The "High-Five" Dancing
Israelis
What Did Israel Know
in Advance of the 9/11 Attacks?
EXCERPT:
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 Eastern] 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]".
[NOTE:
This tactic of generating public sympathy for Israel is the primary
agenda of Israeli public relations via "Holy
Holocaust" museums
and memorials that culture support for Zionist policies to expand
their power and control for "Greater Israel" domination worldwide.
This sympathy for Israel also serves as a "club" to attack any
criticism of Israel as "anti-Semitism", utilizing the
Zionist media to censor any
opposition. For a revealing insight into the world's leading
sponsor of terrorism and the Mid-East holocaust, read "Liberty
Attack". - CR]
The
questions abound: Did the Urban Moving Systems Israeli, 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 more than 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?
by Christopher Ketcham
A CounterPunch Special Investigation
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 detail 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 has 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 whey 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 Weekhawken, 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 lie-detector 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, tow days after
the men where picked up, the owner of the 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 screens 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 them 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 that to me, nothing 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. Canistraro 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 whey
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 Dershowithz
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 acknowledgement 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
doesn't 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 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 Janjour, 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 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 with the CIA:
"People I've talked to at the CIA were outraged at what was going on.
They thought it was outrageous that they hadn't been a real
investigation, that the facts were handing 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 that the operations included taps on
telephones, placement or 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."
Israel's "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, the 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 "travelling 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 to 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 impropable
series of coincidences emerges from a close reading of the 2001 DEA
memo, the 9/11 Commission's staff statements and final reports, 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-Qaeda-connected suspects lived and operated
near one another, in some cases less than half a mile apart, for various
periods during 2000-01 in the run-up to the attacks. In addition, to
northern New Jersey and Hollywood, Florida, these 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" name Michael Calmanomic, 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 NorthBeltline 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
terrorist funder by the European Union and U.S. governmetn 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 funnelling 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 Bram, questioned near Hollywood, Fla., in January 2001,
said he had served tow years in Israeli intelligence "working with
classified information" Hanan Serfty, 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 eaves-dropping 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" Michael 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 examine
the "are 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 weekly 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
expose 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 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
angel", 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 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?"
[Welcome to the world of
counter counter-intelligence. - CR]
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 student" 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 of 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".
Chocking 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 expose 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-Israeli
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 peppered 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 they were spam identities). CAMERA
spokesman Alex Safian later told me that Cameron's upbringing in Iran,
where his father travelled as an archaeologist, 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, 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 the
meeting, within four days of the posting of Cameron's series on Fox
News.com, the transcripts disappeared, replace 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 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 mitigation 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 state?"
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 Hami were
among the hijackers who operated in close proximity to Israeli "art
students" in Hollywood, Florida, and to the Urban Moving Systems, 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 the attack.
The CIA, along with the 9/11
Commission in its adoption of the CIA story, claim 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 [?].
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 the 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". [Editor's note: Equally logical
would be the explanation that both were USraeli agents all along, as was
Osama Bin Laden. - Andrew Winkler]
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 s result, "U.S. intelligence find 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 Israreli 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 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 prion 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 could have been made
successfully against Israeli spies were never brought to trial, or that
the investigation 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 Eastern] 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
the 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 Israeli, 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 more than 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 answer 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.
Chistopher Ketcham is a
freelance journalist who has written for Harper's and Salon. Many of his
writings, including his groundbreaking story on the Israeli art
students, can be read on his website: christopherketcham.com, as can the
Shea memo.
Source: Counterpunch