Once again tahoeblue has posted some good
interesting info, see the previous post.
Christopher Ketcham preceded Bamford in
September, with with the article "Trojan Horse", that focuses on Verint,
Amdocs, and CALEA (the legislation which brought all of these problems into
existence);
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/ketcham.php?articleid=13506
The most in depth piece written on
the "dancing Israelis" that I've seen is also written by Christopher Ketcham,
and can be seen here...
http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t71616.htmlOriginally
posted here...
http://www.counterpunch.org/ketcham03072007.htmlit is no
longer avail so I'll reproduce it as follows...
A CounterPunch Special
Investigation
High-Fivers and Art Student Spies
What Did Israel Know in
Advance of the 9/11 Attacks?
By CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM
On the afternoon
of September 11, 2001, an FBI bulletin known as a BOLO - "be on lookout" --
was issued with regard to three suspicious men who that morning were seen
leaving the New Jersey waterfront minutes after the first plane hit World Trade
Center 1. Law enforcement officers across the New York-New Jersey area were
warned in the radio dispatch to watch for a "vehicle possibly related to New
York terrorist attack":
White, 2000 Chevrolet van 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.
At 3:56 p.m., twenty-five minutes after the issuance of the
FBI BOLO, officers with the East Rutherford Police Department stopped the
commercial moving van through a trace on the plates. According to the police
report, Officer Scott DeCarlo and Sgt. Dennis Rivelli approached the stopped
van, demanding that the driver exit the vehicle. The driver, 23-year-old Sivan
Kurzberg, refused and "was asked several more times [but] appeared to be
fumbling with a black leather fanny pouch type of bag". With guns drawn, the
police then "physically removed" Kurzberg, while four other men - two more
men had apparently joined the group since the morning - were also removed
from the van, handcuffed, placed on the grass median and read their Miranda
rights.
They had not been told the reasons for their arrest. Yet,
according to DeCarlo's report, "this officer was told without question by the
driver [Sivan Kurzberg],'We are Israeli. We are not your problem.Your problems
are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem.'" Another of the five
Israelis, again without prompting, told Officer DeCarlo - falsely -
that "we were on the West Side Highway in New York City during the incident".
From inside the vehicle the officers, who were quickly joined by agents from the
FBI, retrieved multiple passports and $4,700 in cash stuffed in a sock.
According to New Jersey's Bergen Record, which on September 12 reported the
arrest of the five Israelis, an investigator high up in the Bergen County law
enforcement hierarchy stated that officers had also discovered in the vehicle
"maps of the city with certain places highlighted. It looked like they're hooked
in with this", the source told the Record, referring to the 9/11 attacks. "It
looked like they knew what was going to happen when they were at Liberty State
Park."
The five men were indeed Israeli citizens. They claimed to be in
the country working as movers for Urban Moving Systems Inc., which maintained a
warehouse and office in Weehawken, New Jersey. They were held for 71 days in a
federal detention center in Brooklyn, New York, during which time they were
repeatedly interrogated by FBI and CIA counterterrorism teams, who referred to
the men as the "high-fivers" for their celebratory behavior on the New Jersey
waterfront. Some were placed in solitary confinement for at least forty days;
some were given as many as seven liedetector tests. One of the Israelis, Paul
Kurzberg, brother of Sivan, refused to take a lie-detector test for ten weeks.
Then he failed it.
Meanwhile, two days after the men were picked up, the
owner of Urban Moving Systems, Dominik Suter, a 31- year-old Israeli national,
abandoned his business and fled the United States for Israel. Suter's departure
was abrupt, leaving behind coffee cups, sandwiches, cell phones and computers
strewn on office tables and thousands of dollars of goods in storage. Suter was
later placed on the same FBI suspect list as 9/11 lead hijacker Mohammed Atta
and other hijackers and suspected al-Qaeda sympathizers, suggesting that U.S.
authorities felt Suter may have known something about the attacks. The
suspicion, as the investigation unfolded, was that the men working for Urban
Moving Systems were spies. Who exactly was handling them, and who or what they
were targeting, was as yet uncertain.
It was New York's venerable Jewish
weekly The Forward that broke this story in the spring of 2002, after months of
footwork. The Forward reported that the FBI had finally concluded that at least
two of the men were agents working for the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence
agency, and that Urban Moving Systems, the ostensible employer of the five
Israelis, was a front operation. Two former CIA officers confirmed this to me,
noting that movers' vans are a common intelligence cover. The Forward also noted
that the Israeli government itself admitted that the men were spies. A "former
high-ranking American intelligence official", who said he was "regularly briefed
on the investigation by two separate law enforcement officials", told reporter
Marc Perelman that after American authorities confronted Jerusalem at the end of
2001, the Israeli government "acknowledged the operation and apologized for not
coordinating it with Washington". Today, Perelman stands by his reporting. I
asked him if his sources in the Mossad denied the story. "Nobody stopped talking
to me", he said.
In June 2002, ABC News' 20/20 followed up with its own
investigation into the matter, coming to the same conclusion as The Forward.
Vincent Cannistraro, former chief of operations for counterterrorism with the
CIA, told 20/20 that some of the names of the five men appeared as hits in
searches of an FBI national intelligence database. Cannistraro told me that the
question that most troubled FBI agents in the weeks and months after 9/11 was
whether the Israelis had arrived at the site of their "celebration" with
foreknowledge of the attack to come. From the beginning, "the FBI investigation
operated on the premise that the Israelis had foreknowledge", according to
Cannistraro. A second former CIA counterterrorism officer who closely followed
the case, but who spoke on condition of anonymity, told me that investigators
were pursuing two theories. "One story was that [the Israelis] appeared at
Liberty State Park very quickly after the first plane hit. The other was that
they were at the park location already". Either way, investigators wanted to
know exactly what the men were expecting when they got there.
Before such
issues had been fully explored, however, the investigation was shut down.
Following what ABC News reported were "high-level negotiations between Israeli
and U.S. government officials", a settlement was reached in the case of the five
Urban Moving Systems suspects. Intense political pressure apparently had been
brought to bear. The reputable Israeli daily Ha'aretz reported that by the last
week of October 2001, some six weeks after the men had been detained, Deputy
Secretary of State Richard Armitage and two unidentified "prominent New York
congressmen" were lobbying heavily for their release. According to a source at
ABC News close to the 20/20 report, high-profile criminal lawyer Alan Dershowitz
also stepped in as a negotiator on behalf of the men to smooth out differences
with the U.S. government. (Dershowitz declined to comment for this article.) And
so, at the end of November 2001, for reasons that only noted they had been
working in the country illegally as movers, in violation of their visas, the men
were flown home to Israel.
Today, the crucial questions raised by this
matter remain unanswered. There is sufficient reason - from news reports,
statements by former intelligence officials, an array of circumstantial
evidence, and the reported acknowledgment by the Israeli government - to
believe that in the months before 9/11, Israel was running an active spy network
inside the United States, with Muslim extremists as the target. Given Israel's
concerns about Islamic terrorism as well as its long history of spying on U.S.
soil, this does not come entirely as a shock. What's incendiary is the idea
- supported, though not proven, by several pieces of evidence - that
the Israelis did learn something about 9/11 in advance but failed to share all
of what they knew with American officials. The questions are disturbing enough
to warrant a Congressional investigation.
Yet none of this
information found its way into Congress's joint committee report on the attacks,
and it was not even tangentially referenced in the nearly 600 pages of the 9/11
Commission's final report. Nor would a single major media outlet track the
revelations of The Forward and ABC News to investigate further. "There weren't
even stories saying it was bullshit", says The Forward's Perelman. "Honestly, I
was surprised". Instead, the story disappeared into the welter of anti-Israel
9/11 conspiracy theories.It's no small boon to the U.S.
government that the story of 9/11-related Israeli espionage has been thus
relegated: the story doesn't fit in the clean lines of the official narrative of
the attacks. It brings up concerns not only about Israel's obligation not to spy
inside the borders of the United States, its major benefactor, but about its
possible failure to have provided the U.S. adequate warning of an impending
devastating attack on American soil. Furthermore, the available evidence
undermines the carefully cultivated image of sanctity that defines the U.S.-
Israel relationship. These are all factors that help explain the story's
disappearance, and they are compelling reasons to revisit it
now.
Torpedoing the FBI Probe
All five future hijackers of
American Airlines Flight 77, which rammed the Pentagon, maintained addresses or
were active within a six-mile radius of towns associated with the Israelis
employed at Urban Moving Systems. Hudson and Bergen counties, the areas where
the Israelis were allegedly conducting surveillance, were a central staging
ground for the hijackers of Flight 77 and their fellow al-Qaeda operatives.
Mohammed Atta maintained a mail-drop address and visited friends in northern New
Jersey; his contacts there included Hani Hanjour, the suicide pilot for Flight
77, and Majed Moqed, one of the strongmen who backed Hanjour in the seizing of
the plane. Could the Israelis, with or without knowledge of the terrorists'
plans, have been tracking the men who were soon to hijack Flight 77?
In
public statements, both the Israeli government and the FBI have denied that the
Urban Moving Systems men were involved in an intelligence operation in the
United States. "No evidence recovered suggested any of these Israelis had prior
knowledge of the 9/11 attack, and these Israelis are not suspected of working
for Mossad", FBI spokesman Jim Margolin told me. (The Israeli embassy did not
respond to questions for this article.) According to the source at ABC News, FBI
investigators chafed at the denials from their higher-ups.
"There is a
lot of frustration inside the bureau about this case", the source told me. "They
feel the higher echelons torpedoed the investigation into the Israeli New Jersey
cell. Leads were not fully investigated". Among those lost leads was
the figure of Dominik Suter, whom the U.S. authorities apparently never
attempted to contact. Intelligence expert and author James Bamford told me there
was similar frustration within the CIA: "People I've talked to at the CIA were
outraged at what was going on. They thought it was outrageous that there hadn't
been a real investigation, that the facts were hanging out there without any
conclusion."
However, what was "absolutely certain", according to Vincent
Cannistraro, was that the five Israelis formed part of a surveillance network in
the New York- New Jersey area. The network's purpose was to track radical
Islamic extremists and/or supporters of militant Palestinian groups like Hamas
and Islamic Jihad. The former CIA counterterrorism officer who spoke anonymously
told me that FBI investigators determined that the suspect Israelis were serving
as Arabic-speaking linguists "running technical operations" in northern New
Jersey's extensive Muslim communities. The former CIA officer said the
operations included taps on telephones, placement of microphones in rooms and
mobile surveillance. The source at ABC News agreed: "Our conclusion was that
they were Arab linguists involved in monitoring operations, i.e., electronic
surveillance. People at FBI concur with this". The ABC News source added, "What
we heard was that the Israelis may have picked up chatter that something was
going to happen on the morning of 9/11".
The former CIA counterterrorism
officer told me:
"There was no question but that [the order to close
down the investigation] came from the White House. It was immediately
assumed at CIA headquarters that this basically was going to be a cover-up so
that the Israelis would not be implicated in any way in 9/11. Bear in mind that
this was a political issue, not a law enforcement or intelligence issue. If
somebody says we don't want the Israelis implicated in this - we know that
they've been spying the hell out of us, we know that they possibly had
information in advance of the attacks, but this would be a political nightmare
to deal with."
The Israeli "Art Student" Spies
There is a second
piece of evidence that suggests Israeli operatives were spying on al-Qaeda in
the United States. It is writ in the peculiar tale of the Israeli "art
students", detailed by this reporter for Salon.com in 2002, following the
leaking of an internal memo circulated by the Drug Enforcement Administration's
Office of Security Programs. The June 2001 memo, issued three months before the
9/11 attacks, reported that more than 120 young Israeli citizens, posing as art
students and peddling cheap paintings, had been repeatedly - and seemingly
inexplicably - attempting to penetrate DEA offices and other law
enforcement and Defense Department offices across the country. The DEA report
stated that the Israelis may have been engaged in "an organized intelligence
gathering activity", but to what end, U.S. investigators, in June 2001, could
not determine. The memo briefly floated the possibility that the Israelis were
engaged in trafficking the drug ecstasy. According to the memo, "the most
activity [was] reported in the state of Florida" during the first half of 2001,
where the town of Hollywood appeared to be "a central point for these
individuals with several having addresses in this area".
In retrospect,
the fact that a large number of "art students" operated out of Hollywood is
intriguing, to say the least. During 2001, the city, just north of Miami, was a
hotbed of al-Qaeda activity and served as one of the chief staging grounds for
the hijacking of the World Trade Center planes and the Pennsylvania plane; it
was home to fifteen of the nineteen future hijackers, nine in Hollywood and six
in the surrounding area. Among the 120 suspected Israeli spies posing as art
students, more than thirty lived in the Hollywood area, ten in Hollywood proper.
As noted in the DEA report, many of these young men and women had training as
intelligence and electronic intercept officers in the Israeli military -
training and experience far beyond the compulsory service mandated by Israeli
law. Their "traveling in the U.S. selling art seem[ed] not to fit their
background", according to the DEA report.
One "art student" was a former
Israeli military intelligence officer named Hanan Serfaty, who rented two
Hollywood apartments close to the mail drop and apartment of Mohammed Atta and
four other hijackers. Serfaty was moving large amounts of cash: he carried bank
slips showing more than $100,000 deposited from December 2000 through the first
quarter of 2001; other bank slips showed withdrawals for about $80,000 during
the same period. Serfaty's apartments, serving as crash pads for at least two
other "art students", were located at 4220 Sheridan Street and 701 South 21st
Avenue. Lead hijacker Mohammed Atta's mail drop was at 3389 Sheridan
Street--approximately 2,700 feet from Serfaty's Sheridan Street apartment. Both
Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, the suicide pilot on United Airlines Flight 175,
which smashed into World Trade Center 2, lived in a rented apartment at 1818
Jackson Street, some 1,800 feet from Serfaty's South 21st Avenue
apartment.
In fact, an improbable series of coincidences emerges from a
close reading of the 2001 DEA memo, the 9/11 Commission's staff statements and
final report, FBI and Justice Department watch lists, hijacker timelines
compiled by major media and statements by local, state and federal law
enforcement personnel. In at least six urban centers, suspected Israeli spies
and 9/11 hijackers and/or al-Qaedaconnected suspects lived and operated
near one another, in some cases less than half a mile apart, for various periods
during 200001 in the run-up to the attacks. In addition to northern New
Jersey and Hollywood, Florida, these centers included Arlington and
Fredericksburg, Virginia; Atlanta; Oklahoma City; Los Angeles; and San
Diego.
Israeli "art students" also lived close to terror suspects in and
around Dallas, Texas. A 25-year-old "art student" named Michael Calmanovic,
arrested and questioned by Texas-based DEA officers in April 2001, maintained a
mail drop at 3575 North Beltline Road, less than a thousand feet from the 4045
North Beltline Road apartment of Ahmed Khalefa, an FBI terror suspect. Dallas
and its environs, especially the town of Richardson, Texas, throbbed with "art
student" activity. Richardson is notable as the home of the Holy Land
Foundation, an Islamic charity designated as a terrorist funder by the European
Union and U.S. government in December 2001. Sources in 2002 told The Forward, in
a report unrelated to the question of the "art students", that "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 [2001]".
It's plausible that the intelligence prompting the shutdown of the Holy Land
Foundation came from "art student" spies in the Richardson area.
Others
among the "art students" had specific backgrounds in electronic surveillance or
military intelligence, or were associated with Israeli wiretapping and
surveillance firms, which prompted further concerns among U.S. investigators.
DEA agents described Michael Calmanovic, for example, as "a recently discharged
electronic intercept operator for the Israeli military". Lior Baram, questioned
near Hollywood, Fla., in January 2001, said he had served two years in Israeli
intelligence "working with classified information". Hanan Serfaty, who
maintained the Hollywood apartments near Atta and his cohorts, served in the
Israeli military between the ages of 18 and 21. Serfaty refused to disclose his
activities between the ages of 21 and 24, including his activities since
arriving in the U.S.A. in 2000. The French daily Le Monde meanwhile reported
that six "art students" were apparently using cell phones that had been
purchased by a former Israeli vice consul in the U.S.A.
Suspected Israeli
spy Tomer Ben Dor, questioned at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport in May 2001, worked
for the Israeli wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping company NICE Systems
Ltd. (NICE Systems' American subsidiary, NICE Systems Inc., is located in
Rutherford, New Jersey, not far from the East Rutherford site where the five
Israeli "movers" were arrested on the afternoon of September 11.) Ben Dor
carried in his luggage a print-out of a computer file that referred to "DEA
Groups". How he acquired information about so-called "DEA Groups" - via,
for example, his own employment with an Israeli wiretapping company - was
never determined, according to DEA documents.
"Art student" Michal Gal,
arrested by DEA investigators in Irving, Texas, in the spring of 2001, was
released on a $10,000 cash bond posted by Ophir Baer, an employee of the Israeli
telecommunications software company Amdocs Inc., which provides phone-billing
technology to clients that include some of the largest phone companies in the
United States as well as U.S. government agencies. Amdocs, whose executive board
has been heavily stocked with retired and current members of the Israeli
government and military, has been investigated at least twice in the last decade
by U.S. authorities on charges of espionage-related leaks of data that the
company assured was secure. (The company strenuously denies any
wrong-doing.)
According to the former CIA counterterrorism officer with
knowledge of investigations into 9/11-related Israeli espionage, when law
enforcement officials examined the "art students" phenomenon, they came to the
tentative conclusion that "the Israelis likely had a huge spy operation in the
U.S. and that they had succeeded in identifying a number of the hijackers". The
German daily Die Zeit reached the same conclusion in 2002, reporting that
"Mossad agents in the U.S. were in all probability surveilling at least four of
the 19 hijackers". The Fox News Channel also reported that U.S. investigators
suspected that Israelis were spying on Muslim militants in the United States.
"There is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9/11 attacks, but
investigators suspect that the Israelis may have gathered intelligence about the
attacks in advance, and not shared it", Fox correspondent Carl Cameron reported
in a December 2001 series that was the first major exposé of allegations of
9/11-related Israeli espionage. "A highly placed investigator said there are
'tie-ins'. But when asked for details, he flatly refused to describe them,
saying, 'evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell
you about evidence that has been gathered. It's classified
information.'"
One element of the allegations has never been clearly
understood: if the "art students" were indeed spies targeting Muslim extremists
that included al-Qaeda, why would they also be surveilling DEA agents in such a
compromising manner? Why, in other words, would foreign spies bumble into
federal offices by the scores and risk exposing their operation? An explanation
is that a number of the art students were, in fact, young Israelis engaged in a
mere art scam and unknowingly provided cover for real spies. Investigative
journalist John Sugg, who as senior editor for the Creative Loafing newspaper
chain reported on the "art students" in 2002, told me that investigators he
spoke to within FBI felt the "art student" ring functioned as a wide-ranging
cover that was counterintuitive in its obviousness. DEA investigators, for
example, uncovered evidence connecting the Israeli "art students" to known
ecstasy trafficking operations in New York and Florida. This was, according to
Sugg, planted information. "The explanation was that when our FBI guys started
getting interested in these folks [the art students] - when they got too
close to what the real purpose was - the Israelis threw in an ecstasy
angle", Sugg told me. "The argument being that if our guys thought the Israelis
were involved in a smuggling ring, then they wouldn't see the real purpose of
the operation". Sugg, who is writing a book that explores the tale of the "art
students", told me that several sources within the FBI, and at least one source
formerly with Israeli intelligence, suggested that "the bumbling aspect of the
art student thing was intentional."
When I reported on the matter for
Salon.com in 2002, a veteran U.S. intelligence operative with experience
subcontracting both for the CIA and the NSA suggested a similar possibility. "It
was a noisy operation", the veteran intelligence operative said. The operative
referred me to the film Victor, Victoria. "It was about a woman playing a man
playing a woman. Perhaps you should think about this from that aspect and ask
yourself if you wanted to have something that was in your face, that didn't make
sense, that couldn't possibly be them". The intelligence operative added, "Think
of it this way: how could the experts think this could actually be something of
any value? Wouldn't they dismiss what they were seeing?" U.S. and Israeli
officials, dismissing charges of espionage as an "urban myth", have publicly
claimed that the Israeli "art students" were guilty only of working on U.S. soil
without proper credentials. The stern denials issued by the Justice Department
were widely publicized in the Washington Post and elsewhere, and the endnote
from officialdom and in establishment media by the spring of 2002 was that the
"art students" had been rounded up and deported simply because of harmless visa
violations. The FBI, for its part, refused to confirm or deny the "art students"
espionage story. "Regarding FBI investigations into Israeli art students",
spokesman Jim Margolin told me, "the FBI cannot comment on any of those
investigations." As with the New Jersey Israelis, the investigation into the
Israeli "art students" appears to have been halted by orders from on high. The
veteran CIA/NSA intelligence operative told me in 2002 that there was "a great
press to discredit the story, discredit the connections, prevent [investigators]
from going any further. People were told to stand down. You name the agency,
they were told to stand down". The operative added, "People who were perceived
to be gumshoes on [this matter] suddenly found themselves hammered from all
different directions. The interest from the middle bureaucracy was not that
there had been a security breach but that someone had bothered to investigate
the breach. That was where the terror was".
Choking off the press
coverage
There was similar pressure brought against the media venues that
ventured to report out the allegations of 9/11- related Israeli espionage. A
former ABC News employee high up in the network newsroom told me that when ABC
News ran its June 2002 exposé on the celebratory New Jersey Israelis, "Enormous
pressure was brought to bear by pro-Israeli organizations"--and this pressure
began months before the piece was even close to airing. The source said that ABC
News colleagues wondered, "how they [the pro-Israel organizations] found out we
were doing the story. Pro- Israeli people were calling the president of ABC
News. Barbara Walters was getting bombarded by calls. The story was a hard sell
but ABC News came through the management insulated [reporters] from the
pressure".
The experience of Carl Cameron, chief Washington correspondent
at Fox News Channel and the first mainstream U.S. reporter to present the
allegations of Israeli surveillance of the 9/11 hijackers, was perhaps more
typical, both in its particulars and aftermath. The attack against Cameron and
Fox News was spearheaded by a pro-Israel lobby group called the Committee for
Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), which operated in tandem
with the two most highly visible powerhouse Israel lobbyists, the
Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee
(itself currently embroiled in a spy scandal connected to the Defense Department
and Israeli Embassy). "CAMERA pep- pered the shit out of us", Carl Cameron told
me in 2002, referring to an e-mail bombardment that eventually crashed the Fox
News.com servers. Cameron himself received 700 pages of almost identical e-mail
messages from hundreds of citizens (though he suspected these were spam
identities). CAMERA spokesman Alex Safian later told me that Cameron's
upbringing in Iran, where his father traveled as an archeologist, had rendered
the reporter "very sympathetic to the Arab side". Safian added, "I think
Cameron, personally, has a thing about Israel"--coded language implying that
Cameron was an anti-Semite. Cameron was outraged at the
accusation.
According to a source at Fox News Channel, the president of
the ADL, Abraham Foxman, telephoned executives at Fox News' parent, News Corp.,
to demand a sit-down in the wake of the Cameron reportage. The source said that
Foxman told the News Corp. executives, "Look, you guys have generally been
pretty fair to Israel. What are you doing putting this stuff out there? You're
killing us". The Fox News source continued, "As good old boys will do over
coffee in Manhattan, it was like, well, what can we do about this? Finally, Fox
News said, 'Stop the e-mailing. Stop slamming us. Stop being in our face, and
we'll stop being in your face--by way of taking our story down off the web. We
will not retract it; we will not disavow it; we stand by it. But we will at
least take it off the web.'" Following this meeting, within four days of the
posting of Cameron's series on Fox News.com, the transcripts disappeared,
replaced by the message, "This story no longer exists".
What did Mossad
know and tell the U.S.?
Whether or not Israeli spies had detailed
foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks, the Israeli authorities knew enough to warn
the U.S. government in the summer of 2001 that an attack was on the horizon. The
British Sunday Telegraph reported on September 16, 2001, that
two senior
agents with the Mossad were dispatched to Washington in August 2001 "to alert
the CIA and FBI to the existence of a cell of as many as 200 terrorists
said to be preparing a big operation". The Telegraph quoted a "senior Israeli
security official" as saying the Mossad experts had "no specific information
about what was being planned". Still, the official told the Telegraph, the
Mossad contacts had "linked the plot to Osama bin Laden". Likewise, Die Zeit
correspondent Oliver Schröm reported that on
August 23, 2001,
the Mossad "handed its American counterpart a list of names of terrorists who
were staying in the U.S. and were presumably planning to launch an attack in the
foreseeable future". Fox News' Carl Cameron, in May 2002, also reported warnings
by Israel: "Based on its own intelligence, the Israeli government provided
'general' information to the United States in the second week of August that an
al-Qaeda attack was imminent". The U.S. government later claimed these warnings
were not specific enough to allow any mitigating action to be taken. Mossad
expert Gordon Thomas, author of Gideon's Spies, says German intelligence sources
told him that as late as August 2001 Israeli spies in the United States had made
surveillance contacts with "known supporters of bin Laden in the U.S.A. It was
those surveillance contacts that later raised the question: how much prior
knowledge did Mossad have and at what stage?"
According to Die Zeit, the
Mossad did provide the U.S. government with the names of suspected terrorists
Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who would eventually hijack the Pentagon
plane. It is worth noting that Mihdhar and Hazmi were among the hijackers who
operated in close proximity to Israeli "art students" in Hollywood, Florida, and
to the Urban Moving Systems Israelis in northern New Jersey. Moreover, Hazmi and
at least three "art students" visited Oklahoma City on almost the same dates,
from April 1 through April 4, 2001.
On August 24, 2001, a day after the
Mossad's briefing, Mihdhar and Hazmi were placed by the CIA on a terrorist watch
list; additionally, it was only after the Mossad warning, as reported
by Die Zeit, that the CIA, on August 27, informed the FBI of the presence of the
two terrorists. But by then the cell was already in hiding, preparing for
attack.
The CIA, along with the 9/11 Commission in its adoption
of the CIA story, claims that Mihdhar and Hazmi were placed on the watch list
solely due to the agency's own efforts, with no help from Mossad. Their
explanation of how the pair came to be placed on the watch list, however, is far
from credible and may have served as a cover story to obscure the Mossad
briefing [See Ketcham's sidebar story -- "The Kuala Lumpur Deceit"]. This brings
up the possibility that
the CIA may have known about the existence of
the alleged Israeli agents and their mission, but sought, naturally, to keep it
quiet. A second, more troubling scenario, is that the CIA may have subcontracted
to Mossad, given that the agency was both prohibited by law from conducting
intelligence operations on U.S. soil, and lacked a pool of competent
Arabic-fluent field officers. In such a scenario, the CIA would either
have worked actively with the Israelis or quietly abetted an independent
operation on U.S. soil. In his 9/11 investigative book, The Looming Tower,
author Lawrence Wright notes that FBI counterterrorism agents, infuriated at the
CIA's failure to fully share information about Mihdhar and Hazmi, speculated
that "the agency was shielding Mihdhar and Hazmi because it hoped to recruit
them". The two al-Qaeda men, Wright notes, "must have seemed like attractive
opportunities; however, once they entered the United States they were the
province of the FBI..." Wright further observes that the CIA's reticence to
share its information was due to a fear "that prosecutions resulting from
specific intelligence might compromise its relationship with foreign services".
When in the spring of 2002 the scenario of CIA's domestic subcontracting to
foreign intelligence was posed to the veteran CIA/NSA intelligence operative,
with whom I spoke extensively, the operative didn't reject it out of hand. The
operative noted that in recent years the CIA's human intelligence assets, known
as "humint" - spooks on the ground who conduct surveillances, make
contacts, and infiltrate the enemy - had been "eviscerated" in favor of the
NSA's far less perilous "sigint", or signals intelligence program, the remote
interception of electronic communications. As a result, "U.S. intelligence finds
itself going back to sources that you may not necessarily like to go back to,
but are required to", the veteran intelligence operative said. "We don't like
the fact, but our humint structures are gone. Israeli intel's humint is as
strong as ever. If you have an intel gap, those gaps are not closed overnight.
It takes years and years of diligent work, a high degree of security, talented
and dedicated people, willing management and a steady hand. It is not a fun
business, and it's certainly not one without its dangers. If you lose that
capability, well organizations find themselves having to make a pact with the
devil. The problem [in U.S. intel] is very great".
If such an
understanding did exist between CIA and Mossad with regard to al-Qaeda's U.S.
operatives, the complicity would explain a number of oddities: it would explain
the CIA's nearly incoherent, and perhaps purposely deceptive, reconstruction of
events as to how Mihdhar and Hazmi joined the watch list; it might even explain
the apparent brazenness of the Israeli New Jersey cell celebrating on the
morning of 9/11 (protected under the CIA wing, they were free to behave as they
pleased). It would also explain the assertion in one of the leading Israeli
dailies, Yedioth Ahronoth, that in the months prior to 9/11, when the Israeli
"art students" were being identified and rounded up, the CIA "actively promoted
their expulsion". The implication in the Yedioth Ahronoth article was that the
CIA was simply being careless, not trying to spirit the Israelis safely out of
the country. At this point we cannot be certain.
Israeli spying against
the U.S. is of course hotly denied by both governments. In 2002, responding to
my own questions about the "art students", Israeli embassy spokesman Mark Regev
issued a blanket denial. "Israel does not spy on the United States", Regev told
me. The pronouncements from officialdom are strictly pro forma, as it is no
secret that spying by Israel on the United States has been wide-ranging and
unabashed. A 1996 General Accounting Office report, for example, found that
Israel "conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the United
States of any U.S. ally". More recently, a former intelligence official told the
Los Angeles Times in 2004 that "[t]here is a huge, aggressive, ongoing set of
Israeli activities directed against the United States". It is also routine that
Israeli spying is ignored or downplayed by the U.S. government (the case of
convicted spy Jonathan Pollard, sentenced to life in prison in 1986, is a
dramatic exception). According to the American Prospect, over the last 20 years
at least six sealed indictments have been issued against individuals allegedly
spying "on Israel's behalf", but the cases were resolved "through diplomatic and
intelligence channels" rather than a public airing in the courts. Career Justice
Department and intelligence officials who track Israeli espionage told the
Prospect of "long-standing frustration among investigators and prosecutors who
feel that cases that could have been made successfully against Israeli spies
were never brought to trial, or that the investigations were shut down
prematurely".
The Questions That Await Answers
Remarkably, the
Urban Moving Systems Israelis, when interrogated by the FBI, explained their
motives for "celebration" on the New Jersey waterfront a celebration that
consisted of cheering, smiling, shooting film with still and video cameras and,
according to the FBI, "high-fiving" - in the Machiavellian light of
geopolitics. "Their explanation of why they were happy", FBI spokesman Margolin
told me, "was that the United States would now have to commit itself to fighting
[Middle East] terrorism, that Americans would have an understanding and empathy
for Israel's circumstances, and that the attacks were ultimately a good thing
for Israel". When reporters on the morning of 9/11 asked former Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the effect the attacks would have on Israeli-
American relations, he responded with a similar gut analysis: "It's very good",
he remarked. Then he amended the statement: "Well, not very good, but it will
generate immediate sympathy [for Israel from Americans]".
What is perhaps
most damning is that the Israelis' celebration on the New Jersey waterfront
occurred in the first sixteen minutes after the initial crash, when no one was
aware this was a terrorist attack. In other words, from the time the first plane
hit the north tower, at 8:46 a.m., to the time the second plane hit the south
tower, at 9:02 a.m., the overwhelming assumption of news outlets and government
officials was that the plane's impact was simply a terrible accident. It was
only after the second plane hit that suspicions were aroused. Yet if the men
were cheering for political reasons, as they reportedly told the FBI, they
obviously believed they were witnessing a terrorist act, and not an
accident.
After returning safely to Israel in the late autumn of 2001,
three of the five New Jersey Israelis spoke on a national talk show that winter.
Oded Ellner, who on the afternoon of September 11 had, like his compatriots,
protested to arresting officer Sgt. Dennis Rivelli that "we're Israeli",
admitted to the interviewer: "We are coming from a country that experiences
terror daily. Our purpose was to document the event". By his own admission,
then, Ellner stood on the New Jersey waterfront documenting with film and video
a terrorist act before anyone knew it was a terrorist act.
One obvious
question among many comes to mind: If these men were trained as professional
spies, why did they exhibit such outright oafishness at the moment of truth on
the waterfront? The ABC network source close to the 20/20 report noted one of
the more disturbing explanations proffered by counterintelligence investigators
at the FBI: "The Israelis felt that in some way their intelligence had worked
out - i.e., they were celebrating their own acumen and ability as
intelligence agents".
The questions abound: Did the Urban Moving Systems
Israelis, ready to "document the event", arrive at the waterfront before the
first plane came in from the north? And if they arrived right after, why did
they believe it was a terrorist attack? What about the strange tale of the "art
students"? Could they have been mere hustlers, as they claimed, who ended up
repeatedly crossing paths with federal agents and living next door to most of
the 9/11 hijackers by coincidence? Did the Israeli authorities find out more
about the impending attacks than they shared with their U.S. counterparts? Or
did the Israeli spies on the ground only intercept vague chatter that, in their
view, did not warrant breaking cover to share the information? On the other
hand, did the U.S. government receive more advance information about the attacks
from Israeli authorities than it is willing to admit? What about the 9/11
Commission's eliding of reported Israeli warnings that may have led to the
watch- listing of Mihdhar and Hazmi? Were the Israeli warnings purposely washed
from the historical record? Did the CIA know more about pre-9/11 Israeli spying
than it has admitted?
The unfortunate fact is that the truth may never be
uncovered, not by officialdom, and certainly not by a passive press. James
Bamford, who in a coup of reporting during the 1980s revealed the inner workings
of the NSA in The Puzzle Palace, points to the "key problem": "The Israelis were
all sent out of the country", he says. "There's no nexus left. The FBI just
can't go knocking on doors in Israel. They need to work with the State
Department. They need letters rogatory, where you ask a government of a foreign
country to get answers from citizens in that country". The Israeli government
will not likely comply. So any investigation "is now that much more
complicated", says Bamford. He recalls a story he produced for ABC News
concerning two murder suspects -- U.S. citizens - who fled to Israel and
fought extradition for ten years. "The Israelis did nothing about it until I
went to Israel, knocking on doors, and finally found the two suspects. I think
it'd be a great idea to go over and knock on their doors", says
Bamford.
The suspects are gone. The trail is cold. Yet many of the key
facts and promising leads sit freely on the web, in the archives, safe in the
news-morgues at 20/20 and The Forward and Die Zeit. An investigator close to the
matter says it reminds him of the Antonioni film "Blow-Up", a movie about a
photographer who discovers the evidence of a covered-up murder hidden before his
very eyes in the frame of an enlarged photograph. It's a mystery that no one
appears eager to solve.
Why is NONE of this information in the
9/11 Commission Final Report?
I think we know the answer to
that.
How could the Israelis be in such
uncanny proximity with the alleged hijackers without MASSIVE foreknowledge of
their plans, identities, and locations?
Yup, and before attacks of
antisemitism can be hurled we also have confirmation of our other "Allie" Saudi
Arabia, being fully aware of these patsies...I mean terrorist
hijackers...
Speaking to the Arabic satellite network Al-Arabiya on
Thursday, Bandar -- now Abdullah's national security adviser -- said Saudi
intelligence was "actively following" most of the September 11, 2001, plotters
"with precision." http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/meast/11/01/saudiarabia.terrorism/#cnnSTCVideo