Fourth “Israeli spy” a Kiwi academic
by Francis
Till
CURRENT affairs and entertainment broadcast programme Holmes on
Friday revealed the identity of a man it said was the mysterious fourth suspect in the drip-fed passport affair, Anthony (Tony) David
Resnick.
Mr Resnick is 35-year-old family man and former
St John Ambulance paramedic — and a native New
Zealander who spent 13 years in Israel, at least part of them as an ambulance worker.
During the opening segment of the half-hour show, presenter Paul Holmes fronted a story reported by Robyn Janes that said Mr Resnick was a “person of interest” to the police and that he had left the country without warning on the 24th of March and had since resigned from his job.
Ms Janes said that unspecified sources had told the Holmes programme that police had executed a search warrant on Mr Resnick’s office at Auckland
University of Technology, where he had been working for the last several years as a lecturer. The
Resnick family home, where he lived with his wife and children, is now empty, the Holmes programme reported, and Mr Resnick’s father said he had been in contact with his son but did not indicate where his son might be.
The New
Zealand Herald said Mr Resnick had gone to Israel, but did not substantiate that claim. It somewhat oddly identified Mr Resnick as “a practising Jew,” and said he had been a member of the Jewish Council in
Auckland.
According to the Herald, Mr Resnick was
“a respected and well-liked paramedic with the St
John Ambulance in Auckland before taking a job as a lecturer in the division of healthcare practice at
AUT two years ago.”
Stephen Goodman, president of the Jewish
Council in Auckland, told the Herald he would be
“very surprised” if Mr Resnick were involved in the passport affair.
Neither the Herald nor the Holmes programme revealed the source for conclusions that
Mr Resnick was the fourth man and police told the
Holmes programme that no comment would be forthcoming “on any specific matter” pertaining to its investigation of the passport affair.
The
disappearing Zandvoort and other odd
twists
[Barkan]But purported plot kingpin Ze’ev Barkan (left) and his alleged sidekick Tony Resnick are not the only figures to have vanished from the scene.
The Weekend Australian said a police witness in the case against Eli Cara and Uriel Kelman, identified in the New Zealand press as Michael
Zandvoort, may have been using a fabricated identity.
The Weekend
Australian said it had been unable to locate Mr Zandvoort and that when its reporters had spoken with a woman by that name, they discovered she was wheelchair-bound and had lost her passport in
Australia. The woman told the paper that shortly after that she had started receiving phone calls for a Mr Zandvoort, someone she had never heard of.
“I don’t believe he exists,” she told the
Weekend Australian. “I am the only Zandvoort in New Zealand.”
A quick search of Telecom’s online white pages reveals that there are several listings for
Zandvoort in New Zealand, however.
Still, the Weekend Australian said the woman “believes she too may have been caught up in a fake passport scandal.”
The same story includes
a new twist on the role of the Australian
Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) in the
affair.
Early versions of the story included speculation that the ASIO had tipped New Zealand intelligence and police officials off about a purported Israel spy ring, but the Weekend Herald says it was the other way around.
According to the Weekend Australian, at some point after Mr Cara’s arrest New Zealand authorities alerted ASIO, which subsequently raided
Mr Cara’s rented home on Sydney’s north shore.
The Weekend Australian has contended that
Mr Cara’s claim to have worked for an Israel-based travel agency, Eastward Bound, is dubious since no such agency had filed required business papers in
Australia. It said the Haifa headquarters of the agency “didn’t appear to know that it even had a
Sydney branch” — but also said that the agency had not returned calls and that Mr Cara’s employment with the agency while he was in Israel had been substantiated by a third party.
It also says the community in which Mr Kelman lived in Israel, a young and family-friendly town of 17,000 named Shoham, is “well known as home to former defence force and Mossad agents.” It does not reveal sources for that claim.
The story partly repeats an earlier, undocumented assertion that Mr Cara’s mother,
Zehava Werner, has said her son (and Mr
Kelman) were on “a mission” to New Zealand about which she knew little.
The Weekend Australian said Israeli commentators “have no doubt that the men are
Mossad.”
Not proof,
just smudge
Yesterday, The
Age clarified the significance of government revelations that Mr Barkan, the alleged mastermind of the purported passport scammers, had worked in Israel embassies in Brussels and
Austria.
Closing a story on an alleged visit to New
Zealand by a “senior Mossad regional representative” based in Singapore, it quotes
Foreign Minister Phil Goff as saying that Mr
Barkan’s work as an attache in those embassies did not constitute evidence that he worked for an intelligence agency and was not the basis for the belief by the New Zealand government that the four-man ring was a state-run operation.
“That [the embassy work] gives some indication of the man’s background. It is not in itself proof that he was in the employment of the
Israeli secret service, and that certainly isn’t the information on which the Government has based its belief that these people were in fact employed by the Israeli secret service,” he is quoted by
The Age as having said.
Not so bad
after all?
The Age cites limited circulation newsletter TransTasman as a primary source for the widely-circulated tale of a visit from a senior Mossad agent on a “please explain” summons from government and says the newsletter claimed the official was summoned for questioning only days after the the initial arrests.
According to TransTasman, it said, the
Mossad official was questioned by “senior public servants, security service officials and police offices.”
“While not disclosed in court the carpeting is understood to have been designed to ascertain whether the Israeli intelligence service was focusing attention on New Zealand, or trying to access New Zealand passports for use in other parts of the world, on the basis New Zealand’s benign security reputation might lessen scrutiny by border agencies,” it quotes TransTasman as having said.
The TransTasman reported that the official did not admit that the men were Mossad agents but, according to the New Zealand
Herald, the report suggested there was “a private understanding, if not admission, that the offenders were operatives.”
The Herald said the visit was by a group, identified the visitors as “regional Israeli intelligence officers,” depicted them as “anxious,” and said the goup was “likely to have included defence officers based in the Israeli embassy” in
Singapore.
The Age reports that the
TransTasman concluded: “The nature of the charges faced by the two convicted Israelis indicates officials concluded Mossad’s actions were directed at passports only.”
There was no mention of earlier assertions by the prime minister that the men had not been charged with espionage activities because: “It may well have been hard to be able to supply the evidence for allegations of espionage as defined under the law.”
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