked planes took off, the FBI impounded a rented Mitsubishi Mirage thought to have been left in a car park by two of the hijackers. Reports from government sources in Abu Dhabi named the two men as Ahmad Ibrahim Ali al-Hazoumi, 22, and Wael Mohammad al-Shehri, 29. They were brothers carrying either Saudi or United Arab Emirates passports. News reports said flight manuals in Arabic were found inside the car.
Another piece of evidence came in the form of bags lost at the airport during a connection from Portland, Maine, to one of the hijacked planes. These were believed to contain a copy of the Koran, an instructional video on flying commercial aircraft and a fuel consumption calculator. A rental car left in Portland was also seized.
Mr Mueller said in his briefing that his agency had two broad aims. The first was to identify the hijackers and their associates in the United States, round up those associates and ensure the removal of any threat to the commercial air system in future. The second was to establish who assisted the hijackers, both in the United States and overseas.
He said the FBI had identified many of the dead hijackers as well as individuals in the originating cities of the ill-fated flights who may have had something to do with the operation. "We are pursuing those leads aggressively," he added.
In Providence, about 40 miles south-west of Boston, police stopped an Amtrak train travelling from Boston and ordered the passengers to get off. A local television station reported that three people were removed from the train and questioned. One man was seen being handcuffed and led away. Vincent Cianci, the mayor of Providence, said he had been told the police were looking for as many as four suspects who had eluded the authorities in Boston.
Meanwhile, in south Florida, the FBI was investigating two suspected associates of Osama bin Laden, the exiled Saudi financier identified as the possible mastermind behind the attacks, as well as a flying school where some of the hijackers might have received training. A Miami couple, the Vosses, said two men had stayed with them last summer while attending courses. The FBI, they said, identified them as Mohamad Atta and a man whose name was given only as Marwan.
Another flying school in Daytona Beach, Florida, was also being investigated, as well as other leads from around the country. The FBI established command posts at every affected city, airport and crash site, and its agents were reported to be conducting interviews from Maine to southern California.
Alerts were put out for two vehicles, one a white Chevrolet van with New Jersey plates and the logo "Urban Moving Systems" on its side, which was believed to contain three men, and the other a blue- green Toyota believed to contain two Arabs who were seen asking for directions to an airport. Three people were taken into custody for questioning after police stopped a van near the George Washington Bridge connecting New Jersey to New York, but there was no immediate word on whether they were the ones being sought.
The sheer scale of the operation was hard to comprehend. "Think of it as several Oklahoma City bombings wrapped up in one," said the former FBI deputy director, William Esposito.
Several senior officials, including Mr Mueller, said there was no guarantee that the danger of attack had passed. The White House suggested that Air Force One, the President's plane, had been a target even while it was in the air from Sarasota, Florida, heading north - a seemingly incredible scenario that White House officials refused to elaborate on, citing national security concerns.
The investigation will be a major test of the FBI and the leadership of Mr Mueller, who has just taken over after a string of scandals and mishandled cases that have been little short of calamitous. The FBI's crime laboratory service, which is now present at all the crime scenes, was recently lambasted for failing to follow even basic procedures. Memories are still fresh of the Robert Hanssen spy scandal, the disastrous prosecution of the Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee for espionage offences he did not commit, and the mishandling and mysterious loss of documents in the Oklahoma City bombing case - the last investigation to be described as the biggest in US history.
Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, spent most of a short news briefing yesterday making cryptic references to security leaks and the need for all government personnel to respect the confidentiality of materials they handled. He refused to elaborate and said he had no knowledge of security leaks being responsible for Tuesday's calamity. His remarks nevertheless raised questions about the competence of the federal authorities to handle the crisis.
President George Bush, meanwhile, said he would ask Congress for permission to authorise emergency funding, both for the rescue and clean-up operations and for the criminal investigation. Because of concerns about exactly the kind of attack that occurred on Tuesday, the counter-terrorism budget has doubled over the past six years. Questions about how wisely this money has been spent are likely to be raised in the next few days.
One immediate question is the extent of involvement of Mr bin Laden. Orrin Hatch, a Republican senator, said he had heard in a briefing that Mr bin Laden's associates had been heard in an electronic surveillance operation discussing the success of the hijackings. "We have information that indicates representatives that are affiliated with Osama bin Laden were actually saying over the airwaves, private airwaves, that they had hit two targets," Mr Hatch said.
Officially, no fingers are yet being pointed. Some officials, speaking off the record, said Mr bin Laden may have planned the offensive with others. It is likely that the hijackers operated in semi-secret cells, with no obvious hierarchical system, privy only to information that directly concerned them.
That, and the fact that the immediate perpetrators of the attacks are all dead, will make it difficult, if not impossible, to pin down responsibility.
HEAVILY ARMED police and FBI agents swarmed a downtown hotel in Boston yesterday in what appeared to be a search following Tuesday's assault on the World Trade Centre.
Separate FBI activity was reported in southern Florida, meanwhile, where agents searched homes and businesses, apparently paying closest attention to an aviation school where two suspects may have received flight training.
Boston, whose Logan Airport was the scene of two of the four hijackings, has become central to the investigation. Five Arab men who boarded the Boston planes were identified as suspects. At least two were brothers travelling on passports from the United Arab Emirates and one was understood to have trained as a pilot.
Two of the men had flown to Logan from Portland, Maine, reportedly after crossing the border from Canada. However, Canada's prime minister, Jean Chretien, said that there was no confirmation of this.
The bags of one of the men did not make the connection. According to local reports, they contained a copy of the Koran, an instructional video on flying commercial aircraft and a fuel consumption calculator.
The other hijackers were thought to have arrived at Logan by car. A rented Mitsubishi Mirage in the airport was impounded by the FBI, which did not deny claims that it contained Arabic flight manuals. An airline crew tag was also found. Earlier reports said the car was from Canada, but there were also claims it was local. Heavily armed agents swooped on the Westin Hotel in Boston. One man was reported arrested and another wounded. Later, officers also raided the Park Inn outside the city.
Elsewhere, investigators launched what was being billed as the biggest manhunt in US history. "Think of it as several Oklahoma City bombings wrapped up in one," said the former FBI deputy director, William Esposito. An all-points alert was issued for two vehicles thought to be tied to the hijackings. The FBI said it wanted to trace three men in a white Chevrolet van with a New Jersey plate and "Urban Moving Systems" on its side, and a blue-green Toyota with two Arabs inside which had been asking for airport directions. In New Jersey, three people were taken into custody for questioning after police stopped a van near the George Washington Bridge.
In Florida, the FBI was targeting two suspected hijackers, one of whom was believed to be a known supporter of Osama bin Laden, the Saudi dissident widely thought to be behind the attacks.
A local man and his wife interviewed by the FBI said agents told him that two men who stayed in his home for a week in July 2000 were the hijackers. The couple accepted the two men, who were training at Huffman Aviation, a local flight school that employed Mr Voss, as a favour to the company. Charlie Voss said that the agents identified the men as Mohamed Atta and Marwan.
One of the men was reportedly identified from the manifest of one of the hijacked planes. The bureau obtained warrants to search properties in Broward County and Daytona Beach.
The authorities also were developing intelligence linking the suspected attackers to a band of bin Laden sympathisers in Canada, some of Algerian origin, who are suspected of planning an unsuccessful terrorist attack on US soil at Los Angeles airport during the millennium celebrations.
The hunt was being co-ordinated by John Ashcroft, the US Attorney General, and senior law enforcement officers from a fifth-floor Special Emergency Operations Centre at FBI headquarters. At one stage they were joined by US Army Special Forces officers dressed in camouflage gear.
Officials were anxious to be seen to be on top of the situation, ordering thousands of agents from the FBI, CIA and other US government organisations at home and abroad to find the perpetrators. This was as much a face-saving exercise, as they sought to refute claims that they should have been more prepared against a large- scale terrorist onslaught on home soil, as a concerted criminal investigation likely to yield immediate results.
President Bush has spent much time and effort to impress upon the American people the dangers of "asymmetric" threats to the US following the end of the Cold War. These have ranged from attacks on US personnel overseas to nuclear missiles launched from a rogue state to poison gas being released on subways.
To that end, the counterterrorism budget has doubled from $6bn in 1995 to $12bn this year. In addition, Mr Bush intends to spend $8.3bn next year to begin work on his "star wars" defence programme against nuclear attack.
But, while Americans were braced for nuclear missiles coming from Iraq or North Korea they were not alerted to the possibility of suicide missions aimed at their symbols of financial and military power.
Crime scene inquiries were established in New York, Washington, Boston, Newark in New Jersey (where the plane that crashed outside Pittsburgh was seized) and at Pittsburgh. FBI disaster response and evidence recovery teams were rushed to the crash sites, but their efforts were hampered in New York and Washington by the protocol ordering them to wait until all survivors are released.
They were able to study CCTV footage from the airports, passenger lists and tapes of phone calls from known bin Laden sympathisers. They were optimistic about recovering the black box voice recorder from the Pittsburgh aircraft. Hopefully, they said, that might provide some leads as to the hijackers' identities. The recorders in the New York and Washington DC disasters were somewhere under mounds of rubble and could take days, if not weeks to find, if they have survived the carnage at all.
At the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, analysts were poring over intelligence material and telephone intercepts gathered by the National Security Agency. Senator Orrin Hatch, a Republican, said after receiving a briefing from officials, that electronic eavesdropping had picked up bin Laden associates discussing the success of the operation. "We have information that indicates representatives that are affiliated with Osama bin Laden were actually saying over the airwaves, private airwaves that they had hit two targets," said Mr Hatch.
However, officials were counselling caution. All the hijackers had been killed and the sort of painstaking search for evidence that occurred in the Lockerbie bombing, where they were able to piece together the Pan Am aircraft, was unlikely in New York and Washington, given the scale of the damage. It was probable, they said, that the terrorists had comprised a tight cell, in which case, proving that their leader was bin Laden, for example, might also be impossible.
Officials stressed that they were dealing with around a thousand instant leads in an investigation into what was a sophisticated and presumably long-planned onslaught. In a fevered atmosphere, they were having to cope with thousands of Americans volunteering information, much of it useless.
A government website inviting tips from the public was jammed within minutes of being opened. Toll-free numbers for people with leads were also deluged.
Officials were examining previous bin Laden-inspired incidents, including the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, and a failed plot to attack Los Angeles airport. The fact that Tuesday's attacks came just one day before a bin Laden associate was due to be sentenced in New York for his role in the Dar es Salaam bombing was not lost on the authorities.
Boston features in the bin Laden files already, as the home of at least two of his agents. Raed Hijazi, a Boston taxi driver, was sentenced to death in Jordan last year for plotting terrorist atrocities. His friend and fellow taxi driver Bassam Kanj was killed in Lebanon last year leading a militant attack.
September 22, 2001, World Net Daily, Did Israelis Evacuate Towers?
Net rumor sparked by reports from Pakistan, Hezbollah
Published: 09/22/2001 at 1:00 AM
With the aid and speed of the Internet, conspiracy theorists are spreading a rumor that 4,000 Israelis who worked in the World Trade Center didn’t report for work the day two airliners commandeered by terrorists crashed into the towers, destroying the tallest buildings in New York.
The e-mailers and Internet sites spreading the tale suggest this is evidence Israel, not Islamic terrorists, were behind the attack Sept. 11 -- or at least had advance knowledge of it.
There's just one problem with the story, WorldNetDaily has learned. It's not true.
The report seems to have originated in Jordan's Al Watan newspaper and been spread by Pakistani publications, including Jang. Versions of the story have been repeated at news conferences by Islamic clerics in the Middle East and Central Asia.
Alex Safian, associate director of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, or CAMERA, which monitors Middle East media coverage, says his organization first saw the report on Lebanon's Al-Manara Television.
Al-Manara is the television station of Hezbollah ñ a militant Islamic terrorist group.
"4,000 Israeli Employees in WTC Absent the Day of the Attack," read the "Manar TV" headline Sept. 17.
"With the announcement of the attacks at the World Trade Center in New York, the international media, particularly the Israeli one, hurried to take advantage of the incident and started mourning 4,000 Israelis who work at the two towers," started the Hezbollah story.
"Then suddenly, no one ever mentioned anything about those Israelis and later it became clear that they remarkably did not show up in their jobs the day the incident took place.
"No one talked about any Israeli being killed or wounded in the attacks," the story added.
In fact, at least 130 Israelis were killed in the World Trade Center attack. Many more are missing.
Nevertheless, Pakistani political leader Sami-ul Haq, in calling for a nationwide strike yesterday to protest his country's plan to cooperate with the U.S., made reference to the rumor.
"Thousands of Jews working -- nothing happened to them," Haq told a roomful of reporters.
The Israeli consulate may be partly responsible for the rumor. Immediately after the tragic attack, it filed requests for information on as many as 4,000 Israelis who may have been in the World Trade Center at the time of the attacks. Nearly 50,000 people work in the buildings at any one time. Many, however, left the second tower following the first attack.
The estimated death toll is currently around 7,000, but fewer than 300 bodies have been found and even fewer identified.
An FBI spokesman claimed not to have any knowledge of the rumor and refused comment or any interest in it.
October 8, 2001, New York Times, 5 Young Israelis, Caught in Net of Suspicion, by Alison Leigh Cowan,
As their lawyer tells it, when the five young men were picked up by F.B.I. agents in midday on Sept. 11, they had a box cutter with them. One man carried $4,000 in cash, another had two passports.
In short, there probably were good reasons to be suspicious of the men who became the subjects of widespread news coverage.
What those early news accounts missed, however, was that all five of the men were Israeli Jews, and that if they had box cutters, it was because at least four of them and possibly all five worked for Urban Moving Systems, a household moving company in New York and New Jersey.
They are now facing deportation for overstaying their visas and other immigration offenses, but their lawyer says their case is a reminder that though roughly 500 people have now been detained as part of the crackdown on possible terrorists, that does not mean all of them are part of any terror network.
Driving a large van across the George Washington Bridge toward Manhattan hours after the deadly attack on American landmarks, the five men, well built and in their 20's, were speaking in a foreign language. They appeared to be from the Middle East. By some accounts, they seemed to be making light of the tragic situation.
Besides the cash and the passports, one man had fresh pictures of the smoldering wreckage of the trade center in his camera, images he had captured by standing rather conspicuously on the roof of the van.
The men were taken into custody, with news reports leaving the wide impression that the authorities had detained a group of suspicious men taking pictures or rooting for the terrorists from the New Jersey side of the bridge.
They have spent much of the last 27 days inside the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, getting a firsthand glimpse of a side of New York they never dreamed of seeing when they came to the United States as tourists. As much as anything, friends and families say, they came seeking a respite from life in a war zone.
These days, they would be thrilled to return. Shortly after the five Israelis arrived at the detention center, a group of Pakistani Muslims pressured them to join in a hunger strike, according to the Israelis' lawyer, Steven Noah Gordon. That only fortified the impression inside the prison that somehow ''they were all together,'' and invited threats from non-Muslims, he said. For their own safety, he said, they now each have separate cells.
According to Mr. Gordon, his clients were also blindfolded during interrogations, handcuffed in confinement, and forced to take polygraph tests. Though they were technically being held by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Mr. Gordon said, they were told ominously that if they failed to cooperate, they could be charged with violations of obscure ''black-humor statutes'' which, in limited circumstances, allow people to be prosecuted for cracking jokes about security matters like airplane hijackings.
Government officials are refusing to disclose much about the identities or whereabouts of the people who have been detained as part of the manhunt for the suicide hijackers' accomplices. They are divulging even less about the 150 or so who are being held on immigration charges. Some detainees no doubt have useful information about the terrorists' plot. Others seem to have done nothing more than tip off the authorities during questioning that they were living or working here illegally.
''The F.B.I. is vacuuming up everything, good, bad and indifferent,'' said James Oslow, an immigration lawyer in Philadelphia representing two Turkish detainees, whose truck broke down near a military base.
Washington, he said, would ''rather lock everybody up as a means to convince the public they're doing everything appropriate.''
A spokesman for the Justice Department in Washington, Dan Nelson, refused to discuss particulars of the Israelis' case or to confirm that that they were in custody. This reporter, who approached the Metropolitan Detention Center on Friday, was turned away.
Mr. Gordon, who was initially hired by the family of one of the detainees, Oded Ellner, on Sept. 17, agreed to represent the other four pro bono as a favor to the Israeli consulate in New York. ''This is a huge misunderstanding,'' said Yigal Tzarfati, an official with the consulate. The five men in detention, he said, ''have nothing to do with the bombings.''
Mr. Gordon said he did not believe his clients were advised of their rights until he was allowed to visit them on Sept. 25. ''They were beside themselves,'' he said.
Even then, he said, six to eight guards sat in on their meetings and forbade them from speaking any language but English. ''It's the strangest case I've ever seen,'' said Mr. Gordon, who said his clients had ''absolutely nothing'' to do with terrorists.
Inside the prison, mistrust has been running so deep that a visiting rabbi appeared indifferent when asked to help the Israelis get prayer books for the Jewish High Holy Days last month, according to Mr. Gordon.
On Sept. 25, all five signed papers acknowledging violations of United States immigration law. One, Sivan Kurzberg, admitted working illegally on a tourist visa. His brother, Paul Kurzberg, along with Yaron Shmuel and Mr. Ellner, conceded they had overstayed their visas.
The fifth man, Omer Gavriel Marmari, was initially also charged with having overstayed his visa, because he had not left the country by Sept. 19. Since he was in custody when that deadline came, Mr. Gordon said, that charge was dropped, and Mr. Marmari conceded instead that he had failed to notify the government of a change in status.
The five are awaiting deportation back to Israel. Eagerly, friends say.
October 19, 2001, The Forward, Prison is No Joke for 5 Israeli Detainees, by Nacha Cattan,
Al-Manara is the television station of Hezbollah ñ a militant Islamic terrorist group.
"4,000 Israeli Employees in WTC Absent the Day of the Attack," read the "Manar TV" headline Sept. 17.
"With the announcement of the attacks at the World Trade Center in New York, the international media, particularly the Israeli one, hurried to take advantage of the incident and started mourning 4,000 Israelis who work at the two towers," started the Hezbollah story.
"Then suddenly, no one ever mentioned anything about those Israelis and later it became clear that they remarkably did not show up in their jobs the day the incident took place.
"No one talked about any Israeli being killed or wounded in the attacks," the story added.
In fact, at least 130 Israelis were killed in the World Trade Center attack. Many more are missing.
Nevertheless, Pakistani political leader Sami-ul Haq, in calling for a nationwide strike yesterday to protest his country's plan to cooperate with the U.S., made reference to the rumor.
"Thousands of Jews working -- nothing happened to them," Haq told a roomful of reporters.
The Israeli consulate may be partly responsible for the rumor. Immediately after the tragic attack, it filed requests for information on as many as 4,000 Israelis who may have been in the World Trade Center at the time of the attacks. Nearly 50,000 people work in the buildings at any one time. Many, however, left the second tower following the first attack.
The estimated death toll is currently around 7,000, but fewer than 300 bodies have been found and even fewer identified.
An FBI spokesman claimed not to have any knowledge of the rumor and refused comment or any interest in it.
October 8, 2001, New York Times, 5 Young Israelis, Caught in Net of Suspicion, by Alison Leigh Cowan,
As their lawyer tells it, when the five young men were picked up by F.B.I. agents in midday on Sept. 11, they had a box cutter with them. One man carried $4,000 in cash, another had two passports.
In short, there probably were good reasons to be suspicious of the men who became the subjects of widespread news coverage.
What those early news accounts missed, however, was that all five of the men were Israeli Jews, and that if they had box cutters, it was because at least four of them and possibly all five worked for Urban Moving Systems, a household moving company in New York and New Jersey.
They are now facing deportation for overstaying their visas and other immigration offenses, but their lawyer says their case is a reminder that though roughly 500 people have now been detained as part of the crackdown on possible terrorists, that does not mean all of them are part of any terror network.
Driving a large van across the George Washington Bridge toward Manhattan hours after the deadly attack on American landmarks, the five men, well built and in their 20's, were speaking in a foreign language. They appeared to be from the Middle East. By some accounts, they seemed to be making light of the tragic situation.
Besides the cash and the passports, one man had fresh pictures of the smoldering wreckage of the trade center in his camera, images he had captured by standing rather conspicuously on the roof of the van.
The men were taken into custody, with news reports leaving the wide impression that the authorities had detained a group of suspicious men taking pictures or rooting for the terrorists from the New Jersey side of the bridge.
They have spent much of the last 27 days inside the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, getting a firsthand glimpse of a side of New York they never dreamed of seeing when they came to the United States as tourists. As much as anything, friends and families say, they came seeking a respite from life in a war zone.
These days, they would be thrilled to return. Shortly after the five Israelis arrived at the detention center, a group of Pakistani Muslims pressured them to join in a hunger strike, according to the Israelis' lawyer, Steven Noah Gordon. That only fortified the impression inside the prison that somehow ''they were all together,'' and invited threats from non-Muslims, he said. For their own safety, he said, they now each have separate cells.
According to Mr. Gordon, his clients were also blindfolded during interrogations, handcuffed in confinement, and forced to take polygraph tests. Though they were technically being held by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Mr. Gordon said, they were told ominously that if they failed to cooperate, they could be charged with violations of obscure ''black-humor statutes'' which, in limited circumstances, allow people to be prosecuted for cracking jokes about security matters like airplane hijackings.
Government officials are refusing to disclose much about the identities or whereabouts of the people who have been detained as part of the manhunt for the suicide hijackers' accomplices. They are divulging even less about the 150 or so who are being held on immigration charges. Some detainees no doubt have useful information about the terrorists' plot. Others seem to have done nothing more than tip off the authorities during questioning that they were living or working here illegally.
''The F.B.I. is vacuuming up everything, good, bad and indifferent,'' said James Oslow, an immigration lawyer in Philadelphia representing two Turkish detainees, whose truck broke down near a military base.
Washington, he said, would ''rather lock everybody up as a means to convince the public they're doing everything appropriate.''
A spokesman for the Justice Department in Washington, Dan Nelson, refused to discuss particulars of the Israelis' case or to confirm that that they were in custody. This reporter, who approached the Metropolitan Detention Center on Friday, was turned away.
Mr. Gordon, who was initially hired by the family of one of the detainees, Oded Ellner, on Sept. 17, agreed to represent the other four pro bono as a favor to the Israeli consulate in New York. ''This is a huge misunderstanding,'' said Yigal Tzarfati, an official with the consulate. The five men in detention, he said, ''have nothing to do with the bombings.''
Mr. Gordon said he did not believe his clients were advised of their rights until he was allowed to visit them on Sept. 25. ''They were beside themselves,'' he said.
Even then, he said, six to eight guards sat in on their meetings and forbade them from speaking any language but English. ''It's the strangest case I've ever seen,'' said Mr. Gordon, who said his clients had ''absolutely nothing'' to do with terrorists.
Inside the prison, mistrust has been running so deep that a visiting rabbi appeared indifferent when asked to help the Israelis get prayer books for the Jewish High Holy Days last month, according to Mr. Gordon.
On Sept. 25, all five signed papers acknowledging violations of United States immigration law. One, Sivan Kurzberg, admitted working illegally on a tourist visa. His brother, Paul Kurzberg, along with Yaron Shmuel and Mr. Ellner, conceded they had overstayed their visas.
The fifth man, Omer Gavriel Marmari, was initially also charged with having overstayed his visa, because he had not left the country by Sept. 19. Since he was in custody when that deadline came, Mr. Gordon said, that charge was dropped, and Mr. Marmari conceded instead that he had failed to notify the government of a change in status.
The five are awaiting deportation back to Israel. Eagerly, friends say.
October 19, 2001, The Forward, Prison is No Joke for 5 Israeli Detainees, by Nacha Cattan,
Five young Israelis detained by FBI agents on September 11 after a witness said they were celebrating the fall of the World Trade Center, were in fact hugging each other out of grief, not jubilation, according to the Israeli consulate in New York.
The men were picked up at 6 p.m. on the day of the attack after a woman reported to the police that they were standing on top of their large van in New Jersey, huddling together for pictures, speaking in a foreign language and hugging each other, the consulate said.
Adding to the confusion that led news reports and perhaps the FBI to suspect their involvement in the attacks is what was found on them when they were stopped in their van heading across the George Washington Bridge toward Manhattan: One man was carrying $4,000 in cash and another man
possessed two passports. A box-cutter like those reportedly wielded by the hijackers was found "in their vicinity," their lawyer, Steven Gordon, said. Mr. Gordon said that at least four of the men worked for a moving company.
None of the men, ages 21 to 27, has been charged in relation to the terror investigation, but all are in a Brooklyn detention center awaiting deportation for violating U.S. immigration laws, including overstaying
their tourist visas, Mr. Gordon said.
The story of five Jews arrested for joking and dancing in triumph atop a rooftop after the attack has been told, retold and embellished in Muslim newspapers and Internet chat rooms as "evidence" of Israel's involvement in the attacks, according to news reports.
"Obviously, they have nothing to do with the bombing. They were hugging because they couldn't believe what happened," a spokesman at the consulate, Ido Aharoni, told the Forward, referring to information he received after a member of his staff interviewed the detainees in their cells. They were indeed snapping photos and squeezing together for group shots, but many others reacted that way, he said. "I think it was just a tragic combination of miscommunication and awkward coincidence."
The household moving company they worked for, Urban Moving Systems, has since closed down, Mr. Gordon said. Voice messages saying "offices are currently closed" are to be heard at seven of the company's locations across the country; messages left on answering machines seeking comment
went unreturned.
On September 25 all five Israelis signed papers acknowledging their immigration violations. Oded Ellner and Paul Kurzberg admitted to overstaying their tourist visas. Mr. Kurzberg's brother Sivan conceded to
working unlawfully in the United States. Omer Marmari acknowledged that he failed to notify the government of a change in status. Yaron Shmuel, who had entered the United States under a "visa-waiver pilot program," conceded to other immigration violations, Mr. Gordon said.
Mr. Gordon said that he, like other attorneys representing those detained in connection with the investigation of the terrorist attacks, has extremely limited access to his clients. He said he is unable to reach them by phone, is getting no firm information about their deportation date and has visited them only twice in their separate cells in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
Mr. Gordon said he called the detention center on Monday, where they had been since being taken into custody, and was told his clients were not there. But a few hours later, his clients called him from inside the
center.
"I would have figured at this point, after an immigration judge entered a final order of deportation, and no other charges have been filed against them, that at the very least, the government would acknowledge their
presence in custody," Mr. Gordon said.
A call to the MDC was answered by a woman who identified herself as Officer Smith. She said she had no information on the five Israelis and that they were not there.
"This is but one of the hundreds of hundreds of cases of people who are in detention whose families don't even know they are being detained because they cannot speak with people outside," and in many cases, have no access to lawyers, Mr. Gordon said. He said immigration attorneys are flooded with
similar cases and have asked him to take on some of their clients, which he now plans to do.
Mr. Gordon said the Israelis have been subjected to blindfolding, a forced polygraph test and a blackout of information about their rights. They were told that if they did not cooperate they could be charged with violations of "black-humor statutes" for their actions right after the attack, he said. And non-Muslim inmates "physically" threatened them after Muslim prisoners pressured them to join them in a hunger strike, he said.
November 9, 2001, Salon.com, "Islamism is fascism," Daniel Pipes says leading American Muslim groups want Islamic law to rule the U.S. -- even if they won't admit it -- and must be carefully watched, by Eric Boehlert, 08:03 PM EST,
For Muslims in America, the rhetorical war of words continues to escalate at home. Two weeks after sparring publicly with Jewish advocacy groups over the accurate number of Muslims living in the U.S., the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Thursday issued a call to stop the “Islamophobic smear campaign” against the American Muslim community and its leaders. CAIR urged journalists and public officials not to “be used as unwitting tools in this campaign or to undermine President Bush’s efforts to show that the war on terrorism is not a conflict with Islam.”
CAIR angrily pointed to a recent Los Angeles Times article which reported, “Pro-Israel or Jewish organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Defense League and the Middle East Forum think tank have provided news organizations with reams of critical documentation on Muslim leaders in recent weeks.”
And the group singled out Middle East Forum’s Daniel Pipes for special scorn, calling Pipes “one of the foremost proponents of the current smear campaign,” which has tied CAIR with Islamic radicalism and even violence.
In an interview with Salon, Pipes answers those charges, and warns that many Muslims in America want Islamic law to rule the land.
What’s your reaction to CAIR’s claims?
My reaction is that CAIR realizes that the obscurity in which it toiled before Sept. 11 has now ended, and the sort of activities it engaged in and could get away with then [has ended]. It acknowledges in this press release, “On an almost daily basis we have been forced to defend our organization,” they say.
But they suggest they’re having to defend themselves from stereotyping and smearing, not just scrutiny.
It’s not stereotyping. There are Muslim organizations I think are great and Muslim organizations I think are terrible. CAIR is the worst. It’s the most aggressive, the most extreme. The most destructive. It’s not stereotyping. What’s the stereotype? It’s typical of CAIR that it pleads this sort of discrimination all the time. Instead of standing up and fighting squarely for what it’s arguing, it’s hiding behind this smear campaign. I’m saying this is a radical organization that does not belong in the mainstream of American life.
So were you disappointed when President Bush met with CAIR in September?
I think that’s a mistake, yes.
You wrote of the Muslim population in this country, “A substantial body shares with the suicide hijackers a hatred of the United States.” What percentage of Muslims in America would you estimate share that hatred of America?
The numbers are fluid. There have been a number of polls. There’s one cited today on National Review Online that shows really quite a substantial proportion feeling alienated from the country. I can’t offhand give you numbers. What I can say on the phone is there is a substantial body of people who are not integrated, who do not feel they are American first. The problem is even more acute in Britain, where really it’s become a national issue in the last few weeks with British citizens going off to Afghanistan to [support the Taliban and] fight potentially their own nationals.
But we haven’t seen that here.
We’ve seen a little bit of it. Very little. It has not become an issue as it has in Britain.
What’s the percentage of American Muslims who want to see the government, as you’ve said, “brought to its knees”? Would that be at the same level of those here who share bin Laden’s hatred for America?
Well, there are different degrees. Some, a small number, actively embrace the bin Laden ideology. But that is very small. There are a large number who feel an alienation from the country.
Do you think CAIR wants to create an Islamic state in America?
Without a doubt.
Would that include prohibiting conversion out of Islam?
Of course.
Criminalizing adultery, banning consumption of pork and doing away with the equality of the sexes?
Of course. Now, they don’t say that in black and white in their writings. I can’t prove that to you. I can tell you that there are all sorts of intimations of it. I can tell you I can sense it. I can make this case, but I can’t make it specifically for CAIR. But you asked me, do I think that’s what they want? Yes.
That seemed to be the most startling part of your writings — the notion that Muslims in America want to create an Islamic state here and institute Islamic law.
I’m not saying it’s going to happen. I’m just saying if we do have a body of people who want this, this is something we should know about. And pay attention to.
But if they’re not saying it, how do we know that’s what they want?
Well, CAIR is a Washington lobby group, and if it wants to be invited to the White House it has to be somewhat cautious about saying this. There is an environment in which such ideas are fairly common. So they’re not specific to CAIR. It is what anyone who is an Islamist [an Islamic fundamentalist with extreme political views] wants. It goes almost without saying. If you’re an Islamist you want Muslims in power and application of Islamic law. There was a nice quote in the San Francisco Chronicle in a story about the American Muslim Alliance convention that took place a few weeks ago, quoting a man saying, “I want to see a Muslim president by 2020.” He didn’t say “I want the application of Islamic law,” but what’s the point of having a Muslim president?
Well, what’s the difference in somebody saying I want to see a Jewish president by 2020?
Don’t compare Judaism and Christianity with Islamism.
But the person you mentioned who said he wanted a Muslim president by 2020, he didn’t say he wanted he wanted a fundamentalist Muslim president.
It’s like saying I want a fascist president.
Are you equating Islam with fascism?
No, I equate Islamism with fascism. And the person quoted by the Chronicle was at an Islamist conference. Assume anyone at an Islamist conference is an Islamist and wants Muslims in power. Granted, you can use the language and in the mouth of somebody else it would be as innocuous as wanting a Jewish or Mormon president. In this case, in the mouth of an Islamist it’s not innocuous. One has to have different filters. Islamism is a totalitarian ideology. An Islamist is a danger in the same way a fascist is a danger. I don’t advocate locking them up. I do advocate keeping a close eye on them. Those people can make real trouble.
Saying Muslims want to create a Muslim state in America, does that strike you as alarmist at all?
How could that be alarmist when I can see signs all around?
Well, I’m just asking you.
Look, I have a filter. I’ve studied Islam and Islamism for 30 years. I have a sense of how they proceed and what their agenda is like. And I see it. You don’t. You haven’t spent the time. Most Americans haven’t. So what I think I can do that’s of value is say look, “I recognize this pattern, I’ve seen it before in Indonesia, in Iran. And now I see it here.” I’m not saying it’s going to happen soon, or at all. I see elements that 15 years or 10 years ago I didn’t see.
When CAIR protests to CBS that it should not have Budweiser advertisements when the U.S. soccer team is playing the Iranian soccer team, out of respect for Iranians who don’t drink alcohol, that itself is minor, right — who cares? But it is part of a larger picture — first prohibit advertisements, and then alcohol — which is part of the Islamist agenda. There is no end of small things, each of which is not terribly important. But together is a different ordering of society.
CAIR used a quote of yours in its press release: “At a minimum it would have to entail the vigilant application of social and political pressure to ensure that Islam is not accorded special status of any kind in this country.” I guess the question is what’s the difference between special status and acceptance?
I believe our Constitution does not allow for special status for members of a religion. I don’t want to see bias or prejudice against Muslims and I endorse their full rights as American citizens. I just don’t want them to have special status.
I’m sure they would argue they simply want acceptance within society.
But their acceptance would go beyond what I consider normal acceptance. They want the rules to be rewritten for them. They want a whole host of ways that Islam and Muslims have special status.
The other quote that caught my attention from your writing was “Officials need to scrutinize the speech, associations, and activities of potential visitors or immigrants for any signs of Islamist allegiances and keep out anyone they suspect of such ties.” To some that might sound an awful lot like old anticommunist rhetoric.
What’s wrong with that?
Well, that’s my question. Was that by design?
Our policy for decades has been based on a benign view of visitors and would-be immigrants. That’s foolish. And if Sept. 11 couldn’t persuade you of that, nothing will. There are lot of people out there who dislike this country and want to do harm to it. And our immigration procedures have done nothing to protect us from that. They have looked at ordinary criminality and they have not looked at ideas and beliefs and I believe that they should. We do have laws dating back to the ’50s and I think they should be made operative.
Look, I like this country as it is and I don’t want it to turn into something quite different. What I’m advocating is a means to protect, roughly speaking, the status quo. If you want to see an Islamist country, then you will have the opposite view from mine and more power to you. The danger is within. If we don’t wake up to that now, we will have further attacks and blows that will wake us up later. I would like to wake us up now.
Eric Boehlert, a former senior writer for Salon, is the author of "Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush."
November 21, 2001, New York Times, Dozens of Israeli Jews Are Being Kept in Federal Detention, by Tamar Lewin and Alison Leigh Cowan,
THE DETAINEES
Among the more than 1,100 people the government has detained since Sept. 11 are dozens of young Israeli Jews who came to the United States in recent months and took jobs selling trinkets at shopping malls throughout the country.
Charged with working without proper papers, some have been kept in detention by the Immigration and Naturalization Service for nearly a month. In some cases, the immigration service has invoked special post- Sept. 11 laws to keep the Israelis in jail but presented no evidence of a link to the terrorism investigation.
"We think there are about 50 in detention now, in San Diego, Houston, Kansas City, St. Louis and Cleveland, and there are some who have been released," said Ido Aharoni, a spokesman for the Israeli consulate in New York. "It's not easy to get an exact count. They may be embarrassed that they were working illegally, and we only find out when their mothers call, because they haven't been in touch, and we check and find them in jail."
Normally, working without papers is treated as a minor offense, for which foreigners are not detained.
While both the detainees and their lawyers say they are baffled by the detentions, some of those familiar with the cases said they believed the impetus was the interest of law enforcement officials in companies that offer young Israelis — and perhaps others in the Middle East — help in coming to, and working in, the United States.
"It's hard to understand," said Suzanne Brown, a St. Louis lawyer representing 5 of the 10 Israelis detained there. "Just today, I talked with the I.N.S. officer in charge of the St. Louis office, who said he doesn't know who is conducting the investigation of the Israelis. And what are they investigating? I don't know."
In Ohio, on Oct. 31, the immigration service detained nine men and two women, all of whom had valid passports and tourist visas. Nine of the 11 were released on bond on Friday, but two remain in the Medina County jail, outside of Cleveland. The next hearing for the Israelis — all in their early 20's and recently finished with their Israeli army service — is scheduled for Nov. 27, in Cleveland.
"It doesn't make sense that they held any of these kids as long as they did, and we don't know of any reason why they're still holding two," said David Leopold, the Cleveland lawyer representing them. "You hear there's more than 1,000 detainees, and if these cases are any example, you have to wonder if they're just locking people up to make it look like they're getting somewhere on their investigation."
Dan Nelson, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said that he was unaware of the Israeli detainees, but that generally, since Sept. 11, there has been greater scrutiny of those who violate immigration laws.
"We are taking every step we can to prevent future terrorist attacks," Mr. Nelson said. "We are conducting the largest investigation in U.S. history, and we are leaving no stone unturned."
In New York, immigration officials began deporting five young Israeli moving men who have been in federal custody since Sept. 11. Two of the deportees, Oded Ellner and Omer Gavriel Marmari, landed in Tel Aviv yesterday. The others, Paul Kurzberg and his brother Sivan, and Yaron Shmuel, were expected to fly to Israel today.
The five aroused attention in New Jersey after people noticed them going to unusual lengths to photograph the World Trade Center ruins and making light of the situation. One photograph developed by the F.B.I. showed Sivan Kurzberg holding a lighted lighter in the foreground, with the smoldering wreckage in the background, said Steven Noah Gordon, a lawyer for the five.
As objectionable as their behavior may be, Mr. Gordon said of their long incarceration, "It's not a crime and they were being treated as if it was."
The five were asked to take polygraph tests before being allowed to leave. But Paul Kurzberg refused on principle to divulge much about his role in the Israeli army or subsequently working for people who may have had ties to Israeli intelligence, Mr. Gordon said. His client had trouble with one seven-hour polygraph test administered last week, but did better on a second try.
Mr. Kurzberg's lawyer said it was his understanding that Attorney General John Ashcroft had to sign off on his release.
In the Ohio cases, the immigration service said at a hearing last week that the 11 Israelis were "special" nonterrorist cases. But Judge Elizabeth Hacker, the immigration judge conducting the hearing, questioned the agency's case for keeping the Israelis in jail.
"Although the service alleges that these cases are `special,' it has failed to present any credible evidence of the basis for this finding," Judge Hacker said in a bond memorandum. "Indeed, the service has failed to submit any evidence of terrorist activity or of a threat to the national security. There is no evidence of the risk of harm to the community."
Russell Bergeron, a spokesman for the immigration service, said decisions on when to refuse bond were made case by case.
When Judge Hacker set bond, the government filed an emergency appeal, which, under procedures adopted last month, automatically allows the government extra time to detain people.
At the hearing, the government lawyers said the Israelis were the subject of a criminal investigation by the F.B.I. of an individual or company that promised living and travel expenses in return for selling at shopping-mall pushcarts. The government says the Ohio detainees worked for Quality Sales Inc., a Florida concern.
Tom Dean, the lawyer representing Quality Sales, declined to provide information about the company or its principals, but he said the company was cooperating with federal authorities to resolve "any concern about possible criminal conduct."
The F.B.I. refused to comment on its dealings with Quality Sales or other such companies.
Some of those familiar with the cases said such companies may provide an open channel for terrorists to enter the country without background checks.
The Israelis who were detained in Ohio lived in three apartments in Findlay, Ohio, south of Toledo, and worked in several different malls.
"When they came Oct. 31, the immigration agents knocked on the door, and waked us from sleep," said Ori Ben-Tur, one of the Ohio detainees who was released on Friday. "When we asked why they arrest us, they said they suspect we work in illegal jobs. They told us we could probably come back to our apartment the same day, or the day after."
When the detention dragged on, he said, the Israelis became increasingly worried, and, after several days in detention, arranged legal representation by Mr. Leopold.
Mr. Ben-Tur said he and the others had been interrogated separately.
"Some of the questions weren't so nice for an Israeli, who has served in the army, and fought against terrorism," he said. "I asked them, do they know what Israel thinks of the Arab countries, do they know Israel thinks of America as a big, big friend?"
Mr. Ben-Tur, and his lawyer, said they had no idea why he and most of the others had been released, while two, Oren Behr and Yaniv Hani, were still being detained.
November 23, 2001, The Washington Post, 60 Israelis on Tourist Visas Detained Since Sept. 11; Government Calls Several Cases 'of Special Interest,' Meaning Related to Post- Attacks Investigation, by John Mintz,
At least 60 young Israeli Jews have been arrested and detained around the country on immigration chargessince the Sept. 11 attacks, many of them held on U.S. governmentofficials' invocation of national security.
Federal officials have presented no evidence that the Israelis, most of whom worked selling toys and trinkets at kiosks in shopping malls, had anything to do with terrorism. In one of the few cases to reach a hearing, a federal administrative law judge in Cleveland rejected any suggestion that the 11 Israelisbefore her had any ties to terrorists.
The cases -- in Ohio, Missouri, Texas and California -- originated in the weeks after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks. Tipsters apparently called the FBI or the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to report suspicions about Middle Eastern-looking people who were were living together in apartments and working in groups at shopping malls, sources involved in the cases said.
Federal agents arrested dozens of the Israeli men and women in late October and early November on charges of working without authorization while in the United States on tourist visas, documents that don't allow their holders to be employed. Agents interrogated theIsraelis and in most cases ordered them held without bond.
In several cases, such as those in Cleveland and St. Louis, INS officials testified in court hearings that they were "of special interest to thegovernment," a term that federal agents have used in many of the hundreds of cases involving mostly Muslim Arab men who have beendetained around the country sincethe terrorist attacks.
An INS official who requested anonymity said the agency will not comment on the Israelis. But he said the use of the term "special interest" means the case in question is "related to the investigation of September 11th."
Justice Department spokesman Dan Nelson also declined to comment on the cases but added that, in general, "post-9-11, every time somebody's picked up on an immigration law violation, there's going to be greater scrutiny.
"We're conducting the largestinvestigation in U.S. history, and we're trying to prevent and disrupt terrorist attacks," Nelson added. "We're leaving no stone unturned."
Israeli officials said that the casesinvolved only the Israelis' apparently illegal employment in the United States and that U.S. officials are not making any claim that any of them were involved in terrorism.
"Israelis visiting the U.S. have to respect the laws of the host country," said Mark Regev, a spokesman for the Israeli Embassy here, which has been in touch with many of itsdetained citizens. "If they're in violation of their visa, there are consequences to be paid, especially after September 11th."
All the Israeli detainees are in their early twenties and are observing a time-honored tradition in their country -- touring the world after their mandatory service in the Israeli military. A number of them had served in counterterrorist units in Israel, a close U.S. ally in the fight against terrorism.
"It was obvious they mistook us" as Arabs from Israel, said Israeli army veteran Liron Diamant, 24, in describing his arrest on Oct. 31 at an apartment in Findlay, Ohio. In an hours-long interrogation by FBI agents, he and his friends were questioned in detail about their Israeli military service, Diamant said.
"All of us cooperated fully with them," he said. "We want to help the U.S. anti-terror effort, since we fight the same enemy in our country."
INS officials ordered Diamant and 10 co-workers, who sold rubber band-propelled toy helicopters at malls around Toledo, to be held without bond. In a hearing last week, thegovernment also asked Justice Department immigration judge Elizabeth Hacker to keep the Israelisin custody.
But Hacker rejected the officials' arguments, setting bond for all 11 at $10,000 each. "Although the [INS] alleges that these cases are 'special,' it has failed to present any credible evidence of the basis for this finding," she wrote in her decision. "Indeed, the service has failed to submit any evidence of terrorist activity or of a threat to the national security."
The INS then appealed her finding, which under the law automatically means the Israelis cannot be released on bond. Within a few days, the INS partially reversed itself, allowing nine of the Israelis to be released on $10,000 bond and holding the other two on no bond.
David Leopold, a Cleveland immigration lawyer representing the11 Israelis, said that ordinarily the INS would not bother with a case of unauthorized employment by a foreign tourist-visa holder.
"If they're still holding people who clearly have no tie-in to September 11th, what does it say about the quality of the overall investigation" and detention of hundreds of Arabs? Leopold said. "The government is using immigration statutes to pull people into this wide web, and once in it, it's difficult to get out."
In one hearing on the Cleveland case, agents said that, among other things, the Israelis are "the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation by the FBI into an individual or company who had agreed to pay living and travel expenses" in exchange for their work at the malls, the judge said in her decision.
Thomas Dean, an attorney for Miami-based Quality Sales Inc., which employed the Israelis in Ohio, said his client "wants to cooperate in any way it can" and added that thegovernment is indeed looking into the circumstances surrounding the hiring of the Israelis.
Dean added that a governmentofficial told him that one possible avenue of the probe is that an overseas terrorist group could somehow insert an operative into a group of employed foreigners. Almost all the visiting Israelis made contact with the trinket companies only after they entered the United States, although some people in Israel had steered them toward the firms, he said.
The investigations of the Israelisworking at malls is separate from another case of detained Israelis, in New York. On Sept. 11, five young Israeli army veterans who worked for a moving company were observed at a park on the Hudson River in New Jersey snapping photographs of the burning World Trade Center and seemingly clowning around. To complicate matters, when authorities arrested them they had box-cutters in their moving van, the types of weapons used by the terrorist hijackers. Two other Israelis working for the same firm were arrested later.
Officials found they all had overstayed their visas, and they were held in a federal jail in Brooklyn until this week, when they began to be returned to their homes in Israel.
Back in Ohio, Diamant is waiting for his next court date, and for word that he and his friends, too, can return to their country.
"We just want to go home," he said, "and get this adventure behind us."
December 21, 2001, The Forward, Israel Calls Fox's Spy Reports 'Baseless', by Marc Perelman,
A series of broadcasts on the Fox News Channel reporting that Israeli operatives had prior knowledge of the September 11 terrorist attacks, but failed to warn U.S. officials, have been described as "baseless" and
"innuendo" by several Jewish groups and an Israeli embassy spokesman.
The reports, barely noted by the rest of the American media, have placed Fox in the unfamiliar position of defending itself against charges of anti-Israel bias. Like many of the other conservative news outlets owned by Rupert Murdoch, Fox normally earns accolades from pro-Israel activists for its coverage of the Middle East.
In a series of four reports broadcast on the "Special Report with Brit Hume" from December 11 to 14, Fox News correspondent Carl Cameron, citing unnamed sources and classified documents, said that more than 60 Israelis had been detained since September 11 and that a "handful" of them were active "Israeli military."
Mr. Cameron further reported that, "There is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the September 11 attacks, but investigators suspect that the Israelis may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not shared it."
Mr. Cameron added that "a highly placed" source had refused to provide specific details of the investigation, saying that the "evidence linking these Israelis to September 11 is classified."
Mr. Cameron also reported that some 140 Israelis had been detained prior to the attacks as a result of a longstanding U.S. investigation into an "organized intelligence gathering operation." Mr. Cameron said that an interagency "working group" has been compiling evidence of Israeli spying since the mid 1990s.
"It is a pity that a serious network like Fox gave it coverage," said an Israeli embassy spokesman, Mark Regev, calling the report "rubbish." "It's all based on unfounded innuendo."
Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, also attacked the report.
"I think that the charge... is a sinister dangerous innuendo which fuels anti-Semitism," Mr. Foxman said. "So the Arabs say the Mossad did it and more than 4,000 Jews [didn't come to work that day]. Fox says Israelis knew and didn't tell. Which means they permitted the deaths of Americans. It is irresponsible and very troubling."
Media outlets in some Arab and Muslim countries have reported that Israel masterminded the September 11 attacks to turn the United States against the Muslim world.
Mr. Cameron told the Forward that he stood by his story. A Fox news spokesman said the network also stood by the report.
Hawkish supporters of Israel employed by Mr. Murdoch were less talkative.
New York Post columnist John Podhoretz, who frequently voices his support for the Israeli right wing, declined to comment, citing his status as an employee of Fox News. The New York Post is owned by Mr. Murdoch's News Corp.
William Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, also did not return a call for comment. The Standard is also owned by News Corp.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could also not be reached for comment. Mr. Netanyahu is a frequent commentator on Fox News.
The report took some Jewish organizational leaders by surprise, given that Fox News is frequently cited as the most pro-Israel of any of the broadcast outlets.
Morton Klein, head of the Zionist Organization of America, said he was "stunned" that Fox would report a story that "so harms an image of a major ally with not a shred of evidence and using only unnamed sources."
"This plays into the hand of the anti-Semitic Arab media and anti-Semites around the world," Mr. Klein added. "Fox has been a station that has been quite careful and more fair about Israel than other stations, so I'm surprised."
Alex Safian, associate director of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, or Camera, a group that monitors the news media, described Mr. Cameron as a reporter who "had a thing about Israeli espionage."
Mr. Safian cited a May 2000 report in which Mr. Cameron raised the issue of an "alleged penetration of U.S. government phone systems" by an Israeli telecommunications company. That same day, Mr. Safian noted, The New York Times reported that a federal inquiry looking into the company's possible links with Israel intelligence had found no evidence of espionage.
Camera is the only Jewish organization to issue a formal statement on the Fox story. Other Jewish groups contacted for this story said they have chosen to bring up the issue in private conversations with Fox News
executives.
Mr. Klein said he had written a letter to Fox News, while Mr. Foxman said he has had "conversations" with Fox network officials.
Spokespersons for both the Justice Department and the FBI told the Forward they had no comment on the Fox story. However, a law enforcement official, who asked not to be identified, said the claims that Israeli spies had prior knowledge of the attacks were "inaccurate."
Both Mr. Foxman and Mr. Safian said they were not in a position to gauge the more general allegations of Israeli spying in America.
"We are not in a position to know a lot about certain claims," said Mr. Foxman. "I have a feeling that to buttress this expose [Fox] had to build up a case that the Israelis are spying."
Howard Kurtz, a media reporter for the Washington Post, said the Fox report stood on shaky ground.
"To suggest that some Israelis knew of the September 11 attacks in advance and didn't warn the United States is an extremely explosive charge," said Mr. Kurtz, in an response by email. "To hang that on the phrase `investigators suspect,' as Fox News did, `is an awfully thin reed on which to rest such an accusation -- especially when the network says these investigators refused to provide details."
Mr. Kurtz, who is also a co-host of Reliable Sources, CNN's talk show on the media, added that while Israeli spying was "certainly a legitimate subject for media scrutiny... that's very different than floating even the possibility of Israeli involvement in the worst terrorist attack in history."
March 5, 2002, Le Monde, An Enigma: Vast Israeli Spy Network Dismantled in the US, by Sylvain Cypel, Translated by Malcolm Garris,
It is undoubtedly the largest case of Israeli spying in the United States – that has been made public – since 1986. In June 2001, an investigative report detailed the activities of more than one-hundred Israeli agents, some presenting themselves as fine arts students, others tied to Israeli high-tech companies. All were challenged by the authorities, were questioned, and a dozen of them are still imprisoned. One of their tasks was to track the Al-Qaida terrorists on American territory – without informing the federal authorities. Elements of this investigation, taken up by American television Fox News, reinforce this thesis: that Israel did not transmit to the United States all the evidence in its possession on the preparation of the September 11 attacks.
The latest issue of the Online Intelligence Letter, a publication specializing in questions of information, has revealed that a vast Israeli spy network operating on American territory was dismantled.
It is the biggest affair involving the Mossad (the Israel’s external security agency) in activity against the United States since Jonathan Pollard, an employee of the US Navy, was condemned to life in prison, in 1986, for spying for Israel’s benefit. Which was the real scale of this network? The facts evoked by an American investigative report do not indicate if the network obtained the information it was after, or if the authorities dismantled it in its initial phase.
According to the chief editor of Online Intelligence, Guillaume Dasquié, this "vast network of Israeli intelligence agents was neutralized by the counter-espionage services of the Department of Justice." The Americans "would have apprehended or expelled close to 120 Israeli nationals."
M. Dasquié gives a report on a "61-page review article" from June 2001, given to the American justice department by a "task force" made up of agents of the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) and some INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) agents "who were associated with the FBI and the office of investigation of the US Air Force." Questioned by Le Monde, Will Glaspy, of the Public Affairs department of the DEA, authenticated this report, and said the DEA "holds a copy."
This is not the first time that information relating to Israeli espionage appeared in the United States since the Pollard affair. In June 1999, the review Insight had described, at length, a "secret" investigation by division 5 of the FBI regarding Israeli phone-tapping targeting the White House, the State Department and the National Security Council.
After the attacks of September 11, very little detailed information had come out about the arrest of some sixty Israelis. Finally, from the 11th to the 14th of December 2001, the Fox News television channel aired an investigation in four parts into Israeli espionage in the United States, in the broadcast "Carl Cameron Investigates." The Israeli embassy in Washington immediately responded by stating that it did not contain "anything true." American Jewish organizations such JINSA (Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs), AIPAC (America-Israel Political Action Committee) and others, denounced the report as a "machination." Fox withdrew from its Internet site, one day and half after its posting, all the material related to this investigation.
Le Monde requested three times with Fox News to provide a tape of the broadcast. It was never done. On February 26, Fox told our correspondent in New York that sending it posed "a problem," without being specific. Le Monde, however took note of the whole script in this investigation. Carl Cameron evokes "a vast secret investigation held there" relating to "140 Israelis made to pass for students of the University of Jerusalem or Betzalel Academy of Arts [which have] unceasingly sought to come into contact with civil servants and, according to a document, targeted and penetrated military bases, dozens of buildings of the DEA, FBI, and others."
His investigation focused on two aspects. Firstly, could the Israelis have had preliminary knowledge of the September 11 attacks and not informed the Americans? His sources, explains Carl Cameron, tell him: "The principal question is ‘how they could they have not known?’" On the screen, his editor-in-chief tells him thus: "Certain reports confirm that the Mossad sent representatives to the United States to warn them, before September 11, of the imminence of a major terrorist attack. That does not go in the direction of an absence of warning." Cameron’s response: "The problem is not the absence of warning, but the absence of useful details" compared to those which American services suspect Israel of having held.
The second round of the investigation touched on Israeli companies providing administrative services for American companies, which would conceal information. It was aimed at the manufacturer of Amdocs software, placed on Wall Street, which lists, for the 25 major telephone companies of the United States, all the calls coming into and originating from American territory, as well as the companies Nice and Comverse Infosys, the latter providing the data-processing programs to American law enforcement agencies authorized to eavesdrop on private phone conversations. Comverse is suspected of having introduced into its systems of the "catch gates" in order to "intercept, record and store" these wire-taps. This hardware would render the "listener" himself "listened to."
Question to Cameron: "Are there reasons to believe the Israeli government is implicated?" Answer: "No, none, but a classified top-secret investigation is underway." The broadcast had been shown beforehand to the highest persons in charge of the CIA, the FBI, the NSA (the agency in charge of phone-taps), theDEA and the American Justice Department, none of which objected to its airing.
The report submitted to the American Justice Department, to which Le Mondehad access, shows that many of the "fine-arts students" suspected of illicit activity have a military past in Israeli information or advanced technology units. Some entered and left the United States on several occasions, remaining each time for short periods. Several are related to the hi-tech Israeli companies of Amdocs, Nice and Retalix.
Challenged, a "coed" saw her guarantee of $10,000 paid by an Israeli working at Amdocs. Questioned, two others admitted being employed by Retalix.
Le Monde obtained other information not contained in this report. Six of the intercepted "students" had a cellular telephone bought by an Israeli ex-vice-consul in the United States. Two others, at an unspecified time, arrived in Miami by direct flight from Hamburg, and went to the residence of an FBI agent, to try to sell him artwork, left again for the Chicago airport to go to the residence of an agent of the justice department, then again took a plane directly for Toronto – all in one day.
More than a third of these "students," who, according to the report, moved in at least 42 American cities, stated they resided in Florida. Five at least were intercepted in Hollywood, and two in Fort Lauderdale. Hollywood is a town of 25,000 inhabitants to the north of Miami, close to Fort Lauderdale. At least 10 of the 19 terrorists of 9/11 were residing in Florida.
Four of the five members of the group that diverted American Airlines flight number 11 – Mohammed Atta, Abdulaziz Al-Omari, Walid and Waïl Al-Shehri, as well as one of the five terrorists of United flight 175, Marwan Al-Shehhi – resided all at various times in... Hollywood, Florida. As for Ahmed Fayez, Ahmed and Hamza Al-Ghamdi and Mohand Al-Shehri, who took over United flight 75, like Saïd Al-Ghamdi, Ahmed Al-Haznawi and Ahmed Al-Nami, of United flight 93 which crashed September 11 in Pennsylvania, and Nawaq Al-Hamzi, of AA flight 77 (crashed into the Pentagon), they all at one time resided at Delray Beach, in the north of Fort Lauderdale.
This convergence is, inter alia, the origin of the American conviction that one of the tasks of the Israeli "students" would have been to track the Al-Qaida terrorists on their territory, without informing the federal authorities of the existence of the plot.
Two enigmas remain. Why was the Israeli network a priority of drug enforcement agents? An assumption: the DEA is the main American agency inquiring into the money laundering. A network such as Al-Qaida used "dirty" [funding], and the Taliban’s Afghanistan was the primary exporter of opium in the world. Why this astonishing "cover" of false students canvassers for poor artwork? The Israeli network seemed to hold lists of names. Its members knew at which office or which private residence to go. The objective was apparently to make contact, even for a short time.
According to an Israeli specialist in espionage, "this story is a ridiculous joke, and is not serious." Contacted, the services of the Israeli Prime Minister still had not, as of Monday evening March 4, answered our questions. The American Justice Department indicated to us that "a dozen" of these "students" would still be imprisoned indefinitely, and all the others had been released or deported. The FBI indicated to us that it will not make "any comment at this stage." The CIA, the FBI, the DEA, the INS, the NSA, the Justice Department and the Pentagon have all designated an investigator on this file.
March 6, 2002, International Herald Tribune, U.S. cool to report of Israeli spy ring, by Brian Knowlton,
American officials expressed caution and doubts Tuesday about reports that a large ring of Israelis spies had been broken up last year in the United States, where some of them allegedly had come in pursuit of Al Qaeda militants.
Le Monde, the Paris daily, reported Tuesday that as many as 120 Israeli agents, passing themselves off as fine-arts students or employees of Israeli high-tech companies, had entered the country. The newspaper said that all had been detained and interrogated, that many had been expelled and that dozen or so remained in U.S. custody.
Information on the possible ring was said to have come partly from a 61-page report sent to the Justice Department in June 2001 by a task force drawn from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI and a U.S. Air Force investigative unit, Le Monde reported. A drug administration spokeswoman confirmed Tuesday that a draft of such a report existed "sort of a compilation of material," but she said that she could say nothing further.
But an FBI spokesman told the Reuters news agency flatly, "There wasn't a spy ring." Asked about information in a Paris-based newsletter, the Lettre d'Intelligence Online, on which Le Monde partly based its report, the spokesman called it a "bogus story."
In Israel, a spokesman told Reuters: "The prime minister's office declines to comment on this matter."
It was unclear whether the purported Israeli spies might have gained any sensitive information. But Le Monde suggested, while offering no supporting evidence, that as many of the Israelis lived or worked in Florida, near some of the suspected Sept. 11 hijackers, they may have gained insight into the planned attacks but did not alert U.S. authorities.
The Israelis stayed in at least 42 U.S. cities, but more than one-third of them lived in Florida, where at least 10 of the 19 suspected terrorists also lived, Le Monde said. Of those, at least five lived in the town of Hollywood, the newspaper said, noting that five of the alleged hijackers also resided in that town.
Guillaume Dasquie, editor of Intelligence Online, told Reuters on Monday that the report did not specify what information was being sought by the alleged agents.
"The report shows the clandestine network was engaged in several intelligence operations," he said. "It was a long-term project." Le Monde's article said that the report also described how some of the Israelis had attempted to enter buildings belonging to the Drug Enforcement Administration and other U.S. agencies. It suggested that the actions may have been linked to the drug administration' s close monitoring of money-laundering, which also could provide a link to Qaeda militants.
The newspaper described the operation as the biggest Israeli spy case in the United States since 1986, a reference to the life sentence given Jonathan Pollard, an American who passed U.S. military secrets to Israel.
March 9, 2002, AP Worldstream, Tourists or spies? Federal agencies track 'suspicious' Israeli art students, by Connie Cass,
WASHINGTON Roving Israeli "art students" have added another chapter to the annals of international intrigue for eager spy-watchers _ perhaps overeager ones.
Suspicion of spying prompted the U.S. government to round up and deport dozens of young Israelis for immigration violations. It appears they were simply engaged in a pursuit popular among their countrymen _ peddling cheap goods to pay for budget world tours.
Or were some up to something more?
Fittingly for a spy tale, much remains murky.
The Drug Enforcement Administration's security office began compiling a dossier on 125 youthful Israeli visitors in January 2001, after a few showed up at DEA field offices selling landscapes and abstract paintings.
Then, last spring, the FBI sent a warning to other federal agencies to watch for visitors calling themselves "Israeli art students" and attempting to bypass security at federal buildings.
The warning said some were probably just peddlers but others acted suspiciously, and might even be Islamic fundamentalists posing as Israelis. The notice came months before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
A DEA draft report documented the sales calls at agents' offices or homes in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Chicago, Atlanta, New Orleans, Miami and other cities. Some visitors sold paintings at prices ranging from dlrs 50 to dlrs 200, while others claimed they were showing the works to promote Israeli art.
The 61-page DEA report suggests the Israelis' wanderings "may well be an organized intelligence-gathering activity." Yet it mostly chronicles people selling overpriced paintings door to door.
Justice Department spokeswoman Susan Dryden said the agency "does not have information to support these accounts of Israeli students possibly committing espionage."
A senior FBI official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Friday that the bureau also has investigated and is satisfied that the young people were not involved in espionage or intelligence gathering.
Meanwhile, the young people, mostly in their 20s, were deported because their tourist visas did not permit them to work here.
Russ Bergeron, spokesman for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, said dozens of "art students" were deported from California, the Midwest and Florida, and more elsewhere. No one has tallied the total, he said.
Apparently they were neither artists nor students.
The DEA's draft report, obtained by The Associated Press, said one leader of a group of sales people described buying the paintings for dlrs 8 to dlrs 10 in Florida, then reselling them for dlrs 50 or more.
Some of the Israelis said the art came from Universal Art Inc. in Sunrise, Florida. Repeated calls to the company were not answered.
Several of those questioned by investigators said they were students from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. But Pnina Calpen, spokeswoman for the Israeli school, said no one named in the report was a student there in the last 10 years.
The draft report was first obtained by a French Web site, Intelligenceonline.com.
Although Israel is an ally, it has spied on the United States. Jonathan Pollard, a civilian Navy intelligence analyst, pleaded guilty in 1986 to spying for Israel and is serving a life sentence.
The DEA report said many of the "art students" had served in intelligence or electronic signal intercept units during their mandatory service in the Israeli army. "That these people are now traveling in the U.S. selling art seems not to fit their background," it noted.
Yet many young Israelis tramp around Asia, Europe or the United States, tapping into an underground network of jobs to pay their way.
"It's become almost a tradition that once you finish military service you take a world tour, and then you face life for real," said Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith.
Other young Israelis working illegally in the United States have been caught up in the security net since Sept. 11.
In Findlay, Ohio, for example, 11 Israelis selling toy helicopters in malls were arrested. They were jailed for three weeks because INS officials suggested in court they were of interest to investigators tracking terrorists. A judge eventually allowed them to go home.
Their lawyer, David Leopold, said an FBI agent told him the bureau was checking whether the mall workers might be spies.
"I laughed it off and I still laugh it off," Leopold said. "The whole thing was goofy."
March 9, 2002, AP Online, Gov't Tracks Israeli Art Students, by Connie Cass, Associated Press Writer,
WASHINGTON Roving Israeli "art students" have added another chapter to the annals of international intrigue for eager spy-watchers _ perhaps overeager ones.
Suspicion of spying prompted the U.S. government to round up and deport dozens of young Israelis for immigration violations. It appears they were simply engaged in a pursuit popular among their countrymen _ peddling cheap goods to pay for budget world tours.
Or were some up to something more?
Fittingly for a spy tale, much remains murky.
The Drug Enforcement Administration's security office began compiling a dossier on 125 youthful Israeli visitors in January 2001, after a few showed up at DEA field offices selling landscapes and abstract paintings.
Then, last spring, the FBI sent a warning to other federal agencies to watch for visitors calling themselves "Israeli art students" and attempting to bypass security at federal buildings.
The warning said some were probably just peddlers but others acted suspiciously, and might even be Islamic fundamentalists posing as Israelis. The notice came months before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
A DEA draft report documented the sales calls at agents' offices or homes in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Chicago, Atlanta, New Orleans, Miami and other cities. Some visitors sold paintings at prices ranging from $50 to $200, while others claimed they were showing the works to promote Israeli art.
The 61-page DEA report suggests the Israelis' wanderings "may well be an organized intelligence-gathering activity." Yet it mostly chronicles people selling overpriced paintings door to door.
Justice Department spokeswoman Susan Dryden said the agency "does not have information to support these accounts of Israeli students possibly committing espionage."
A senior FBI official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Friday that the bureau also has investigated and is satisfied that the young people were not involved in espionage or intelligence gathering.
Meanwhile, the young people, mostly in their 20s, were deported because their tourist visas did not permit them to work here.
Russ Bergeron, spokesman for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, said dozens of "art students" were deported from California, the Midwest and Florida, and more elsewhere. No one has tallied the total, he said.
Apparently they were neither artists nor students.
The DEA's draft report, obtained by The Associated Press, said one leader of a group of sales people described buying the paintings for $8 to $10 in Florida, then reselling them for $50 or more.
Some of the Israelis said the art came from Universal Art Inc. in Sunrise, Fla. Repeated calls to the company were not answered.
Several of those questioned by investigators said they were students from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. But Pnina Calpen, spokeswoman for the Israeli school, said no one named in the report was a student there in the last 10 years.
The draft report was first obtained by a French Web site, Intelligenceonline.com.
Although Israel is an ally, it has spied on the United States. Jonathan Pollard, a civilian Navy intelligence analyst, pleaded guilty in 1986 to spying for Israel and is serving a life sentence.
The DEA report said many of the "art students" had served in intelligence or electronic signal intercept units during their mandatory service in the Israeli army. "That these people are now traveling in the U.S. selling art seems not to fit their background," it noted.
Yet many young Israelis tramp around Asia, Europe or the United States, tapping into an underground network of jobs to pay their way.
"It's become almost a tradition that once you finish military service you take a world tour, and then you face life for real," said Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith.
Other young Israelis working illegally in the United States have been caught up in the security net since Sept. 11.
In Findlay, Ohio, for example, 11 Israelis selling toy helicopters in malls were arrested. They were jailed for three weeks because INS officials suggested in court they were of interest to investigators tracking terrorists. A judge eventually allowed them to go home.
Their lawyer, David Leopold, said an FBI agent told him the bureau was checking whether the mall workers might be spies.
"I laughed it off and I still laugh it off," Leopold said. "The whole thing was goofy."
AP writer Ted Bridis contributed to this report.
March 10, 2002, Telegraph - Herald (Dubuque) / Associated Press, Israeli 'art students' draw authorities' attention; Immigration violations: Dozens are deported after originally being suspected of spying,
WASHINGTON (AP) - Roving Israeli "art students" have added another chapter to the annals of international intrigue for eager spy- watchers - perhaps overeager ones.
Suspicion of spying prompted the U.S. government to round up and deport dozens of young Israelis for immigration violations. It appears they were simply engaged in a pursuit popular among their countrymen - peddling cheap goods to pay for budget world tours.
Or were some up to something more?
Fittingly for a spy tale, much remains murky.
The Drug Enforcement Administration's security office began compiling a dossier on 125 youthful Israeli visitors in January 2001, after a few showed up at DEA field offices selling landscapes and abstract paintings.
Then, last spring, the FBI sent a warning to other federal agencies to watch for visitors calling themselves "Israeli art students" and attempting to bypass security at federal buildings.
The warning said some were probably just peddlers but others acted suspiciously, and might even be Islamic fundamentalists posing as Israelis. The notice came months before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
A DEA draft report documented the sales calls at agents' offices or homes in Los Angeles, Phoenix, Chicago, Atlanta, New Orleans, Miami and other cities. Some visitors sold paintings at prices ranging from $50 to $200, while others claimed they were showing the works to promote Israeli art.
The 61-page DEA report suggests the Israelis' wanderings "may well be an organized intelligence-gathering activity." Yet it mostly chronicles people selling overpriced paintings door to door.
Justice Department spokeswoman Susan Dryden said the agency "does not have information to support these accounts of Israeli students possibly committing espionage."
A senior FBI official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Friday that the bureau also has investigated and is satisfied that the young people were not involved in espionage or intelligence gathering.
Meanwhile, the young people, mostly in their 20s, were deported because their tourist visas did not permit them to work here.
Russ Bergeron, spokesman for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, said dozens of "art students" were deported from California, the Midwest and Florida, and more elsewhere. No one has tallied the total, he said.
Apparently, they were neither artists nor students.
The DEA's draft report, obtained by The Associated Press, said one leader of a group of salespeople described buying the paintings for $8 to $10 in Florida, then reselling them for $50 or more.
Some of the Israelis said the art came from Universal Art Inc. in Sunrise, Fla. Repeated calls to the company were not answered.
Several of those questioned by investigators said they were students from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design. But Pnina Calpen, spokeswoman for the Israeli school, said no one named in the report was a student there in the last 10 years.
The draft report was first obtained by a French Web site, Intelligenceonline.com.
Although Israel is an ally, it has spied on the United States. Jonathan Pollard, a civilian Navy intelligence analyst, pleaded guilty in 1986 to spying for Israel and is serving a life sentence.
The DEA report said many of the "art students" had served in intelligence or electronic signal intercept units during their mandatory service in the Israeli army. "That these people are now traveling in the U.S. selling art seems not to fit their background," it noted.
Yet, many young Israelis tramp around Asia, Europe or the United States, tapping into an underground network of jobs to pay their way.
"It's become almost a tradition that once you finish military service you take a world tour, and then you face life for real," said Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith.
Other young Israelis working illegally in the United States have been caught up in the security net since Sept. 11.
In Findlay, Ohio, for example, 11 Israelis selling toy helicopters in malls were arrested. They were jailed for three weeks because INS officials suggested in court they were of interest to investigators tracking terrorists. A judge eventually allowed them to go home.
March 11, 2002, Jewish World Review, An Israeli spy network in the United States?, by Daniel Pipes,
IN a spectacular scoop, the most serious and authoritative newspaper of France, Le Monde, announced on its front page last Tuesday that "An Israeli Spy Network Was Dismantled in the United States." The lengthy article asserts that "without doubt" this is the biggest spy story of its type in over fifteen years.
But American journalists found not a shred of evidence to support the claim. More important, it met with wall-to-wall derision from the U.S. and Israeli governments. The Justice Department spokeswoman, for instance, dismissed it as "an urban myth that has been circulating for months" and indicated there were no Israelis arrested for espionage. The FBI spokesman called it a "bogus story," adding "there wasn't a spy ring."
Actually, any observant reader can sense that Le Monde's account - with its crazy-quilt of unsourced allegations, drive-by innuendoes, and incoherent obscurities, but no hard facts - is nonsense.
That one of the world's most prestigious newspapers promotes such twaddle prompts two observations.
First, even the most sober media has a known weakness for sensational conspiracy theories. The New York Times found itself wiping egg off its collective face after lavishing attention in May 1991 on the "October surprise" theory peddled by Gary Sick that, to win the presidential election in 1980, Ronald Reagan had conspired with the ayatollahs in 1980 to keep Americans imprisoned in Iran.
In June 1998, CNN aired "Valley of Death," a would-be expose of American troops' use of sarin nerve gas during a clandestine 1970 raid into Laos. The two producers and the on-air narrator (Peter Arnett) all lost their jobs as a result.
Second, such conspiracy theories do not appear suddenly, but emerge piecemeal from the muck. In this case, the notion that found full flower in Le Monde apparently began life as a passing reference in, of all things, the September 1998 Starr Report on President Bill Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky. During their final sexual encounter on March 29, 1997, Lewinsky reported that the couple had a lengthy conversation in which the president told her "he suspected that a foreign embassy (he did not specify which one) was tapping his telephones."
This was red meat for conspiracy theorists, who immediately focused on Israel. For example, Gordon Thomas, a British journalist, in March 1999 announced (in Gideon's Spies: The Secret History of the Mossad, from St. Martin's) that Israel's intelligence service possessed tapes with 30 hours of Clinton-Lewinsky cooings.
The usually responsible Insight magazine elaborated this theory in May 2000 with a story on the "huge security nightmare" of Israeli spying on high-level U.S. officials by "using telephone-company equipment at remote sites to track calls placed to or received from high-ranking government officials, possibly including the president himself."
Fox News immediately named an Israeli company involved: Amdocs, Ltd., which supposedly has the records (though not the contents) of virtually every call made in the United States.
In June 2001, a Justice Department task force issued a 61-page draft report noting a pattern of activities by Israelis in the United States and raised the possibility of their being part of an intelligence-gathering operation - possibly of a drug-trafficking gang.
In mid-December 2001, Fox News named a second Israeli telephone company (Comverse Infosys, which it said has access to nearly all wiretaps placed by U.S. law enforcement), then added an explosive accusation: Israel had its own spying operation against militant Islamic groups in the United States and "may have gathered intelligence about the [9/11] attacks in advance, and not shared it."
(Here, Fox News regurgitated a very tired theme. For example, in a 1990 expose of the Mossad, By Way of Deception, Victor Ostrovsky claimed that Israeli agents knew in advance about the truck bomb that killed 241 U.S. Marines in October 1983 but did not warn their American counterparts.)
A Paris-based newsletter, Intelligence Online, in late February reported that the U.S. Department of Justice had neutralized a "vast network of Israeli intelligence agents" by arresting or expelling 120 Israelis.
Finally, Le Monde (which is presently in negotiations to buy Intelligence Online) completed the process by broadcasting Intelligence Online's fantasy to the wide world.
All this matters, for conspiracy theories are easier to kill than to bury. They haunt the fringes of the political spectrum, poisoning the political debate. Shame, then, on those media outlets that contributed to this dangerous falsehood.
March 15, 2002, The Forward, FBI: Deported Students Weren't Agents, by Marc Perelman,
Israeli and American officials are dismissing as groundless a spate of recent reports about Israeli spying on U.S. government buildings and military facilities and about possible prior Israeli knowledge of the September 11 attacks.
At least some elements of the reports, however, have received confirmation from officials at the Drug Enforcement Agency and the FBI, who acknowledge having investigated the Israelis cited in the press reports, although the FBI said it found "no credence" to the spying allegations.
Last week, a French newsletter, Intelligence Online, reported that U.S. authorities arrested or expelled some 120 Israelis identified as art students because they were part of a spy ring allegedly trying to penetrate
federal buildings and military facilities.
The publication based its account on a June 2001 DEA draft report cataloguing the suspicious activities of those so-called art students. The report was later handed over to the FBI.
A few days after the French online report, Le Monde, France's newspaper of record, raised the possibility that the Israeli art students were in fact trailing Al Qaeda operatives. Le Monde said this possibility gave credence to the hypothesis that Israel had not shared with Washington all the information it had gathered on the September 11 attacks.
Israeli intelligence officials dismissed the French allegations as preposterous. "This is just ridiculous," said Ami Ayalon, a former head of Israel's Shin Bet general security service, echoing several current Israeli
officials. "Since the Pollard affair, there is a consensus in the Israeli intelligence community that spying on America is harmful," he added. He was referring to former U.S. Navy intelligence officer Jonathan Pollard, whose arrest in 1986 on charges of spying for Israel caused a crisis in U.S.-Israeli relations.
Thomas Hinojosa, a DEA spokesman, said that he couldn't authenticate the draft report. However, he confirmed that individuals purporting to be Israeli art students had attempted to establish contact with DEA agents and to enter federal buildings on at least several occasions.
"Our agents noted suspicious activities and reported them to our headquarters last year," he said. "This was compiled into an internal document and then referred to law enforcement agencies."
Bill Carter, a spokesman for the FBI, acknowledged that the bureau had investigated the case.
"After an agency reported suspicious activities by those so-called students, the FBI conducted an investigation and determined that there was no credence to the assumption that this was an Israeli spying operation," he said. "None of the Israelis were charged with espionage and they were all deported by the INS for visa violations."
American suspicion about the activities of "Israeli art students" and Israeli spying in general is nothing new.
In March 2001, the federal National Counterintelligence Executive issued a warning urging employees to report all contact with people describing themselves as Israeli art students. It said some had gone to the private residences of senior U.S. officials under the guise of selling art.
"These individuals have been described as aggressive," the warning said. "They attempt to engage employees in conversation rather than giving a sales pitch."
However, the warning added that there may be two groups involved, one with an "apparently legitimate money-making goal while the second, perhaps a non-Israeli group, may have ties to a Middle Eastern Islamic fundamentalist group."
In recent years two reports, one by the Government Accounting Office, the other by the Defense Intelligence Agency, warned against Israeli economic and military espionage activity in the United States. In addition, the FBI conducted an investigation during the late 1990s into alleged Israeli wiretapping of the White House, the State Department and the National Security Council. The investigation ended in May 2000 without any result, according to The New York Times.
Several young Israelis who were detained after September 11 in Ohio, Florida, California, Pennsylvania and Missouri told the Forward they were questioned about possible intelligence activities.
"After they realized we were no terrorists, they thought we were spying on local Arabs and they grilled us," said Yaniv Hani, who was arrested with 12 Israelis in Ohio and released in late December. "Basically, they were shooting in all directions."
The preliminary DEA report, which was reportedly authored by a task force involving the INS, the DEA, the FBI and the Air Force, summarized the findings of the questioning of the so-called students between January and May 2001 after more than 100 were arrested, mostly in California, Florida and Texas.
According to Intelligence Online, the Israelis implicated were between 22 and 30 years of age and the network had around 20 "cells."
The report said they tried to penetrate several government facilities, including the Tinker Air Base in Oklahoma City where AWACS surveillance planes and many B-1 bombers are repaired.
The draft report allegedly states that most of the students questioned acknowledged serving in military intelligence, electronic-signals interception or explosive-ordnance units.
The news picked up steam after it was relayed and amplified by Le Monde. In its own reporting, Le Monde added that Israeli spies may have been trailing Al Qaeda members in the United States without informing Washington. Le Monde noted that more than one-third of the Israelis under investigation lived in Florida, which served as a temporary home base to at least 10 of the 19 hijackers in the September 11 attacks.
Those elements, Le Monde wrote, support "the thesis according to which Israel did not share with the U.S. all the elements it had about the planning of the September 11 attacks." Fox News also made such allegations in December.
Both the French and the Fox reports were dismissed by Israel and its supporters and received limited coverage in the American media.
"People are just planting falsehoods," said Uzi Arad, a former head of the Mossad.
A former senior U.S. intelligence official offered a different hypothesis.
"My guess and the one I heard from people in counterintelligence is that this could have been an Israeli training exercise, because they were all young and amateurish," he said.
March 15, 2002, The Forward, "Spy Rumors Fly on Gusts of Truth: Americans Probing Reports of Israeli Espionage," by Marc Perelman,In June 2001, a Justice Department task force issued a 61-page draft report noting a pattern of activities by Israelis in the United States and raised the possibility of their being part of an intelligence-gathering operation - possibly of a drug-trafficking gang.
In mid-December 2001, Fox News named a second Israeli telephone company (Comverse Infosys, which it said has access to nearly all wiretaps placed by U.S. law enforcement), then added an explosive accusation: Israel had its own spying operation against militant Islamic groups in the United States and "may have gathered intelligence about the [9/11] attacks in advance, and not shared it."
(Here, Fox News regurgitated a very tired theme. For example, in a 1990 expose of the Mossad, By Way of Deception, Victor Ostrovsky claimed that Israeli agents knew in advance about the truck bomb that killed 241 U.S. Marines in October 1983 but did not warn their American counterparts.)
A Paris-based newsletter, Intelligence Online, in late February reported that the U.S. Department of Justice had neutralized a "vast network of Israeli intelligence agents" by arresting or expelling 120 Israelis.
Finally, Le Monde (which is presently in negotiations to buy Intelligence Online) completed the process by broadcasting Intelligence Online's fantasy to the wide world.
All this matters, for conspiracy theories are easier to kill than to bury. They haunt the fringes of the political spectrum, poisoning the political debate. Shame, then, on those media outlets that contributed to this dangerous falsehood.
March 15, 2002, The Forward, FBI: Deported Students Weren't Agents, by Marc Perelman,
Israeli and American officials are dismissing as groundless a spate of recent reports about Israeli spying on U.S. government buildings and military facilities and about possible prior Israeli knowledge of the September 11 attacks.
At least some elements of the reports, however, have received confirmation from officials at the Drug Enforcement Agency and the FBI, who acknowledge having investigated the Israelis cited in the press reports, although the FBI said it found "no credence" to the spying allegations.
Last week, a French newsletter, Intelligence Online, reported that U.S. authorities arrested or expelled some 120 Israelis identified as art students because they were part of a spy ring allegedly trying to penetrate
federal buildings and military facilities.
The publication based its account on a June 2001 DEA draft report cataloguing the suspicious activities of those so-called art students. The report was later handed over to the FBI.
A few days after the French online report, Le Monde, France's newspaper of record, raised the possibility that the Israeli art students were in fact trailing Al Qaeda operatives. Le Monde said this possibility gave credence to the hypothesis that Israel had not shared with Washington all the information it had gathered on the September 11 attacks.
Israeli intelligence officials dismissed the French allegations as preposterous. "This is just ridiculous," said Ami Ayalon, a former head of Israel's Shin Bet general security service, echoing several current Israeli
officials. "Since the Pollard affair, there is a consensus in the Israeli intelligence community that spying on America is harmful," he added. He was referring to former U.S. Navy intelligence officer Jonathan Pollard, whose arrest in 1986 on charges of spying for Israel caused a crisis in U.S.-Israeli relations.
Thomas Hinojosa, a DEA spokesman, said that he couldn't authenticate the draft report. However, he confirmed that individuals purporting to be Israeli art students had attempted to establish contact with DEA agents and to enter federal buildings on at least several occasions.
"Our agents noted suspicious activities and reported them to our headquarters last year," he said. "This was compiled into an internal document and then referred to law enforcement agencies."
Bill Carter, a spokesman for the FBI, acknowledged that the bureau had investigated the case.
"After an agency reported suspicious activities by those so-called students, the FBI conducted an investigation and determined that there was no credence to the assumption that this was an Israeli spying operation," he said. "None of the Israelis were charged with espionage and they were all deported by the INS for visa violations."
American suspicion about the activities of "Israeli art students" and Israeli spying in general is nothing new.
In March 2001, the federal National Counterintelligence Executive issued a warning urging employees to report all contact with people describing themselves as Israeli art students. It said some had gone to the private residences of senior U.S. officials under the guise of selling art.
"These individuals have been described as aggressive," the warning said. "They attempt to engage employees in conversation rather than giving a sales pitch."
However, the warning added that there may be two groups involved, one with an "apparently legitimate money-making goal while the second, perhaps a non-Israeli group, may have ties to a Middle Eastern Islamic fundamentalist group."
In recent years two reports, one by the Government Accounting Office, the other by the Defense Intelligence Agency, warned against Israeli economic and military espionage activity in the United States. In addition, the FBI conducted an investigation during the late 1990s into alleged Israeli wiretapping of the White House, the State Department and the National Security Council. The investigation ended in May 2000 without any result, according to The New York Times.
Several young Israelis who were detained after September 11 in Ohio, Florida, California, Pennsylvania and Missouri told the Forward they were questioned about possible intelligence activities.
"After they realized we were no terrorists, they thought we were spying on local Arabs and they grilled us," said Yaniv Hani, who was arrested with 12 Israelis in Ohio and released in late December. "Basically, they were shooting in all directions."
The preliminary DEA report, which was reportedly authored by a task force involving the INS, the DEA, the FBI and the Air Force, summarized the findings of the questioning of the so-called students between January and May 2001 after more than 100 were arrested, mostly in California, Florida and Texas.
According to Intelligence Online, the Israelis implicated were between 22 and 30 years of age and the network had around 20 "cells."
The report said they tried to penetrate several government facilities, including the Tinker Air Base in Oklahoma City where AWACS surveillance planes and many B-1 bombers are repaired.
The draft report allegedly states that most of the students questioned acknowledged serving in military intelligence, electronic-signals interception or explosive-ordnance units.
The news picked up steam after it was relayed and amplified by Le Monde. In its own reporting, Le Monde added that Israeli spies may have been trailing Al Qaeda members in the United States without informing Washington. Le Monde noted that more than one-third of the Israelis under investigation lived in Florida, which served as a temporary home base to at least 10 of the 19 hijackers in the September 11 attacks.
Those elements, Le Monde wrote, support "the thesis according to which Israel did not share with the U.S. all the elements it had about the planning of the September 11 attacks." Fox News also made such allegations in December.
Both the French and the Fox reports were dismissed by Israel and its supporters and received limited coverage in the American media.
"People are just planting falsehoods," said Uzi Arad, a former head of the Mossad.
A former senior U.S. intelligence official offered a different hypothesis.
"My guess and the one I heard from people in counterintelligence is that this could have been an Israeli training exercise, because they were all young and amateurish," he said.
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.
In particular, a group of five Israelis arrested in New Jersey shortly after the September 11 attacks and held for more than two months was subjected to an unusual number of polygraph tests and interrogated by a
series of government agencies including the FBI's counterintelligence division, which by some reports remains convinced that Israel was conducting an intelligence operation. The five Israelis worked for a moving company with few discernable assets that closed up shop immediately afterward and whose owner fled to Israel.
Other allegations involved Israelis claiming to be art students who had backgrounds in signal interception and ordnance. (See related story, Page 8.)
Sources emphasized that the release of all the Israelis under investigation indicates that they were cleared of any suspicion that they had prior knowledge of the September 11 attacks, as some anti-Israel media outlets
have suggested.
The resulting tensions between Washington and Jerusalem, sources told the Forward, 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.
Most experts and former officials interviewed for this article said that such so-called unilateral or uncoordinated Israeli monitoring of radical Muslims in America would not be surprising.
In fact, they said, Israeli intelligence played a key role in helping the Bush administration to crack down on Islamic charities suspected of funneling money to terrorist groups, most notably the Richardson, Texas-based Holy Land Foundation last December.
"I have no doubt Israel has an interest in spying on those groups," said Peter Unsinger, an intelligence expert who teaches justice administration at San Jose University. "The Israelis give us good stuff, like on the Hamas charities."
According to one former high-ranking American intelligence official, who asked not to be named, the FBI came to the conclusion at the end of its investigation that the five Israelis arrested in New Jersey last September were conducting a Mossad surveillance mission and that their employer, Urban Moving Systems of Weehawken, N.J., served as a front.
After their arrest, the men were held in detention for two-and-a-half months and were deported at the end of November, officially for visa violations.
However, a counterintelligence investigation by the FBI concluded that at least two of them were in fact Mossad operatives, according to the former American official, who said he was regularly briefed on the investigation by two separate law enforcement officials.
"The assessment was that Urban Moving Systems was a front for the Mossad and operatives employed by it," he said. "The conclusion of the FBI was that they were spying on local Arabs but that they could leave because they did not know anything about 9/11."
However, he added, the bureau was "very irritated because it was a case of so-called unilateral espionage, meaning they didn't know about it."
Spokesmen for the FBI, the Justice Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service refused to discuss the case. Israeli officials flatly dismissed the allegations as untrue.
However, the former American official said that after American authorities confronted Jerusalem on the issue at the end of last year, the Israeli government acknowledged the operation and apologized for not coordinating it with Washington.
The five men -- Sivan and Paul Kurzberg, Oded Ellner, Omer Marmari and Yaron Shmuel -- were arrested eight hours after the attacks by the Bergen County, N.J., police while driving in an Urban Moving Systems van. The police acted on an FBI alert after the men allegedly were seen acting strangely while watching the events from the roof of their warehouse and the roof of their van.
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 Bergen County police immediately handed the suspects to the INS, which turned them over to a joint police-FBI terrorism task force set up after September 11 to deal with all possible links with the attacks.
The five Israelis were detained in the high-security Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn in solitary confinement until mid-October. On September 25, they all signed papers acknowledging violations of U.S. immigration law. At the end of October, the INS issued a deportation order which was enforced a month later after a review by the Justice Department and prodding by Jewish and Israeli officials.
However, the former official said, this is just the official story.
In fact, he said, the nature of the investigation changed after the names of two of the five Israelis showed up on a CIA-FBI database of foreign intelligence operatives, he said. At that point, he said, the bureau took
control of the investigation and launched a Foreign Counterintelligence Investigation, or FCI.
FBI investigations into possible links to the September 11 attacks are usually carried by the bureau's counterterrorism division, not its counterintelligence division.
"An FCI means not only that it was serious but also that it was handled at a very high level and very tightly," the former official said. That view was echoed by several former FBI officials interviewed.
Steven Gordon, an American lawyer hired by the families to help secure their release, said he could not confirm which FBI division was in charge of the investigation. However, he acknowledged that "there were a lot of people involved, including counterintelligence officials from the FBI."
The men all underwent at least two polygraph tests each, the lawyer added. He said one of the Israelis took the test seven times, a very unusual total according to several polygraph experts interviewed by the Forward.
After the men were arrested, FBI agents searched the warehouse of Urban Moving Systems in Weehawken, N.J., seizing computer hard drives and documents. The warehouse was closed on September 14, said Ron George, a spokesman for the New Jersey State Division of Consumer Affairs.
On December 7, a New Jersey judge ruled that the state could seize the goods remaining inside the warehouse. The state also has a lawsuit pending against Urban Moving Systems and its owner, Dominik Otto Suter, an Israeli citizen.
The FBI questioned Mr. Suter once. However, he left the country afterward and went back to Israel before further questioning. Mr. Suter declined through his lawyer to be interviewed for this article.
Earlier this year, the New York State Department of Transportation revoked Urban Moving System's license after discovering that the company's midtown Manhattan base was only a mailing address.
After they returned to Israel at the end of November, the five men told local media that they were kept in solitary confinement, beaten, deprived of food and questioned while blindfolded and in their underwear.
Mr. Ellner, one of the five Israelis, said on two occasions in recent weeks that the five men had decided not to grant any interviews right now "because we went through a very difficult period and we are not ready for
this."
Their Israeli lawyer, Ram Horwitz, told the Forward he was still waiting for the results of the medical tests undertaken by the men in Israel to make a decision on an eventual lawsuit in the United States for mistreatment.
Both Mr. Horwitz and Mr. Gordon insisted the men were not intelligence officers.
Irit Stoffer, an Israeli Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said the allegations were "completely untrue" and that there were "only visa violations."
"The FBI investigated those cases because of 9/11," Ms. Stoffer said.
Charlene Eban, a spokeswoman for the FBI in Washington, and Don Nelson, a Justice Department spokesman, said they had no knowledge of an Israeli spying operation.
"If we found evidence of unauthorized intelligence operations, that would be classified material," added Jim Margolin, a spokesman for the FBI in New York.
One leading expert in American intelligence operations, Chip Berlet, a senior analyst at the Boston-based Political Research Associates, explained that there "is a backdoor agreement between allies that says that if one of your spies gets caught and didn't do too much harm, he goes home. It goes on all the time. The official reason is always a visa violation."
March 21, 2002, The Jewish Advocate (Boston, MA), An Israeli Spy Network in the U.S.?, by Daniel Pipes,
In a spectacular scoop, the most serious and authoritative newspaper of France, Le Monde announced on its front page last Tuesday that ,An Israeli Spy Network Was Dismantled in the United States." The lengthy article asserts that "without doubt" this is the biggest spy story of its type in over 15 years.
But American journalists found not a shred of evidence to support the claim. More important, it met with wall-to-wall derision from the U.S. and Israeli governments. The Justice Department spokeswoman, for instance, dismissed it as "an urban myth that has been circulating for months" and indicated there were no Israelis arrested for espionage.
Actually, any observant reader can sense that Le Monde's account is nonsense.
That one of the world's most prestigious newspapers promotes such twaddle prompts two observations.
First, even the most sober media has a known weakness for sensational conspiracy theories. The New York Times found itself wiping egg off its collective face after lavishing attention in May 1991 on the "October surprise" theory peddled by Gary Sick that, to win the presidential election in 1980, Ronald Reagan had conspired with the ayatollahs in 1980 to keep Americans imprisoned in Iran.
In June 1998, CNN aired "Valley of Death," a would-be expose of American troops' use of sarin nerve gas during a clandestine 1970 raid into Laos. The two producers and the on-air narrator (Peter Arnett) all lost their jobs as a result.
Second, such conspiracy theories do not appear suddenly, but emerge piecemeal from the muck. In this case, the notion that found full flower in Le Monde apparently began life as a passing reference in, of all things, the September 1998 Starr Report on President Bill Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky. During their final sexual encounter on March 29, 1997, Lewinsky reported that the couple had a lengthy conversation in which the president told her "he suspected that a foreign embassy (he did not specify which one) was tapping his telephones."
The usually responsible Insight magazine elaborated this theory in May 2000 with a story on the "huge security nightmare" of Israeli spying on high-level U.S. officials by "using telephone-company equipment at remote sites to track calls placed to or received from high-ranking government officials, possibly including the president himself."
Fox News immediately named an Israeli company involved: Amdocs, Ltd., which supposedly has the records (though not the contents) of virtually every call made in the United States.
In June 2001, a Justice Department task force issued a 61page draft report noting a pattern of activities by Israelis in the United States and raised the possibility of their being part of an intelligence-gathering operation -- possibly of a drug-trafficking gang.
In mid-December 2001, Fox News named a second Israeli telephone company (Comverse Infosys, which it said has access to nearly all wiretaps placed by U.S. law enforcement), then added an explosive accusation: Israel had its own spying operation against militant Islamic groups in the United States and "may have gathered intelligence about the [9/11] attacks in advance, and not shared it."
A Paris-based newsletter, Intelligence Online, in late February reported that the U.S. Department of Justice had neutralized a "vast network of Israeli intelligence agents" by arresting or expelling 120 Israelis.
Finally, Le Monde (which is presently in negotiations to buy Intelligence Online) completed the process by broadcasting Intelligence Online's fantasy to the wide world.
All this matters, for conspiracy theories are easier to kill than to bury. They haunt the fringes of the political spectrum, poisoning the political debate. Shame, then, on those media outlets that contributed to this dangerous falsehood.
April 1, 2002, Insight on the News, Intelligence agents or art students? The DEA and Justice Department believe there was something sinister behind unusual visits Israeli `art students' paid to employees of law-enforcement agencies, by Paul Rodriguez,
From Paris to Washington to New York City and back again, a story has reverberated about an alleged Israeli spy ring that was busted in the United States last year. Intelligence Online, a well-respected Internet news service broke the explosive story, which quickly was picked up by Le Monde in France, then the Associated Press (AP) in Washington and other news outlets.
These stories all seem to track a similar report last December by Carl Cameron of Fox News outlining concerns among U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence agencies that an Israeli-based network of operatives was spying or otherwise engaged in information-gathering activities within the United States. All the news agencies said or mentioned that many of those under investigation subsequently were deported by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) for visa violations. Most also quoted named and unnamed Israeli spokesmen as saying that Israel doesn't spy on the United States and that whatever these Israeli citizens were doing was not criminal even if inappropriate and in violation of their visas.
INSIGHT already was investigating such allegations and had obtained numerous documents for what from the beginning was planned as an investigative report. Amid the breaking news of the so-called "Israeli spy-ring bust," it is time to clear the air on a variety of real and half-baked charges reported by others. Specifically:
* The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) began an "unprecedented" internal-security investigation early last spring following reports from field agents and regional offices involving suspicious activities by Israeli citizens engaged in the sale of artwork and paintings throughout the Southeast, South and Southwest, including Florida, Texas and California.
* The "Israeli art students" -- so dubbed because that's how they described themselves to various law-enforcement officials when confronted -- were both male and female and, as appropriate to their ages and required under Israeli law, served that nation's military.
* These alleged students traveled in "organized" teams of eight to 10 people, with each group having a team leader.
* Reports of Israeli art students calling on DEA employees began at least as early as January 2000 and continued through at least June 2001.
* These unusual visits at both the homes and offices of DEA officers were expanded to include employees of "several other law-enforcement and Department of Defense agencies."
* "The number of reported incidents has declined" since spring 2001, though the "geographic spread of the incidents has increased to Wisconsin, Oklahoma and Los Angeles."
* The stories offered by the Israeli art students "are remarkable in their consistency" insofar as they state they either are from the University of Jerusalem or the Bezalel Academy of Arts in Jerusalem."
* Despite the students' claims that they had themselves produced the artwork or paintings they were offering for sale, "information has been received which indicates the art is actually produced in China."
All this is contained in official DEA documents obtained by INSIght, including one produced in early June 2001. These represent an extraordinary compilation by DEA's Office of Security Programs chronicling not only contacts of DEA personnel at home or at their offices, but also similar incidents involving employees of other agencies and the military.
"It is a very alarming set of documents," says one high-ranking federal law-enforcement official when told of the cache of materials collected by INSIGHT. "This shows how serious DEA and Justice consider this activity."
Indeed, says a senior Justice Department official briefed on an ongoing multiagency task force, "We think there is something quite sinister here but are unable at this time to put our finger on it." But, said another federal law-enforcement source: "The higher-ups don't want to deal with this and neither does the FBI because it involves Israel."
One report, Suspicious Activities Involving Israeli Art Students at DEA Facilities, lists more than 180 documented-incident cases. Analysts tell INSIGHT they appear to be attempts "to circumvent the access-control systems at DEA offices" and to capture personal information about private lives of DEA law-enforcement officers, such as where they live, what cars they drive and how they behave outside of their official offices. This was concluded, in part, based on photographs made of U.S. law officers and other materials seized by a variety of federal and local law-enforcement officers during searches.
"The nature of the individuals' conduct, combined with intelligence information and historical information regarding past incidents involving Israeli organized crime, leads IS [DEA's Internal Security division] to believe the incidents may well be an organized intelligence-gathering activity," a classified document euphemizes.
The documents do not clearly label the activities of the so-called art students as a government-sanctioned spying operation, as widely reported. But they do make clear there is a covert nature to the well-orchestrated activities. In one reference, DEA said telephone numbers obtained from one encounter with its agents in Orlando, Fla., "have been linked to several ongoing DEA MDMA [the illegal drug Ecstasy] investigations in Florida, California, Texas and New York now being closely coordinated by DEA headquarters" in Washington.
A review of passports obtained by law enforcement also showed that a majority of the students traveled to numerous countries, including Thailand, Laos, India, Kenya, Central and South America, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands and Canada.
Besides federal law-enforcement incidents, DEA's IS unit found that several military bases also had experienced unauthorized entries by some of the students, including two bases from which Stealth aircraft and other supersecret military units operate. Unauthorized photographing of military sites and civilian industrial complexes, such as petroleum-storage facilities, also was reported to the DEA, the documents show and interviews confirm.
In virtually every incident of the many reported by the entire DEA field-office structure the pattern was similar: Students would attempt to enter secure buildings, take photographs, follow federal agents when they left buildings, show up at their homes, take pictures of their cars and circle their neighborhoods, visiting only their houses and then departing.
"This is very odd behavior under any situation," says a current DEA official who had heard but not yet seen the reports until INSIGHT shared them. "The patterns are clear and they pose a significant danger to our officers in the field." Maybe U.S. national security.
On March 4, Intelligence Online reported that U.S. authorities had busted an Israeli spy ring in the United States that had sought to penetrate various federal law-enforcement agencies and military establishments. According to one wire report, the online service also said that documents it had obtained showed "a huge Israeli spy ring operating in the United States was rolled up by l he Justice Department's counter-espionage service" last year.
Once newspapers and the AP picked the story up, FBI officials downplayed it, telling reporters that no charges of espionage had been filed. The carefully worded statements left out any mention of whether spying was suspected. FBI and INS officials told newsmen that mint of those involved -- an estimated 100 or so "Israeli art students" -- overstayed their visas and had been deported. Some also were found to have illegal drugs or admitted to illegal-drug usage and were deported for this, too, documents showed and officials confirm to INSIGHT.
A spokesmen for the Israeli Embassy in Washington says suggestions of espionage are nonsense and that all that might have been involved was a few visa violations. "If there were crimes committed then why weren't any of these people charged?" a spokesman asked. "That's not to say that there isn't any organized crime involving Israeli citizens," said another Israeli official when asked about DEA concern that the art students might have been tied to a criminal syndicate. "If that is so, I hope they put them in jail. We don't need those types of people, no matter who they are, loose on the streets."
This Israeli government official also tells INSIGHT that his government's police and intelligence services cooperate fully with their counterparts in the United States, including the ongoing Ecstasy investigation mentioned in one of the DEA documents this magazine has obtained. "It is unfortunately a big problem, and we are working to help stop it," the Israeli official confirms.
FBI and Justice spokesmen have sought either to downplay or knock out the stories -- even discredit the DEA reports and their authors. But if DEA was wrong then how can Justice explain this item INSIGHT discovered that was circulated by a little-known but sensitive White House agency called the U.S. Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive.
That agency not only circulated an internal warning to intelligence, federal law enforcement and White House planners -- three full months before DEA issued its own internal report -- but also posted on its site a warning to all federal employees about Israeli art students aggressively trying to enter federal facilities and going to the homes of senior federal agents. The same thing apparently was going on with a non-Israeli outfit with possible ties to a Middle Eastern Islamic fundamentalist group.
April 16, 2002, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Florida-Based Movers' Ring Uses Shady Tactics, Illegal Workers, Watchdogs Say, by Dan Benson,
Apr. 16--A Thiensville couple's run-in last week with a Florida-based moving company is the latest in a growing battle by government agencies and consumer watchdogs against strong-arm tactics by such companies, many of them owned and operated by Israeli nationals.
Consumer advocates charge that a network of such companies routinely engages in questionable, if not illegal, business practices and they frequently change their business name when complaints start to pile up.
They also tend to hire young Israeli men just out of the military who come here to make quick money, often without proper work visas, before moving on to vacation in more exotic foreign locales.
Danny Biran, consul at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., said it's very common for young Israeli men to come to the United States after fulfilling their three-year military commitment and before entering college.
"There are a lot of Israeli guys after they finish their duty in the army they want to go to Australia, Japan, Thailand, Greece and the U.S.," he said. "They want to see the world."
But to do that they need money, and the best place to do that is in the United States, even if it means working illegally, Biran said.
"They can make a lot of money in a short time in the U.S. and then they can go visit Latin America or someplace where the dollar goes farther," Biran said.
It's only natural that many of the young Israelis find work with East Coast moving companies, many of which are owned by Israeli immigrants and nationals.
A September 1997 Jerusalem Post story estimated that more than half of the New York City area's 250-some moving companies were owned by Israeli entrepreneurs, many of whom immigrated to the U.S. in the mid- to late 1980s.
"Several of the Israeli moving companies have given the industry a bad name, using cheap prices and low-balling techniques," muscling out Irish and Italians who formerly dominated the business, the story says.
The highly competitive atmosphere spawned "hellish tales of customers locked in moving trucks, warehouses stuffed with consumers' missing furniture, couches ripped and gouged, and hutzpadik tip requests," the Post reported.
Another Jerusalem Post story in January said the trip to the U.S. "has become practically a rite of passage for Israeli youth: the post-army trip to some exotic locale, often combined with a stint in the United States to make quick money -- illegally."
After Sept. 11, more than 60 Israelis, many of whom were working for moving companies, were deported for visa violations.
For instance, five college students from Israel working illegally for Urban Moving Systems, a New York City company, were deported. On Sept. 14, that company closed its doors and its owner went back to Israel, abandoning a collection of New Jersey warehouses where people's goods were stored. The State of New Jersey had to get involved to return items to people.
"Israelis are to moving as Japanese are to cars," said Tommy Chanz, a spokesman for Advanced Moving Systems in Sunrise, Fla.
His company employed the two men who showed up at Paul and Bridget Fletcher's Ozaukee County doorstep Tuesday, demanding about $1,700 before they would unload the Fletchers' furniture from their truck.
The Fletchers had contracted with the company a month earlier to bring their furniture from a Maine warehouse and already had paid the company $1,500. The original estimate was $1,725.
When the Fletchers refused to pay the extra money, the two men drove off and were soon apprehended by Thiensville police.
Criminal charges weren't filed, but the two men are in the Ozaukee County Jail, being held on warrants from the Immigration and Naturalization Service and North Carolina charging them with robbing and assaulting a resident there when he refused to pay extra money to have his furniture unloaded.
One of the men arrested, Oshri Cohen, 30, is an Israeli national, as are Chanz and Advanced Moving's owner, Zion Rokah.
James Balderrama, who operates a Web site for victims of illicit movers, said a network of up to 100 companies owned by Israeli nationals is involved.
"These thieves, these crooks, take everything you own and hold it hostage. And it's not just about your TV, tables and furniture. It's your baby pictures and heirlooms.
"Everything I own was taken from me," Balderrama said. "I'm not emotionally attached to my couch, but I am to my daughter's baby pictures."
What happened to the Fletchers was "a classic moving scam," said Glen Lloyd, a spokesman with the state Bureau of Trade and Consumer Protection.
"They low-ball you to get your business, then after they have your business, they say it's going to weigh more than previously thought. Then they have you over a barrel, and when you object, they say you're not going to get your stuff," Lloyd said.
People often pay anyway because they already are overwhelmed by the stress of the move, Lloyd and others said.
"And sometimes these movers are very big people and can be very physically intimidating," he said.
Also protecting such moving companies is the fact that local law enforcement won't usually get involved, said Balderrama. He said he started his Internet site, www.movingadvocateteam.com, after he was ripped off by a mover.
Debbie Gebhardt, chief of staff for Rep. Tom Petri (R-Fond du Lac), said the reaction in her office and people in the U.S. Department of Transportation was "wow" when they heard about movers being apprehended by the Thiensville police and about the North Carolina charges.
Legislation to strengthen enforcement of interstate trucking laws against bullying movers is being developed in the House Transportation Committee, of which Petri is a member. Gebhardt is hopeful that it will reach Congress this session.
One aspect of the legislation, she said, might be to require background checks of drivers, possibly weeding out "some of the worker bees," such as young Israelis violating their visas.
Another possible provision, she said, might empower states with enforcing federal interstate regulations.
"For instance, federal regulations say you can only charge 10 percent more than the estimate. But first you have to release the goods and then argue about the money," Gebhardt said.
"What these men did to the couple in Thiensville, charging them double the estimate, violated federal law."
But since 1995, when the Interstate Commerce Commission was abolished, the trucking industry has been regulated by what officials say is an understaffed U.S. Department of Transportation.
And since the terrorist attacks Sept. 11, enforcing regulations governing moving companies has taken a back seat to airport security and other concerns, said David Barnes, a spokesman for the Office of Inspector General, the DOT's enforcement arm.
"But there is an increasing concern because people are getting ripped off," he said.
So far this year, Barnes' office -- in cooperation with the FBI, INS and local law enforcement -- has shut down eight moving companies in New York and another in San Jose, Calif. Most of the men involved were Israeli immigrants or nationals.
In Wisconsin, the state Bureau of Trade and Consumer Protection received about 100 written complaints last year about moving companies, said Elmer Prenzlow, a spokesman for the agency, up from 77 in 2000.
"Deregulation always offers the opportunity for fraudulent operators to enter that area and unjustly profit from illegal activities," he said. "But it appears the federal government is now refocusing in this area."
Consumer advocates also are hailing landmark legislation recently passed in Florida, which would make it a felony for a mover to hold a consumer's goods hostage while demanding a higher price than was quoted. It also requires all bids to be put in writing.
The measure is waiting for Gov. Jeb Bush's signature.
MOVING TIPS:
To protect themselves from unscrupulous movers, Elmer Prenzlow, of the Bureau of Trade and Consumer Protection, suggested that consumers:
--Get a binding estimate, signed by both the consumer and the moving company.
--Check with the Better Business Bureau and with a consumer protection agency in the state where the mover is located.
--Use the Internet for research purposes only. "The worst thing you can do is get on the Internet and shop around for price, because you don't know who you're dealing with," Prenzlow said. Visit industry sites, such as the American Moving and Storage Association's Web site www.moving.org, and consumer sites such www.consumeraffairs.com.
--Get four or five references from the mover. Ask friends and family for recommendations as well.
April 21, 2002, Sunday Gazette-Mail, Movers and shakedowns: Ring uses shady tactics, illegal Israeli workers, watchdogs say, by Dan Benson,
MILWAUKEE - A suburban Milwaukee couple's recent run-in with a Florida-based moving company is the latest in a growing battle by government agencies and consumer watchdogs against strong-arm tactics by such companies, many of them owned and operated by Israeli nationals.
Consumer advocates charge that a network of such companies routinely engages in questionable, if not illegal, business practices and they frequently change their business name when complaints start to pile up.
They also tend to hire young Israeli men just out of the military who come here to make quick money, often without proper work visas, before moving on to vacation in more exotic foreign locales.
Danny Biran, consul at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, said it's very common for young Israeli men to come to the United States after fulfilling their three-year military commitment and before entering college.
"There are a lot of Israeli guys after they finish their duty in the army they want to go to Australia, Japan, Thailand, Greece and the U.S.," he said. "They want to see the world."
But to do that they need money, and the best place to do that is in the United States, even if it means working illegally, Biran said.
"They can make a lot of money in a short time in the U.S. and then they can go visit Latin America or someplace where the dollar goes farther," Biran said.
It's only natural that many of the young Israelis find work with East Coast moving companies, many of which are owned by Israeli immigrants and nationals.
A September 1997 Jerusalem Post story estimated that more than half of the New York City area's 250-some moving companies were owned by Israeli entrepreneurs, many of whom immigrated to the United States in the mid- to late 1980s.
"Several of the Israeli moving companies have given the industry a bad name, using cheap prices and low-balling techniques," muscling out Irish and Italians who formerly dominated the business, the story says.
The highly competitive atmosphere spawned "hellish tales of customers locked in moving trucks, warehouses stuffed with consumers' missing furniture, couches ripped and gouged, and hutzpadik tip requests," the Post reported.
Another Jerusalem Post story in January said the trip to the United States "has become practically a rite of passage for Israeli youth: the post-army trip to some exotic locale, often combined with a stint in the United States to make quick money - illegally."
After Sept. 11, more than 60 Israelis, many of whom were working for moving companies, were deported for visa violations.
For instance, five college students from Israel working illegally for Urban Moving Systems, a New York City company, were deported. On Sept. 14, that company closed its doors and its owner went back to Israel, abandoning a collection of New Jersey warehouses where people's goods were stored. The State of New Jersey had to get involved to return items to people.
Extra money demanded to unload furniture
"Israelis are to moving as Japanese are to cars," said Tommy Chanz, a spokesman for Advanced Moving Systems in Sunrise, Fla.
His company employed the two men who showed up at Paul and Bridget Fletcher's suburban Milwaukee doorstep recently, demanding about $1,700 before they would unload the Fletchers' furniture from their truck.
The Fletchers had contracted with the company a month earlier to bring their furniture from a Maine warehouse and already had paid the company $1,500. The original estimate was $1,725.
When the Fletchers refused to pay the extra money, the two men drove off and were soon apprehended by police in the couple's hometown of Thiensville, Wis.
Criminal charges weren't filed, but the two men are in the Ozaukee County Jail, being held on warrants from the Immigration and Naturalization Service and North Carolina charging them with robbing and assaulting a resident there when he refused to pay extra money to have his furniture unloaded.
One of the men arrested, Oshri Cohen, 30, is an Israeli national, as are Chanz and Advanced Moving's owner, Zion Rokah.
James Balderrama, who operates a Web site for victims of illicit movers, said a network of up to 100 companies owned by Israeli nationals is involved.
"These thieves, these crooks, take everything you own and hold it hostage. And it's not just about your TV, tables and furniture. It's your baby pictures and heirlooms.
"Everything I own was taken from me," Balderrama said. "I'm not emotionally attached to my couch, but I am to my daughter's baby pictures."
What happened to the Fletchers was "a classic moving scam," said Glen Lloyd, a spokesman with the state Bureau of Trade and Consumer Protection.
"They low-ball you to get your business, then after they have your business, they say it's going to weigh more than previously thought. Then they have you over a barrel, and when you object, they say you're not going to get your stuff," Lloyd said.
People often pay anyway because they already are overwhelmed by the stress of the move, Lloyd and others said.
"And sometimes these movers are very big people and can be very physically intimidating," he said.
Also protecting such moving companies is the fact that local law enforcement won't usually get involved, said Balderrama. He said he started his Internet site, www.movingadvocateteam.com, after a mover ripped him off.
Debbie Gebhardt, chief of staff for Rep. Tom Petri, R-Wis., said the reaction in her office and from people in the U.S. Department of Transportation was "wow" when they heard about movers being apprehended by the Thiensville police and about the North Carolina charges.
Legislation would require background check
Legislation to strengthen enforcement of interstate trucking laws against bullying movers is being developed in the House Transportation Committee, of which Petri is a member. Gebhardt is hopeful that it will reach Congress this session.
One aspect of the legislation, she said, might be to require background checks of drivers, possibly weeding out "some of the worker bees," such as young Israelis violating their visas.
Another possible provision, she said, might empower states with enforcing federal interstate regulations.
"For instance, federal regulations say you can only charge 10 percent more than the estimate. But first you have to release the goods and then argue about the money," Gebhardt said.
"What these men did to the couple in Thiensville, charging them double the estimate, violated federal law."
But since 1995, when the Interstate Commerce Commission was abolished, the trucking industry has been regulated by what officials say is an understaffed U.S. Department of Transportation.
And since the terrorist attacks Sept. 11, enforcing regulations governing moving companies has taken a back seat to airport security and other concerns, said David Barnes, a spokesman for the Office of Inspector General, the DOT's enforcement arm.
"But there is an increasing concern because people are getting ripped off," he said.
So far this year, Barnes' office - in cooperation with the FBI, INS and local law enforcement - has shut down eight moving companies in New York and another in San Jose, Calif. Most of the men involved were Israeli immigrants or nationals.
Consumer advocates also are hailing landmark legislation recently passed in Florida, which would make it a felony for a mover to hold a consumer's goods hostage while demanding a higher price than was quoted. It also requires all bids to be put in writing.
The measure is waiting for Gov. Jeb Bush's signature.
Consumers have means to protect themselves
To protect themselves from unscrupulous movers, Elmer Prenzlow, of the Wisconsin Bureau of Trade and Consumer Protection, suggested that consumers:
* Get a binding estimate, signed by the consumer and the moving company.
* Check with the Better Business Bureau and with a consumer protection agency in the state where the mover is located.
* Use the Internet for research purposes only. "The worst thing you can do is get on the Internet and shop around for price, because you don't know who you're dealing with," Prenzlow said. Visit industry sites, such as the American Moving and Storage Association's Web site www.moving.org, and consumer sites such www.con sumeraffairs.com.
April 30, 2002, Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Movers' ring uses shady tactics, illegal Israelis, watchdogs say, by Dan Benson,
MILWAUKEE _ A suburban Milwaukee couple's run-in last week with a Florida-based moving company is the latest in a growing battle by government agencies and consumer watchdogs against strong-arm tactics by such companies, many of them owned and operated by Israeli nationals.
Consumer advocates charge that a network of such companies routinely engages in questionable, if not illegal, business practices and they frequently change their business name when complaints start to pile up.
They also tend to hire young Israeli men just out of the military who come here to make quick money, often without proper work visas, before moving on to vacation in more exotic foreign locales.
Danny Biran, consul at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., said it's very common for young Israeli men to come to the United States after fulfilling their three-year military commitment and before entering college.
"There are a lot of Israeli guys after they finish their duty in the army they want to go to Australia, Japan, Thailand, Greece and the U.S.," he said. "They want to see the world."
But to do that they need money, and the best place to do that is in the United States, even if it means working illegally, Biran said.
"They can make a lot of money in a short time in the U.S. and then they can go visit Latin America or someplace where the dollar goes farther," Biran said.
It's only natural that many of the young Israelis find work with East Coast moving companies, many of which are owned by Israeli immigrants and nationals.
A September 1997 Jerusalem Post story estimated that more than half of the New York City area's 250-some moving companies were owned by Israeli entrepreneurs, many of whom immigrated to the U.S. in the mid- to late 1980s.
"Several of the Israeli moving companies have given the industry a bad name, using cheap prices and low-balling techniques," muscling out Irish and Italians who formerly dominated the business, the story says.
The highly competitive atmosphere spawned "hellish tales of customers locked in moving trucks, warehouses stuffed with consumers' missing furniture, couches ripped and gouged, and hutzpadik tip requests," the Post reported.
Another Jerusalem Post story in January said the trip to the U.S. "has become practically a rite of passage for Israeli youth: the post-army trip to some exotic locale, often combined with a stint in the United States to make quick money _ illegally."
After Sept. 11, more than 60 Israelis, many of whom were working for moving companies, were deported for visa violations.
For instance, five college students from Israel working illegally for Urban Moving Systems, a New York City company, were deported. On Sept. 14, that company closed its doors and its owner went back to Israel, abandoning a collection of New Jersey warehouses where people's goods were stored. The State of New Jersey had to get involved to return items to people.
"Israelis are to moving as Japanese are to cars," said Tommy Chanz, a spokesman for Advanced Moving Systems in Sunrise, Fla.
His company employed the two men who showed up at Paul and Bridget Fletcher's suburban Milwaukee doorstep this week, demanding about $1,700 before they would unload the Fletchers' furniture from their truck.
The Fletchers had contracted with the company a month earlier to bring their furniture from a Maine warehouse and already had paid the company $1,500. The original estimate was $1,725.
When the Fletchers refused to pay the extra money, the two men drove off and were soon apprehended by police in the couple's hometown of Thiensville, Wis.
Criminal charges weren't filed, but the two men are in the Ozaukee County Jail, being held on warrants from the Immigration and Naturalization Service and North Carolina charging them with robbing and assaulting a resident there when he refused to pay extra money to have his furniture unloaded.
One of the men arrested, Oshri Cohen, 30, is an Israeli national, as are Chanz and Advanced Moving's owner, Zion Rokah.
James Balderrama, who operates a Web site for victims of illicit movers, said a network of up to 100 companies owned by Israeli nationals is involved.
"These thieves, these crooks, take everything you own and hold it hostage. And it's not just about your TV, tables and furniture. It's your baby pictures and heirlooms.
"Everything I own was taken from me," Balderrama said. "I'm not emotionally attached to my couch, but I am to my daughter's baby pictures."
What happened to the Fletchers was "a classic moving scam," said Glen Lloyd, a spokesman with the state Bureau of Trade and Consumer Protection.
"They low-ball you to get your business, then after they have your business, they say it's going to weigh more than previously thought. Then they have you over a barrel, and when you object, they say you're not going to get your stuff," Lloyd said.
People often pay anyway because they already are overwhelmed by the stress of the move, Lloyd and others said.
"And sometimes these movers are very big people and can be very physically intimidating," he said.
Also protecting such moving companies is the fact that local law enforcement won't usually get involved, said Balderrama. He said he started his Internet site, www.movingadvocateteam.com, after he was ripped off by a mover.
Debbie Gebhardt, chief of staff for U.S. Rep. Tom Petri, R-Wis., said the reaction in her office and people in the U.S. Department of Transportation was "wow" when they heard about movers being apprehended by the Thiensville police and about the North Carolina charges.
Legislation to strengthen enforcement of interstate trucking laws against bullying movers is being developed in the House Transportation Committee, of which Petri is a member. Gebhardt is hopeful that it will reach Congress this session.
One aspect of the legislation, she said, might be to require background checks of drivers, possibly weeding out "some of the worker bees," such as young Israelis violating their visas.
Another possible provision, she said, might empower states with enforcing federal interstate regulations.
"For instance, federal regulations say you can only charge 10 percent more than the estimate. But first you have to release the goods and then argue about the money," Gebhardt said.
"What these men did to the couple in Thiensville, charging them double the estimate, violated federal law."
But since 1995, when the Interstate Commerce Commission was abolished, the trucking industry has been regulated by what officials say is an understaffed U.S. Department of Transportation.
And since the terrorist attacks Sept. 11, enforcing regulations governing moving companies has taken a back seat to airport security and other concerns, said David Barnes, a spokesman for the Office of Inspector General, the DOT's enforcement arm.
"But there is an increasing concern because people are getting ripped off," he said.
So far this year, Barnes' office _ in cooperation with the FBI, INS and local law enforcement _ has shut down eight moving companies in New York and another in San Jose, Calif. Most of the men involved were Israeli immigrants or nationals.
Consumer advocates also are hailing landmark legislation recently passed in Florida, which would make it a felony for a mover to hold a consumer's goods hostage while demanding a higher price than was quoted. It also requires all bids to be put in writing.
The measure is waiting for Gov. Jeb Bush's signature.
To protect themselves from unscrupulous movers, Elmer Prenzlow, of the Wisconsin Bureau of Trade and Consumer Protection, suggested that consumers:
-Get a binding estimate, signed by both the consumer and the moving company.
-Check with the Better Business Bureau and with a consumer protection agency in the state where the mover is located.
-Use the Internet for research purposes only. "The worst thing you can do is get on the Internet and shop around for price, because you don't know who you're dealing with," Prenzlow said. Visit industry sites, such as the American Moving and Storage Association's Web site www.moving.org, and consumer sites such www.consumeraffairs.com.
-Get four or five references from the mover. Ask friends and family for recommendations as well.
June 1, 2002, The Middle East, With friends like these ...: Ed Blanche reports on allegations of Israeli espionage on its closest ally, the United States, by Ed Blanche,
Over the years there have been persistent reports of Israeli espionage in the United States, Israel's closest ally, provider of some $90 billion in aid and the country on which it has relied more than once for its very survival.
With the notable exception of the case of US Navy analyst Jonathan Pollard, an American Jew and passionate Zionist who was sentenced to life imprisonment in March 1987 for passing secrets to Israel, these episodes have followed what has become a familiar pattern. After making a few headlines, they have simply faded away under bland official denials that anything was amiss.
But in recent weeks there have been new allegations of a wide-ranging clandestine operation by Israel's intelligence services in which, it is alleged, they sought to penetrate the US departments of defence and justice, along with other government agencies. Other rumours allege the Israelis may have also been trying to track Al Qaeda activists before the 11 September attacks. These too were quickly dismissed by US authorities while the US media, renowned for an investigative fervour that has repeatedly exposed wrongdoing at the highest levels of government, has, with at least one notable exception, ignored the allegations with a uniformity that suggested high-level official efforts had been exerted to silence it.
Undeterred, Fox television, one of the most conservative US networks, along with Intelligence Online, a French website that specialises in security matters, and the respected French daily Le Monde, report that US authorities have arrested or deported some 120 Israelis since February 2001 for suspected espionage.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has dismissed these reports. It insists no Israeli has been charged with spying, but says an undisclosed number of Israeli students have been expelled for immigration violations. Justice Department spokeswoman Susan Dryden dismissed the espionage allegations as "an urban myth that's been circulating for months".
The 11 September attacks uncorked a whirlwind of outlandish conspiracy theories, some of which said Jewish Americans had been warned not to visit the World Trade Centre on that fateful day. These have generally been so bizarre and paranoid that they were given no credulity. But the affair of the mysterious Israelis and the allegations that they were involved in systematic clandestine activity across the US that compromised US security, has a resonance and familiarity that does not allow it to be dismissed quite so easily.
Israel's intelligence organisations have been spying on the US and running clandestine operations since the Jewish state was established, from spiriting an estimated 200 pounds of weapons-grade uranium for its secret nuclear arms programme in the 1960s to widespread industrial espionage.
Duncan L Clarke of the American University's School of International Service in Washington, who is well connected to the intelligence community, wrote in a damning paper on Israel's economic spying in the US: "The United States and Israel agreed in 1951 not to spy on one another. There is little evidence that the United States has conducted economic espionage against Israel, but the agreement has been flouted repeatedly and flagrantly by Israel. Israeli economic espionage has infuriated the US intelligence community, especially the FBI and the Customs Service, and has left a legacy of distrust in that community ... The greater concern, however, is not Israel's behaviour. Rather it is with those senior US officials and legislators who abide it.
"This aspect of the `special relationship' with Israel annoys, even embitters, much of the permanent national security bureaucracy. It is also a latent domestic political issue with divisive overtones. Whatever immediate advantages Israel's illicit practices may bring, they could eventually weaken the long-run relationship that is the ultimate guarantee of Israel's security."
Much of this activity was conducted for many years by the highly secret Scientific Liaison Bureau, known by its Hebrew acronym Lakam and run by the Defence Ministry in Tel Aviv. Lakam was disbanded after the Pollard scandal, and its work undertaken by Malmab (the Security Authority for the Ministry of Defence).
The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, reported in April 1996 that Israel "conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the United States of any US ally". But no action, publicly at least, seems to have been taken to prevent this.
This stems in part from the unique strategic relationship between the US and Israel and the reluctance of successive administrations to rock the boat, despite what has been described as "serious misgivings within the US national security bureaucracy concerning Israel's net value as a strategic asset". But there is another important factor: the powerful pro-Israel lobby in the US and the willingness of Congress to look the other way when illegal Israeli activities are exposed.
While the operation described by Fox, Intelligence Online and Le Monde is unlikely to have caused anywhere near the damage to US security inflicted by navy analyst Pollard, who provided Israeli intelligence with a mountain of top secret material in 1984-85 (some of which was reported to have been sanitised and passed on to Soviet intelligence on the orders of then Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to increase the flow of Soviet immigrants to Israel), it would still be political dynamite which could backlash on Israel, particularly as it has found itself increasingly isolated internationally over the Intifada.
The Pollard case was a breakthrough for the FBI. The Washington Post commented in February 1999: "Until then, its agents had been forced by US policy to turn a blind eye to Israeli spying in the United States. `We would often catch the Israelis and then be told to let them go,' said one counter-intelligence agent."
The reports of the operation were based on a 61-page report compiled by a US interagency task force, dated June-July 2001, summarising the information gleaned from questioning of the arrested Israelis. The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) headed the investigation because its internal security unit had first come across the "unusual behaviour of young Israeli nationals who had gained access to DEA circles".
The DEA has access to other departments and is a key agency in tracking laundered money used by drug cartels and terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda.
These people, it said, had posed as students selling art works and handicrafts, but in fact many of them had `served in military intelligence, electronic intercept and/or explosive ordnance units' in the Israeli Army. "This appeared to tie in with a short report carried by The Washington Post--one of the few on this subject carried by the US media--in late November, that 60 Israelis had been detained in the nationwide roundup of terrorist suspects after 11 September. It also said Immigration and Naturalisation Service officials testified in court hearings related to the arrests, that this group was "of special interest to the government".
No further report on this group, most of whom faced immigration violations such as expired visas, appeared in the US media until 11 December, when Fox television began a four-part report on the mysterious Israelis. It said that around 140 Israelis had been detained across the US in an enormous investigation into a suspected espionage ring that began months before 11 September.
Fox quoted US investigators as saying that "some of the detainees ... failed polygraph (lie detector) tests when questioned about alleged surveillance activities against and in the United States." There is no indication that any Israelis were involved in the 11 September attacks but investigators suspect that they may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance but "did not share it" with US authorities.
Fox said in its highly detailed report that US communications facilities had been penetrated by Israeli intelligence through two Israeli-owned telecommunications companies, Comverse Infosys, which provides US law enforcement departments with computer equipment for wiretapping, and Admocs, which between them handle virtually all the billings records in the US. Some of the arrested "students", it said, had worked for Admocs and "other companies in Israel that specialise in wiretapping".
The reference to Admocs is particularly interesting, because in June 2000, federal authorities conducted a highly classified investigation that focused on the Admocs Corporation of Missouri and investigated whether Israeli agents had used the software company to intercept telephone conversations between the White House, the State Department and other government departments. There had been suspicions about Admocs as far back as 1996. However, officials said no evidence to substantiate the allegations had been found and reports of a major espionage problem were quickly smothered by the government.
Officials admitted the entire investigation had become "radioactive" and "too hot to handle", but declined to give any details. However, FBI officials at the time confirmed to some reporters that the Israelis were running a major eavesdropping operation that reached into the highest echelons of government, using chip implants in Israeli-designed equipment.
Then, as with the latest investigation, the issue was quietly dropped by US authorities and ignored by the US media.
In October 1995, the Defence Investigative Service (DIS), the Pentagon's counterespionage division, issued a warning to some 250 defence-related facilities in the New York area that Israel "aggressively collects military and industrial technology", including data on surveillance satellites and missile defences. It said that there had been at least four instances, during the time Jonathan Pollard was operating, in which Israeli agents stole "proprietary information" on US military projects. The DIS alert said Israel used "strong ethnic ties" to enlist agents among Jewish Americans--Pollard being a case in point--along with "financial aggrandisement and the identification and exploitation of individual frailties" of US citizens. It noted that "placing Israeli nationals in key industries is a technique utilised with great success".
The DIS alert was withdrawn in December following complaints by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rit that the warning singled out "ethnicity as a matter of counter-intelligence vulnerability". The DIS could have been talking about Pollard, whose case, according to The New York Times, "symbolised the darker aspects of the normally warm relationship between the United States and Israel while also exposing fissures long dividing American and Israeli Jews".
In 1979, the CIA advised in a 47-page report, paraphrased by The Washington Post, that "Israeli intelligence agencies have blackmailed, bugged, wiretapped and offered bribes to US government employees in an effort to gain sensitive intelligence and technical information".
June 24, 2002, ABC News 20/20, The White Van. Were Israelis Detained on Sept. 11 Spies?
June 21 — Millions saw the horrific images of the World Trade Center attacks, and those who saw them won't forget them. But a New Jersey homemaker saw something that morning that prompted an investigation into five young Israelis and their possible connection to Israeli intelligence.
Maria, who asked us not to use her last name, had a view of the World Trade Center from her New Jersey apartment building. She remembers a neighbor calling her shortly after the first plane hit the towers.
She grabbed her binoculars and watched the destruction unfolding in lower Manhattan. But as she watched the disaster, something else caught her eye.
Maria says she saw three young men kneeling on the roof of a white van in the parking lot of her apartment building. "They seemed to be taking a movie," Maria said.
The men were taking video or photos of themselves with the World Trade Center burning in the background, she said. What struck Maria were the expressions on the men's faces. "They were like happy, you know … They didn't look shocked to me. I thought it was very strange," she said.
She found the behavior so suspicious that she wrote down the license plate number of the van and called the police. Before long, the FBI was also on the scene, and a statewide bulletin was issued on the van.
The plate number was traced to a van owned by a company called Urban Moving. Around 4 p.m. on Sept. 11, the van was spotted on a service road off Route 3, near New Jersey's Giants Stadium. A police officer pulled the van over, finding five men, between 22 and 27 years old, in the vehicle. The men were taken out of the van at gunpoint and handcuffed by police.
The arresting officers said they saw a lot that aroused their suspicion about the men. One of the passengers had $4,700 in cash hidden in his sock. Another was carrying two foreign passports. A box cutter was found in the van. But perhaps the biggest surprise for the officers came when the five men identified themselves as Israeli citizens.
‘We Are Not Your Problem’
According to the police report, one of the passengers told the officers they had been on the West Side Highway in Manhattan "during the incident" — referring to the World Trade Center attack. The driver of the van, Sivan Kurzberg, told the officers, "We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem." The other passengers were his brother Paul Kurzberg, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner and Omer Marmari.
When the men were transferred to jail, the case was transferred out of the FBI's Criminal Division, and into the bureau's Foreign Counterintelligence Section, which is responsible for espionage cases, ABCNEWS has learned.
One reason for the shift, sources told ABCNEWS, was that the FBI believed Urban Moving may have been providing cover for an Israeli intelligence operation.
After the five men were arrested, the FBI got a warrant and searched Urban Moving's Weehawken, N.J., offices.
The FBI searched Urban Moving's offices for several hours, removing boxes of documents and a dozen computer hard drives. The FBI also questioned Urban Moving's owner. His attorney insists that his client answered all of the FBI's questions. But when FBI agents tried to interview him again a few days later, he was gone.
Three months later 2020's cameras photographed the inside of Urban Moving, and it looked as if the business had been shut down in a big hurry. Cell phones were lying around; office phones were still connected; and the property of dozens of clients remained in the warehouse.
The owner had also cleared out of his New Jersey home, put it up for sale and returned with his family to Israel.
‘A Scary Situation’
Steven Gordon, the attorney for the five Israeli detainees, acknowledged that his clients' actions on Sept. 11 would easily have aroused suspicions. "You got a group of guys that are taking pictures, on top of a roof, of the World Trade Center. They're speaking in a foreign language. They got two passports on 'em. One's got a wad of cash on him, and they got box cutters. Now that's a scary situation."
But Gordon insisted that his clients were just five young men who had come to America for a vacation, ended up working for a moving company, and were taking pictures of the event.
The five Israelis were held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, ostensibly for overstaying their tourist visas and working in the United States illegally. Two weeks after their arrest, an immigration judge ordered them to be deported. But sources told ABCNEWS that FBI and CIA officials in Washington put a hold on the case.
The five men were held in detention for more than two months. Some of them were placed in solitary confinement for 40 days, and some of them were given as many as seven lie-detector tests.
Plenty of Speculation
Since their arrest, plenty of speculation has swirled about the case, and what the five men were doing that morning. Eventually, The Forward, a respected Jewish newspaper in New York, reported the FBI concluded that two of the men were Israeli intelligence operatives.
Vince Cannistraro, a former chief of operations for counterterrorism with the CIA who is now a consultant for ABCNEWS, said federal authorities' interest in the case was heightened when some of the men's names were found in a search of a national intelligence database.
Israeli Intelligence Connection?
According to Cannistraro, many people in the U.S. intelligence community believed that some of the men arrested were working for Israeli intelligence. Cannistraro said there was speculation as to whether Urban Moving had been "set up or exploited for the purpose of launching an intelligence operation against radical Islamists in the area, particularly in the New Jersey-New York area."
Under this scenario, the alleged spying operation was not aimed against the United States, but at penetrating or monitoring radical fund-raising and support networks in Muslim communities like Paterson, N.J., which was one of the places where several of the hijackers lived in the months prior to Sept. 11.
For the FBI, deciphering the truth from the five Israelis proved to be difficult. One of them, Paul Kurzberg, refused to take a lie-detector test for 10 weeks — then failed it, according to his lawyer. Another of his lawyers told us Kurzberg had been reluctant to take the test because he had once worked for Israeli intelligence in another country.
Sources say the Israelis were targeting these fund-raising networks because they were thought to be channeling money to Hamas and Islamic Jihad, groups that are responsible for most of the suicide bombings in Israel. "[The] Israeli government has been very concerned about the activity of radical Islamic groups in the United States that could be a support apparatus to Hamas and Islamic Jihad," Cannistraro said.
The men denied that they had been working for Israeli intelligence out of the New Jersey moving company, and Ram Horvitz, their Israeli attorney, dismissed the allegations as "stupid and ridiculous."
Mark Regev, the spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Washington, goes even further, asserting the issue was never even discussed with U.S. officials.
"These five men were not involved in any intelligence operation in the United States, and the American intelligence authorities have never raised this issue with us," Regev said. "The story is simply false."
No 'Pre-Knowledge'
Despite the denials, sources tell ABCNEWS there is still debate within the FBI over whether or not the young men were spies. Many U.S. government officials still believe that some of them were on a mission for Israeli intelligence. But the FBI told ABCNEWS, "To date, this investigation has not identified anybody who in this country had pre-knowledge of the events of 9/11."
Sources also said that even if the men were spies, there is no evidence to conclude they had advance knowledge of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11. The investigation, at the end of the day, after all the polygraphs, all of the field work, all the cross-checking, the intelligence work, concluded that they probably did not have advance knowledge of 9/11," Cannistraro noted.
As to what they were doing on the van, they say they read about the attack on the Internet, couldn't see it from their offices and went to the parking lot for a better view. But no one has been able to find a good explanation for why they may have been smiling with the towers of the World Trade Center burning in the background. Both the lawyers for the young men and the Israeli Embassy chalk it up to immature conduct.
According to ABCNEWS sources, Israeli and U.S. government officials worked out a deal — and after 71 days, the five Israelis were taken out of jail, put on a plane, and deported back home.
While the former detainees refused to answer ABCNEWS' questions about their detention and what they were doing on Sept. 11, several of the detainees discussed their experience in America on an Israeli talk show after their return home.
Said one of the men, denying that they were laughing or happy on the morning of Sept. 11, "The fact of the matter is we are coming from a country that experiences terror daily. Our purpose was to document the event."
ABCNEWS' Chris Isham, John Miller, Glenn Silber and Chris Vlasto contributed to this report.
August 29, 2004, The Record (Bergen County, NJ) / Knight Ridder Newspapers, Spy probe may reach beyond Israel case, by Warren P. Strobel,
WASHINGTON - An FBI probe of the handling of highly classified material by Pentagon civilians is broader than previously reported, and goes well beyond allegations that a single midlevel analyst gave a top-secret Iran policy document to Israel, three sources familiar with the investigation said Saturday.
The probe, which has been going on for more than two years, also has focused on other civilians in the Secretary of Defense's office, said the sources, who spoke on condition they not be identified, but who have firsthand knowledge of the subject.
In addition, one source said, FBI investigators in recent weeks have conducted interviews to determine whether Pentagon officials gave highly classified U.S. intelligence to a leading Iraqi exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, which may in turn have passed it on to Iran. INC leader Ahmed Chalabi has denied his group was involved in any wrongdoing.
The link, if any, between the two leak investigations remains unclear. But they both center on the office of Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, the Pentagon's No. 3 official.
Feith's office, which oversees policy matters, has been the source of numerous controversies over the past three years. His office had close ties to Chalabi and was responsible for postwar Iraq planning that the administration has now acknowledged was inadequate. Before the war, Feith and his aides pushed the now-discredited theory that former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaeda.
No one is known to have been charged with any wrongdoing in the current investigation. Officials cautioned that it could result in charges of mishandling classified information, rather than the more serious charge of espionage.
The Israeli government on Saturday strenuously denied it had spied on the United States, its main benefactor on the global scene.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the powerful pro-Israel lobby, also has denied any wrongdoing.
Officials said the investigation centers on charges that a midlevel Pentagon analyst passed information to AIPAC, which then passed it to the Israeli government.
That analyst, Larry Franklin, works for Feith's deputy, William Luti, and served as an important - albeit low-profile - adviser on Iran issues to Feith and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.
Franklin, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who lives in West Virginia, could not be reached for comment Saturday.
Investigators are said to be looking at whether Franklin acted with authorization from his superiors, one official said.
Two sources disclosed Saturday that the information believed to have been passed to Israel was the draft of a top-secret presidential order on Iran policy, known as a National Security Presidential Directive. Because of disagreements over Iran policy among President Bush's advisers, the document is not believed to have ever been completed.
Having a draft of the document - which some Pentagon officials may have believed was too lenient toward Iran - would have allowed Israel to influence U.S. policy while it was still being made. Iran is among Israel's main security concerns.
Two or three staff members of AIPAC have been interviewed in connection with the case. In a statement, AIPAC said any allegation of criminal conduct was "false and baseless." It is "cooperating fully" with investigators, AIPAC's statement said.
Israeli officials insisted they stopped spying on the United States after the exposure of Jonathan Pollard, who was arrested in 1985 and sentenced to life in prison for spying for Israel.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan declined to discuss the continuing investigation.
"Obviously, any time there is an allegation of this nature, it's a serious matter," he told reporters traveling with Bush in Ohio.
In a statement issued late Friday, the Pentagon said it "has been cooperating with the Department of Justice on this matter for an extended period of time. It is the DoD [Department of Defense] understanding that the investigation within the DoD is limited in its scope."
But other sources said the FBI investigation is wider-ranging than initial news reports suggested.
They said it has involved interviews of current and former officials at the White House, Pentagon, and State Department.
Investigators have asked about the security practices of several other Defense Department civilians, they said.
Franklin's name surfaced in news reports last year when it became known that he and another Pentagon Middle East specialist, Harold Rhode, met in late 2001 with Manucher Ghorbanifar, an Iranian arms merchant who played a role in the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said publicly last year that nothing came of the meeting, which reportedly was brokered by former National Security Council official Michael Ledeen.
Rhode could not be reached for comment Saturday.
Feith has long been close to Israel. In 2000, he helped author a paper, "A Clean Break," that advised incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to adopt a much tougher approach to the Palestinians and Israel's Arab neighbors.
A former Feith employee, Karen Kwiatkowski, has described how senior Israeli military officers were sometimes escorted to his Pentagon office without signing in as security regulations required.
August 30, 2004, Israel Faxx, Israel Denies Spying on United States, by VOA News & Ha'aretz,
Israel Has denied that it is spying on the United States. The FBI is investigating whether a Pentagon official passed classified information to AIPAC, an Israeli lobby group in America that, in turn, passed it on to Israel.
The official Israeli response to the spy assertion was a firm denial of any involvement in the case. A statement from Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office said the government was not aware of the incident. It read, "Israel is not employing any intelligence assets in the United States."
That position was elaborated on by Yuval Steinetz, chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee in the Israeli parliament. He said Israel decided to halt all espionage activities against the United States following the arrest and conviction of Jonathan Pollard, who was caught passing secrets to Israel nearly 20 years ago.
"Since [the] Pollard case there was clear and firm decision not to spy against the United States government or in the United States, and therefore I am 100 percent confident that there is no Israeli involvement in this case," he said.
The 1985 arrest of Pollard was a diplomatic bombshell whose repercussions are still being felt. Pollard, a formal naval intelligence analyst, has become an Israeli citizen since his arrest, conviction and imprisonment for spying, and several Israeli governments have campaigned without success to get him released.
The current case involves allegations that Larry Franklin, a Christian who is an official in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia bureau, passed on information to Israel via the American Israel Public Affairs Committee lobby group. The FBI investigation has been under way for more than a year and centers on allegations that Franklin passed on information from sensitive deliberations on Iran at a time when the Bush administration policy had not been fully formulated.
Both Israel and the United States are concerned about Iran's nuclear capability. The Israeli media have speculated that a recent drill conducted here in which anti-radiation pills were handed out to Israeli citizens is part of a campaign to build the argument that Iran poses a growing and increasingly imminent nuclear threat.
On Sunday, Israeli media attention to the FBI probe was extensive. Israel Radio quoted unnamed government sources as denying anyone at the Pentagon was spying for Israel. Marvin Grenfell, a professor of political science at Hebrew University, agrees that it does not seem likely that Israel would risk damaging relations with its most important ally by spying on it. "My guess is that Israel, following the Pollard Affair, would not risk anything like that again. And that probably this has been blown out of proportion, possibly by some people in the United States."
That position was taken in a front-page story in Sunday's Jerusalem Post. The story, which was typical of nearly all Israeli newspapers, quoted what it described simply as "sources" in Jerusalem as saying the spying allegations are nothing more than an "internal U.S. political story." "This is an American political story, an elections story, a pre-convention story to try to slander and criticize Bush. It has nothing to do with us," the source was quoted as saying.
Sources have told Ha'aretz that the U.S. administration believes that the FBI will refrain from charging Franklin with espionage. The FBI apparently lacks any evidence that the Pentagon data analyst was operated by either Israel or AIPAC.
Franklin could be charged with mishandling a classified document. However, the FBI has yet to make an official pronouncement on whether Franklin would be arrested and what charges he might face. Nevertheless, investigators are broadening their probe and interviewing figures at the Defense Department, the State Department and outside the administration.
The Los Angeles Times reported Sunday that Franklin might have conveyed the classified information innocently, not realizing he was breaking the law. "The man is not a spy, he's an idiot," an official familiar with the investigations told the paper.
September 3, 2004, Los Angeles Times, Israel Has Long Spied on US, Say Officials, by Bob Drogin and Greg Miller,
WASHINGTON - Despite its fervent denials, Israel secretly maintains a large and active intelligence-gathering operation in the United States that has long attempted to recruit U.S. officials as spies and to procure classified documents, U.S. government officials said.
FBI and other counterespionage agents, in turn, have covertly followed, bugged and videotaped Israeli diplomats, intelligence officers and others in Washington, New York and elsewhere, the officials said. The FBI routinely watches many diplomats assigned to America.
Officials said FBI surveillance of a senior Israeli diplomat, who was the subject of an FBI inquiry in 1997-98, played a role in the latest probe into possible Israeli spying. The bureau now is investigating whether a Pentagon analyst or pro-Israel lobbyists provided Israel with a highly classified draft policy document. The document advocated support for Iranian dissidents, radio broadcasts into Iran and other efforts aimed at destabilizing the regime in Tehran, officials said this week.
The case is unresolved, but it has highlighted Israel's unique status as an extremely close U.S. ally that presents a dilemma for U.S. counterintelligence officials.
"There is a huge, aggressive, ongoing set of Israeli activities directed against the United States," said a former intelligence official who was familiar with the latest FBI probe and who recently left government. "Anybody who worked in counterintelligence in a professional capacity will tell you the Israelis are among the most aggressive and active countries targeting the United States."
The former official discounted repeated Israeli denials that the country exceeded acceptable limits to obtain information.
"They undertake a wide range of technical operations and human operations," the former official said. "People here as liaison … aggressively pursue classified intelligence from people. The denials are laughable."
Current and former officials involved with Israel at the White House, CIA, State Department and in Congress had similar appraisals, although not all were as harsh in their assessments. A Bush administration official confirmed that Israel ran intelligence operations against the United States. "I don't know of any foreign government that doesn't do collection in Washington," he said.
Another U.S. official familiar with Israeli intelligence said that Israeli espionage efforts were more subtle than aggressive, and typically involved the use of intermediaries.
But a former senior intelligence official, who focused on Middle East issues, said Israel tried to recruit him as a spy in 1991.
"I had an Israeli intelligence officer pitch me in Washington at the time of the first Gulf War," he said. "I said, 'No, go away,' and reported it to counterintelligence."
The U.S. officials all insisted on anonymity because classified material was involved and because of the political sensitivity of Israeli relations with Washington. Congress has shown little appetite for vigorous investigations of alleged Israeli spying.
In his first public comments on the case, Israel's ambassador, Daniel Ayalon, repeated his government's denials this week. "I can tell you here, very authoritatively, very categorically, Israel does not spy on the United States," Ayalon told CNN. "We do not gather information on our best friend and ally." Ayalon said his government had been "very assured that this thing will just fizzle out. There's nothing there."
In public, Israel contends it halted all spying operations against the United States after 1986, when Jonathan Jay Pollard, a former Navy analyst, was convicted in U.S. federal court and sentenced to life in prison for selling secret military documents to Israel.
U.S. officials say the case was never fully resolved because a damage-assessment team concluded that Israel had at least one more high-level spy at the time, apparently inside the Pentagon, who had provided serial numbers of classified documents for Pollard to retrieve.
The FBI has investigated several incidents of suspected intelligence breaches involving Israel since the Pollard case, including a 1997 case in which the National Security Agency bugged two Israeli intelligence officials in Washington discussing efforts to obtain a sensitive U.S. diplomatic document. Israel denied wrongdoing in that case and all others, and no one has been prosecuted.
But U.S. diplomats, military officers and other officials are routinely warned before going to Israel that local agents are known to slip into homes and hotel rooms of visiting delegations to go through briefcases and to copy computer files.
"Any official American in the intelligence community or in the foreign service gets all these briefings on all the things the Israelis are going to try to do to you," said one U.S. official.
At the same time, experts said relations between the CIA and Israel's chief intelligence agency, the Mossad, were so close that analysts sometimes shared highly classified "code-word" intelligence on sensitive subjects. Tel Aviv routinely informs Washington of the identities of the Mossad station chief and the military intelligence liaison at its embassy in America.
"They probably get 98% of everything they want handed to them on a weekly basis," said the former senior U.S. intelligence officer who has worked closely with Israeli intelligence. "They're very active allies. They're treated the way the British are."
Another former intelligence operative who has worked with Israeli intelligence agreed. "The relationship with Israeli intelligence is as intimate as it gets," he said.
Officials said Israel was acutely interested in U.S. policies and intelligence on the Middle East, especially toward Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia.
"They are sophisticated enough to want to know where the levers are they can influence, which people in our government are taking which positions they can try to influence," said a former high-ranking CIA official.
But the official said the relationship between the U.S. and Israel, at least in intelligence circles, "is not one of complete trust at all."
The latest counterintelligence investigation began more than two years ago, and initially focused on whether officials from a powerful Washington lobbying group, the American Israel Political Action Committee, passed classified information to Israel, officials said.
Several months later, the FBI conducted surveillance of Naor Gilon, chief of political affairs at the Israeli Embassy, meeting with two AIPAC officials. The arrival of a veteran Iran analyst at the Pentagon, Larry Franklin, sparked a new line of FBI inquiry.
In 1997 and 1998, the FBI had monitored Gilon as part of an investigation into whether Scott Ritter, then a U.S. intelligence official working with U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq, was improperly delivering U.S. spy-plane film and other secret material to Israeli intelligence. Gilon was posted in New York at the time and operated as liaison between Israel's Anan, or military intelligence service, and the U.N. teams, several officials said.
"Naor was the focus of FBI surveillance into allegations that I was a mole," said Ritter, who was never charged in the case. "They suspected Naor was working me to gain access to U.S. intelligence, which was absurd."
In an e-mail message this week, Gilon said he was under orders not to talk to the media about the current case. He has denied any wrongdoing in interviews with Israeli newspapers.
Franklin has not responded to requests for comment, and officials said he was cooperating with authorities. The FBI interviewed several AIPAC officials last Friday and copied the contents of a computer hard drive. AIPAC has denied any wrongdoing and said it was cooperating fully with investigators.
In a statement released Thursday, AIPAC said the group's continued access to the White House, senior administration officials and ranking members of Congress during the two-year probe would have been "inconceivable … if any shred of evidence of disloyalty or even negligence on AIPAC's part" had been discovered.
AIPAC, has especially close ties to the Bush administration. Addressing the group's policy conference on May 18, President Bush praised AIPAC for "serving the cause of America" and for highlighting the nuclear threat from Iran.
Washington and Tel Aviv differ on their assessments of Iran's nuclear weapons development. Israel considers Iran's nuclear ambitions its No. 1 security threat, and the issue is the top priority for AIPAC. The Bush administration takes the Iran nuclear threat seriously, but its intelligence estimates classify the danger as less imminent than do the Israeli assessments.
What mystifies those who know AIPAC is how one of the savviest, best-connected lobbying organizations in Washington has found itself enmeshed in a spy investigation.
Although never previously implicated in a potential espionage case, AIPAC has frequently been a subject of controversy. Its close ties to Israel and its aggressive advocacy of Israeli government positions has drawn criticism that it should be registered as an agent of a foreign country. Others, noting its ability to organize significant backing for or against candidates running for national office, have demanded that it be classified as a political action committee.
So far the group has avoided both classifications, either of which would impose major restrictions on its activities.
Three years ago, Fortune magazine ranked AIPAC fourth on its list of Washington's 25 most powerful lobbying groups — ahead of such organizations as the AFL-CIO and the American Medical Assn.
October 1, 2004, The Middle East, With friends like these ... The Israeli government has strenuously denied involvement in the current spy scandal in the United States but the episode has undoubtedly opened up old wounds, by Ed Blanche,
THE SCANDAL OVER A suspected Israeli mole in the Pentagon who allegedly passed highly sensitive policy documents on Iran to Israeli agents in Washington has rekindled suspicions long held by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and others in Washington, that the Jewish state systematically spies on its strategic ally and benefactor.
Shortly before George Tenet retired as director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in June, he alleged that an Israeli agent was operating in Washington. Tenet was challenged to identify the agent, but for reasons that were never explained apparently did not do so.
Nonetheless, that episode underlined growing unease in some quarters in Washington about the influence Israel's right-wing might have in the Bush administration through the pro-Likud neo-conservatives, largely in the Pentagon, and the politically powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its associated organisations, such as the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
The Israeli government and AIPAC have strenuously denied they were involved in the current scandal. But others claim Israel's intelligence organisations have been spying on the US and running clandestine operations since the Jewish state was established, from spiriting an estimated 200lbs of weapons-grade uranium for its secret nuclear arms programme in the 1960s to widescale industrial espionage.
Much of this is believed to be conducted by the highly secret Scientific Liaison Bureau, known by its Hebrew acronym Lakam, run by the Defence Ministry and its equally little-known successor, Malmab (the Security Authority for the Ministry of Defence).
The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of the US Congress, reported in April 1996 that Israel "conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the United States of any US ally". And it is not the only US government agency to condemn the Israelis for their subterfuge. But no action, publicly at least, seems to have been taken to prevent this or any warning issued to Israel to stop its illegal activities or face the consequences.
According to Duncan Clarke of the American University's School of International Service in Washington, who wrote a damning paper on Israel's industrial espionage in the US: "The United States and Israel agreed in 1951 not to spy on each other. There is little evidence that the United States has conducted economic espionage against Israel, but the agreement has been flouted repeatedly and flagrantly by Israel.
"Israeli economic espionage has infuriated the US intelligence community, especially the FBI and the Customs Service and has left a legacy of distrust in that community...The greater concern, however, is not Israel's behaviour. Rather it is with those senior US officials and legislators who tolerate it.
"This aspect of the 'special relationship' with Israel annoys, even embitters, much of the permanent national security bureaucracy. It is also a latent domestic political issue with divisive overtones. Whatever immediate advantages Israel's illicit practices may bring, they could eventually weaken the long-running relationship that is the ultimate guarantee of Israel's security," Clarke adds.
In the latest episode, FBI officials allege that Lawrence A. Franklin, a former Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) analyst attached to the Office ofSpecial Plans run by leading neocon Douglas Feith, the under-secretary of defence, passed confidential documents, including a draft policy paper, on US policy on Iran to two lobbyists affiliated with AIPAC, who--the rumour goes--relayed them to Israeli intelligence.
US policy towards Iran is crucial to the Israelis, who have threatened to launch preemptive strikes against Iran's nuclear installations to prevent the Islamic Republic acquiring nuclear weapons they say could be used against the Jewish state. US officials are concerned because the draft document was being debated by policy-makers at the time, possibly putting the Israeli government in a position to influence the final directive.
Franklin is an ideological comrade of Feith, an outspoken supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's Likud Party, and a disciple of Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence. Wolfowitz and Feith were the most forceful promoters of invading Iraq and have long advocated regime change in two of Israel's primary adversaries, Iran and Syria. Feith served as a Middle East specialist with the National Security Council during the Reagan administration.
The Franklin case is part of a more extensive, two-year-old investigationby the FBI into whether AIPAC has systematically funnelled classified US material, including National Security Agency electronic intercepts, to Israel.
In the only major case of Israeli espionage that went to court in the US, Jonathan Pollard, a civilian intelligence analyst with the US Navy, was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987 for spying for Israel. During his 18 months of betrayal, for $2,500 a month and other inducements, Pollard, a Jew, stole at least 1,800 classified documents amounting to 800,000 pages. The case caused immense damage to US-Israeli relations.
Pollard's Israeli handlers from the highly secretive Lakam, set up by Shimon Peres in the 1960s, evaded arrest. But ever since then, the FBI has been looking for a high-level mole in the US government who provided the numbers and dates of the secret documents Pollard's handlers instructed him to steal during their weekly meetings in an apartment near the Israeli Embassy in Washington.
Pollard pleaded guilty and thus never appeared in open court where Israeli intelligence activities could be exposed to the light of day. But the case was considered a breakthrough for the FBI. "Until then," The Washington Times wrote on 16 November 1998, "its agents had been forced by US policy to turn a blind eye to Israeli spying the United States. Said one counter-intelligence agent: 'We would often catch theIsraelis and then be told to let them go'."
The full extent of the damage caused by Pollard's treason remains unknown to this day because theIsraelis have refused to return the most sensitive documents he passed to them. For years after Pollard's arrest, the Israelis claimed his spying was an unsanctioned rogue operation. But in January 1996 Israel granted Pollard citizenship. In May 1998, after more than a decade of denials, Binyamin Netanyahu's government admitted that Pollard had operated as an Israeli agent against the US "handled by high-ranking officials".
Whether there is any link there with the Franklin case is not known, although given the intervening years it is unlikely. But because AIPAC has been implicated in the Franklin case, diplomatic sources say it could, if prosecutions ensue, turn out to be far more damaging to US-Israel relations than Pollard's treason. Indeed, the signs are that other leading neocons could be dragged into the FBI probe.
Suspicions about a highly placed Israeli mole in the US governmentresurfaced in May 1997. US National Security Agency surveillance and wiretapping of the Mossad station in Washington intercepted a telephone conversation between senior Israeli agents in January of that year in which they mentioned someone codenamed "Mega" in relation to obtaining a copy of a confidential letter then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher had sent to Yasser Arafat regarding the Arab-Israeli peace process.
That suggested to counter-intelligence officials that "Mega" could be a senior figure in the Clinton administration who was passing secrets to the Israelis. Israel denied the allegations and said the eavesdroppers had mistranslated the codeword "Elga", used to refer to the CIA, and that there was no such person as "Mega".
The Clinton administration did not pursue the case, in public at least, and apparently accepted the glib Israeli explanation, although, apparently, with some misgivings. At that time, relations between Washington and Israel were in serious trouble over the efforts by Netanyahu to sabotage the peace process, and both sides wanted to avoid an open rift.
It remains to be seen whether Franklin or others will be charged with espionage, which would be deeply embarrassing for Israel, AIPAC and the Bush administration. But he has also been the subject of another investigation, this time by the Senate Intelligence Committee, involving alleged "rogue" intelligence activities. These include clandestine contacts with opponents of the Tehran regime and the prospects of overthrowing it.
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