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A
number of the Israelis resided
for a period of time in
Hollywood, Fla. — the small
city where Mohammed Atta and
three terrorist comrades lived
for a time before Sept.
11.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/680110/posts
The
Israeli “art student” mystery
Some were found carrying photographs they had taken of federal agents. One was discovered with a computer printout in his luggage that referred to
” DEA groups.”
One
Israeli was discovered holding banking receipts for substantial sums of money, close to $180,000 in withdrawals and deposits over a two-month period. A number of the Israelis resided for a period of time in Hollywood, Fla. — the small city where Mohammed Atta and three terrorist comrades lived for a time before
Sept. 11.
Federal agents, the warning stated, had
“arrested two of these individuals for trespassing and discovered that the suspects possessed counterfeit work visas and green cards.”
According to the INS, the deportations resulted from violations of student visas that forbade the Israelis from working in the United
States. (In fact, Salon has established that none of the Israelis were enrolled in the art school most of them claimed to be attending; the other college they claimed to be enrolled in does not exist.) After the Sept. 11 attacks, many more young Israelis — 60, according to one AP dispatch and other reports — were detained and deported.
Sometimes they pitched their artwork — landscapes, abstract works, homemade pins and other items they carried about in portfolios. At other times, they simply attempted to engage agents in conversation.
The females among them were invariably described as “very attractive” — “blondes in tight shorts or jeans, real lookers,” as one DEA agent put it to Salon.
“They were flirty, flipping the hair, looking at you, smiling. ‘Hey, how are you? Let me show you this.’ Everything a woman would do if she wanted to get something out of you.”
On Oct. 1 of last year, Texas newswoman Anna
Werner, of KHOU-TV in Houston, told viewers about a “curious pattern of behavior” by people with “Middle Eastern looks” claiming to be Israeli art students. “Government guards have found those so-called students,” reported
Werner, “trying to get into [secure federal facilities in Houston] in ways they’re not supposed to — through back doors and parking garages.” Federal agents, she said, were extremely
“concerned.”
Sources told Werner that similar incidents had occurred at sites in New
York, Florida, and six other states, “and even more worrisome, at 36 sensitive
Department of Defense sites.”
And yet the story died on the vine. No one followed up.
In a four-part series on Fox’s “Special Report With Brit Hume” that aired in mid-December, Cameron reported that federal agents were investigating the “art student” phenomenon as a possible arm of Israeli espionage operations tracking al-Qaida operatives in the United States.
Most of the 60 detained after
Sept. 11 had been deported, Cameron said.
“Some of the detainees,” reported Cameron,
“failed polygraph questions when asked about alleged surveillance activities against and in the United States.” Some of them were on active military duty. (Military service is compulsory for all young Israelis.)
Cameron was careful to note that there was “no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9/11
attacks” and that while his reporting had dug up “explosive information,” none of it was necessarily conclusive. Cameron was simply airing the wide-ranging speculations in an ongoing investigation.
And nothing more was heard on the topic in mainstream quarters.
Dated Dec. 18, four days after the final installment in the Fox series, the document warns of security breaches in
DEA telecommunications by unauthorized
“foreign nationals” — and cites an
Israeli-owned firm with which the DEA contracted for wiretap equipment —
breaches that could have accounted for the access that the “art students” apparently had to the home addresses of agents.
On Feb. 28, the respected Paris-based espionage newsletter
Intelligence Online reported in detail on what turned out to have been one of Cameron’s key source documents: the
60-page DEA memo. The memo itself, which
Salon obtained in mid-March, went no further than to speculate in the most general terms that the “nature of the individuals’ conduct” suggested some sort of “organized intelligence gathering activity.”
The memo also pointed out that there was some evidence connecting the art students to a drug ring.
However, Intelligence Online and then France’s newspaper of record, Le
Monde, came to a much more definite —
and explosive — conclusion. This was the jackpot, they concluded, a proven spy ring run by the Mossad
or the Israeli government.
Thus you had
Intelligence Online leading its
Feb. 28 piece with the statement that “a huge Israeli spy ring operating in the
United States was rolled up,” and you had
Le Monde trumpeting
on March 5 that a “vast Israeli spy network” had been dismantled in the “largest case of Israeli spying” since 1985, when mole Jonathan
Pollard was busted selling
Pentagon secrets to the Mossad. Reuters that same day went with the headline “U.S.
Busts Big Israeli Spy Ring,” sourcing
Le Monde’s story.
THE two French journals came to conclusions that the memo itself clearly did not. And yet they had unearthed some intriguing material. Six of the “students” were apparently carrying cell phones purchased by a former Israeli vice consul to the United States.
According to Le
Monde, two of the “students” had traveled from
Hamburg to
Miami to visit an FBI agent in his home, then boarded a flight to Chicago and visited the home of a Justice Dept. agent, then hopped a direct flight to Toronto —
all in one day.
According to Intelligence
Online, more than one-third of the students, who were spread out in 42
cities, lived in Florida, several in
Hollywood and Fort Lauderdale, Fla. —
one-time home to at least 10 of the 19
Sept. 11 hijackers.
In at least one case, the students lived just a stone’s throw from homes and apartments where the Sept. 11 terrorists resided: In Hollywood, several students lived at 4220 Sheridan St., just down the block from the 3389 Sheridan St. apartment where terrorist mastermind Mohammed Atta holed up with three other Sept. 11
plotters.
Many of the students, the DEA report noted, had backgrounds in Israeli military intelligence and/or electronics surveillance; one was the son of a two-star Israeli general, and another had served as a bodyguard to the head of the
Israeli army.
The DEA report on which the French journals based their investigations contained a wealth of remarkable tales. To take just a few samples:
- On March 1, 2001, a DEA special
agent in the Tampa division offices
“responded to a knock at one of the
fifth floor offices. At the door was a
young female who immediately identified
herself as an Israeli art student who
had beautiful art to sell. She was
carrying a crudely made portfolio of
unframed pictures.”Aware of the “art
student” alert, the agent invited the
girl to an interview room, where he was
joined by a colleague to listen to the
girl’s presentation. “She had
approximately 15 paintings of different
styles, some copies of famous works,
and others similar in style to famous
artists. When asked her name, she
identified herself as Bella
Pollcson, and pointed out one of
the paintings was signed by that name.”Then things got interesting: In the
middle of her presentation, she changed
her story and claimed that the
paintings were not for sale, but “that
she was there to promote an art show in
Sarasota, Fla., and asked for the
agents’ business cards so that
information regarding the show could be
mailed to them.” Well, where’s the
show? asked the agents. When’s it going
up? Pollcson couldn’t say: didn’t know
when or where — or even who was
running it.Later it was determined
that she had lied about her name as
well. -
On Oct. 20, 2000, in the Houston
offices of the DEA, a “male Israeli art
student was observed by the Security
Officers [entering] an elevator
from a secure area. [The
officers] were able to apprehend
the art student before he could enter a
secure area on the second floor.” Three
months later, in January 2001, a “male
Israeli” was apprehended attempting to
enter the same building from a back
door in a “secured parking lot area.”He claimed “he wanted to gain access to
the building to sell artwork.” -
On April 30, 2001, an Air Force
alert was issued from Tinker Air Force
Base in Oklahoma City concerning
“possible intelligence collection being
conducted by Israeli Art Students.”
Tinker AFB houses AWACS surveillance
craft and Stealth bombers. The report
does not elaborate on what kind of
intelligence was being sought. -
On May 19, 2001, two Israeli
nationals “requested permission to
visit a museum” at Volk Field Air
National Guard Base in Camp Douglas,
Wis. “Approximately ten minutes after
being allowed on the base, the two were
seen on an active runway, taking
photographs.” The men, charged with
misdemeanor trespass, were identified
as 26-year-old Gal Kantor and
22-year-old Tsvi Watermann, and
were released after paying a $210 fine.According to the Air Force security
officer on duty, “Both were asked if
they were involved in the selling of
art while in the U.S. Kantor became
very upset over this, and questioned
why they were being asked about that
… Kantor’s whole demeanor changed,
and he then became uncooperative.”
So it went week after week, month after month, for more than a year and a half. In addition to the locations mentioned above, there were “art student” encounters in
Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, El
Paso, Los Angeles, Miami, Orlando, New
Orleans, Phoenix, San Diego, Little Rock,
Seattle, Washington, D.C., Arlington,
Texas, Albuquerque, and dozens of other small cities and towns.
“Their stories,” the DEA
report states, “were remarkable only in
their consistency. At first, they will
state that they are art students,
either from the University of Jerusalem
or the Bezalel Academy of Arts in
Jerusalem. Other times they will
purport to be promoting a new art
studio in the area. When pressed for
details as to the location of the art
studio or why they are selling the
paintings, they become evasive.”
Indeed, they had reason to be nervous, because they were lying. Salon
contacted Bezalel Academy’s Varda
Harel, head of the Academic Students’
Administration, with a list of every
“student” named in the DEA report, including their dates of birth, passport numbers, and in some cases military registration numbers.
Not a single name was identified in the Bezalel database, either as a current student or as a graduate of the past 10 years (nor had any of the “students” tried to apply to
Bezalel in the last ten years). As for the
University of Jerusalem, there is no such entity.
There is the Hebrew University of
Jerusalem, but Heidi Gleit, the school’s foreign press liaison, told me that Israelis commonly refer to the school as Hebrew University, not the University of Jerusalem. (Hebrew University, she said, does not release student records to the public.)
STILL, the U.S. press was uninterested. Just one day after the Le Monde report, the
Washington Post ran a story on
March 6 that seemed to put the whole thing to rest.
Headlined “Reports of Israeli Spy
Ring Dismissed,” the piece, by John
Mintz and Dan Eggen, opened with official denials from a “wide array of U.S. officials” and quoted Justice
Department spokeswoman Susan Dryden
as saying, “This seems to be an urban myth that has been circulating for months. The department has no information at this time to substantiate these widespread reports about Israeli art students involved in espionage.”
The Post quoted anonymous officials who said they thought the allegations had been
“circulated by a single
employee of the Drug Enforcement
Administration who is angry that his
theories have not gained currency …
[T]wo law enforcement officials
said the disgruntled DEA agent, who
disagreed with the conclusion of FBI
and CIA intelligence experts that no
spying was taking place, appears to be
leaking a memo that he himself wrote.”
An INS spokesman acknowledged to the
Post that several dozen Israelis had been deported, but said it was the result of
“routine visa violations.” At the same time, DEA spokesman Thomas Hinojosa
told the Post that
“multiple reports of
suspicious activity on the part of
young Israelis had come into the
agency’s Washington headquarters from
agents in the field. The reports were
summarized in a draft memo last year,
but Hinojosa said he did not have a
copy and could not vouch for the
accuracy of media reports describing
its contents.”
The Post’s apparent debunking was far from convincing, even to the casual reader. Of course there was no proof that the art students were part of a spy ring: Intelligence Online and
Le Monde had jumped the gun.
However, the real possibility that they were part of a spy ring could not be dismissed — any more than could any other theory one might advance to explain their unusual behavior. With that in mind,
Justice spokeswoman Dryden’s assertion that reports of an Israeli spy ring were an “urban myth” was an oddly overplayed denial. A response that fit the facts would have been something like
“There have been numerous reports of suspicious behavior by Israelis claiming to be art students.
We are looking into the allegations.”
Instead, Dryden appeared to be trying to forestall any discussion of just what the facts of the case were. Given the political sensitivities and the potentially embarrassing nature of the case, that was not surprising.
IF the whole thing was an “urban myth,” like the sewer reptiles of Manhattan, and if it all led back to one deskbound nut job in the DEA, then what were those
“reports of suspicious activity” that had come in from agents in the field?
Hinojosa’s statement about the DEA memo was suspiciously evasive: If the “media reports describing its content” (that is, the articles in Le Monde and
Intelligence Online) were in fact based on the DEA memo whose existence
Hinojosa acknowledged, then the “lone nut” explanation offered by anonymous U.S. officials was at best irrelevant and at worst a rather obvious piece of disinformation, an attempt to shove the story under the rug.
(In fact, the French articles were based on the actual DEA memo — a fact any news organization could have quickly verified, since the leaked DEA document had been floating around on various Web venues, such as Cryptome.org, as early as March 21).
To someone not familiar with the 60-page DEA memo, or to reporters who didn’t bother to obtain it, the fact that a disgruntled employee leaked a memo he wrote himself might seem like decisive proof that the whole “art student” tale was a canard. In reality, the nature of the memo makes its authorship irrelevant. The memo is a compilation of field reports by dozens of named agents and officials from DEA offices across America.
It contains the names, passport numbers, addresses, and in some cases the military ID numbers of the
Israelis who were questioned by federal authorities. Pointing a finger at the author is like blaming a bank robbery on the desk sergeant who took down the names of the robbers.
Of course, the agent (or agents) who wrote the memo could also have fabricated or embellished the field reports. That does not seem to have been the case.
Salon contacted more than a half-dozen agents identified in the memo.
One agent said she had been visited six times at her home by “art students.” None of the agents wished to be named, and very few were willing to speak at length, but all confirmed the veracity of the information.
Despite such obvious holes in the official story, neither the Post
nor any other mainstream media organization ran follow-up articles. The
New York Times has not yet deemed it worth covering — in fact, the paper of record has not written about the art student mystery even once, not even to pooh-pooh it.
One or two minor media players did some braying — ‘Israel had been caught spying, etc. ‘ and the bonko conspiracy fringe had a field day, but the rest of the media, taking a cue from the big boys, decided it was a nonstarter: the
Post’s “debunking” and the
Times’ silence had effectively killed the story.
So complete was the silence that by mid-March, Jane’s Information Group, the respected British intelligence and military analysis service, noted:
“It is rather strange that the
U.S. media seems to be ignoring what
may well be the most explosive story
since the 11 September attacks — the
alleged break-up of a major Israeli
espionage operation in the USA.”
The only major American media outlet aside from Fox to seriously present the
“art student” allegations was Insight on the News, the investigative magazine published weekly by the conservative Washington Times.
In a
March 11 article, Insight quoted a senior
Justice Department official as saying, “We think there is something quite sinister here but are unable at this time to put our finger on it” — essentially echoing what the DEA report concluded.
Managing editor Paul M.
Rodriguez, who wrote the Insight story and had quietly tracked the art student phenomenon for weeks before
Intelligence Online scooped him, took an agnostic stance toward the mystery. “There is zero information at this time to suggest that these students were being run by the Mossad,” he told me.
“Nothing we’ve come across would suggest this.
We have seen nothing that says this is a spy ring run by the Israeli government directly or with a wink and a nod or some other form of sub rosa control. Based on what we’ve been told, seen and obtained I just don’t see the so-called spy ring as a certain fact. Does that make it not so? I don’t know.”
Rodriguez added, “I think the investigators’ take is this: What were these ‘students’ doing going around accessing buildings without authorization, tracking undercover cops to their homes —
if not for some sort of intel mission?
It’s sort of a mind-fuck scenario, if one were to believe this was a conspiracy by a foreign intel source and/or a bunch of nutty ‘kids’ fucking around just to see how far they could push the envelope —
which they seem to have pushed pretty damn far, given the page after page after page of intrusions and snooping alleged.”
The Israeli embassy denies the charges of a spy ring. “We are saying what we’ve been saying for months,” spokesman Mark
Reguev told Salon, referring to the Fox series in December. “No American official or intelligence agency has complained to us about this. The story is nonsense. Israel does not spy on the United
States.”
Whether or not the “art students” are
Israeli spies, Reguev’s blanket disavowal is untrue: Israel does spy on the United States. This should come as no surprise: Allies frequently spy on each other, and Israeli intelligence is renowned as among the best and most aggressive in the world. Israel has been at war off and on since its birth as a nation in 1948 and is hungry for information it deems essential to its survival.
And America’s relationship to
Israel and support for it is essential to the survival of the Jewish state. Add these things up, and espionage against the
United States becomes understandable, if not justifiable.
The U.S. government officially denies this, of course, but it knows that such spying goes on.
- In 1996, the U.S. General
Accounting Office issued a report
indicating that “Country A,” later
identified as Israel, “conducts the
most aggressive espionage operation
against the United States of any U.S.
ally.” - A year earlier, the Defense
Investigative Service circulated a memo
warning U.S.military contractors that
“Israel aggressively collects
[U.S.] military and industrial
technology” and “possesses the
resources and technical capability to
successfully achieve its collection
objectives.” The memo explained that
“the Israelis are motivated by strong
survival instincts which dictate every
facet of their political and economic
policies.” - In the history of Israeli espionage
in and against the United States, the
case of Jonathan Pollard was certainly
the most heinous.Pollard, a civilian
U.S. naval intelligence analyst,
provided Israeli intelligence with an
estimated 800,000 pages of classified
U.S. intelligence information. The
Israelis in turn passed the information
to the Soviets, compromising American
agents in the field — several of whom
were allegedly captured and killed as a
result. Israel at first denied, and
then admitted, Pollard’s connections to
the Mossad after he was arrested in
1985 and imprisoned for life.The case
severely strained American-Israeli
relations, and continues to rankle many
American Jews, who believe that since
Pollard was spying for Israel, his
sentence was unduly harsh. (Other
American Jews feel equally strongly
that Pollard and the Israelis betrayed
them.)
Any attempt to understand the official
U.S. response to the Israeli art student mystery — and to some degree, the media response — must take into account both the smoke screen that states blow over incidents that could jeopardize their strategic alliances, and America’s unique and complex relationship with Israel. The
Jewish state is a close if problematic ally with whom the United States enjoys a
“special relationship” unlike that maintained with any other nation in the world.
But U.S. and Israeli interests do not always coincide, and spying has always been deemed to cross a line, to represent a fundamental violation of trust.
According to intelligence sources, the
United States might perhaps secretly tolerate some Israeli spying on U.S. soil if the government decided that it was in our interest (although it could never be acknowledged), but certain types of spying will simply not be accepted by the United
States, whether the spying is carried out by Israel or anyone else.
If England or France spied on the
United States, American officials would likely conceal it. In the case of Israel, there are far stronger reasons to hide any unseemly cracks in the special relationship.
The powerful pro-Israel political constituencies in Congress; pro-Israel lobbies; the Bush administration’s strong support for
Israel, and its strategic and political interest in maintaining close ties with the Jewish state as a partner in the “war against terror”; the devastating consequences for U.S.-Israeli relations if it was suspected that Israeli agents might have known about the Sept. 11 attack —
all these factors explain why the U.S.
government might publicly downplay the art student story and conceal any investigation that produces unpalatable results.
THE pro-Israel lobby is a vast and powerful force in American politics; the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, is the No. 1 foreign-policy lobby and the fourth most powerful lobby in Washington, according to Fortune
Magazine. Michael Lind, a senior fellow of the New America Foundation and a former executive editor of the National
Interest, calls the Israel lobby “an ethnic donor machine” that “distorts U.S. foreign policy” in the Middle East.
Among foreign service officers, law enforcement and the military, there is an impression, says Lind, that you can’t mess with Israel without suffering direct and indirect smears, such as being labeled an
Arabist.
Lind, who himself has been virulently attacked as an anti-Semite for his forthrightness on the subject, acknowledges that the Israel lobby is no different from any other — just more effective. “This is what all lobbies do,”
Lind observes. “If you criticize the AARP, you hate old people and you want them to starve to death. The Israel lobby is just one part of the lobby problem.”
Considering the volatility of the issue, it is not surprising that almost no one in officialdom wants to go on the record for a story like the art students.
“In government circles,” as Insight’s
Rodriguez put it, “anything that has to do with Israel is always a hot topic, a third rail — deadly. No one wants to touch it.”
Fox News’ Cameron quoted intelligence officers saying that to publicly air suspicions of Israeli wrongdoing was tantamount to “career suicide.” And the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in one of its bloodiest and most polarizing phases, has only exacerbated sensitivities. Some of the same pressures that keep government officials from criticizing Israel may also explain why the media has failed to pursue the art student enigma.
Media outlets that run stories even mildly critical of Israel often find themselves targeted by organized campaigns, including form-letter e-mails, the cancellation of subscriptions, and denunciations of the organization and its reporters and editors as anti-Semites.
Cameron, for example, was excoriated by various pro-Israel lobbying groups for his exposé. Representatives of the
Jewish Institute for National Security
Affairs (JINSA), the Anti-Defamation
League (ADL), and the Committee for
Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in
America (CAMERA) argued that the Fox report cited only unnamed sources, provided no direct evidence, and moreover had been publicly denied by spokesmen for the FBI and others (the
last, of course, is not really an argument).
In a December interview with
Salon, CAMERA’s associate director,
Alex Safian, said that several
“Jewish/Israeli groups” were having
“conversations” with representatives of
Fox News regarding Cameron’s piece. Safian said he questioned Cameron’s motives in running the story. “I think Fox has always been fair to Israel in its reporting,” said Safian. “I think it’s just Cameron who has something, personally, about
Israel. He was brought up in the Middle
East.
Maybe that has something to do with it. Maybe he’s very sympathetic to the
Arab side. One could ask.”
The implicit suggestion was that
Cameron is a bigot; in conversation,
Safian would later make the same allegation about the entire editorial helm at Le Monde, which he called an anti-Semitic newspaper.
Told of Safian’s comments, Cameron said, “I’m speechless. I spent several years in Iran growing up because my father was an archaeologist there. That makes me anti-Israel?” The chief Washington correspondent for Fox News, Cameron had never before been attacked for biased coverage of Israel or Israeli-related affairs — or for biased coverage of
Arabs, for that matter.
CAMERON defends his December reporting, saying he had never received any heat whatsoever from his superiors, nor had he ever been contacted by any dissenting voices in government. Oddly, four days after the Cameron investigation ran, all traces of his report — transcripts, Web links, headlines — disappeared from the
Foxnews.com archives. (Normally, Fox leaves a story up for two to three weeks before consigning it to the pay archive.)
When Le Monde contacted Fox in
March for a copy of the original tapes,
Fox News spokesmen said the request posed a problem but would not elaborate. (Fox
News now says Le Monde never called.)
Asked why the Cameron piece disappeared, spokesman Robert
Zimmerman said it was “up there on our
Web site for about two or three weeks and then it was taken down because we had to replace it with more breaking news. As you know, in a Web site you’ve got x amount of bandwidth — you know, x amount of stuff you can put stuff up on [sic]. So it was replaced.
Normal course of business, my friend.” (In fact, a text-based story on a Web site takes up a negligible amount of bandwidth.)
When informed that Cameron’s story was gone from the archives, not simply from the headline pages (when you entered the old URL, a Fox screen appeared with the message “This story no longer exists”),
Zimmerman replied, “I don’t know where it is.”
The extreme sensitivity of the Israeli art student story in government circles was made clear to this reporter when, in the midst of my inquiries at DEA and elsewhere, I was told by a source that some unknown party had checked my records and background. He proved it by mentioning a job I had briefly held many years ago that virtually no one outside my family knew about. Shortly after this, I received a call from an individual who identified himself only by the code name Stability.
Stability said he was referred to me from
“someone in Washington.” That someone turned out to be a veteran D.C. correspondent who has close sources in the
CIA and the FBI and who verified that
Stability was a high-level intelligence agent who had been following the art student matter from the inside.
Stability was guarded in his initial conversation with me. He said that people in the intelligence committee were suspicious about my bona fides and raised the possibility that someone was “using” me. “Your name is known and has been known for quite a while,” Stability said. “The problem is that you’re going into a hornet’s nest with this. It’s a very difficult time in this particular area.
This is a scenario where a lot of people are living a bunker mentality.” He added,
“There are a lot of people
under a lot of pressure right now
because there’s a great effort to
discredit the story, discredit the
connections, prevent people from going
any further [in investigating the
matter]. There are some very, very
smart people who have taken a lot of
heat on this — have gone to what I
would consider extraordinary risks to
reach out. Quite frankly, there are a
lot of patriots out there who’d like to
remain alive. Typically, patriots are
dead.”
In a subsequent conversation, Stability said that the DEA’s Office of Professional
Responsibility is currently undertaking an aggressive investigation targeting agents suspected of leaking the June 2001 memo. The
OPR inquiry was initiated as a result of
Intelligence Online’s exposé
of the DEA document in late February.
According to Stability, at least 14 agents
— including some in agencies other than
DEA — are now under intense scrutiny and interrogation.
Half a dozen agents have been polygraphed several times over, computers have been seized, desks have been searched.
A DEA spokesman would neither confirm nor deny the allegation. “Anything that has to do with internal security, which would include OPR, is not anything we’re able to discuss,” the spokesman said. As for the DEA document itself, Stability said that all information gathering for it ceased around June 2001. He also noted that “there are multiple variations of that document” floating around DEA and elsewhere.
“It was a living, breathing
document,” Stability said, “that grew
on a week-by-week basis, that was being
added to as people forwarded
information. To say this was a
coordinated effort would be a stretch;
it was ad hoc. But that document
[the DEA memo] didn’t just
happen. That document was the result of
literally dozens of people providing
input, working together. These events
were going on, people were looking at
them, but could not understand them.
“It wasn’t until the end of 2000 and the beginning of 2001 that field agents ran across a series of visits that occurred within a very close period of time,” Stability said. Agents from across the country began talking to each other, comparing notes.
“There was an embryonic
understanding that there was something
here, something was happening. People
kept running across it. And agents
being who they are, gut feelings being
what they are, they would catch a
thread. They’d start to pull a thread,
and next thing, they’d end up with the
arm of the jacket and the back was
coming off, and then you’d end up with
reports like you saw. The information,
in its scattered form, is one thing.The information compiled, documented,
timelined, indexed, is a horrific event
for some of these people. Because it is
indisputable.”
“Agents started to realize that people were coming to their homes,” he continued.
“If you are part of an organization like this, you tend to be careful about your security. When something disturbs that sense of security, it’s unnerving. One thing that was understood fairly early on was that the students would go to some areas that didn’t have street signs, and in fact they would already have directions to these areas.
That indicated that someone had been there prior to them or had electronically figured where the agents were located — using credit card records, things of that nature. This sat in the back of people’s minds as to the resources necessary to do that.”
“I will tell you that there is still great debate over what [the art students?] specific purposes were and are,” Stability went on.
“When you take an individual who picks up a group of individuals from an airport, individuals who supposedly have no idea what they’re doing in-country, who fly on over from a foreign land, whose airline tickets could in some instances total a value greater than $15,000 — and who get picked up at the airport and drive specifically to one individual’s home, which they know the exact directions to: Yeah, you could say there’s a problem here.
You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to understand that.
The overarching item is that a lot of work went into going to people’s houses to sell them junk from China in plastic frames.”
But to what end? What was the value?
What was to be gained? “Unknown, unknown,”
Stability said. “You could be anywhere from D.C. to daylight on that one. Even on our side, you have to take all the stuff and draw it all out and clean out all the chaff. I will tell you that from those who are working ground zero [of this case], it is a difficult puzzle to put together, and it is not complete by any means.” Even the spooks are baffled; they have no answers.
SO let’s draw out the chaff ourselves and see if we can at least speculate. In intel circles, there are a number of working theories, according to Stability.
“Profiling of federal agents is one,” said
Stability. “Keeping tabs on other people, other foreign nationals, is another. A third is that they were working for organized crime — that’s an easy one, and it almost sounds more like a cover than a reality.
The predominant thought is that it was a profiling endeavour, and from a profiling aspect, also one of intimidation.”
You mean this whole vast scheme was a mind fuck, to use Paul Rodriguez’s elegant phrasing? A psy-ops endeavor to spook the spooks? Perhaps. As Stability put it,
“Almost nothing is wrong in this particular instance, Mr. Ketcham. In this particular situation, right is wrong, left is right, up is down, day is night.”
Yet for the most part the targeted agents weren’t spooks in the strictest sense: They were DEA — cops who bust drug dealers. And that leads us into Theory No.
1, also known as the Art Student/Drug
Dealer Conspiracy. This theory has a piece of evidence to support it: the link, mentioned in the leaked DEA memo, between an Ecstasy investigation and the telephone numbers provided by an Israeli detained in
Orlando.
There are “problems” with Israeli nationals involved in the Ecstasy business, according to Israeli Embassy spokesman Reguev. “Israeli authorities and the DEA are working together on that issue,” he said. In a statement before
Congress in 2000, officials with the U.S.
Customs Service, which intercepted some 7
million Ecstasy tablets last year, noted that “Israeli organized-crime elements appear to be in control” of the multibillion-dollar U.S.
Ecstasy trade,
“from production through the international smuggling phase. Couriers associated with
Israeli organized crime have been arrested around the world, including … locations in the U.S. such as Florida, New Jersey,
New York and California.”
Miami was cited as one of the main entry points of Ecstasy into the United
States and was specified as one of the central “headquarters for the criminal organizations that smuggle Ecstasy”;
Houston was also cited for large Ecstasy seizures — an interesting nexus, given the large number of “art students” who congregated both in the Miami and Ft.
Lauderdale area and in Houston. “Israeli nationals in the Ecstasy trade have been very sophisticated in their operations,” says a U.S.
Customs officer who has investigated the groups.
“Some of these individuals have been skilled at counterintelligence and in concealing their communications and movements from law enforcement.” It would thus seem that Israeli organized crime has at least the capacity to pull off a widespread surveillance and intelligence operation. The drug connection would also explain the sizable reserves of cash one
Tampa student was handling.
One DEA agent named in the “art student” report told Salon that the best possible explanation for the affair — and he admitted to being utterly baffled by it
— was that drug dealers were involved.
“Why us if not because of the DEA’s mission?” the agent asked. “I mean, what would Israeli intel want with us? Here’s another avenue of inquiry to take: Israeli organized crime is the now the biggest dealer of Ecstasy in the United States.
These students?
It was Israeli organized crime judging our strength, getting a survey of our operations. What if I wanted to burglarize your building and go through your files? I’d do a reconnoiter. Get a sense of the floor plan and security, where the guards are stationed, how many doors, what kind of locks, alarm systems, backup alarm systems.”
The trouble with this theory is the obvious one: In the annals of crime chutzpah, for drug dealers to brazenly approach drug agents in their homes and offices may represent the all-time world record. And what conceivable useful intelligence could they gather that would be worth the risk? Were the tee-heeing tight-sweatered Israeli babes pulling some kind of Mata Hari stunt, seducing paunchy middle-aged DEA boys and beguiling them into loose-lipped info sharing?
Theory No. 2 is that they were all engaged in espionage. This scenario has the virtue of simplicity — if it smells like a spy, walks like a spy, and talks like a spy, it probably is a spy — but doesn’t make much sense, either. Why would the Mossad — or any spy outfit with a lick of good sense — use kids without papers as spies? And, just as our incredulous DEA agent noted, what intelligence useful to Israel could be gathered from DEA offices, anyway?
I SUGGESTED to Stability that the operation, if it was that, was purposely conspicuous — almost oafish. “Yes, it was,” he replied. “It was a noisy operation. Did you ever see
‘Victor/Victoria’? It was about a woman playing a man playing a woman. Perhaps you should think about this from that aspect and ask yourself if you wanted to have something that was in your face, that didn’t make sense, that couldn’t possibly be them.”
He added, “Think of it this way:
How could the experts think this could actually be something of any value?
Wouldn’t they dismiss what they were seeing?”
That’s where you enter truly dark territory: Theory No. 3, the Art Student as Agent as Art Student Smoke Screen. It has major problems, but let’s roll with it for a moment. This theory contends that the art student ring was a smoke screen intended to create confusion and allow actual spies — who were also posing as art students — to be lumped together with the rest and escape detection. In other words, the operation is an elaborate double fake-out, a hiding-in-plain-sight scam.
Whoever dreamed it up thought ahead to the endgame and knew that the
DEA-stakeout aspect was so bizarre that it would throw off American intelligence.
According to this theory — Stability’s
“Victor/Victoria” scenario — Israeli agents wanted, let’s say, to monitor al-Qaida members in Florida and other states. But they feared detection.
So to provide cover, and also to create a dizzyingly Byzantine story that would confuse the situation, Israeli intel flooded areas of real operations with these bumbling “art students” — who were told to deliberately stake out DEA agents.
Perhaps. Why not? Up is down, left is right. I nudged Stability on the obvious implication of the “Victor/Victoria” scenario: If this was a ruse, a decoy to conceal another operation, what was that other operation? “Unknown,” Stability said.
THEN of course there’s Theory No. 4: that they really were art students. Either they were recruited in Israel as part of an art-selling racket or they simply hit upon the idea themselves. This theory is basically the de facto position held by the U.S. and Israeli governments, which insist that the only wrong committed by the “students” was to sell art without the proper papers.
There are almost too many problems with this to list, but it’s worth mentioning a few: Why in the world would people try to sell cheap art market to DEA officials?
Why would they almost all use the same bogus Bezalel Academy of Arts cover story?
Why would anyone running such a racket to make money use foreign nationals without green cards, knowing that they would quickly be snagged for visa violations?
And why did so many of these itinerant peddlers, wandering the United States on their strange mission of hawking cheap
Chinese knockoff paintings, have “black information” about federal facilities?
There are other theories. One is that these were spies in training, newly minted
Mossad graduates on test runs to see how they would operate in field conditions.
I asked Stability how hotly the matter was now being pursued in intel and law enforcement. “Depends on who you speak to,” he told me. “Some people say that it’s a dead issue, a fantasy. Most of the investigations are happening at an ad hoc level. There are people out there that you couldn’t sway off some of the cases, because that’s how dedicated they are.”
Apparently, at least some agents in FBI remain quite concerned about the art student problem. According to several intelligence sources, including Stability, on Dec. 3, 2001, six separate FBI field offices simultaneously forwarded communiqués to FBI headquarters inquiring into the status of the investigation. The FBI agents wanted to have a “clarification” as to what was going on.
The subject may not be officially dead yet. The art student matter may be taken up by the congressional committees investigating intelligence failures leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks, according to another source.
What about the crucial Washington
Post article, in which anonymous federal agents alleged the DEA memo was the work of a disgruntled employee?
“The Washington Post article was a plant — that’s obvious. The story was killed,” Stability told me. Who planted the story? Stability claimed the FBI was behind it. “Every organization is running scared,” Stability added, “because they’re afraid of the next shoe to drop. There are many smoking guns out there, many. So consequently every one is at a level of heightened anxiety, and when they’re anxious they make mistakes.”
Yes, but what are they afraid of? What will the smoking guns prove? Questions, questions, labyrinthine questions, and the more you ask in this matter, the fewer get answered.
When I called the CIA to inquire about the agency’s March 2001 alert — an alert that evinced deep disquiet over the affair
— an official who was aware of the inquiry told me, “I’ll make a recommendation to you: Don’t write a story. This whole thing has been blown way out of proportion. As far as we’re concerned, we reported it, yes, but subsequently it’s nothing of interest to us. And we’ve just closed the book on it.
And I really recommend you do the same.
Let it go. There’s nothing here.”
Not everyone else in law enforcement is so sure. “There’s a lot of concern among the agents,” said the DEA source. “We’re investigators. We’re not satisfied when we don’t have answers. This is a mystery that has an answer and it has to be resolved.”
Christopher
Ketcham is a freelance writer in New York City.
on
this website: The
New York Post: A Spy Myth is
Born
| Le
Monde article, Mar 5, 2002: An Enigma:
Vast Israeli Spy Network Dismantled in
the US
FBI
Probes Mossad Espionage at Clinton
White House
Vast
Israeli Spy Network
Dismantled in the
US
Outlink: Were
Israelis warned not to go to the WTC on
9-11?
| Mike
Lilly has checked over the WTC death
lists so far available, and Israelis
are statistically under-represented
| A
hostile response | Tim
Baran
suggests that the Israelis got in
to work too late?
Lawyer:
Detained Israelis Returned Home |
Aldo
de Pascale retails scuttlebut on
Israeli agents and the Golden
Gate
Israel
dismisses report it didn’t share WTC
attack data | Israeli
agents and the
Golden Gate |
Flashback: The
Five Israeli “tourists” detained on
September 11 in New Jersey as suspected
conspirators | Carl
Cameron (Fox TV) Investigates role of
Israeli spies before Sept.
11: stunning
four-part serial | Israel’s
fury at Fox TV’s hints about Sept.11,
2001: first bubbles surface in outraged
JTA dispatch
War on Terror: As
Israelis languish in U.S.
jails, Jewish
activists wondering why | Israeli
“students” identified trying to get
into secure US buildings |
Another under-reported WTC mystery:
Two
Israelis found with video footage of
Sears Tower, tallest building, in
Chicago
Two
Mossad agents arrested in the Mexico
Congress Chamber with guns, explosives:
no word
since then | El
Diario reported: Two arrested, one a
foreigner: Bomb in San Lázaro:
Were carrying attaché case with
explosives and grenades
Robert
Mugabe hired Mossad agents to eliminate
rival in Rhodesia election
campaign
Diario
de México reported, Oct 11,
2001: Two Israeli agents arrested: Bomb
in Mexico Congress Chamber:
Were
carrying attaché case with
explosives and grenades | Comment
by Voz de Aztlan
US
asked Israeli Detainees if They Were
Spies | What
did the Mossad know in advance about
September 11 (and not pass on to USA
allies?) | Israeli
“students” identified trying to
get target=”_blank”>Instant
into secure US buildings
Discussion:
How many Israelis survived the World
Trade Center atrocity?
Miami
Herald reports ,
“Nuclear plants tighten security: FBI
seeking 6 men seen in Midwest
[all six were carrying plans of
three Florida nuclear plants, and
Israeli passports] |
Messages to Israel Warned of WTC
Attack
Israelis detained for “puzzling
behavior” after WTC tragedy |
Israelis
mistaken for terrorists may be home
soon