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 — makes no
sense.
— Daniel Pipes
A
Spy Myth is Born
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.
David Irving comments:
I have a few words to say about this article in my
Radical’s
Diary. But American journalists found not a shred of evidence to support the claim, and 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” and said “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
— makes no sense.
That one of the world’s most prestigious newspapers promotes such errant nonsense prompts two observations.
First, even the most sober media have a proven 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 exposé 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 on 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
exposé 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 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.
Daniel Pipes (
www.DanielPipes.org
) is director of the Philadelphia-based
Middle East Forum.
Index href=”http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/” target=”_blank”>Were work too late? it didn’t share WTC 11: stunning jails, Jewish one a
on the Mossad
Washington
Post also suggests it is a
hoax
FBI
Probes Mossad Espionage at Clinton
White House
Vast
Israeli Spy Network Dismantled in the
US | Le Monde article in French:
An
Israeli spy network has been dismantled
in the United States
Outlink:
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
Lawyer:
Detained Israelis Returned Home |
Aldo
de Pascale retails scuttlebut on
Israeli agents and the Golden Gate
| Israel’s
fury at Fox TV’s hints about Sept.11,
2001: first bubbles surface in outraged
JTA dispatch | Israel
dismisses report
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.
four-part serial | 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?) | War on Terror: As
Israelis languish in U.S.
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 TowerTwo
Mossad agents arrested in the Mexico
Congress Chamber with guns, explosives:
no word since then | El
Diario reported: Two arrested,
foreigner: Bomb in San Lázaro:
Were carrying attaché case with
explosives and grenades